Guest essay by Tarik Cyril Amar, in The Multiplural World, Oct 4, 2024 (with recommended, related readings further below)
(This essay first appeared in RT International, Oct 4, 2024. Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany who teaches and researches political science at Koç University in Istanbul. His subject areas include Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe; the history of World War II; the cultural Cold War; and the politics of memory)
As the world teeters on the verge of a massive war in the Middle East that could turn into World War Three, it is hard to even notice other important events. Overshadowing all other news is the hideous spectacle of Israel and the collective West co-perpetrating a genocide in Gaza while also producing multiple attacks and massacres in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Israel is also issuing ceaseless threats to do even worse if the victims dare fight back. When Gaza is being exterminated and Beirut is burning, why would people turn to look at sleepy Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament?
Yet that is where on October 1 a quietly historic event took place, namely the first major public appearance of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, publisher and outstanding investigative journalist after his release on June 25 from some 14 years of vicious, American-British persecution and incarceration. Some of his detention amounted to torture, according to UN special rapporteur Nils Melzer and the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.
Watch, listen read:
Julian and Stella Assange’s presentation in Strasbourg on Oct 1, 2024: (weblinks to the video recording and the transcript, on the website of the Council of Europe here)
Though he is now free, Assange has not, it is important to note, received justice and most likely never will. A victim of outrageous abuses of state power, the crimes against him have not even been acknowledged by their perpetrators. Instead, to escape further persecution, Assange was forced through a plea deal to pretend to recognize his own non-existent guilt. But as he put it in Strasbourg on October 1– clearly with ironic reference to the title of a famous Soviet dissident’s memoir – he “chose freedom over unrealizable justice”.
Justice for him “is now precluded” in the future, too, because Washington has written into the plea deal that he “cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request” in the U.S. So much, once again, for the rule of law in the “rules-based international order”. Once again, this is perverted to the last moment and beyond.
This extremely murky outcome also means, again in Assange’s own words, that he is “not free today because the system worked” but because in effect, he pleaded guilty to journalism, which is, quite simply, not a crime.
The occasion for Assange’s statement and short Q&A session in Strasbourg was a deceptively small-scale hearing at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. PACE is a 46-country organization (not to be confused with the European Union itself). The October 1 hearing was organized by PACE’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights and preceded a full debate that addressed a detailed report on Assange’s treatment and its “chilling effects on human rights”. That debate took place on October 2. Its key result was PACE’s official confirmation that Assange was a political prisoner. Everyone not completely brainwashed by U.S. propaganda has, of course, long known that despite Washington’s blatant abuse of its 1917 Espionage Act to persecute Assange.
And Assange is not just any political prisoner: All political prisoners suffer unjustly and deserve support. But due to the worldwide reverberations of his persecution by the U.S., the rogue hegemon of the West, history will look back on Julian Assange as the single most important political prisoner of the first post-Cold War decades, without a grain of hyperbole. The issues at stake were and remain of global importance and will shape the future of humanity, for better or worse: freedom of expression; the role of free, unimpeded media in holding the powerful to account; the increasingly aggressive efforts by the rich and powerful to shut down such challenges, especially across borders; the lack of protection for individuals targeted by powerful states that manipulate or disobey their own laws; and last but not least, the enormous abuses suffered by the working classes of the world, especially in the Global South, at the hands of a West that wages wars of aggression and torture campaigns and now is co-perpetrating genocide.
All this is one reason the meeting in Strasbourg was so important. The other reason is the fact that Assange’s fate is connected to the horrors that are currently being inflicted on the Middle East. For it was Assange’s revelations of decades of crimes committed by the U.S. and its Western followers in the Middle East (broadly understood) that led most of all to his ordeal.
While Assange also came under the fire of those perpetrating ‘Russiagate/Russia rage’ (the response to the exposing of Democratic Party corruption and manipulations during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which Hillary Clinton still cannot accept she lost), that was not the key issue. Assange has obviously not somehow functioned as a Russian agent. Indeed, in Strasbourg he bent over backwards, repeatedly, to falsely imply equivalence between the systematic mass murder by Israel of (mostly) Palestinian journalists and the killing of their journalist counterparts on both sides in the Ukraine war.
What really started tripping up WikiLeaks was its exemplary investigative work on U.S. atrocities committed during the fundamentally illegal war of aggression against the Iraqi people in 2003 and after. That painted a first, big American target on Assange’s back in 2010. That year, WikiLeaks released the by-now famous video ‘Collateral Murder‘ that provided clear evidence of war crimes committed in 2007 by a merrily murderous (and chatty!) crew of American gunship pilots. More revelations followed, including about death squads effectively run by the U.S. and its auxiliaries during the long U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan as well as U.S. ‘rendition‘ programs (that is, kidnapping) featuring black sites, and torture, including in Europe.
There was only one other WikiLeaks exploit that rivaled its exposure of the very dirty realities of the so-called Great War on Terror (and its sequels) in enraging the U.S., and that was the ‘Vault 7’ documents released in 2017. Assange’s own summary in Strasbourg “revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, and its subversion of antivirus software, automobiles, smart TVs and iPhones”.
After that, the U.S. pulled out all the stops. This was the time of the Donald Trump presidency. He may well be the next U.S. president as he flaunts his friendship with X owner Elon Musk, who pretends to promote “free speech”. As Assange explained during the Q&A in Strasbourg, WikiLeaks had angered the national security state, “one of the constitutive powers” of the ‘real’ political system in the U.S. In response, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo “launched a campaign of retribution” that included not only Assange’s brutalization by isolation and incarceration but also “plans to kidnap and to assassinate him” inside the embassy of another state (Ecuador) in another country (Britain). “Theft, hacking attacks and the planting of false information” were used against Assange’s associates and WikiLeaks staff. In a particularly vile and creepy episode, his wife and infant son were in the Americans’ sights as well: instructions were once given to obtain DNA from the diaper of their baby son.
It is obvious that Assange was compelled to strike a plea deal that perverted justice. Yet, one fact is too often overlooked because we have become used to it: With myriad crimes committed against those being invaded and occupied in the Middle East, spied upon and manipulated everywhere, and trying to expose the abuses, not a single perpetrator has ever been prosecuted, or even investigated, as the PACE report stresses. If you are puzzled by the impunity of genocidal, apartheid Israel during its current rampage through the Middle East, keep in mind that the West as a whole has a much larger, longstanding culture of impunity.
This legal nihilism can be creative. In order to go after Assange after 2017, some of the finest minds of U.S. jurisprudence invented a whole new and completely perverse theory. In Assange’s concise summary of this piece of skullduggery: “Only U.S. citizens have free speech rights; Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights.” At the same time, “The U.S. Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So, Europeans in Europe must obey U.S. secrecy law with no defense at all,” that is even less than what American citizens are formally granted under their first amendment rights. “An American in Paris” (note Assange’s Gene Kelly allusion), Assange pointed out, “can talk about what the U.S. government is up to – perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defense and he may be extradited just like me.”
The ongoing case of Julian Assange is about many crucial things. But if I had to pick only one as the single most important question, it would be the almost comically arrogant and crude U.S. overreach. This is such an obvious slap in the face to every other state in the world, but that’s just the American establishment’s way of doing things. They really can’t, it seems, help themselves.
What makes this overreach into the decisive issue is something else. Whatever perversions and abuses American leaders will come up with, they will affect either the U.S. only, as they should, or they will affect all of us, as they often do now. In other words, the U.S. does not have healthy boundaries. It will always overstep, as long as it feels strong enough or that others are weak enough.
The first, strategic step toward at least limiting and containing American abuses is for other countries to preserve or reclaim their sovereignty. In that regard, it is sadly ironic that Assange spoke in the EU before a European institution. Notwithstanding PACE’s best efforts, Western Europe is the part of the world least likely to regain sovereignty. Others, however, have never lost it or they are well on their way to reasserting it.
Recommended, related readings:
* Western governments and media criminal support of Israel’s crimes against the people of Palestine and Lebanon, guest essay by Tarik Cyril Amar, in The Multiplural World, Sept 27, 2024 (with recommended, related readings)
* Craig Murray and Richard Medhurst discuss Julian Assange’s appearance in Strasbourg on October 1, broadcast on Consortium News, Oct 3, 2024 (two hour broadcast at weblink) Journalist, diplomat and whistleblower Craig Murray joins journalist Richard Medhurst to speak about Julian Assange‘s speech to the ‘PACE’ committee of the Council of Europe on October 1 and on the explosive situation in the Middle East that could lead to regional war. The two journalists discuss their own recent experiences of detention in the British prison/industrial complex.
