Belmarsh Tribunals demand justice for Julian Assange
“The first casualty when war comes is truth,” U.S. Sen. Hiram W. Johnson of California said in 1929, debating ratification of the KelloggBriand Pact, a noble but ultimately failed attempt to ban war. He continued: “It begins what we were so familiar with only a brief period ago, this mode of propaganda whereby … people 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.”
Time and again, Johnson has been proven right. Our government’s impulse to control information and manipulate public opinion to support war is deeply ingrained. The past 20 years, dominated by the so-called “War on Terror,” are no exception. Sophisticated PR campaigns, a compliant mass media and the Pentagon’s pervasive propaganda machine all work together, as Noam Chomsky and the late Ed Herman defined it in the title of their groundbreaking book, “Manufacturing Consent.”
One publisher consistently challenging the pro-war narrative pushed by the U.S. government 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. Wikileaks titled that video, “Collateral Murder.”
The New York Times and other newspapers partnered with Wikileaks to publish stories based on the leaks. This brought increased attention to the editorin-chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. In December 2010, two months after the release of the “Collateral Murder” video, then-Vice President Joe Biden said Assange was “closer to being a hitech terrorist than the Pentagon papers.” 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.
With a secret grand jury empaneled 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’s asylum, British authorities arrested him and locked him up in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, often called “Britain’s Guantánamo.” 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 charges. If extradited and convicted in the U.S., Assange faces 175 years in a maximum-security prison.
While the Conservative-led UK government seems poised to extradite Assange, a 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. The Belmarsh Tribunal has assembled some of the world’s most prominent, progressive activists, artists, politicians, dissidents, human rights attorneys and whistleblowers, all speaking in defense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
“We are bearing witness to a travesty of justice,” Jeremy Corbyn, a British member of Parliament, said at the tribunal. “To 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’s expedient and convenient to kill people who get in the way of whatever grand scheme they’ve got. We say no.”
Corbyn is joined in his call by The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel — major newspapers that published articles based on the leaked documents. “Publishing is not a crime,” the newspapers declared.
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.