{"id":3822,"date":"2023-01-28T21:19:40","date_gmt":"2023-01-28T21:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/?p=3822"},"modified":"2023-01-28T21:19:40","modified_gmt":"2023-01-28T21:19:40","slug":"the-belmarsh-tribunals-demand-justice-for-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/?p=3822","title":{"rendered":"The Belmarsh Tribunals Demand Justice for Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan<\/a><\/p>\n

\"belmarsh_tribunals_r.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first casualty when war comes is truth,\u201d U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson of California said in 1929, debating ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a noble but ultimately failed attempt to ban war. Reflecting on World War I, which ended a decade earlier, he continued, \u201cit begins what we were so familiar with only a brief period ago, this mode of propaganda whereby\u2026people become war hungry in their patriotism and are lied into a desire to fight. We have seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Time and again, Hiram Johnson has been proven right. Our government\u2019s impulse to control information and manipulate public opinion to support war is deeply ingrained. The past twenty years, dominated by the so-called War on Terror, are no exception. Sophisticated PR campaigns, a compliant mass media and the Pentagon\u2019s pervasive propaganda machine all work together, as public intellectual Noam Chomsky and the late Prof. Ed Herman defined it in the title of their groundbreaking book, \u201cManufacturing Consent,\u201d borrowing a phrase from Walter Lippman, considered the father of public relations.<\/p>\n

One publisher consistently challenging the pro-war narrative pushed by the U.S. government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has been the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Wikileaks gained international attention in 2010 after publishing a trove of classified documents leaked from the U.S. military. Included were numerous accounts of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the killing of civilians, and shocking footage of a helicopter gunship in Baghdad slaughtering a dozen civilians, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, on the ground below. Wikileaks titled that video, \u201cCollateral Murder.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Times and other newspapers partnered with Wikileaks to publish stories based on the leaks. This brought increased attention to the founder and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. In December, 2010, two months after release of the Collateral Murder video, then-Vice President Joe Biden, appearing on NBC, said Assange was \u201ccloser to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers.\u201d Biden was referring to the 1971 classified document release by Daniel Ellsberg, which revealed years of Pentagon lies about U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.<\/p>\n

With a secret grand jury empanelled in Virginia, Assange, then in London, feared being arrested and extradited to the United States. Ecuador granted Assange political asylum. Unable to make it to Latin America, he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He lived inside the small, apartment-sized embassy for almost seven years. In April 2019, after a new Ecuadorian president revoked Assange\u2019s asylum, British authorities arrested him and locked him up in London\u2019s notorious Belmarsh Prison, often called \u201cBritain\u2019s Guant\u00e1namo.\u201d He has been held there, in harsh conditions and in failing health, for almost four years, as the U.S. government seeks his extradition to face espionage and other charges. If extradited and convicted in the U.S., Assange faces 175 years in a maximum-security prison.<\/p>\n

While the Conservative-led UK government seems poised to extradite Assange, a global movement has grown demanding his release. The Progressive International, a global pro-democracy umbrella group, has convened four assemblies since 2020 called The Belmarsh Tribunals. Named after the 1966 Russell-Sartre Tribunal on the Vietnam War, convened by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sarte, The Belmarsh Tribunal has assembled some of the world\u2019s most prominent, progressive activists, artists, politicians, dissidents, human rights attorneys and whistleblowers, all speaking in defense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are bearing witness to a travesty of justice,\u201d Jeremy Corbyn, a British Member of Parliament and a former leader of the Labour Party, said at the tribunal. \u201cTo an abuse of human rights, to a denial of freedom of somebody who bravely put himself on the line that we all might know that the innocent died in Abu Ghraib, the innocent died in Afghanistan, the innocent are dying in the Mediterranean, and innocents die all over the world, where unwatched, unaccountable powers decide it\u2019s expedient and convenient to kill people who get in the way of whatever grand scheme they\u2019ve got. We say no. That\u2019s why we are demanding justice for Julian Assange.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corbyn is joined in his call by The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel\u2013major newspapers that published articles based on the leaked documents. \u201cPublishing is not a crime,\u201d the newspapers declared.<\/p>\n

Never before has a publisher been charged under the U.S. Espionage Act. The Assange prosecution poses a fundamental threat to the freedom of speech and a free press. President Biden, currently embroiled in his own classified document scandal, knows this, and should immediately drop the charges against Julian Assange.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan \u201cThe first casualty when war comes is truth,\u201d U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson of California said in 1929, debating ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a noble but ultimately failed attempt to ban war. Reflecting on World War I, which ended a decade earlier, he continued, \u201cit begins what we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3823,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3822\/revisions\/3823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}