Whistleblowers

What I Got Wrong About Julian Assange

January 8, 2022 Dean Yates, Consortium News. Educate! Australia, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Journalism, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

I wrote a piece for Australian online publisher Crikey just before Julian Assange’s extradition hearings resumed in September 2020 in which I regurgitated a slur that has done enormous harm to his reputation. Australian journalists should stop using the WikiLeaks treasure trove in their stories if they wouldn’t speak up for Assange, I’d written. Journalists like to think they’d go to jail to protect a source. Well, their source was suffering in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison, I said. The problem was I also wrote that Assange dumped the Iraq and Afghan war logs on the internet without redacting names. I was wrong and lazy in repeating that slur which appeared whenever you Googled Assange’s name.

PEN America And The Betrayal Of Julian Assange

December 28, 2021 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Journalism, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer’s integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States.

On Contact: Slow-Motion Execution Of Julian Assange

December 26, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. Resistance Report Criminal Justice and Prisons, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the torture of Julian Assange with his father, John Shipton. Julian Assange committed the empire’s greatest sin – he exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption, and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Labour, Trump or Biden – it does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds.

Committee To Protect Journalists Excludes Assange From Jailed Journalist Index

December 26, 2021 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Journalism, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

A record number of journalists are imprisoned throughout the world, according to the annual prison index released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). But that number excludes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. CPJ, which is based in New York, opposes the United States Justice Department’s prosecution against Assange. However, for the third year, the press freedom organization declined to classify him as a jailed journalist. In the organization’s press release on the 2021 index, it states, “No journalists were jailed in North America at the time of the census deadline.” That may be true, but it obscures what the U.S. government is doing to keep a journalist detained in the United Kingdom.

NYT Reporting On Airstrikes Should Give Daniel Hale More Credit

December 21, 2021 Sam Carliner, Common Dreams. Educate! Daniel Hale, Drones, New York Times (NYT), Whistleblowers

The New York Times recently came through with a display of reporting that should be commended. On December 18, the paper announced its release of hundreds of the Pentagon's confidential reports of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East. This follows its high profile investigations into the U.S. drone murder of the Ahmadi family during the Afghanistan withdrawal, and an American strike cell in Syria that killed dozens of civilians with airstrikes. Many journalists will, rightfully, praise the New York Times for its reporting on U.S. airstrikes and the civilian cost. Far fewer will point out how the inhumanity of U.S. airstrikes were first revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Daniel Hale.

Freeing Julian Assange

December 18, 2021 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

The legal systems in the United Kingdom and the United States will not spare WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The only way this political case will end is if U.S. officials conclude the cost is no longer worth the benefit of making an example out of him. Support for prosecuting Assange comes from within U.S. intelligence agencies (particularly the C.I.A.), the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Defense Department, the national security division of the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia, and several influential senators and representatives in the U.S. Congress. On December 10, the British High Court of Justice granted the U.S. government’s appeal in the extradition case against Assange and significantly increased the likelihood that he will one day be transported to the U.S. for an unprecedented trial involving charges under the Espionage Act.

Why We Must Defend Julian Assange

December 17, 2021 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

December 10 is International Human Rights Day. It is always a sham holiday for the United States, which locks up its own people at rates exceeding those of every other country, and routinely makes war against the rest of the world. In 2021 the date was treated as even more of a mockery than in the past. Joe Biden convened a bizarre democracy summit, wherein he declared other nations good or bad based on whether they go along with the dictates of the U.S. empire. Although it was in London where the U.S. behaved in a particularly shameful manner, working with the United Kingdom to secure the right to extradite Julian Assange. In 2018 Assange was indicted in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, a hanging court where acquittals are rare.

On Contact: Assange Can Be Extradited, Says Court

December 13, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. Resistance Report Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

On Friday, the British High Court in London overturned an earlier lower court decision blocking the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. The ruling sends the case back to the Magistrate’s Court with instructions to allow the extradition to be approved or denied by British Home Secretary Priti Patel. The ruling, which included a decision to continue to hold Assange in a high security prison, is a severe blow to the Wikileaks co-founder’s efforts to prevent his extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act. The extradition is now in the hands of Patel, unless Assange’s lawyers, as expected, file an appeal to the UK Supreme Court.

Assange Plans To Appeal High Court Decision Backing Extradition

December 11, 2021 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

Attorneys for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plan to appeal to the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom after the country’s appeals court overturned a decision that blocked the extradition of Assange to the United States. The High Court of Justice was “satisfied” with diplomatic assurances offered by the U.S. government related to how Assange would be treated in jail or prison, and they stated, “There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say.” “There is no basis for assuming that the U.S.A. has not given the assurances in good faith,” the High Court also insisted.More significantly, the High Court remitted the case back to the district court and instructed a district judge at this level to send the request to the Secretary of State in the Home Department for extradition.

A Judicial Kidnapping

December 11, 2021 John Pilger, Consortium News. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

Miscarriage of justice is an inadequate term in these circumstances. It took the bewigged courtiers of Britain’s ancient regime just nine minutes on Friday to uphold an American appeal against a District Court judge’s acceptance in January of a cataract of evidence that hell on earth awaited Assange across the Atlantic: a hell in which, it was expertly predicted, he would find a way to take his own life. Volumes of witness by people of distinction, who examined and studied Julian and diagnosed his autism and his Asperger’s Syndrome and revealed that he had already come within an ace of killing himself at Belmarsh prison, Britain’s very own hell, were ignored. The recent confession of a crucial F.B.I. informant and prosecution stooge, a fraudster and serial liar, that he had fabricated his evidence against Julian was ignored.

Assange’s Judge Is Longtime Friend Of Minister Who Oversaw Arrest

December 4, 2021 Matt Kennard And Mark Curtis, Consortium News. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the judge who will soon decide Julian Assange’s fate, is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan, who as foreign minister arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy. The two have known each other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan called Burnett “the Judge.” Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a judge at the court of appeal. Now the most powerful judge in England and Wales, Burnett will soon rule on Assange’s extradition case. The founder of WikiLeaks faces life imprisonment in the U.S..

‘Believing The Propaganda That The Government Follows The Law’

November 30, 2021 Consortium News. Resistance Report Afghanistan War, Australia, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Whistleblowers

Whistleblower David McBride faces life in prison for revealing war crimes in Afghanistan to the media. Watch his story here. David McBride, a former Australian military lawyer, tells journalist Michael West about alleged war crimes and a cover-up in Afghanistan. He faces trial for leaking hundreds of pages of defense force information to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (whose offices were then raided by federal police), offering insight on clandestine operations of Australia’s elite special forces, including incidents of troops killing unarmed men and children.

Why There Are So Few Whistleblowers

November 26, 2021 Melvin Goodman, Counter Punch. Educate! Accountability, Congress, Legal System, Whistleblowers

Adam Schiff’s new book, “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could,” makes a strong case for the importance of whistleblowing, particularly in these fractured times. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, argues that his committee is “uniquely dependent on whistleblowers” because of the “classified nature” of its work. Without whistleblowers, the congressional intelligence committees would be “almost completely reliant on the intelligence agencies to self-report,” according to Schiff. A whistleblower in the intelligence community cannot go to the press, so they must have “access to Congress” or the “whole system fails.”

New Files Expose Australian Government’s Betrayal Of Assange

November 18, 2021 Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Extradition, Julian Assange, Whistleblowers

Was the government of Australia aware of the US Central Intelligence Agency plot to assassinate Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and journalist arrested and now imprisoned under unrelentingly bleak, harsh conditions in the UK? Why have the country’s elected leaders refused to publicly advocate for one of its citizens, who has been held on dubious charges and subjected to torture by a foreign power, according to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer? What does Canberra know about Julian’s fate and when did it know it? The Grayzone has obtained documents revealing that the Australian government has since day one been well-aware of Julian’s cruel treatment inside London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison, and has done little to nothing about it.

Syria Massacre Coverup Shows Danger Of Assange Precedent

November 16, 2021 Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News. Educate! Julian Assange, Syria, Wars and Militarism, Whistleblowers

The report contains many significant revelations, including that the U.S. military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the U.S. war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

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