Andrew
Fowler is een Australische gelauwerde onderzoeksjournalist, die
eerder werkte voor ABC. Hij heeft zich vastgebeten in de zaak
Assange, de meer dan schunnige vervolging van een man die zich
op uitstekende wijze heeft gekwijt van zijn taak als
onderzoeksjournalist en die een groot aantal oorlogsmisdaden en
smerige en gewelddadige politieke spelletjes van de VS (en bondgenoten) heeft blootgelegd…… 

Ondanks dat is Assange door zijn ‘collega’s’ van de reguliere media uitgemaakt voor
verrader en charlatan, terwijl deze ‘journalisten’ zich achter de enorme
terreur hebben geschaard die de westerse wereld onder aanvoering van de
VS hebben uitgeoefend en nog uitoefenen in het Midden-Oosten, Afrika en Zuid-Amerika (daar o.a. met grootschalige geheime operaties), ook al is die enorme terreur, veelal in de vorm van illegale oorlogen, die zogenaamd
gelegitimeerd zijn met overduidelijke leugens en dat niet één keer maar
meerdere keren!!! Overigens moet je daar Oekraïne ook nog aan toevoegen als een land dat door ingrijpen van de VS in grote ellende is beland en waar men NB oorlog voert tegen de bevolkingsgroep die de voormalige president Janoekovytsj democratisch (en dus legaal) heeft gekozen en dat in door internationale waarnemers goedgekeurde verkiezingen…..

In het
volgende artikel van John Kendall Hawkins, gepubliceerd op
CounterPunch, komt het hele verhaal van Assange nog eens
voorbij en wordt uitvoerig ingegaan op de manier waarop Assange
geestelijk en daarmee lichamelijk is gemarteld, eerst in de
Ecuadoraanse ambassade (in de tijd voorafgaand aan zijn illegale
arrestatie door de politie van Londen) en daarna in de Belmarsh
gevangenis, waar hij in isolatie(-folter) wordt gehouden……

Het
artikel met veel verwijzingen, o.a, naar de film ‘Not in our name’,
gemaakt door John Furse, waarna met een paar bekenden wordt gesproken
over het vreselijke lot dat Assange heeft getroffen, waarbij hij
schandalig genoeg ook nog werd beschuldigd van verkrachting, een
smerige streek van het Zweedse ministerie van justitie, uiteraard met
hulp van terreurorganisatie CIA…….. De journalisten die zo’n
commentaar hebben op Assange, alleen omdat hij de waarheid naar
buiten bracht (en niemand in gevaar heeft gebracht zoals zo vaak
wordt gelogen als zou hij dit wel hebben gedaan), zouden minstens de film van Furse moeten zien……

Als
Julian Assange wordt uitgeleverd en veroordeeld in de VS, zal dat een
grote klap zijn voor de echt onafhankelijke journalistiek op de sociale media en op zeker dat met de uitspraak andere onderzoeksjournalisten worden
gewaarschuwd de mond te houden als het om zware misdaden van de overheid
gaat…..

Assange zal in de VS op zeker tot een heel
lange gevangenisstraf worden veroordeeld, terwijl hij in feite al meer dan 9 jaar
heeft vastgezeten en dat voor het vertellen van de waarheid en het bewijs daarvoor te hebben gegeven, NB met officiële documenten (op Wikileaks), zaken waarop het
volk recht heeft!! Een groot aantal journalisten van de reguliere
media moeten zich dan ook doodschamen dat ze Assange zo hebben
besmeurd……

Lees het
volgende uitstekende artikel, zie de video en geeft het door, tijd dat de wereld
wakker wordt en Assange in de armen sluit, het is een schande dat
deze man wordt gefolterd voor het naar buiten brengen van de smerige
waarheid die men in het westen wil verdoezelen…… Vergeet niet dat
ook Nederland blindelings heeft meegewertk aan de massamoorden van de
VS in de illegale oorlogen die deze terreurentiteit o.a. in het Midden-Oosten en Afghanistan heeft gevoerd en nog voert……. Met die illegale oorlogen waren de heren/dames journalisten het zoals gezegd wel eens, zonder
naar de zogenaamde redenen daarvoor te kijken (leugens van de CIA, NSA en dat niet zelden in samenwerking met andere geheime diensten als de MIVD), laat staan deze te onderzoeken………
(en dat zijn dezelfde journalisten die de woorden fake news in de
mond durven te nemen als ze het hebben over de onafhankelijke journalistiek op de sociale media…..)

August
20, 2020

Torturing
Assange: An Interview with Andrew Fowler

by John
Kendall Hawkins

Drawing
by Nathaniel St. Clair

“I love Wikileaks.”

– DJ Trump

“Can’t we drone him?”

– Hillary Clinton

Andrew Fowler is an Australian
award-winning investigative journalist and a former reporter for the
ABC’s Foreign Correspondent and Four Corners programs. and the
author of The
Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’
Fight for Freedom.
This is an updated edition of his 2011 account of the rise and
political imprisonment of Assange. 

Much of that account explained how
Assange seemingly inevitably moved toward an adversarial positioning
against American imperialism abroad. He was a tonic for the
indifference expressed by so many ordinary Americans in the traumatic
aftermath of 9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state. Boston
Legal’s Alan Shore (James Spader) seems to sum
it up succinctly.

His updated version discusses the
torture Assange is currently undergoing at Belmarsh prison in
Britain. Here is a must-see
film regarding his torture.

His book also contains the latest
on UC Global’s comprehensive spying on Assange and his visitors at
the Ecuadorian embassy in London in the last year of his ‘refuge’
there. UC Global is a Spanish security company hired to protect the
embassy. It has since been revealed that they were passing on data to
American intelligence, presumably the CIA. 

Certainly, Fowler implies
such a connection in his updated book, citing two Assange hacking
breaches of US government servers, each of which, Fowler writes, the
CIA went berserk, as if they’d been hit by a foreign enemy. In the
last (new) chapter of the book, “The Casino,” Fowler describes
how outraged the CIA was when Assange published their hacking tools,
known as Vault 7, on Wikileaks: “Sean Roche, the deputy director of
digital innovation at the CIA, remembers the reaction from those
inside the CIA. He said he got a call from another CIA director who
was out of breath: ‘It was the equivalent of a digital Pearl
Harbor.’” Below is my recent interview with the author.

* Note: Upon his release of the
Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg was referred to as “the most
dangerous man in the world.”

             

What is the up-to-date
status of Julian’s health?

It seems quite clear that there is
an attempt by the British and US administrations to destroy Assange,
either driving him to suicide or a psychological breakdown. He has
had a lung condition for a number of years, which has not been
properly treated, and is clearly suffering from huge stress. During
his last court appearance over a video link, there were long pauses
between his words, even when speaking his own name.

When Chelsea Manning was
imprisoned at Quantico she spent 23 hours per day in solitary
confinement and was stripped naked at night. How does Julian’s
treatment at Belmarsh compare? Manning’s treatment was said to be
an attempt to coerce her into ratting on others, including,
presumably Assange. What do you see as the ultimate purpose of
Assange’s treatment? And how does it amount to torture?

The ultimate purpose of Assange’s
treatment is a warning to others. Particularly other journalists.
It’s the modern day equivalent of crucifixion, putting heads of
enemies on spikes, or public hangings. The torture of Assange
involves two main areas: being confined to three rooms in a single
building for 7 years, and unable to leave without fear of arrest and
extradition to Sweden which was playing an underhand role to allow
Assange to be extrdited to the US. As the UN rapporteur on torture
Nils Meltzer wrote that never in the two decades he had spent
investigating war crimes had he ever seen such a ganging up of so
many powerful nations against one individual. It is a testament to
Assange’s mental strength that he resisted at all.

No effort was made by the
Swedes to “question” Assange once he was lifted from the
Ecuadorian Embassy, suggesting that their purpose all along was, as
Assange and his defenders averred, a pretext for hand-over. You’d
think there was some way to nix the bail jump charge given this
likelihood of intergovernmental collusion. Thoughts?

There are no outstanding
allegations for Assange to answer in Sweden. They were always only
allegations, rather than charges. It is important to understand that
if the Swedish prosecutors had charged Assange, they would have had
to reveal the evidence of the ‘offences’ to his lawyers upon
which those charges were based. And the evidence was not only thin,
it pointed to a conspiracy. So it was possible to keep Assange in the
embassy, while the UK prosecuting authority worked at ways of getting
him extradited to Sweden. 

There seems little doubt that the plan all
along was to use Sweden as a holding pen for Assange as the US
applied for his extradition. It is possible he could take his case to
the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), but the Brexit decision,
makes this area extremely murky.

Can you provide more
details about the UC Global, the Spanish company brought into the
Ecuadorian Embassy to spy on Assange? Do we know more about what data
that they gathered? Has a more definitive connection to the CIA been
made? Has any further effort been put into place to quash the
extradition process based on this fact alone? (He could never expect
a fair trial back in the US if such surveillance and potentially
framing were done.)

UC Global not only recorded
hundreds of conversations inside the Ecuadorian embassy, but also
photographed
the phones [and] their location identifying IMEI numbers,
passports and other documents of everyone who visited Assange in the
embassy between 2015 and 2018. It’s my understanding that the case
running in Madrid at the moment against the former CEO of UC Global,
David Morales, who is charged with illegally spying on Assange and
his lawyers (a specifically illegal act in Europe) will be used by
the Assange legal team to argue that the US extradition case should
be thrown out. It is my understanding that if any material gathered
spying on Assange and his lawyers is used, or even known about, by
those involved in the US prosecution – the charges must be
withdrawn. There has been no definitive connection to the CIA. The
closest I have managed to make the link is to the State Department
and White House confidantes.

Snowden’s, Permanent
Record is one of the best reads I’ve had in quite some time.
You could argue that his revelations are equally, if not more
significant, than what Assange offers up through Wikileaks. Where do
you stand on the difference of value, if any, between Wikileaks and
the Snowden revelations?

The main differences are: Assange
is a recipient of information which as a journalist he publishes.
Snowden is a source. When it comes to quantifying the different
values of their work, Assange mainly provided information and
analysis, whereas Snowden exposed intelligence gathering systems. In
the source-journalist relationship, they both need each other. Both
exposed the activities of a war-making machine. Without Assange it is
unlikely that we would have had Snowden. It was WikiLeaks that opened
up the public on a truly massive scale to a secret world of horror
and deception which until then had been largely hidden from view. For
Snowden’s part he brought the argument home that it wasn’t just
foreign governments who were being spied on, it was the Americans
themselves. They both played a significant and at times overlapping
role in revealing the truth about the world we’re in.

Assange and Snowden seem to
have had their differences over the years. Snowden describes in PR
how he chose his nickname: “The final name I chose for my
correspondence was ‘Verax,’ Latin for ‘speaker of truth,’ in
the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called
‘Mendax’ (‘speaker of lies’)—the pseudonym of the young man
who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange.” (p.193)
There was irritability there between them, and Snowden didn’t trust
Assange with his life (fearing that a dump, rather than a
journo-processed revelation system, would close off future
whistleblower arguments). His first choice had been the NYT,
but their suppression of James Risen’s 2004 pre-election piece on
STELLARWIND enraged him and he ended up going with Greenwald et
al, instead.
Snowden suggests character differences between the two, but on the
other hand Assange really pissed the US government off when he sent a
woman to rescue Snowden from Hong Kong. Some of us thought Obama was
going to shoot down Bolivia One with president Evo Morales on board
because Obama thought Snowden was onboard.

 

I see in Permanent
Record Snowden says he
decided not to go with WikiLeaks because of a change of policy to
publish material unredacted, or ‘pristine’ as he calls it. Not
sure why he says this because WL policy is to redact. [Here’s
Snowden’s explanation.] WL did put all the
Iraq/Afghanistan/Cablegate documents online un-redacted, but only
after David Leigh of the Guardian
published the password — and the material was already out on the
internet. I’ve never asked Assange this, but there is another
Mendax. In the 1920s an Australian science fiction writer Erle Cox’a
Mendax was an eccentric inventor. Mendax experiments with ‘matter
transmission’ ‘invisibility’ and ‘extracting gold from
seawater’. There is a tension between the two, no doubt about it.
Snowden still errs on the side of secrecy and Assange on the side of
publication, possibly the difference between an ex-intelligence agent
and a journalist.

Covid-19 seems to be the
wild card in the deck, vis-a-vis Assange’s extradition to the US.
If he doesn’t contract the illness in prison, then his extradition
next year could prove problematic — courts, protests, circus. How
do you think the virus will affect the legal proceedings? Do you
think he’ll be better off under Biden’s DOJ? Or worse, given the
perceived threat to the Democrats he represents? Do you see a way for
his defense to exploit the DNC/Russia hack dishonesty?

Not sure how Covid will impact
anything much, other than slowing down the process, which in itself
is extremely problematic for Assange. He’s already been in prison
or under house arrest (including the embassy) for nine years. I’m
not sure what it takes to embarrass the UK government into refusing
the extradition request, but the new indictment is surely turning the
political prosecution into a farce. The US now wants to re-arrest
Assange to wrap in a new indictment because the first one was likely
to fail. In past years it might have been possible for the UK
Government to reject this deceptive or incompetent behaviour by the
US, but Britain is a spent force now on the world stage, and the US
can do whatever it wants.

As for Biden’s DoJ, he’s called
Assange a ‘high-tech
terrorist’ and has recently said though he favours freedom of
the press it should not compromise US national security. Not much
hope there.

One hope Assange has is the
possible pardoning of Snowden. It plays to Trump’s ‘deep state’
argument that the intelligence agencies are out of control and were
involved in the fabrication of Russian collusion. [Here’s Snowden
referencing his work for the
“Deep State”] Assange’s work has exposed CIA atrocities
(which supports Trump’s position) but WikiLeaks has also revealed
evidence of war crimes by the US military, an establishment so
admired by his core supporters. I fear that a Snowden pardon, much as
I would personally welcome it, would only further isolate Assange.

If
Assange goes down, do you see a future for journalism in the world —
given America’s so-called leadership in this area, by way of the
holy first amendment, but with dwindling global newspapers. The
Guardian, WaPo and
the NYT
remain the only papers of record available in every international
terminal in the world — and sales falling for them, the fight over
what’s real news and what isn’t underway (a proxy war to control
the narrative), how do you see the fight for journalism ahead?

If Assange goes down, it will be
the third domino. First, the rising power of executive government;
second, the destruction of the, at times, countervailing power of the
mainstream media, including public broadcasters who draw their
political power from their audiences (and thus to a certain extent
are independent). The internet has savaged media budgets which has
weakened the overall media environment and empowered governments to
attack and cut public broadcasters. Assange who used the internet as
a weapon for journalism provided a way to re-energise old media
structures — engage readers and challenge executive government
authority. He provided a way to democratise journalism. It is the
reason he is such a threat to the hegemony of the US led five eyes
nations, who until recently in a uni-polar political and strategic
world, have ruled supreme.

I sometimes marvel at the
effect on journalism and even constitutional issues in America that
Australians have had. Early on, Assange seems to have declared war
on the DoD and, later, the US State Department; John Pilger has,
with his interview with the CIA “rogue”
Duane Clarridge, exposed the full fuckin hubris of American foreign
policy; and, Fox News has so dumbed down the political conversation
in America that it may be heading for a fate like that depicted in
Idiocracy.
Any thoughts?

There’s a strange contradiction
in Australia. Australians are very conservative, and cautious, but
part of the national identity is tied to the notion of
anti-authoritarianism, dating back to the nation’s convict past.
The degradation of the mainly poor, transported to Australia from the
UK and Ireland two centuries ago for often minor crimes, created a
bedrock of antagonism against the ruling ‘elites’. This long
history of dissent in Australia has produced outstanding journalists
such as Pilger and Assange, Wilfred Burchett and Philip Knightly. I
can think of no better way to explain how Assange and Murdoch became
two of the most influential global media figures in the past century.
Murdoch rose to power as an anti-establishment figure in the UK and
Assange has done the same on a global basis.

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the debate on Facebook

More articles by:John
Kendall Hawkins

John Kendall Hawkins
is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a
former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.

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