https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfcSqn2XSjI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8j42o04AZA
Bringing Julian Assange Home
By John Pilger - ICH - June 17, 2018
This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger to a rally in
Sydney, Australia, to mark Julian Assange's six years' confinement in
the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Or it will end in tragedy.
The Australian government and prime minister Malcolm Turnbull have an
historic opportunity to decide which it will be.
They can remain silent, for which history will be unforgiving. Or they
can act in the interests of justice and humanity and bring this
remarkable Australian citizen home.
Assange does not ask for special treatment. The government has clear
diplomatic and moral obligations to protect Australian citizens abroad
from gross injustice: in Julian's case, from a gross miscarriage of
justice and the extreme danger that await him should he walk out of
the Ecuadorean embassy in London unprotected.
We know from the Chelsea Manning case what he can expect if a US
extradition warrant is successful -- a United Nations Special
Rapporteur called it torture.
I know Julian Assange well; I regard him as a close friend, a person
of extraordinary resilience and courage. I have watched a tsunami of
lies and smear engulf him, endlessly, vindictively, perfidiously; and
I know why they smear him.
In 2008, a plan to destroy both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in
a top secret document dated 8 March, 2008. The authors were the Cyber
Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the US Defence Department.
They described in detail how important it was to destroy the "feeling
of trust" that is WikiLeaks' "centre of gravity".
This would be achieved, they wrote, with threats of "exposure [and]
criminal prosecution" and a unrelenting assault on reputation. The aim
was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher.
It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the
very principle of freedom of speech.
Their main weapon would be personal smear. Their shock troops would be
enlisted in the media -- those who are meant to keep the record
straight and tell us the truth.
The irony is that no one told these journalists what to do. I call
them Vichy journalists -- after the Vichy government that served and
enabled the German occupation of wartime France.
Last October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Sarah
Ferguson interviewed Hillary Clinton, over whom she fawned as "the
icon for your generation".
This was the same Clinton who threatened to "obliterate totally" Iran
and, who, as US secretary of State in 2011, was one of the instigators
of the invasion and destruction of Libya as a modern state, with the
loss of 40,000 lives. Like the invasion of Iraq, it was based on lies.
When the Libyan President was murdered publicly and gruesomely with a
knife, Clinton was filmed whooping and cheering. Thanks largely to
her, Libya became a breeding ground for ISIS and other jihadists.
Thanks largely to her, tens of thousands of refugees fled in peril
across the Mediterranean, and many drowned.
Leaked emails published by WikiLeaks revealed that Hillary Clinton's
foundation - which she shares with her husband - received millions of
dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the main backers of ISIS and
terrorism across the Middle East.
As Secretary of State, Clinton approved the biggest arms sale ever --
worth $80 billion -- to Saudi Arabia, one of her foundation's
principal benefactors. Today, Saudi Arabia is using these weapons to
crush starving and stricken people in a genocidal assault on Yemen.
Sarah Ferguson, a highly paid reporter, raised not a word of this with
Hillary Clinton sitting in front of her.
Instead, she invited Clinton to describe the "damage" Julian Assange
did "personally to you". In response, Clinton defamed Assange, an
Australian citizen, as "very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence"
and "a nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator".
She offered no evidence -- nor was asked for any -- to back her grave
allegations.
At no time was Assange offered the right of reply to this shocking
interview, which Australia's publicly-funded state broadcaster had a
duty to give him.
As if that wasn't enough, Ferguson's executive producer, Sally
Neighour, followed the interview with a vicious re-tweet: "Assange is
Putin's bitch. We all know it!"
There are many other examples of Vichy journalism. The Guardian,
reputedly once a great liberal newspaper, conducted a vendetta against
Julian Assange. Like a spurned lover, the Guardian aimed its personal,
petty, inhuman and craven attacks at a man whose work it once
published and profited from.
The former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the
WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper pub
