Americas

Veteran reporter John Pilger has issued a stark warning ahead of a landmark court hearing, saying that if WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is extradited to the US “no journalist who challenges power will be safe”.The 81-year-old filmmaker and author of numerous books of investigative journalism, spoke before a hearing at London’s Central Criminal Court, more commonly known as the Old Bailey, that will decide whether his fellow Australian will be sent to America to face 18 espionage and computer hacking charges. The charges carry a potential sentence of up to 175 years in jail.Pilger is among a number of high-profile figures in the media who have said the attempt by the US to punish Assange for exposing the dark side of the so-called “war on terror” represents a threat to anyone interested in defending free speech or protecting journalists who take on powerful targets.In a series of written answers to questions put by The Independent, Pilger, whose documentaries include Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy, said he preferred to talk about “free journalism” rather than “freedom of the press”.“This means journalism that’s informed, honest and not part of any vested interest or groupthink,” he said.“If Julian Assange is extradited to the US, the very idea of a journalism that’s free is lost. No journalist who dares to challenge rapacious power and reveal the truth will be safe.”Pilger has been among those supporters of the 49-year-old Assange who visited him inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he sought asylum in 2012 after skipping bail, as a court sought to send him to Sweden to speak to investigators probing two sexual assault allegations.Assange denied the claims and the probe was later dropped. His lawyers told Swedish authorities he was prepared to cooperate, but feared he may be sent from there to the US.John Pilger says Assange extradition ‘shambolic’In April 2019, after Ecuador withdrew its protection of Assange and he was arrested by London police and later charged by the US, Pilger warned of the potential danger to the health of the Wikileaks founder as he was incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison, having been sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for breaking the terms of his 2012 bail.He tweeted: “Do not forget Julian #Assange. Or you will lose him. I saw him in Belmarsh prison and his health has deteriorated.” He added: “Treated worse than a murderer, he is isolated, medicated and denied the tools to fight the bogus charges of a US extradition. I now fear for him. Do not forget him.”Asked why the US was so desperate to extradite Assange, Pilger said he was a threat to Washington because he and his organisation had “lifted America’s facade”.“It revealed America’s routine war crimes, the lies of its policymakers and an Orwellian surveillance,” he said.“What’s more, the WikiLeaks revelations were 100 per cent authentic. The public service this represents is unprecedented; it is investigative journalism at its finest.”Among the events WikiLeaks helped to expose was an attack in Baghdad in 2007 by two US AH-64 Apache helicopters that targeted buildings and then bore down on a group of people. More than a dozen were killed, including two Reuters journalists. It transpired none of them was armed.“Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one US airman could be heard to say on the video footage.Wikileaks published the video and a transcript in the spring of 2010. A month later, Chelsea Manning, a US army intelligence analyst who had sent hundreds of thousands of secret files to the whistleblower website, was arrested. More

John Shipton does not mince his words. The father of Julian Assange says he believes the US wants to extradite his son and “break him” in revenge for having helped expose what he says were war crimes.If he is sent to the US and convicted of computer hacking and espionage, he faces a sentence of up to 175 years imprisonment in a high security jail in Colorado, likely held in a single cell for 23 hours a day under so-called Special Administrative Measures.“Just to give you some idea what that means – you’re in a small cell, eight feet by ten feet. A concrete wall, a steel door that has a hole in the door. You’re not allowed to speak to each other. Every half an hour, the guard comes along and looks in the peephole,” he says.“The prisoners, in order to communicate with each other, anybody, yell out. bellow, because these are steel doors. So you get this cacophony of screaming in the hallway as people try and communicate with each other. Some of them have been there 10 years, and their minds are cracked. So consequently, they just scream, just to hear their own echoes off the wall.”He adds: “This hellish cacophony is only broken by the guards coming along every half an hour to look in. The reason they do inspect is to stop you from committing suicide. So you’re made to continue to suffer the insufferable. It is vile beyond words. Anyway, that’s what they would do to Julian.”Shipton, 76, speaks to The Independent from Australia, days before a court in London is to decide whether his 49-year-old son, the founder of WikiLeaks, should be extradited to the US to face charges of hacking a Pentagon computer and 17 indictments under the 1917 Espionage Act. The act, passed at a time when the US was at war, does not allow a defendant to argue they were acting in the public interest.His description of what he believes would await his son were he sent to the “SuperMax” prison at Florence, Colorado, where the inmates include “Unabomber“ Theodore Kaczynski, the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and 1993 World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef, echoes testimony from former staff and lawyers, and was presented as evidence during Assange’s hearing.John Shipton, father of Julian Assange, says case against his son intended to cover up war crimesShipton, who attended many of the hearings in London, is clear in his opinion of why the US wants to gets his son.“Julian has the reputation as a speaker of the truth. And WikiLeaks revealed war crimes, and crimes against humanity,” he says. “The persecution of Julian is to destroy the capacity of Julian to speak the truth about what’s happened over the last 20 years or so, and the destruction of the Middle East.”Shipton points to the work of Australian academic Dr Gideon Polya and others, who have estimated the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan led to millions of deaths. He also says millions of people were turned into migrants or refugees as a result of the conflicts.“The persecution of Julian is founded upon disguising their intentions,” he says.Shipton and Assange’s mother, Christine Hawkins, parted before his son was born. Assange took his last name from his stepfather, Brett Assange. Shipton was not present when Assange was growing up, but says he was in regular contact with him from the age of around 24.Had Assange shown an interest in challenging the powerful by that point?“We only ever spoke about how to analyse, or how to get at what is actually happening in the world, you know, what is actuality,” he says. “And then, after the Desert Storm destruction of Iraq, then things intensified.”He adds: “He doesn’t hate the US, by the way. The nature of his work is very similar to the nature of the US. They have the First Amendment, they have a constitution, they have the Bill of Rights.“And they have the belief that the ferment generated by free speech will produce a wealth of ideas. That’s the great side of the US, of course, the other side of the coin is its foreign policy.”Shipton says neither Assange nor WikiLeaks hacked anything. Rather, the site acted as a publisher for materials provided by whistleblowers. It also allowed anyone to analyse and comment on the material, he says. More

He is the newspaper editor who famously fell out with his source. A decade later, Alan Rusbridger’s personal feelings for Julian Assange, someone he described as “a narcissistic egomaniac”, have changed remarkably little. There is no indication Assange’s opinion of Rusbridger has altered much either.Yet, as the world awaits a court decision in London that will determine whether Assange, 49, is extradited to the US to face espionage charges that could land him in jail for 175 years, the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian has emerged as one of the most strident defenders of the WikiLeaks founder.He has said the US’s pursuit of Assange, aided by the British authorities, represents a threat to all journalists, and should alarm anyone concerned about defending free speech. “[The charges are] for things that were recognisably what journalists do. He had a great story, and he had a great source,” Rusbridger, 67, tells The Independent. “It is dangerous that they are trying to pick him off, and lock him up for a long time, on a story that leaps over any public interest hurdle.”He adds: “And it’s a shame people got hung up on whether he’s a real journalist, or the other things he does in his life which we may or may not like, and have sort of shrugged their shoulders at protesting the way they’re attacking him for things that journalists do, that will have big implications for journalists.”Assange’s relationship with The Guardian began in 2007, when Rusbridger says he started receiving documents and information from the Australian hacker. One of those documents allowed the newspaper to publish a story in August that year showing former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars and hiding them in foreign bank accounts. More

The rights of Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange have been “severely violated” for more than a decade, according to the UN’s top envoy on torture, and the British government should release him from detention immediately.Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, said Mr Assange had been convicted of no crime, and yet as he awaited for a court to decide whether to extradite him to the US to face espionage charges, he was at threat of contracting Covid-19.Mr Melzer repeated his assertion Mr Assange’s treatment amounted to torture, and called for the British authorities to either release him or put him under guarded house arrest.“The British authorities initially detained Mr Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence,” he said in a statement released in Geneva.“Today, he is detained for exclusively preventative purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years.”He added: “Mr Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”Mr Assange, 49, founded the whistleblower site Wikileaks in 2006, but generated headlines around the world in 2010, when he released material passed to him by then US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.Assange: A timeline of the investigationMr Assange said the material showed the US and its allies were committing war crimes during its occupation of Iraq.Among the most disturbing of the material was video footage that showed two US AH-64 Apache helicopters attacking buildings in Baghdad in 2007, and then closing in a group of people. Among the people were children and journalists.“Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one US airman could be heard to say of the attack that killed at least a dozen people. Ms Manning served seven years for leaking the video, much of that time spent in solitary confinement. Mr Assange, who is being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison, which like many such facilities has seen an outbreak of Covid cases, was arrested 10 years ago over alleged sexual crimes in Sweden. Mr Assange has always denied the allegations and Mr Melzer said they were withdrawn because of lack of evidence.Mr Assange jumped bail in 2012 and sought and obtained political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he spent seven years. He was arrested from there in April 2019 by the British authorities, acting on an extradition request from the US where he faces 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret American military documents a decade ago. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.The British government accused Mr Assange of skipping bail and he was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. Judge Deborah Taylor told him he had exploited his position.  “Whilst you may have had fears as to what may happen to you, nonetheless you had a choice,” she told him. Mr Assange’s defence team argues he is a journalist and entitled to First Amendment protections for publishing such information. They have also said the conditions he would face in a US prison would breach his human rights. They also argued he had entered the Ecuadorian Embassy out of desperation to avoid being sent to the US.“Mr Assange’s rights have been severely violated for more than a decade. He must now be allowed to live a normal family, social and professional life, to recover his health and to adequately prepare his defence against the US extradition request pending against him,” said Mr Melzer.Last month, Stella Morris, Mr Assange’s partner and the mother of his two children, called on Donald Trump to pardon him.“I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas,” she tweeted.There was no immediate response to enquiries from the British Home Office. More