Recently I’ve been putting a bit of energy into the Campaign to support Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, more generally. Its seemed to me that often people talk about Assange & others: whistleblowers and journalists outside of the context of what the the actual leaks are. Out of the context of the peace movement.

Recently I was asked to give a talk to the members of the Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church as part of the 15 June Sunday Service, just a couple of days after I was arrested at a Rally in support of Julian Assange outside the UK Consulate in Collins St, Melbourne.

I’ve got a transcript and a couple of folks have asked that I make it available, so here it is.

Jacob Grech
OzPeace
speaking on behalf of Melbourne4WikiLeaks

Contact info@ozpeace.org

WHISTLEBLOWERS ARE THE NEW TERRORISTS

On Friday evening just passed, our time, the extradition trial of Julian Assange began.

At the hearing, Ben Brandon, the British lawyer representing the US government, said that the extradition “related to one of the largest compromises of confidential information in the history of the United States.” Julian pointed out that 175 years, the sentences of the 18 indictments, of his life were at stake.

However, the Judge, Emma Arbuthnot, was having none of it and set a trial date in February next year. Now, just as an aside…. Because Julian’s life has been exposed for all to poke at, its only fair that we have a look at the Judge. Lady Arbothnot of Edrom, made chief justice by Queen Lizzie, while her husband, Lord Arbothnot of Edrom was a Tory Member of Parliament and the Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, the mob who scrutinise the Armed Forces Act, in fact one of the people who should probably be charged for some of the war crimes that WikiLeaks exposed.. he was also Parliamentary Chairperson of the Conservative Friends of Israel and was a Senior Associate of the Royal United Services Institute…. During his time as a Tory MP he was involved in a expenses scandal for using Government funds to clean his pool and paint his Summer House…

These are the sort of people tasked with determining the future of Julian Assange, an Australian man, from here in Melbourne, who has been denied his freedom since August 2010, soon to be nine years. For the crime of exposing Western Government’s dirty secrets.

But he has been denied more than his freedom. He’s been denied his health: medical reports from UN doctors say that he is exhibiting all the physical and mental signs of psychological torture. He is unwell, he’s lost a huge amount of weight and just two weeks ago the court system deemed that he was too sick to attend court. Nonetheless, they keep him in a prison built for terrorists and murderers in his cell for usually 23 hours a day, with no access to any of the resources he needs to organise his legal defence.

He has been vilified and demonised, turned into an Emmanuel Goldstein caricature. He has been accused of being a rapist, a spy, a terrorist, a traitor, a narcissist, a misogynist, a control freak, ’Putin’s Bitch’ and ‘in league with Trump’ by politicians, media moguls, journalists, courts and activists.

As well of course as being anti-semite, anti-arab, a zionist, anti-zionist, anti-union, anti-christian (the Anti-Christ, in fact), un Australian, un American (well, duh) a nazi, an anarchist, alt right, alt left, a democrat stooge, later replaced by republican stooge, and even Public Enemy #1, all by people who still seem to garner what passes for respect in the mainstream media.

…and yet, when any of these individual allegations are investigated, From the Swedish allegations, where a condom allegedly torn by Julian mid sex was produced that did not have his, or anyone’s DNA on it, to the allegations of being in Trump’s camp, when his comment on the US election was that there was a choice between Cholera and Gonorrhoea, referring to Clinton and Trump, I believe respectively…. To being ‘Putin’s Bitch’ when WikiLeaks have released thousands of documents from Russian sources that do Putin or the Russian Government no favours at all.

There has not been a single allegation that to a fair mind, holds any water.

….and when I say this, I am quite willing to listen to any allegation anyone in the audience here today has… if they have any proof at all that would be willing to tender as evidence in say, a FairWork Commission hearing… let alone a Grand Jury, afterwards.

I said that same thing at another meeting once and someone came up to me and told me that they met him in the early days and he couldn’t support him because he was quote “dismissive and abrasive”. … OK.

I say that last bit because it is so indicative of the discourse that has grown around him. Just about everyone it seems, even most of the people that support him or at least take the position that they don’t think he should be extradited to the US for espionage, wants to push the line that he is not a nice man. … and on that, in this room we have all had the privilege in our lives, as activists, writers, union officials, whatever, of having spent time with some of the greatest leaders our society, our end of it anyway, has produced. How many of them were not ‘dismissive and abrasive’ at times?

Yeah, I see many of you are having reminiscence and a private internal chuckle. I know many of you have had the occasion at one time or another in your political lives to think to yourselves about one of our leaders, who was maybe making an impromptu remark “Oh comrade, did you really need to say that?”

You see, Julian Assange, like all of us, is not an angel. He is not perfect. He is not Francis of bloody Assisi. He is a man…. from Melbourne.

He came down here from Townsville to go to Melbourne Uni as a young bloke, a computer geek, a nerd frankly. After playing around, it is rumoured, breaking into the data bases of arms companies like the Canadian giant Nortel, he assisted the Victorian Police with busting a child exploitation ring on the net and then set up our first free public access internet service provider, Suburbia.

Why? Because like all of us, he believed in the fundamental truth of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That everyone should have access to information to help in their search for truth.

…and yeah, that he was a part of the cyber punk subculture, that I, and I don’t think anyone else in this room could get into, meant that he was able to have fun doing it.

What exactly was he doing? Well early on he realised that the control of information lay at the very heart of power. It has always been so. We’ve always known it.

As a computer geek of his generation though, rather than seeing it in terms of class exploitation he saw it in terms of communications security and the imbalance of power which lay at the heart of information technology…. That they, the state, the system, call it what you will, not only controlled what true information we the people had access to, but that they had free and unfettered access to all… all… of our information.

…. and so he and his friends set about developing software that would enable all of us to keep our communications secure…. At the cutting edge of digital cryptography…. The kind of security that only last year led the Federal Government, with the support of the Opposition to pass the Telecommunications Assistance Bill, to force IT companies to help them crack, in, of course, secrecy.

In short, they were taking on the system.

But keeping their own communications, our own communications safe was only half the job.

To continue the analogy I began earlier, it’s never just about workers becoming more empowered, the other side of the struggle has always been holding the bosses to account.

And so WikiLeaks first incarnation, leaks.org was born to encourage people with information about what was really going on to come forward.

Remember, we’re talking here about the early years of this century, the early 2000s. When the news cycle was full of Howard bullshitting about Children Overboard, The Wheat Board was busy shredding documents about bribes to Iraq… no-one knew, or still knows to this day, exactly what happened at the World Trade Centre that September… and then of course, there were the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” which were being used as a justification for…. well, for atrocities which even we, at the time, could not have foretold in our darkest imaginings.

We can’t talk about WikiLeaks, we can not talk about Julian… and it wasn’t just Julian, sure he was at the centre of it, he had the vision… was the sometimes “abrasive and dismissive” Leader if you like, who ultimately carried it… and is still carrying it. …. we can’t talk about WikiLeaks, or the broader movement for transparency, or any of it outside the context of the times. The time when the Western world, the Coalition of the Willing was going to War on the Axis of Evil, trying to control the narrative to make it sound like some perverted Tolkeinesq quest for justice…. When in fact, we know that it was something else: something else entirely.

It was in this climate, of street marches every other week, of big public meetings and small cafe conversations discussing the war, of journalists debating weapons of mass destruction, of trade unions taking stands from the Board Room at Trades Hall to tool box meetings on sites. It was a time when churches, and I don’t just mean the Unitarians, were speaking about these issues from the pulpit.

This is the climate in which WikiLeaks was born. A climate where everyone knew we were being lied to, but none of us had the means to prove it.

WikiLeaks was born as an organisation to enable people who had access to the truth of what was going on to let the rest of us know… in a way that was anonymous, to protect them from repressive laws. Not in order to cause chaos, but in the hope that when the people were given access to the truth, they would be able to do something about it.

…and by making us aware that it was there, to encourage people to use it… to blow the whistle.

It was born as a part of the broad peace movement, with all the hope that that embodied; however naive you may now feel it was.

It was about transparency and truth. It is still about those things.

Without WikiLeaks (and Private Manning) we would not have had access to the Collateral Murder video, that showed an Apache chopper gunning down people it knew to be journalists, medics and children. Without WikiLeaks we would not have had the details of what happened at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib. We would not have documented evidence of hundreds of war crimes perpetrated against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. We would not have evidence in the US Government’s complicity in the arming and support of dictatorships. We would not have evidence of arms deals, of bribes, of evil and corruption in high places. Sure, we already knew, or at least assumed, but what WikiLeaks gave us was evidence.

Without WikiLeaks we wouldn’t have had Edward Snowden’s revelations. We wouldn’t have had the documents that show that places like Pine Gap and Kojarema were the war fighting bases that we’ve been saying they were all along. We wouldn’t have had the proof, the details of massive government surveillance systems like PRISM and X Keyscore.

Without WikiLeaks we wouldn’t have had the Stratfor Papers, we wouldn’t have had the Panama Papers, the US Diplomatic Cables leak or the emails from the US Democratic National Committee exposing the filthy campaign they were running to get Clinton elected at any cost.

Without WikiLeaks, we wouldn’t have had the text of the Trans Pacific Partnership.

We wouldn’t have details, hard details, word by word, of the CIA involvement in the French election. We wouldn’t know all the programs exposed by the rafts of leaks called Vault 7 & Vault 8. We wouldn’t have proof of the Israeli Government’s conscious plan to starve Gazan civilians.

What WikiLeaks has given us is the tools to work against war.

….. and as a result: they’ve been relentlessly and viciously attacked by the powers that be.

Not just Julian & WikiLeaks: Chelsea Manning is in prison for refusing to testify against him. Edward Snowden is in exile in hiding. Ola Bini is in jail in Ecuador. Aaron Schwartz is dead, suicide apparently.

A journalist Maltese compatriot of mine, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was murdered by a car bomb after being threatened over her work on the Panama Papers.

Here in Australia, we have Witness K and Bernard Colliery being tried for leaking the information that ASIS bugged the East Timorese Cabinet Rooms.

We have David McBride slated for trial in two weeks for leaking the Afghan Files that led to the raid of the ABC HQ last week. David, is the son of William McBride, the doctor who broke the news on the effects of Thalidomide. We have Annika Smethurst, a Murdoch stable journalist being raided by the AFP for publishing information, which was true, about the Federal Government’s plans to increase powers to the Australian Signals Directorate, which is a part of the Five Eyes Intelligence Network, to spy on Australian citizens….and that was again, the front page story in The Age just yesterday.

And of course, that is not to leave out Julian, who as I said at the start of my rave, is in Belmarsh Prison, during a trial to see if he will be extradited to the United States for espionage.

Now Belmarsh Prison isn’t any ordinary prison. The BBC has called it Britain’s Guantanamo Bay in 2004…. And I quote from the BBC story
“You don't have to go to Cuba to find terror suspects controversially imprisoned. Nine foreigners have been held in London's Belmarsh Prison for almost three years without charge or trial.”

Today it seems Whistleblowers and the journalists that report their information, are the new terrorists.

And I’m not just using the analogy rhetorically. WikiLeaks has been referred to as a non state terrorist organisation. Various pundits and politicians including Hillary Clinton have either called for Julian’s execution or questioned whether it was possible.

You see, once you call someone a terrorist, anything is possible.

You can, as the FBI did, plant a spy in the movement like Adrian Lamo, the guy who lagged Manning. You can have a CIA Task Force aimed at destroying WikiLeaks, which we now know has been in place since at least 2010.

You can create narratives of sexual abuse and perversion, like they have done with everyone they have labeled a terrorist from Martin Luther King onwards. You can have whole articles removed from websites… and that’s the stuff we know and have detailed information on….

You can stop their bank and on line payment systems, like they did to WikiLeaks

There’s also, to get all Rumsfeldian for a moment, the unknown unknowns. Things we may guess at, but as yet have no way of knowing about.

But we can put one and one together. We can know about very recent undercover police infiltration, for example, of activist organisations in the UK, US and New Zealand… its even been reported on in the mainstream press. We can know about historical instances of undercover police operations here in Australia…. And then we can look at who the loudest detractors of WikiLeaks and Julian in particular are in the activist community and wonder. Some of whom even carry the support of Whistleblowers in their names. We can wonder why, here in WikiLeaks own home town, there has been so much disinformation that a few young blokes, friends of my kids, have said to me, “Yeah I know man, but sticking your head up for him is suicide”

Why? Well because once they label you a terrorist, they can justify any expense and any means.

Lets not make any bones about it: Whistleblowers ARE the new terrorists.

And it may surprise you to hear me say this, but … and so they are.

You see, we’ve come to think of a terrorist as a person or organisation that uses violence to promote their political ideology. Hijackings, car bombings, night club explosions and the like… those things terrify me, I’ll be honest. And I condemn those acts of violence every bit as much as I condemn the state sanctioned legal terrorism that we see all the time, Syria, Palestine, Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and they’re just the current, dare I say it, popular, ones.

But violent extremism is meant to terrify us, the people, not the Government, not the State, not the corporations that profit from it all. Violent terrorism has been absorbed into the Capitalist framework. If you look at the share prices of the biggest arms companies in the world, they jump at every terrorist attack. Every Western Government just use it to justify more spending on the “National Security Apparatus” and to make laws taking away people’s, our, freedoms… it doesn’t scare them at all, let alone terrify them.

What does terrify them though, what makes them shit in their pants and quake in their boots, is the truth…. And the notion that the people can have access to it. What scares them is that they lose control of the narrative…and that, is why they consider people like Julian, like Chelsea, like Edward, like Daphne, like Aaron, terrorists….. because they are terrified.

And so they should be. Because when your whole system is built on an edifice of lies, the only thing that can bring it down is the truth.

So, to end, as in the usual way, with the age old question “What is to be done?” Well, at the moment, that’s a question with two fronts:

The first being “What is to be done to protect Julian?” And all I can say to that is demand. Demand your local member say something. Demand your union do something. Demand that we as a society do not leave one of our own hanging out to dry.

The other question is “What is to be done about Journalists and Whistleblowers being treated as terrorists?”

Julian Assange’s answer as he was being carried out of the Embassy last month was simple: “You can resist”.