Last week, Melzer issued a scathing denunciation of Assange’s persecution, calling it “psychological torture.”

Reporter Philip Williams asked Melzer, “If your calls are ignored, do you fear that he could actually die in prison?” Melzer replied, “Absolutely, yes. That’s a fear that I think is very real … the cumulative effects of that constant pressure, it will become unpredictable how this will end. What we see is that his health condition is currently deteriorating to the point that he cannot even appear at a court hearing. This is not prosecution; this is persecution and it has to stop here and it has to stop now.”

The full radio interview with Melzer can heard here. WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail on May 1 by a British court in a vindictive show trial on fabricated charges of “skipping bail.” Following his eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy on April 11, where Assange had sought asylum and was effectively detained for seven years, he was arrested by British authorities and is now held in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in southeast London.

Melzer’s comment about Assange’s dire condition follows a statement he issued on May 31 demanding an immediate end to the “collective persecution” by the United States and its allies.

The UN torture expert visited Assange in Belmarsh on May 9 along with a medical doctor and psychologist in order to evaluate the condition of the heroic journalist. Melzer issued his statement just one week after the US Justice Department announced 17 counts on charges of violating the Espionage Act—which carry up to 170 years in prison if convicted—and renewed the demand that the WikiLeaks publisher be extradited to the US for prosecution.

Melzer warned that the nine-year “persistent and progressively severe abuse” of Assange by US, British and Ecuadorian authorities and the threat of his being extradited to the US would pose “a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Speaking from Geneva during his interview with ABC Radio Adelaide, Melzer reiterated his warning that Assange cannot get a fair trial in the US “in light of the prevalent prejudice against him and the image of the public enemy that has been portrayed over there.”

In answering a question from Williams about the role of the Australian government in the unfolding attacks on Assange, Melzer said, “The Australian government has been the glaring absentee in this case from my perspective. I would have expected Australia to take steps to protect their national … to protect him from this excessive persecution that he is experiencing currently.”

Assange is the target of an international campaign of vilification, persecution and silencing due to WikiLeaks’ exposure to the people of the world both the war crimes American imperialism and its allies.

Melzer’s warning points to the urgent need to organize a struggle to defend Assange. We urge all of our readers to take up this fight .
Originally published by WSWS.org

Courtesy: Counter Current

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“I want to visit Julian to see he is receiving medical care and to let him know that there are many people around the world who admire him and are grateful for his courage in trying to stop the wars and end the suffering of others,” Maguire said.

“Thursday 11th April, will go down in history as a dark day for the Rights of humanity, when Julian Assange, a brave and good man, was arrested, by British Metropolitan Police, forcibly removed without prior warning, in a style befitting of a war criminal, from the Ecuadorian Embassy, and bundled into a Police Van,” said Maguire.

“It is a sad time when the UK Government at the behest of the United States Government, arrested Julian Assange, a symbol of Freedom of Speech as the publisher of Wikileaks, and the worlds’ leaders and main stream media remain silent on the fact that he is an innocent man until proven guilty, while the UN working Group on Arbitrary Detention defines him as innocent.

“The decision of President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador who under financial pressure from the US has withdrawn asylum to the Wikileaks founder, is a further example of United States’ global currency monopoly, pressurizing other countries to do their bidding or face the financial and possibly violent consequences for disobedience to the alleged world Super Power, which has sadly lost its moral compass. Julian Assange had taken asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy seven years ago precisely because he foresaw that the US would demand his extradition to face a Grand Jury in the US for mass murders carried out, not by him, but by US and NATO forces, and concealed from the public.

“Unfortunately, it is my belief that Julian Assange will not see a fair trial. As we have seen over the last seven years, time and time again, the European countries and many others, do not have the political will or clout to stand up for what they know is right, and will eventually cave into the Unites States’ will. We have watched Chelsea Manning being returned to jail and to solitary confinement, so we must not  be naive in our thinking: surely, this is the future for Julian Assange.

“I visited Julian on two occasions in the Ecuadorian Embassy and was very impressed with this courageous and highly intelligent man. The first visit was on my return from Kabul, where young Afghan teenage boys, insisted on writing a letter with the request I carry it to Julian Assange, to thank him, for publishing on Wikileaks, the truth about the war in Afghanistan and to help stop their homeland being bombed by planes and drones. All had a story of brothers or friends killed by drones while collecting wood in winter on the mountains.

“I nominated Julian Assange on the 8th January 2019 for the Nobel Peace Prize. I issued a press release hoping to bring attention to his nomination, which seemed to have been widely ignored, by Western media. By Julian’s courageous actions and others like him, we could see full well the atrocities of war. The release of the files brought to our doors the atrocities our governments carried out through media. It is my strong belief that this is the true essence of an activist and it is my great shame I live in an era where people like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and anyone willing to open our eyes to the atrocities of war, is likely to be hunted like an animal by governments, punished and silenced.

“Therefore, I believe that the British government should oppose the extradition of Assange as it sets a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistleblowers and other sources of truth the US may wish to pressure in the future. This man is paying a high price to end war and for peace and nonviolence and we should all remember that.”

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, Co-Founder, Peace People Northern Ireland, Member of World BEYOND War Advisory Board
 

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For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and “experts” telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a “mainstream” voice was raised in his defence in all that time.

From the moment he sought asylum, Assange was cast as an outlaw. His work as the founder of Wikileaks – a digital platform that for the first time in history gave ordinary people a glimpse into the darkest recesses of the most secure vaults in the deepest of Deep States – was erased from the record.

Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper.
The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truths about the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the charges, only for them to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.

They failed to mention that Assange was always willing to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London, as had occurred in dozens of other cases involving extradition proceedings to Sweden. It was almost as if Swedish officials did not want to test the evidence they claimed to have in their possession.

The media and political courtiers endlessly emphasised Assange’s bail violation in the UK, ignoring the fact that asylum seekers fleeing legal and political persecution don’t usually honour bail conditions imposed by the very state authorites from which they are seeking asylum.

The political and media establishment ignored the mounting evidence of a secret grand jury in Virginia formulating charges against Assange, and ridiculed Wikileaks’ concerns that the Swedish case might be cover for a more sinister attempt by the US to extradite Assange and lock him away in a high-security prison, as had happened to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

They belittled the 2016 verdict of a panel of United Nations legal scholars that the UK was “arbitrarily detaining” Assange. The media were more interested in the welfare of his cat.

They ignored the fact that after Ecuador changed presidents – with the new one keen to win favour with Washington – Assange was placed under more and more severe forms of solitary confinement. He was denied access to visitors and basic means of communications, violating both his asylum status and his human rights, and threatening his mental and physical wellbeing.

Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No “mainstream” journalist or politician thought this significant either.

They turned a blind eye to the news that, after refusing to question Assange in the UK, Swedish prosecutors had decided to quietly drop the case against him in 2015. Sweden had kept the decision under wraps for more than two years.

It was a freedom of information request by an ally of Assange, not a media outlet, that unearthed documents showing that Swedish investigators had, in fact, wanted to drop the case against Assange back in 2013. The UK, however, insisted that they carry on with the charade so that Assange could remain locked up. A British official emailed the Swedes: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

Most of the other documents relating to these conversations were unavailable. They had been destroyed by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service in violation of protocol. But no one in the political and media establishment cared, of course.

Similarly, they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to answer in Sweden. They told us – apparently in all seriousness – that he had to be arrested for his bail infraction, something that would normally be dealt with by a fine.

And possibly most egregiously of all, most of the media refused to acknowledge that Assange was a journalist and publisher, even though by failing to do so they exposed themselves to the future use of the same draconian sanctions should they or their publications ever need to be silenced. They signed off on the right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special form of rendition for journalists.

This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russiagate narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush Wikileaks and make an example of its founder.

It was about making sure there would never again be a leak like that of Collateral Murder, the military video released by Wikileaks in 2007 that showed US soldiers celebrating as they murdered Iraqi civilians. It was about making sure there would never again be a dump of US diplomatic cables, like those released in 2010 that revealed the secret machinations of the US empire to dominate the planet whatever the cost in human rights violations.

Now the pretence is over. The British police invaded the diplomatic territory of Ecuador – invited in by Ecuador after it tore up Assange’s asylum status – to smuggle him off to jail. Two vassal states cooperating to do the bidding of the US empire. The arrest was not to help two women in Sweden or to enforce a minor bail infraction.

No, the British authorities were acting on an extradition warrant from the US. And the charges the US authorities have concocted relate to Wikileaks’ earliest work exposing the US military’s war crimes in Iraq – the stuff that we all once agreed was in the public interest, that British and US media clamoured to publish themselves.

Still the media and political class is turning a blind eye. Where is the outrage at the lies we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom – the right to publish – being trashed to silence Assange? Where is the willingness finally to speak up in Assange’s defence?

It’s not there. There will be no indignation at the BBC, or the Guardian, or CNN. Just curious, impassive – even gently mocking – reporting of Assange’s fate.

And that is because these journalists, politicians and experts never really believed anything they said. They knew all along that the US wanted to silence Assange and to crush Wikileaks. They knew that all along and they didn’t care. In fact, they happily conspired in paving the way for today’s kidnapping of Assange.

They did so because they are not there to represent the truth, or to stand up for ordinary people, or to protect a free press, or even to enforce the rule of law. They don’t care about any of that. They are there to protect their careers, and the system that rewards them with money and influence. They don’t want an upstart like Assange kicking over their applecart.

Now they will spin us a whole new set of deceptions and distractions about Assange to keep us anaesthetised, to keep us from being incensed as our rights are whittled away, and to prevent us from realising that Assange’s rights and our own are indivisible. We stand or fall together.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org/
 

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Assange sought asylum seven years ago to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault case that was later dropped.

Although Ecuador President Lenin Moreno said that the asylum was withdrawn after “repeated violations of international conventions,” Wikileaks tweeted that Ecuador acted illegally in terminating Assange’s political asylum “in violation of international law”. The organisation’s official Twitter handle had, on April 5, tweeted that Assange would be “expelled within ‘hours or days’ using the #INAPapers offshore scandal as a pretext,” citing a high-level source within the Ecuadorian state, and saying that Ecuador already had an agreement with the United Kingdom for his arrest. 

 The United States’ Department of Justice confirmed that Assange had been indicted over a conspiracy with former US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to commit computer intrusion in 2010.

US prosecutors have alleged that Assange “engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the US Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password” on classified Department of Defence (DoD) computer systems, CNN reported. 

Sweden’s Prosecution Authority also said in a statement that it may re-open its sexual assault probe into Assange.

Assange is an Australian national, and set up Wikileaks in 2006 with the aim of “obtaining and publishing” confidential documents and images. In 2010, it released footages of US soldiers killing civilians from a helicopter in Iraq.

Many tweeted in support of Assange:

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald called the move “criminalization of journalism”

Assange’s attorney in the US, Barry Pollack, said: 

Chelsea Manning a former soldier in the US Army, was arrested in 2010, and convicted in 2013 for releasing nearly 750,000 classified, and unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. Her sentence was commuted in January 2017, but in March 2019, she was once again imprisoned for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Wikileaks.

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Gavin MacFadyen founded and ran the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ), helping to train thousands of journalists in the pursuit of factual inquiry and in defence of the public interest. In tribute, we republish this MacFadyen piece, first published as “In-depth Charger” by the Frontline Club on June 27, 2006.

Serious, in-depth journalism may be unwell but it is still alive in Britain despite an almost complete lack of institutional support in television, and limited resources in print and radio. 

The definitions are many – but most would agree that investigative journalism is ‘normal’ journalism plus money and more importantly, plus time. Getting complicated, difficult or even dangerous stories through the commissioning process, struggling for sufficient time (and funds) for research, getting past the lawyers and on the air or in print requires intense and focused work.

It needs not just more resources than simply phone-bashing or recasting an NGO’s research, but time to think, to read, to make careful preparation, and to read some more. Care, precision, scepticism and accuracy are the guiding principles here. Tenacity and a healthy paranoia are also essentials. It’s from these qualities that major investigative stories are born. 

Tenacity is essential because doors are frequently slammed in your face, unforeseen factual obstacles appear, there are legal problems, threats, less-than-heroic editors a shortage of money and frightened witnesses. Paranoia is needed because most investigative journalists have seen the resources a multi-national corporation, the state or the powerful can bring to bear against a journalist, the editor and, very often, against the witness or whistleblower themselves. Editors and publishers rarely rise to the challenge, particularly if the object of the reporter’s attention has deep pockets.

Gavin MacFadyen (Centre for Investigative Journalism)

Investigative stories don’t, thankfully, require the inspiration of publishers or editors — most have little or none of that quality — but instead demand a reporter’s moral outrage at injustice, incompetence, brutality and misery. These qualities are the fuel of investigative engines around the world. Such interests and passions often make regular hacks uncomfortable. There is a longterm conflict between ‘campaigning’ journalism and ‘dispassionate’ and ‘objective’ reporting.

To the investigative journalist, ‘objective’ is all too frequently shorthand for a stenographic account of information provided by the authorities. Witness the thousands of uncritical embedded reports during the Iraq war. Many of the most accomplished investigative reporters, such as John Pilger and the late Paul Foot, disliked the term investigative. They argued that all good journalism ought to be investigative.

But for many journalists, work is simply a job. Their interest is in lapdog confidences and dining with the powerful. Those who passionately want to provide a voice for those without one, and who fight hypocrisy and exploitation are sadly rare. Between 1966 and the early 1990s British television produced some of the more extraordinary investigations in world television. It forced the resignation of senior government officials, exposed major pharmaceutical scandals, uncovered government corruption, corporate and financial crimes and brought images of slavery, child labour and torture into millions of home for the first time.

Panorama and World in Action were the target of frequent government attacks and outrage but attracted whistleblowers, disgruntled witnesses, public complainants and a number of deranged obsessives.

Filtering stories from these sources required sensitivity and time. Many of the journalists involved received their training in print and later in-house in television.  BBC, Granada and other ITV companies brought younger journalists through a system of research apprenticeships in an environment where there were serious intellectual resources. 

After navigating a decade of legal and political storms, editors and producers learnt the skills of investigative programme-making and, probably even most importantly, ways to defend those skills inside and outside the organisation. With audiences often over 12 million, programmes like World in Action and This Week, were not seen as unprofitable. In contrast to current affairs programmes today, World in Action had in-house research facilities, libraries, in some cases private planes. It also had the confidence that if the company, or their programme, was in difficulty, their journalism would not be abandoned.

Editors, cameramen, sound-recordists, electricians, researchers and travel offices all worked in-house.  A significant feature of in-house production was the implicit understanding that with high standards of evidence, some stories wouldn’t make it, despite months of work. The 20 percent of programmes that didn’t make it were compensated for by the successful programmes that did.
  
None of these conditions apply today – almost all have been destroyed during the last 20 years. The result is an absence of institutional production and protection of investigative stories. Budgets have been reduced. The responsibility for lengthy, high-quality research and production values has been off-loaded by large profitable organizations to individuals journalists, small production companies and to resources like NGOs.

In fact without the major research tools provided by the internet, which have shortened some research tasks from weeks to hours, there would probably be almost no investigative journalism on television and in the press. Without a long-term commitment from the BBC and the independent sector, the public will continue to be deprived of an in-depth understanding of current affairs, investigation of the abuse of the public trust by governments, scrutiny of corporations, corrupt practices, and the continuing failures to protect integrity in the public sector.

A number of organizations have sprung up across Europe and the US to try and reverse these trends.  In Britain, the non-profit Centre for Investigative Journalism has paired experienced investigative journalists with young reporters to encourage the raising of professional standards and the acquisition of skills. This has taken place in Britain and, perhaps more importantly, in countries where enquiry is often a dangerous, even deadly, pursuit. The Frontline Confidential series, co-produced with CIJ, has brought landmark investigations and leading investigative journalists into open discussion for the first time in London.

CIJ runs annual international summer schools – last year at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. On July 21-23 [2006] at City University in London, Anna Politkovskaya, an independent Russian journalist, and Chuck Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington will speak with 20 other trainers and technical experts.

Participants from 25 countries are expected and fees are subsidised by the Lorana Sullivan Foundation. The emphasis will be on the practical.  Details are available from www.investigativereporting.org.uk.
 

The next #CIJSummer Conference, training journalists, editors and researchers in investigative skills, will take place in London in July 2017.

(This article was first published on Opendemocracy.net.)

Also read: WikiLeaks Director Gavin MacFadyen dies at 76

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Image: Exaro

Renowned investigative journalist and director of WikiLeaks Gavin MacFadyen passed away, as per the tweet posted from the WikiLeaks official Twitter account on October 22. The cause of the death of the 76-year-old, who was known as the founder of Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and as a mentor of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains ambiguous. However, CIJ on its website claims that the MacFadyen lost his life to lung cancer.

MacFadyen, who was also a filmmaker, has made more than 50 documentaries since the 1970s, focusing on wide array of subjects like industrial accidents, history of CIA, Watergate, neo-Nazi violence of the UK, nuclear proliferation etc. He founded CJI in 2003 to advance training in the field of investigative journalism for in-depth, sceptical and adversarial reporting. Over the next 13 years he helped train thousands of reporters from over 35 countries, many of which are places where free media is under attack.  He trained several students through CIJ.

In the recent years, his focussed on facilitating and protecting whistleblowing activities. He was closely linked to Assange, and was also responsible for Julian Assange Defence Committee, which raises funds to manage the legal expenses of Assange and other WikiLeaks staff.

He reportedly breathed his last in London on October 22. 
 

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UN body puts UK and Sweden on trial

The UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has decided that Julian Assange is being “arbitrarily held” by a concert of powers – so how might this curious situation play out?

The Working Group finds that Assange is not only entitled to his freedom of movement, but that he has a right to compensation.

This is of course a major PR victory for Assange. And whatever one thinks of the underlying story, the UN Report is a fascinating analysis of the susceptibility of national criminal processes (including on extradition) to international legal review.

So far, there have been no winners in this unique diplomatic quagmire, which has been stagnant since Assange claimed diplomatic asylum in 2012. Both Sweden and the UK have nothing to gain by becoming vicariously liable for his “arbitrary detention”, even if only in the court of international public opinion. Expect angry voices on both sides to raise the matter at this year’s UN General Assembly.

In a sense, the finding of the UN panel is binding mostly as a matter of international moral authority. Should the UK and Sweden choose to ignore the ruling, it could compromise their ability to boldly denounce other perhaps more repressive states in the future – particularly on the basis of any finding by the same UN panel. Both states have appeared over the years at the UN as champions of human rights and dissident cases, and neither has any urge to lose that cachet.

So what now? Despite the chagrin of the British and Swedish governments, there are a few ways forward.

Breaking the deadlock

Swedish officers could visit the Ecuadorian embassy to question Assange and take depositions. Maybe even an extraterritorial trial by an extraordinary Swedish court within the embassy can be arranged. Nothing is impossible in the world of diplomacy.

Assange’s lawyers have urged the charges to be dropped, although this is unlikely to happen before he is formally questioned. Either way, keeping him under what’s now deemed to be “arbitrary constructive detention” will only increase his political martyrdom.

The continuance of diplomatic asylum within the territory of a state hostile towards the accused is always very tricky. The course of events and end game scenarios tend towards the bizarre. US marines blasted hard rock music at deafening levels to flush Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican’s embassy in Panama. Peruvian politician Haya De la Torre was holed up in an embassy for at least three years while Colombia and Peru fought over the matter at the International Court of Justice.

And then there was Umaru Dikko. Dikko, a Nigerian politician who fled a huge corruption investigation at home in 1984, was kidnapped on the streets of London. He was then drugged and crated in what was described as “diplomatic baggage” for export back to Nigeria, accompanied by Israeli agents and doctors tasked with keeping him alive in the crate.It need not come to that. The panel’s conclusions could possibly inject some pragmatism into the whole affair. Assange could capitulate and walk out into the waiting hands of the UK law and be extradited, or perhaps an English court could refuse to allow his extradition based on the UN ruling. Both Assange and Ecuador could drop their claims for compensation for housing and inconveniences.

Now that the decision, however contentious, has been committed to paper and made public, all the concerned parties might finally have an impetus to find the necessary political will to reach some workable compromise to melt this excruciatingly slow-moving diplomatic glacier.

In the meantime, perhaps agents at British, Swedish and American airports should watch out for unusually large diplomatic baggage.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation

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