6/19/20 Patrick Cockburn on the Heinous Mistreatment of Julian Assange

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Patrick Coburn.
He is the author of Chaos and Caliphate, and he's got a brand new book coming out, can't wait for this, War in the Age of Trump.
The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, and the Conflict with Iran.
All right, and here he is in the London review of books, Julian Assange in Limbo.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
I'm great, thank you.
Great to have you back on the show here, and great to see you sticking up for Julian Assange again.
You know, I think, well, a lot of his most important work really came out, took place a decade ago, and there are a lot of people who may not really be familiar with the saga of Julian Assange.
Maybe they only know him as being accused of rigging the election for Trump or this kind of thing, but he is in a lot of trouble, and according to your article, he should not be.
So I was hoping, or well, I was looking forward to this opportunity to give you a chance to explain to the people who is Julian Assange, why is WikiLeaks so important, and why is his prosecution so important, sir?
I think if one was to start with, trying to sum it up in a few phrases, is that what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did in 2010 was really to sort of weaponize freedom of expression.
They had, I'll go into this in a little more detail in a moment, but they were given or got access to a great trove of American documents, the Iraq war logs, the Afghan war logs, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, and they gave them to the press.
They were in the New York Times and the Guardian, the Le Monde, El Pais, you name it.
And this was very revealing about the American government and the way it operated.
I should say this came from a thing, or you know, it was said at the time that the names of U.S. agents were revealed by this.
Now the Pentagon afterwards spent three years and 120 counterintelligence officers trying to find somebody who was named in all the oceans of facts revealed by WikiLeaks who'd subsequently been killed by Al-Qaeda or Taliban or somebody.
They couldn't find a single person and they admitted this at the sentencing hearings of Chelsea Manning, the private who'd given this information to WikiLeaks in 2013.
So that accusation should have sort of disappeared, it hasn't disappeared, but it's still there.
It's one of the reasons, the main reason they're trying to get him, extradite him from the UK.
So that should have been, that accusation should have been buried, dead and buried a long time.
I think that what was really important that this really showed you the inside of the government and governments really don't like that.
It affects their power, it affects their legitimacy, it affects their credibility and that's why they spent 10 years pursuing Assange.
And you know, people talk about Daniel Ellsberg and make films about him as the patron saint of whistleblower, whistleblowing.
He gave the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, you know, and he's looked up as almost a saint by many people.
But Julian Assange is currently in Belmarsh prison, in maximum security prison in Britain.
They apparently can't even get a radio sent to him, 23 and a half hours a day in his cell.
You know, this is very bad stuff.
And they seem to extradite him to the US under the Exponage Act of 1917, passed at the height of war fever in the First World War.
And he could spend 175 years in prison because of this.
So I think this is the most important sort of case about freedom of the press that I've seen in my lifetime as a journalist.
And I also think it's one of the most ill-reported.
You know, rumors are reported as facts.
People think that Assange was accused, you know, was charged by the Swedes with rape.
You know, once you have a rape suspect attached to somebody's name, they become a sort of pariah.
They had newspapers, including all the enormous newspapers, powerful newspapers, which originally published Assange's and WikiLeaks revelations, all distanced themselves from him.
I think because they got nervous, you know, they saw the governments were coming after him and they didn't want to be there.
They did cite sort of minor things, they didn't sort of get on with him, they didn't like his character or something.
But these are really trivial excuses that nobody should pay much attention to.
But I think what they should pay attention to is that this is a tremendous challenge for freedom of the press, freedom of expression.
And because of this sort of multiple charges that have been hurled at Assange, there hasn't been enough resistance or discussion to what the government is seeking to do in this case.
All right.
So, you know, a lot of important points there.
But on that last one, I think is really the most important is the possibility of the precedent set if he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted under the Espionage Act.
You know, it's commonly said that we don't have an official secrets act here in America like you guys do over in the U.K.
But that's not really true.
We do, too.
It is the Espionage Act and it's very broad.
And as written, it would include anyone who disseminates classified information, not just a source in the government who leaks it to a reporter, but a reporter and his editor, too.
And yet they just don't have a history of prosecuting that.
We have a tradition of not going after journalists for that.
But they could.
And of course, it wouldn't apply to David Sanger and Michael Gordon and all of their favorite pets.
It would apply to good reporters doing important work and exposing real scandals.
And you could see not just Assange, but a lot of other great reporters start going to federal prison after him if he is convicted of this.
Yeah, and they'll intimidate a lot of people.
I mean, what's important about this and is that, you know, the U.S., you know, lots of other people have been down this road.
You know, Turkey used to have a wonderful free press, loads of, you know, newspapers and magazines and television and radio stations.
It doesn't anymore.
You know, the government has criminalized dissent.
They just put people in jail who've produced reports on things the Turkish government had done, which are completely true and completely irrefutable.
But the Turkish government just didn't like this stuff appearing and accused them of terrorism and put them in jail for the same thing or didn't even charge them at all, just put them in jail.
You know, worse, the tide against free freedom of the press is happening all over the world.
But if it sort of if this happens in the U.S., this gives an extra an extra charge to two states that want to do that.
You know, the Philippines, the main television station there has been taken off the air by the by the government there.
The India freedom of the press increasingly under attack that's happening all over.
But this is the most the most important place it's happening is the U.S. was freedom of expression and the press was greatest there.
And this is a signal to all these other sort of pop up dictatorships all over the world.
Yep.
And ain't that the truth, too, that there really are very few other societies in the world that have such an iron law as our First Amendment with as much protections as we've had.
And Lord knows without it, our government would run roughshod over our right of, you know, free speech and freedom of the press and everything to the nth degree if they could.
And that's, you know, the wall in their way.
And this looks like a great loophole through that wall.
And as you said, and this is the most infuriating part of it, right, is the way that Julian Assange has been forsaken by the entire rest of the media, even though their skin is on the line, too.
They're willing to say, you know, go ahead, feed him to the lions and leave me alone, which is never going to work.
And they cry all day the way Trump insults them and calls them fake news and delegitimizes them.
But then when it comes to a real concrete threat to their right to continue doing their job, they're all AWOL.
Yeah, I think that that's, you know, it's a real decline from what we saw at the time of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers.
You know, then a lot of papers went in fighting for that, you know, famously, probably their degree of attachment to freedom of the press and fighting the government was a greater in the movies than it really was, you know, but it was there in a way that it's not now.
And, you know, it's not that difficult in most countries to eventually intimidate the press or drive dissent to the margins.
You know, you know, there are some free papers in Russia, you know, but the main the great mass of the media is controlled by the state or allies of the state.
You know, that's that's the pattern all over.
So the fact that they've managed to extradite, maybe able to extradite somebody from the UK shows that this new level of repression in the U.S. can be used outside the country as well as inside.
Mm hmm.
And well, by the way, does it is it pretty much accepted that he will be extradited to the U.S.?
No, no, I don't think that's true.
You know, but it's sort of the various legal things they have to go through, you know, and then there will be appeals.
It's not automatic, you know, but you have a government, you know, which is in power here, which is Boris Johnson and the Home Secretary Priti Patel.
You know, these these these are the rather muted UK equivalents of Donald Trump.
So they're likely to be sympathetic to a source.
On the other hand, you know, let's not say, you know, there is there are still courts.
There's still laws here.
This doesn't at all happen automatically.
Hmm.
Yeah, it seems like there's more law there than there is here.
When Bill Hodge, the bin Ladenite that America fought the Libya war for once he won that war, he sued the MI6 for torture.
He didn't even bother suing the CIA.
It would have got thrown right out of court.
But the Brits actually settled with him because somewhere there was a guy with a powdered wig who was willing to let that go forward.
I talked to him.
He told me, actually, I think I was the first person to know that after he got back to Libya and he told me he was going to sue the British intelligence.
I thought, you know, it's the sort of thing that people say when they're angry.
I didn't realize he was actually going to do it, since it's the middle of the war.
But it's.
But, you know, the whole case, the whole, you know, extraordinary relentless pursuit of Assange, you know, at a number of levels immediately after the revelations were produced about Assange, he was accused of betraying American informants and agents who would then be murdered, you know.
So I mentioned earlier, you know, 120 counterintelligence officers going through all these WikiLeaks documents trying to find somebody.
And you would have thought somebody would have been killed by accident, you know, or just happenstance, you know, that somewhere in Afghanistan, some guy would have been hit by a Taliban rocket.
And you could have said, well, you know, he was mentioned, his name was mentioned by WikiLeaks.
They couldn't find a single one, you know, so that accusation should be dead and buried long ago.
But many people still believe it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They admitted that at Manning's court-martial.
Yeah.
The prosecutor is a more general thing.
Sure, yeah.
And then you're the more general thing of saying sort of espionage, letting classified secrets.
But, you know, I was in Kabul when this was the first release.
And just by chance, I was talking to an off the record talk with a U.S. official.
And he said, you know, what's the coding of the top of these?
And I can't remember exactly the circumstances, but these must have been released.
And I gave it to him, then gave him the code number.
And he said, oh, well, that's not really secret.
You know, this came from a particular network which was used by originally being used by the Pentagon.
But after 9-11, within the U.S. government bureaucracy and particularly the security side or military side of it, you know, they discovered that there were pockets of information that one lot had that others would have been deeply interested, but they didn't know it was there.
So they set up or expanded this database called Supernet that really about half a million people could get access to.
They would have had to get a password.
But, you know, within the people who had the right security ratings could have reached this.
But of course, you know, as this guy was talking to in Kabul said, you know, the U.S. government is not so dumb to put its deepest secrets or things it really doesn't want to know in a system which half a million people can get into.
But, you know, Manning was a private in the army.
He was able to access this.
You know, there were people all over the place.
So it actually it's not where the deep secrets or even the real secrets of the U.S. government sort of thing they're talking about, the names of agents and so forth.
Yeah, that's an important point that this is stuff that they had clearly taken a calculated risk would get exposed in order to give more people access to it.
I was just reminded yesterday that John Bolton said that Manning should have been put to death for this leak, even though, as you're saying, this is just secret and confidential level stuff.
In fact, it was the perfect leak.
Right.
Because it wasn't sources and methods and highest level stuff.
While at the same time, it was the source for 10,000 important news stories about Iraq and Afghanistan.
And then also with the State Department cables, stories so important going back to the seventies.
That was the most, you know, the most famous part of this was this extraordinary and chilling film taken by the gun camera of a U.S.
Apache helicopter in Baghdad in July 2007.
I remember the incident well as I was in Baghdad that 12 civilian told people on the ground had been machine gunned and killed by a U.S. helicopter in Baghdad.
The U.S. said they were all terrorists.
Two of the people were Reuters photographers.
And so we kind of knew it was very unlikely that this was true.
We couldn't quite prove it.
And they went on, they went on sort of saying this.
And it was known that there was a video of what had happened.
And there was a Freedom of Information Act request, but it was never released until Manning and Wicking leaks released it.
And then it showed that, you know, guys on the ground that a, you know, it was very unlikely that armed insurgents would have been wandering around in the open with their guns, with the U.S. helicopter overhead.
But I leave that aside.
You know, they'd mistaken a camera for a journalist's camera for a rocket propelled grenade launcher and so forth.
And they've been sort of laughing and shouting and shooting, killing these people.
And they'd kill the people, you know, in a van that stopped to rescue some of the wounded and so forth.
So it was very horrible.
This was shown in 2010 to the pretty intense embarrassment of the U.S. government.
Most of the stuff isn't quite like that.
You know, there are kinds of people who've been shot at checkpoints and so forth.
An awful lot of it just embarrassed the U.S., you know, that as to what, you know, diplomats were saying about Saudi Arabia or Yemen and stuff like that.
And I think they saw that information just released like that, you know, it means a real loss of power for any state, for any government that loses, that no longer controls that information, although it's not really sort of secret.
You know, given the ease with which basically Wikileaks was able to take it over, you know, foreign states hostile or not, I don't think would have had too many problems getting into that system, you know, and then the U.N., the Pentagon would have known that.
You know, the third thing, which and this is what gave Assange Pariah status, was the accusation of rape in Sweden.
And this was pursued by the Swedish government from the beginning in very sort of murky circumstances.
The two women had gone to the Swedish police and they wanted, they had had sex with Assange, but they wanted to have him to, they wondered if he could be forced to have an HIV test.
And almost immediately, the Swedish police sort of leaked to the press that he was being accused of rape.
You know, and once that's one of those sort of allegations, which means that the person can't really defend themselves because their reputation is so damaged by the accusation itself that they don't really get a hearing.
The Swedes kept dropping this.
They kept on bringing it back.
Now, in my piece, when I do quote at some length Nils Melzod, the U.N. rapporteur on torture who did a long judicial review of the treatment of Assange, and eventually last year wrote a 19 page letter to the Swedish government asking for, to, you know, to explain what had happened, why they'd maintained, you know, over a long period, asking to interview Assange, wanting him to go from UK and the Ecuadorian embassy where he'd taken refuge back to Sweden.
But when he offered to talk to them, you know, on video and other circumstances, didn't really seem to want to do so.
They didn't want this a preliminary investigation, which went on for 10 years.
It was dropped three times.
It was returned three times.
The it's pretty clear the British did not want them to drop it because in this report, the the Crown Prosecution Service in UK is quoted as saying that the writing to the Swedes, to Sweden's chief prosecutor, saying, don't you dare get cold feet.
In other words, don't you dare drop this.
Right.
Your efforts, your pursuit of Assange.
So I think this was very much, you know, extraordinary persecution of a very long period.
Yeah.
And I'm really glad you mentioned that report.
It's by Nils Melzer.
If people just search that and Assange, as Patrick mentioned, 19 page report, it's the single best piece of investigation on the issue of those accusations.
But to wrap up here real quick, Patrick, I wanted to ask you because it seems like we're at a real turning point here.
And it makes sense that WikiLeaks would be the thing that really pushes the issue to ahead, because it is such a step forward in the evolution of journalism and posting so many raw documents at once like this in a way that neither your times or mine would ever dream of.
Right.
And so but now it's sort of given the government the opportunity here then to overreach in their own way.
And maybe it it threatens a future of sort of a Chinese style censorship regime over communication here in the West.
And but it really could go both ways, as you said, even with the extradition in England, it could go both ways.
And it could be that a jury or well, I don't know about a jury in Virginia, but at least maybe the Supreme Court would throw this out and would not allow it to go through in the U.S. There there would be chances for the right thing to happen.
But I wonder if you have a prediction about the future, whether without WikiLeaks, you know, for the very reasons you're quite right, Scott, that's what makes it such an important case.
You know, it could go either way.
But if it goes against Assange, you know, just this this is a tremendous blow to freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
You know, governments don't much mind freedom of expression if people are just expressing things which don't affect real power.
You know, this did affect real power.
And that's why they pursued it so long and are still pursuing.
All right, well, I got to tell you, while we were talking, I went ahead and ordered the new book.
And so it's coming out on July the 7th.
I've got my order in brand new coming out, everybody.
It is called War in the Age of Trump, the defeat of ISIS, the fall of the Kurds, the conflict with Iran.
And thank you so much again for all your time on the show and especially for sticking up for Assange and all that he represents here, Patrick.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
And again, this piece is in the London Review of Books.
That's LRB.co.uk.
Julian Assange in Limbo.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.