Showing posts with label Luke Harding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luke Harding. Show all posts

29 June 2024

The Nauseating Hypocrisy of The Guardian as Julian Assange is Freed

It was Guardian ‘journalists’ who, from the safety of their expense accounts, sneered & jeered whilst intelligence asset Luke Harding invented lies aimed at keeping Assange locked up



Assange & the Guardian  - How a 'liberal' newspaper jeopardised journalistic freedom

Last Tuesday Julian Assange was freed after 12 years of wrongful imprisonment after agreeing a ‘plea deal’ with the US government over espionage charges when the only significant US witness admitted under oath that he had been lying the whole time.

When Assange was set free from Belmarsh for the ‘crime’ of having revealed American war crimes, I wondered what angle I should take. I decided that Guardian hypocrisy was a good approach after I read The Guardian view on the WikiLeaks plea deal: good for Julian Assange, not journalism. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue then Editor Katherine Viner must have overdosed on the stuff.

At last Julian Assange is Free

I then came across Jonathan Cook’s excellent It was the media, led by the Guardian, that kept Julian Assange behind bars.

Cook wrote about how David Leigh and Luke Harding, who worked with Assange on behalf of the Guardian, had become extremely hostile to him for not agreeing to their writing his. Instead they 

‘repeatedly betrayed confidences and manoeuvred against Wikileaks rather the cooperating with it. Assange was particularly incensed to discover that the paper had broken the terms of its written contract with Wikileaks by secretly sharing confidential documents with outsiders, including the NYT.

In giving evidence at the Old Bailey, a senior investigative journalist, Nicky Hager, described the pair’s 2011 book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy as “not a reliable source”. Hostility to Asssange extended to virtually all the Guardian’s ‘journalists’.

Deepa Driver interview with BBC on Assange’s Release

It was Luke Harding and Dan Collyns who wrote the article Manafort held secret talks with Assange (Guardian 27.11.18). This was a fabrication, planted by the intelligence services which alleged that Assange was in league with Donald Trump. Manafort had been Trump’s campaign manager. No evidence was provided for the allegation that they had had 3 visits. The security cameras didn’t catch sight of Manafort and the Embassy visitors’ book was not signed by him. This was Harding’s revenge, courtesy of MI5/6.

At the centre of the US case against Assange was information in Leigh and Harding’s book that ‘Assange was recklessly indifferent to the safety of US informants named in leaked files published by Wikileaks.’ In fact this was the opposite of the truth.

‘Assange was meticulous about redacting names in the documents. It was they – the journalists, including Leigh – who were pressuring Assange to publish without taking full precautions....

But to bolster its feeble claim against Assange – that he was reckless about redactions – the US has hoped to demonstrate that in September 2011, long after publication of the Iraq and Afghan diaries, Wikileaks did indeed release a trove of documents – official US cables – that Assange failed to redact....

In fact, the story behind the September 2011 release by Wikileaks of those unredacted documents is entirely different from the story the court and public is being told. The Guardian has conspired in keeping quiet about the real version of events for one simple reason – because it, the Guardian, was the cause of that release.

The February 2011 Guardian book the US keeps citing contained something in addition to the highly contentious and disputed claim from Leigh that Assange had a reckless attitude to redacting names. The book also disclosed a password – one Assange had given to Leigh on strict conditions it be kept secret – to the file containing the 250,000 encrypted cables. The Guardian book let the cat out of the bag. Once it gave away Assange’s password, the Old Bailey hearings have heard, there was no going back.

Demonstration Outside the Guardian's Offices 2020

It is this that explains why, for over a decade Guardian’s writers and columnists have attacked the very person who the Guardian had teamed up with, to produce its scoops. Instead of campaigning against the extradition proceedings against Assange the Guardian kept quiet. ‘Left’ journalists like George Monbiot refused to cover the case. In 2020 we held a demonstration outside the Guardian’s offices near King’s Cross to protest at its silence during the extradition hearings.

It is therefore a chutzpah (defined as when a boy who has killed both his parents asks the court for mercy because he’s an orphan!) when, after Assange’s release, in its leading article the Guardian wrote that

‘Julian Assange should never have been charged with espionage by the US. The release of the WikiLeaks founder from custody in the UK is good news... This is no triumph for press freedom. Mr Assange’s plea has prevented the setting of a frightening judicial precedent for journalists, avoiding a decision that might bind future courts. Nonetheless, this is the first conviction for basic journalistic efforts under the 1917 act.

Using espionage charges was always a bad and cynical move. ... Alarmingly, the Espionage Act allows no public interest defence, preventing defendants from discussing the material leaked, why they shared it, and why they believe the public should know about it. ... It is possible that future administrations could take this case as encouragement to pursue the press under the Espionage Act. ... The political solution to this lengthy saga is welcome, ... But the threat to press freedom has not ended. Its defence cannot rest either.

That Assange has finally gained his freedom is no thanks to the Guardian which lied and deceived throughout his 14 year ordeal.

Just a few of the poisonous articles in the Guardian - all based on trivial, malicious and unfounded allegations

The stench of hypocrisy emanating from the Guardian’s offices is overwhelming. The Guardian, which benefitted from scoop after scoop after scoop after scoop after scoop as a result of Wikileaks revelations, turned on the person who enabled those front page stories, with a tale of treachery and deceit that would put Judas to shame.

Deepa Driver Speaks on the Injustices of our ‘Justice System’ vs Julian Assange

But when the United States and its masters of the dark arts hit on the idea of framing Assange for rape in Sweden, knowing full well that such an allegation would inevitably cause people to question whether they should be supporting him, the Guardian and the rest of the liberal rat pack ran as fast as their little legs could carry them.

Unlike liberals and identity politics feminists, the Deep State is not stupid. It knows very well how to sow the seeds of division among its opponents. Sexual crimes and #metoo rank highest of all in the list of accusations to wreak havoc in the ranks of Assange’s supporters.

The same has happened over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  Israeli propagandists have worked hard to conjure up tales of ‘rape’ by the Palestinian resistance despite a total lack of evidence. The weaponisation of rape has a long history and Black and Jewish people have both been its victims as they were portrayed as sexual predators in the Deep South and Nazi Germany. The case of the Scottsboro Boys, 9 Blacks who were falsely accused of rape and nearly executed in Alabama, stands out as an example of racialised lynch mob justice.

Nils Melzer, the UN Rapporteur, in The Trial of Julian Assange demolished the accusations of rape showing that it was the Police and a corrupt Swedish prosecutor who formulated these charges despite a lack of evidence. The women concerned hadn’t made allegations of rape. That was the Swedish state on behalf of the United States.

The Guardian was assiduous in playing up the rape allegations. In February 2016, in response to a UN Report that Assange was the victim of arbitrary detention, the Guardian published a leading article  Julian Assange: no victim of arbitrary detention. It said:

It is true that he has never been charged, as his lawyers have argued. But that is because Swedish legal procedure requires an interview to take place before any decision to prosecute: since Mr Assange left Sweden in 2010 before he could be questioned and has resolutely refused to return, no such interview has taken place.

But that was a lie. As Nils Melzer pointed out, Assange delayed his departure from Sweden in order that prosecutors could question him. They refused to do so. He had already been questioned by police. The Guardian and its contributors made a special effort to run with the rape allegations in order to cover up its own malfeasance.

But that did not stop feminists and liberals using these accusations to target Assange on behalf of US imperialism. The Guardian’s ‘journalists’, not least its female journalists, were the worst.

Marina Hyde, the Guardian’s empty head, was the nastiest and snidest of the lot. Hadley Freeman, on loan from the Jewish Chronicle, penned a puerile attempt at wit. Suzanna Moore a poisonous transphobe and Hanna Jane Parkinson joined in the baying mob.

The Guardian’s male ‘journalists’ lacked the viciousness and bitchiness of their female colleagues but they made up for it. None more so than Nick Cohen, whose years of sexual abuse, was covered up by Jonathan Freedland and other senior editors.

Cohen’s abuse was the subject of an article in the NYT. The Guardian prided itself on #metoo but when it came to it, it too covered up gross and persistent sexual assault bordering on rape. As Martha Gill put it in the Observer #MeToo men want to be forgiven, but what of the careers of their casualties? I’m sure all the young journalists who were forced to give up internships or jobs at the Guardian because of Cohen have been handsomely compensated-not.

None of this prevented Cohen from attacking Assange though!

Some of Assange's supporters say that the women have no right to put allegations of sexual abuse before a competent court. Instead, they denounce them as "feminazis" in language so extreme that the women's lawyer said his clients were "the victims of a crime, but they are looked upon as the perpetrators". ...  Activists, who claim they are the enemies of patriarchy, dismiss allegations of sexual abuse as a CIA conspiracy.

Cohen wasn’t the only righteous hypocrite on the Guardian. Marina Hyde was convinced that Assange was ‘a man hiding in an embassy to avoid a rape investigation’. Nothing to do with the CIA wanting to bump him off. The talentless Hyde had an obsession with Assange, remarking in another turgid article that ‘the higher he has gone in his “quest for justice”, the smaller he has looked.’

But when it comes to getting it badly wrong, no one was quite as skilled as Cohen. In another paranoid article Cohen wrote that:

Greenwald and the rest of Assange's supporters do not tell us how the Americans could prosecute the incontinent leaker. American democracy is guilty of many crimes and corruptions. But the First Amendment to the US constitution is the finest defence of freedom of speech yet written. The American Civil Liberties Union thinks it would be unconstitutional for a judge to punish Assange.

And yet Assange was prosecuted. Under the Espionage Act. The Americans were determined to exclude his protections under that same First Amendment (because he wasn’t a citizen). Cohen to be fair was not the only one to get it wrong. James Ball, wrote in 2018 that

The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride. The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US, charges in Sweden have been dropped – and for the embassy, he’s lost his value as an icon

David Crouch attacked Assange over breach of privacy with an article about how he had defied Swedish prosecutors by releasing a statement. Having been interviewed by Sweden’s prosecutors Assange was perfectly entitled to release his version of events.

In 2019 Jessica Elgot, another transfer from the Jewish Chronicle reported on a letter from MPs that urged that priority be given to rape claims that were by then dead. Quite conveniently that saved them from defending someone who had revealed the US’s dirty secrets.

None of these people have apologised for their squalid attacks, despite having got it wrong about the US intention to extradite Assange. If the Guardian had any principles it would have fired the lot. As I said on the demonstration outside the Guardian, it had only one good journalist, its cartoonist Steve Bell, and he was fired!

Declassified Clip on Starmer's Role When at the CPS on the Framing of Julian Assange

All of this pales in comparison with Starmer’s role as head of the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS urged the Swedes not to drop their extradition request when the lack of evidence was plain.  ‘Don’t you dare get fold feet’ was the message sent by the CPS to them.

The CPS has admitted to destroying key emails related to the Assange case, mostly covering the period when Starmer was in charge, while the CPS lawyer overseeing the case advised the Swedes in 2010 or 2011 not to visit London to interview Assange.

Now is a good time to remember that when Starmer was (a deeply unpopular) Director of Public Prosecutions and Assange was fighting attempts to extradite him to Sweden, as a staging post for extradition to the US, Starmer flew at least three times to the US in connection with the Assange case. He was accompanied by security officials. The CPS destroyed all records of Starmer’s discussions – as it did with records showing what he knew about serial rapist Jimmy Savile:

This was not Starmer’s only example of grovelling to the US on extradition. When the US wanted autistic hacker Gary McKinnon after he had hacked its servers looking for information on UFOs, Starmer told the Americans he would ‘do everything’ to ensure the extradition went ahead – and flew in fury to bow and scrape to Washington after the then Home Secretary Theresa May quashed it.

Starmer has been described as a ‘long-time servant of the British security state’ and has relentlessly backed moves to protect state agents from crimes such as rape and murder. He attacked environmental and human rights protesters, supported immunity for soldiers who murdered civilians in Northern Ireland and refused to oppose laws allowing the state to persecute journalists. Not once did he speak out against the relentless US pursuit of Assange, despite the collapse of the US case when its main witness admitted lying.

If Starmer is elected as Prime Minister we can expect a continuation of the Tory policy of criminalising protest. There isn’t a piece of paper between him and the Tories. See Video: Starmer met US agencies about Assange extradition – CPS destroyed all records

An important article in the London Review of Books by Patrick Cockburn, one of the few genuine journalists left, described how:

Melzer describes an investigation that was politicised from the moment on 20 August 2010 when two women, then known only as AA and SW, went to a police station in Stockholm ‘to inquire whether Mr Assange could be compelled to take an HIV test’. Within hours, ‘the Swedish prosecution ordered the arrest of Mr Assange and informed the tabloid newspaper Expressen that he was suspected of having raped two women.’

Over the next nine years, as the investigation was repeatedly closed by one prosecutor only to be reopened by another, Sweden regularly indicated that it wanted to question Assange, but in practice showed little desire to do so or to bring the investigation to a conclusion. The main effect of the stop-go judicial proceedings was to keep the controversy over what Assange did in Stockholm in 2010 on the boil. The Swedish government finally replied to Melzer’s letter in November only to say that it had ‘no further observation to make’; the following day the investigation was formally closed.

None of this is likely to change the way Assange is seen. In keeping with past experience, almost no mainstream news outlet paid any attention to Melzer’s questions about the conduct of the case. The world’s biggest newspapers, which had published the WikiLeaks disclosures on their front pages in 2010, distanced themselves from Assange very shortly afterwards, often declaring that he was a difficult person to deal with or was slapdash in his handling of the US government cables and reports. He was accused of being a ‘narcissist’, as if that were something more than a character flaw, or as if his character flaws – whatever they were – had any bearing on the information that had been revealed.

Given the gravity of the issues at stake, the silence of journalists about Assange’s detention in Belmarsh following Ecuador’s revoking of his asylum status is striking. Here was evidence of a radical shift in US security policy, towards the position taken by countries like Turkey and Egypt, which have sought to criminalise criticism of the state and to conflate the publication of news it doesn’t want the public to hear with terrorism or espionage. ... as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out in the Intercept, Western media have ‘largely ignored what is, by far, the single greatest attack on press freedoms by the US government in the last decade at least: the prosecution and attempted extradition of Julian Assange for alleged crimes arising out of WikiLeaks’s ... publication – in conjunction with the world’s largest newspapers – of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and US diplomatic cables’. They couldn’t jail the editor of the New York Times so they pursued Assange instead.

 

Tribute needs to be paid to Stella Assange, who I had the privilege of meeting during the Future of the Left events at the 2022 Labour Party conference in Liverpool where I spoke. Stella has been a dogged campaigner. John Pilger was a staunch supporter as was Yanis Varoufakis but with very few exceptions Labour MPs like Jess Philips, who ran with the rape allegations, have been silent or hostile.

I have a few observations. The thrust of the US charges related to Wikileaks having endangered their agents and operatives. Although Assange took care not to reveal their names I have to confess that I couldn’t care less what happened to them. I remember when ex-CIA agent Phil Agee, deliberately went out of his way to expose them in his book Inside the Company, which is still a good read. Agee was deported by Home Secretary Merlyn Rees in 1977

The CIA has been responsible, through the coups it has engineered in Chile, Indonesia, Iran etc. for the deaths of over a million people in Indonesia alone. If there are a few less CIA thugs roaming the streets then that makes far more people safe. US foreign policy is designed to make all except the elites unsafe.

I also want to comment on the judicial proceedings. Yet again our judges, who never let it be forgot are the 'most socially exclusive groups of all the professions’ according to the report, Elitist Britain by the Social Mobility Commission and the Sutton Trust. It shows that 65% of senior judges were educated at an independent school & 75% attended Oxford or Cambridge. [Law Gazette, 25.6.19.]

The inquities in this case are staggering. There is firstly the conflict of interests. The Westminster Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot who made key rulings against Assange is married to Lord James Arbuthnot, a former Defence Minister and Chair of the Defence Select Committee. Arbuthnot was also an advisor to the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society.

The Lord Chief Justice who was responsible for rejecting Assange’s first appeal, Ian Burnett, was a long-standing friend of Alan Duncan, the Minister at the Foreign Office who was responsible for the campaign against Ecuador for  harbouring Assange. He later described Assange in parliament as a ‘miserable worm’.

But it’s not just these obvious conflicts of interest. Running through these proceedings is the assumption that the United States has the right to prosecute non-citizens for ‘offences’ committed outside its territorial jurisdiction. Of course in reality the evil empire considers that its reach extends everywhere but at no point did this point even enter the heads of the judiciary.

Secondly Article 4 of the Extradition Treaty of 2007 between the US and Britain explicitly excludes political offences. It reads:

Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense.

 However  the judges are well paid to ensure that their duty to the security state always outweighs their duty to justice and naturally they found a form of weasel words to get around this.

It might be thought that revealing details of war crimes committed by the United States was in itself a compelling reason for rejecting the extradition request however that would be to underestimate the morality of Britain’s judiciary. Crimes by the state are never crimes unless there is a political advantage to making them so. The fact that committing war crimes is illegal under the International Criminal Court Act 2001 is no bar to making revelation of them an offence.

Then there is the small matter of the CIA listening in to privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers. The judges didn’t rule on this they simply ignored it altogether.

Then there was the attempt of the CIA to assassinate Assange. Naturally the judges didn’t think this had any bearing on the extradition proceedings. After all that’s the CIA’s job. So how can one party trying to kill another be of any relevance? 

So all in all Britain’s judiciary completely disgraced themselves but that too is not the first time.

We can thank Australia’s electorate that they turfed out the previous administration under Scott Morrison and elected a Labour government under Anthony Albanese that campaigned vociferously for Assange’s release. Whatever the sins of the Australian Labour Party, and they are many, one can be thankful that Albanese is not Keir Starmer otherwise Assange would still be in Belmarsh.

Tony Greenstein 

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12 January 2024

The Death of the Greatest Film Journalist that the British Media Rejected - John Pilger 1939-2023

True to form – the Guardian’s Obituary Fails to Mention Pilger’s  Searing Criticisms of their Treachery Over Julian Assange




John Pilger In His Own Words: The Late Great Journalist In A Never Before Released Interview

I’m not sure if he was trying to send a message, asking me to pick up the baton, but John Pilger died on my birthday! I can’t think of anyone today who even approaches Pilger’s record of campaigning journalism.

I had a premonition that John Pilger was not long for this world when someone mentioned that during the genocide in Gaza his voice had not been heard. It’s not hard to imagine what Pilger would have made of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the pretence that it is all about destroying Hamas.

Pilger would have instantly seen through the lies of the war criminals who rule us, Blinken, Biden, Sunak and Starmer, and his invective would have been all the sharper for that. We live in a world of lies where there is a pretence that Israeli genocide and its attacks on ambulances, hospitals, homes and children, are all about Hamas rather than the ethnic cleansing that Israeli politicians openly proclaim.

Pilger was a staunch supporter of the Palestinians. Not for him the vile and fabricated accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anyone who criticises this wretched apartheid state.

The Zionist lobby reacted with their usual cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ when he produced Palestine is Still the Issue for ITV in 2002.


Palestine is Still the Issue (2002) - John Pilger

In Why my film is under fire Pilger described how

The pro-Israel lobby intimidates journalists to ensure that most coverage remains biased in its favour.

Does anyone imagine that Pilger’s article would get past its Zionist gatekeeper, Jonathan Freedland, today? Freedland and Guardian Editor Kath Viner would argue that accusing the ‘victims’ of ‘anti-Semitism’ of making false allegations was itself anti-Semitic, even if those ‘victims’ were rich and powerful supporters of genocide. To Freedland Palestinians are never victims. Only Jews merit that title.

Pilger described how Michael Green, Chairman of Carlton TV, attacked his 2002 film Palestine is Still the Issue in the Jewish Chronicle. Green was rebuked for that by Carlton’s Factual Department.

John Pilger's Legendary Career Praised by Fellow Journalists

Pilger was recruited by the Mirror in 1963 and became chief foreign correspondent before he was sacked at the behest of the Zionist spy and thief who owned the Mirror, Robert Maxwell, at the end of 1985. He briefly returned when Piers Morgan was editor. None of this was mentioned in the Mirror’s obituary. He was also their war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra

Pilger also wrote for the New Statesman, where he had a column from 1991 to 2014, and the Independent. His last piece for the Statesman was in 2014. As it moved to the right his message became uncomfortable to its Blairite Editor, Jason Cowley.

The Mirror was not the only paper which was selective in what it said. The Guardian ran the most dishonest obituary. It described Pilger’s journalistic history thus:

He left the Mirror in 1985 and wrote for other papers, including the Guardian. He was a supporter of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

And that was it. No explanation as to why he hadn’t had an article published in The Guardian since 2019.  For that we have to turn to his interview with KPFA in 2018 where he described how his

last appearance was in the Guardian which 3 years ago got rid of people like me in what was pretty much a purge of those who were really saying things the Guardian no longer says anymore. That has happened right across the liberal media.

The War on Democracy – Latin America

Pilger was an anti-imperialist and his obituary writers found that hard to deal with. That meant he opposed US foreign policy and the devastation that it has wrought. Not a subject for The Guardian!

In The War on Democracy - Latin America Pilger described how serial US intervention, overt and covert, had toppled a series of governments in the Latin American region since the 1950s. The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the US. Pilger said of the film that it was “about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery". These people

describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us.

The Quiet Mutiny - World in Action (1970)

The Vietnam War was instrumental in disillusioning many of us who had grown up on American rhetoric of freedom and democracy. His first film The Quiet Mutiny, was made by Granada TV’s World in Action (1970).

The film broke the story of insurrection by drafted troops in Vietnam. In The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley described Pilger's revelations as among the most important reporting from Vietnam. The soldiers' revolt – including the killing of US in Indo-China.


Vietnam: The Last Battle - John Pilger (1995) - Vietnam War Documentary

In Vietnam: The Last Battle Pilger returned to Vietnam 20 years after the US had left only to find ilosing many of the gains it had fought for as it was drawn into the globalised market economy while imperialist control exerted itself through the World Bank, the IMF and other global institutions. It is called ‘market socialism’.


John Pilger: Paying the Price Killing the Children of Iraq 2000

Pilger campaigned against the Iraq War and what led up to it in his film Paying the Price Killing the Children of Iraq 2000. Pilger described the bombing of Iraq and sanctions as ‘a war against the children of Iraq’. The US sanctions killed half a million children but when asked about it US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it." When Pilger questioned her spokesman James Rubin about this, he claimed Albright's words were taken out of context.

Year Zero: The Silent Death Of Cambodia

Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia alerted the world to the horrors wrought by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The film was originally broadcast on commercial TV in Britain and Australia without advertising, which was unprecedented. The British Film Institute listed it as one of the 10 most important documentaries of the 20th century.

Pilger revealed that as many as 2m people out of a population of 7m were killed or starved by the Khmer Rouge. ‘The genocide of Pol Pot was begun by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.’ US bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 caused such turmoil that the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power in 1975 was made inevitable. Pilger says

‘The new rulers of Cambodia called 1975 Year Zero, the dawn of an age in which there would be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money; only work and death... For me, coming here has been like stumbling into something I could never imagine and what follows is the first complete film report by Westerners from the ashes of a gentle land.’

 ‘Nothing had prepared us,’ he said.

There was no power, no drinking water, no shops, no services of any kind. At the railway station, trains stood empty at various stages of interrupted departure. Personal belongings and pieces of clothing fluttered on the platforms, as they fluttered on the mass graves beyond.

At Tuol Sleng extermination centre, where men, women and children were tortured and killed, black-and-white photographs of the victims stare out of the screen. Outside, deserted streets are interrupted by the lone figure of an infant – his parents almost certainly dead or missing – weaving his way down the middle of the road.

Pilger's spontaneous, vivid reporting of the power politics that caused such suffering is a model of anger suppressed. He described how, as a means of punishing the Vietnamese, whose army had liberated Cambodia the US and its allies declared a blockade on stricken Cambodia. Unicef’s representative, Jacques Beaumont, said,

‘In one of the very poor barracks with practically nothing, there was already 54 children dying. One of them was sitting in the corner of the room with swollen legs because he was starving. He did not have the strength to look at me or to anybody. He was just waiting to die. Ten days later, four of these children were dead and I will always remember that, saying: “I did not do anything for these children, because we had nothing.”’

The Red Cross representative, François Bugnion, took Pilger aside and asked him if he could contact ‘someone in the Australian government who can arrange for an aircraft to fly in a truck, food and drugs to save thousands of lives while the politics are being ironed out’. The Australian ambassador in Bangkok didn’t respond.

Near the end of the film, he refers to a starving boy whose screams can be heard rising and falling in agony. ‘Of course,’ he says directly to the camera, ‘if you're in Geneva or New York or London, you can’t hear the screams of [this] little boy.’

Year Zero’s broadcast in Britain had a phenomenal public response. 40 sacks of post arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham, with £1m in the first few days. ‘This is for Cambodia,’ wrote an anonymous Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week’s wage. An elderly woman sent her pension for two months. A single parent sent her savings of £50.

Frontline News described how Pilger won an International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences award for his 1979 film Year Zero: The Silent Death Of Cambodia, which revealed the extent of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.

Screened in 50 countries and seen by 150 million viewers, Year Zero was credited with raising more than $45 million in unsolicited aid for Cambodia, which helped rescue normal life: it restored a clean water supply in Phnom Penh, stocked hospitals and schools, supported orphanages and reopened a desperately needed clothing factory, allowing people to discard the black uniforms the Khmer Rouge had forced them to wear.

Year Zero won many awards. Pilger himself won the 1980 United Nations Media Peace Prize for ‘having done so much to ease the suffering of the Cambodian people’.

Pilger made a total of five documentaries on Cambodia. Their later films reported on the American and British governments' back-door support for the exiled Khmer Rouge. In 2008, the former SAS soldier Chris Ryan, then a bestselling author, lamented in a newspaper interview that

when John Pilger, the foreign correspondent, discovered we were training the Khmer Rouge in the Far East [we] were sent home.  [Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia]

John Pilger - Stealing A Nation - Diego Garcia (Chago´s Island) [HD]

Pilger opposed the hypocrisy and deceit of US and British imperialism. No more obvious a case was there than the islanders of Diego Garcia. In Stealing A Nation - Diego Garcia (Chago´s Island) in 2000 Pilger described  how

‘there are times when one tragedy one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments often justify their actions with lies.’ 

Pilger described how a government that called itself civilised

‘tricked and expelled its most vulnerable citizens so that it could give their homeland to a foreign power for a military base.’

Pilger was referring to how Chagos Island was handed over the United States behind the backs of the islanders.

‘In Death of a Nation: The East Timor Conspiracy’

One of Pilger’s most important films in terms of the impact it had was his 1994 film ‘In Death of a Nation: The East Timor Conspiracy’. Portugal decolonised in 1974. Independence was declared by Fretilin on 28 November 1975 and the Indonesian military invaded East Timor on 7 December 1975 and did not leave till 1999.

The Indonesian government subjected the people of East Timor to routine and systematic torture, sexual slavery, extrajudicial executions, massacres, and deliberate starvation

In 1996 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to two men from East Timor, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta, for their ongoing efforts to end the occupation. In 1999 a referendum resulted in an overwhelming majority in favour of independence.

Indonesia’s invasion had been supported by the US and Australia. Once again the US, whilst preaching freedom support dictatorship. Australia has as is clear with the Aukus Pact, been the US’s main ally in the Pacific and a local imperialist power in its own right.

The First Australians Fight Back - John Pilger - The Secret Country – 1985

It isn’t surprising, given that Pilger was Australian, that he was particularly concerned with the question of the Aboriginal people.

The First Australians Fight Back Pilger described how

As children, we were given to understand that we were merely innocent bystanders to the slow and natural death of an ancient people, the First Australians, rather than the inheritors of a history every bit as rapacious as that of the United States, Latin America, Africa.

John Pilger - The Last Dream - Secrets 1988

In the Last Dream Pilger returned to Australia to make a special, three-part documentary, The Last Dream, screened at the time of the country’s bicentenary in 1988. Reflecting on 200 years of White Australia, it is an antidote to the celebrations that followed.

Gough Whitlam - Australian Prime Minister Overthrown in a CIA/British Coup

Secrets was the second of the trilogy and Pilger focused on the treatment of the Aborigines. Pilger remarks that:

This film is about another Australia, an Australia behind the beer-can images and well-worn stereotypes, a place of secrets. The story of my country has been, and remains, an epic cover-up.

Highlighting Aboriginal deaths in police custody, he noted that Australia has the highest rate of imprisonment for black people in the world and likens film of the funeral of a black who died from head injuries while being held by police to scenes in the South African township of Soweto.

Breaking the Silence : Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003) - John Pilger

In his 2003 film Breaking the Silence : Truth and Lies in the War on Terror  Pilger describes the lies and falsehoods that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan. Tony Blair promised that:

To the Afghan people, we make this commitment. We will not walk away... If the Taliban regime changes, we will work with you to make sure its successor is one that is broadbased, that unites all ethnic groups and offers some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.

 George Bush had said a few days earlier:

The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and its allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. The US is a friend of the Afghan people.

Almost every word they spoke was a lie as we can see with Biden’s scuttle from Afghanistan but they prepared the way for the conquest of both Afghanistan and Iraq. It was also the start of the ‘War on Terror’ which was a war against Muslims at home and state sponsored terrorism abroad. Pilger described Kabul as

a glimpse of Dresden post-1945, with contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue. They have no light and heat; their apocalyptic fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the pock-marks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses are twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top of each other, reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer Rouge to mark Year Zero.

It could be Gaza today that Pilger was describing.

John Pilger Documentary - The Coming War on China

The Coming War on China was completed in the month Trump was elected President. The film investigated the manufacture of a ‘threat’ and the beckoning of a nuclear confrontation and tells how when the US decided that China was a threat to its imperial dominance, two-thirds of US naval forces were transferred to Asia and the Pacific. This was the ‘pivot to Asia', announced by Obama in 2011.

Seldom referred to in the Western media, 400 American bases surround China with ships, missiles and troops, in an arc that extends from Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India.

Chapter 1 is set in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, which the US took over as a UN ‘trust territory’ in 1945 with an obligation to ‘protect the population’s health and wellbeing’. From 1946 to 1958, the US exploded the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day in the islands, contaminating its people and environment.

Filmed on irradiated Bikini Atoll, which cannot be safely inhabited today, perhaps ever, Pilger described the testing in 1954 of the world's first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Bravo, which vaporised an entire island. The inhabitants had been moved to a nearby atoll, Rongelap, where the ‘unexpected’ fallout endowed them with multiple cancers.

The film is a portrayal of US imperialism in all its ugliness. An ugliness that the BBC is dedicated to hiding.

Julian Assange in conversation with John Pilger

When Julian Assange and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the NYT and other 'papers of record', he was celebrated.

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian's character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Biden called him a 'hi-tech terrorist'. Hillary Clinton asked, 'Can't we just drone this guy?'


The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Assange - the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it 'mobbing' -- brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. Pilger called them Vichy journalists.

This was a 68-minute interview with Julian Assange, recorded during the filming of John Pilger’s THE WAR YOU DON’T SEE. We owe it to Pilger to ensure that Assange is freed from Belmarsh prison.

Governments and Media roles in War Propaganda | THE WAR YOU DON'T SEE |

In The War You Don't See, Pilger returned to the subject of war reporting and its role in the making of wars. This ‘drum beat’ was the theme of Pilger's 1983 documentary, a history of war journalism from the Crimea in the 19th century (‘the last British war without censorship’) to Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War in 1982.

The War You Don’t See analyses propaganda as a weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan. The title refers to censorship by omission – ‘the most virulent form of censorship,’ and the collusion of journalists in nominally free societies such as Britain and the United States.

The film begins with shocking footage from Iraq in 2007. A US Apache gunship opens fire on a Baghdad street, killing in cold blood two Reuter journalists, along with civilians. There is no provocation – the victims are unarmed. One of the Apache crew comments ‘Nice’ as he murders people at a safe distance. Titled ‘Collateral Murder’, the video was leaked to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning.

‘Selling’ the 2003 invasion of Iraq is the centrepiece of Pilger's film. The news media is exposed as a source of illusions, such as a non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11. A CIA witness says the primary aim of intelligence supplied by the Pentagon is to manipulate public opinion.

The New Rulers of the World (2001)

In The New Rulers of the World in July 2001 Pilger explained that

“A small group of powerful individuals are now richer than most of the population of Africa. Just 200 giant corporations dominate a quarter of the world’s economic activity... The famous brands of almost everything from running shoes to baby clothes are now made in very poor countries with cheap labour, at times bordering on a form of slave labour.”

Globalisation had become a topical subject by the time The New Rulers of the World was screened. More than a million people opposed to the increasing gap between rich and poor had staged a series of anti-capitalist demonstrations.

John Pilger’s documentary brought together several themes that run throughout his work – the way in which superpowers use small countries as pawns in their global strategies, the courting of dictators by the West to open the doors to valuable resources and the exploitation of workers to provide riches in which they do not share.

The film puts the story of multinationals’ global domination into a political context and demonstrates how the West has increased its stranglehold on poor countries by using the might of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation to control their economies.

Utopia

Utopia was Pilger’s fourth film about the Aborigines. Released in 2013 Utopia broke what amounted to a national silence about the brutalising of Indigenous people.

New footage is juxtaposed with that of his earlier films. The point was made that little has changed for many of those excluded from white Australia's wealth, regardless of an official apology for 'wrongs past and present'.

The material comfort of Whites contrasted with the First Australians who died from Dickensian diseases in their 40s and were imprisoned at a rate six times that of blacks in apartheid South Africa. Western Australia, the richest state had the highest incarceration rate of juveniles, mainly Indigenous, in the world.

Pilger takes a journey from million-dollar properties in Sydney and Canberra to the ironically named Northern Territory region of Utopia, where communities are without basic services, such as fresh running water. In Darwin, he shows shocking footage of police routinely mistreating a seriously ill Aboriginal man who is left to die in a cell, his cries for help unheeded.

A former prisons minister describes 'racking and stacking' Aboriginal prisoners. A shadow Labor Party minister becomes abusive when Pilger asks him why, after 30 years in Parliament, he has not alleviated the poverty of his black constituents. Utopia also revealed a new ‘stolen generation’ of children taken from their mothers.

Thalidomide 1974; The 98 We Forgot

Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot, his 1974 programme for ITV, helped win compensation for children who suffered birth defects when expectant mothers took the drug. He went on to have his own half-hour documentary series on ITV from 1974 until 1977.

‘This is a war of propaganda’: John Pilger on Ukraine and Assange |

In Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works Pilger told how in the 1970s he met Leni Riefenstahl, whose films glorified the Nazis. She told him that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? he asked.  “Yes, especially them,” she said. Pilger noted that ‘I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.’

Pilger described  how in his lifetime, the USA has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries.  It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.

The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

Pilger described how his friend, Harold Pinter, a Jewish anti-Zionist, in the years before he died in 2008, made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence. “U.S. foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.’

In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said:

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Pilger described how he asked Pinter if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.

It’s the same. It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”

Pilger described the news from the war in Ukraine as not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. Pilger described how he had never known such blanket propaganda.

In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.

In recent years US “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, accompanied by false assurances by James Baker’s to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.

NATO on Hitler’s Borderline

Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has reached the borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23m dead in the Soviet Union. Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals?

The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.

ITV Report on Hostility of Mariupul’s population to the Ukrainian Army

Pilger asked when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago? (This is taken from an edited version of an address to the Trondheim World Festival, Norway, 6.9.22.)

The Guardian and Julian Assange

It is no surprise that the Guardian passed over its relationship with Assange in one sentence. Pilger had been a bitter critic of the paper. Pilger wrote about how it had been open season on Assange for more than a decade.

‘In 2011, The Guardian exploited Julian's work as if it was its own, collected journalism prizes and Hollywood deals, then turned on its source.

In a Guardian book by David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange is quoted as saying during a dinner in a London restaurant that he didn't care if informants named in the leaks were harmed.

Neither Harding nor Leigh were at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, actually was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind.

Lecturing a group of City University students, David Leigh mocked the very idea that "Julian Assange will end up in an orange jumpsuit". His fears were an exaggeration, it was paranoia he sneered. Edward Snowden later revealed that Assange was on a "manhunt timeline".

Another despicable Guardian journalist was James Ball who wrote

‘The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride. The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US...’

Luke Harding was outside the Ecuadorean embassy on the evening Julian sought asylum. Standing with a police line he gloated "Scotland Yard may well have the last laugh."

The campaign was relentless. Guardian columnists scraped the barrel. "He really is the most massive turd," wrote Suzanne Moore of a man she had never met. Suzanne Moore, a right-wing feminist commented in the New Statesman after the arrest:

‘O frabjous day! We are all bored out of our minds with Brexit when a demented looking gnome is pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the secret police of the deep state. Or “the met” as normal people call them.’

The Guardian’s Smear Article Attacking Assange – It was Totally Without Foundation

Pilger wrote that Julian Assange’s only crime was revealing government crimes and lies and so performed one of the great public services of his lifetime. Pilger wrote in 2020 how a decade previously

the Guardian exploited Assange's work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian's David Leigh, now retired as 'investigations editor' and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian 'scoop' that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise.

Pilger spoke of

‘the Judases on the Guardian who flirted with Julian, exploited his landmark work, made their pile then betrayed him, have nothing to fear. They are safe because they are needed. (my emphasis)

Pilger, in JULIAN ASSANGE MUST BE FREED, NOT BETRAYED told how in 2011, David Leigh told journalism students at City University that Assange was "quite deranged". When a student asked why, Leigh replied, "Because he doesn't understand the parameters of conventional journalism".

Pilger commented that it was

precisely because he did understand that the "parameters" of the media often shielded vested and political interests and had nothing to do with transparency that the idea of WikiLeaks was so appealing to many people, especially the young, rightly cynical about the so-called "mainstream".

A Guardian editorial on Assange’s extradition said

It is not a question of how wise Mr. Assange is, still less how likable. It's not about his character, nor his judgement. It's a matter of press freedom and the public's right to know.

Pilger commented in THE LIES ABOUT ASSANGE MUST STOP NOW that

what the Guardian is trying to do is separate Assange from his landmark achievements, which have both profited the Guardian and exposed its own vulnerability, along with its propensity to suck up to rapacious power and smear those who reveal its double standards.

Kevin Lygo, managing director of media and entertainment at ITV described Pilger as “a giant of campaigning journalism” who offered viewers a level of analysis and opinion that was rare in mainstream television.

He had a clear, distinctive editorial voice which he used to great effect throughout his distinguished filmmaking career. His documentaries were engaging, challenging, and always very watchable.

He eschewed comfortable consensus and instead offered a radical, alternative approach on current affairs and a platform for dissenting voices over 50 years,” he added.

Tony Greenstein

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