The case of Julian Assange represents the most dangerous and
concerted attack on journalism and freedom of the press in over a century. It
has nothing to do with the Assange himself, despite attempts to portray his
attempted deportation as being a consequence of him seeking asylum in the
Ecuadorian Embassy and before that the false accusation of rape.
You would have to go back to the case of John Wilkes in 1762
for a similar case. In that case Wilke’s attack on George III’s ministers led
to the issue of a General Warrant, which was deemed illegal by Chief Justice
Pratt.
The Corrupt Lord Justice Burnett - friend of Alan Duncan
In the case of Assange far from defending press freedom the Judiciary have led the attack on it. Lord
Chief Justice Burnett who ruled in the High Court against Assange and in favour
of accepting US assurances about prison conditions in the USA just happened to
be a close friend of former Deputy Foreign Secretary Alan Duncan, who led the hounding
Assange, describing him as a ‘miserable little worm’. A description that might
better be applied to Burnett and himself.
Burnett if he had any integrity, given his close relations
with Duncan. would have recused himself but to expect honesty or integrity from
British judges is like expecting Boris Johnson to tell the truth.
Other recent cases involving attacks on press freedom include
Mary
Whitehouse v Dennis Lemon in
1977. Gay Times had reprinted James Kirkup's poem The Love that Dares to Speak its Name in which a Roman Centurion had sex with the
crucified Christ. Lemon received
a 9 month suspended sentence from another judicial dinosaur, Alan King-Hamilton,
who told the court that homosexuality had caused the fall of the Roman Empire. The
offence was blasphemous libel, which was abolished in 2008.
The ABC
trial held the following year, 1978, was authorised by the then Labour
Government’s illiberal Home Secretary Merlyn Rees and Attorney General Sam
Silkin. ABC was short for the names of the 3 Defendants, Audrey, Berry and
Campbell. It involved the unprecedented use of Section 1 of the Official
Secrets Act against non-spies for having disclosed the existence of GCHQ, the
eavesdropping centre.
The government case was quickly discredited since the
information was already in the public domain. Also revealed was the use of
police vetting of juries necessitating the replacement of the whole jury.
Justice Mars Jones described the prosecution as ‘oppressive’ and threw out the Section
1 charges.
There was the gaoling of 2 journalists for 3 and 6 months for refusing to divulge their sources to the Vassall Tribunal set up after the revelation that Vassall, a civil servant working in the Admiralty, had been a Soviet spy.
In the case of Goodwin
v UK in March 1996 the European Court of Human Rights [ECHR] ruled that
under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, a court could not
force a journalist to divulge his sources. The Engineer had intended to publish
confidential financial information about Tetra Ltd. Naturally the High Court,
Court of Appeal and House of Lords took the side of property interests and
ordered Goodwin had to divulge his sources of information and when he refused was
fined £5,000 for contempt of court. The European courts ruled otherwise.
The most recent case involving press
freedom was the gaoling
of Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray was sacked by
Jack Straw, New Labour Foreign Secretary and Blair toady. Murray’s crime was to
have revealed the extensive use of torture (boiling people alive) by the then
ruler of the country Islam Karimov.
Murray wrote
that the SNP leadership, Sturgeon in particular, the Crown
Office and police conspired to convict Alex Salmond on charges of sexual
harassment and attempted rape. Salmond was acquitted on all charges. The
British establishment got their revenge when senior Scottish judge and Sturgeon
loyalist Lady Dorrian issued an order
forbidding the publication of the names of the women who given false witness
testimony against Salmond.
In March 2021 Dorrian found Murray to be in contempt of court
after he published information that in her view could potentially lead to
identifying some of the complainants, what was called jigsaw identification and
sentenced him to eight months' imprisonment.
What made this case particularly outrageous was that Dorrian
had ruled that in the case of the mainstream press, she would have imposed a
non-custodial sentence.
But perhaps the most significant case that of The
Sunday Times v. United Kingdom in 1972. This was in pre-Murdoch days when
the ST was a campaigning paper. Distillers had produced Thalidomide, a
tranquiliser taken by pregnant women, which resulted in hideous deformities in
babies. Thalidomide used its financial muscle to force many parents into taking
meagre settlements.
The ST printed an article in 1972 with the promise of further
articles. The Attorney General obtained an injunction at the High Court preventing
publication. Although it was overturned by the Court of Appeal the House of
Lords upheld the injunction. It went to the European Court of Human Rights which
ruled 11-9 that the injunction interfered with the freedom of the press.
I mention these cases because it gives the context to the
case of Julian Assange and what Nils
Melzer calls his persecution. Assange has been in prison for 3 years and confined
in the Ecuadorian Embassy for 7 years for the ‘crime’ of having revealed via
Wikileaks the gross war crimes of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It says everything about the British Judiciary that they have
nothing to say about the right to expose war crimes but are happy to gaol and
extradite those who blow the Whistleblowers. This is also true of both the British
Government and Labour’s pathetic leader Keir Starmer.
The British government together with the Swedish and US governments
have been complicit in this persecution and attempted in effect to destroy
Assange through a web of disinformation and dirty tricks including the making of
false charges of rape.
On 10 May I forwarded a letter from
the Julian Assange Defence Campaign
to Brighton Kemptown Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle asking him to sign 2 Early
Day Motions. 12 Labour, 6 SNP/Alba, 2 Plaid Cymru, 1 Green, 2 Independent and
even 1 Tory (David Davies) signed EDM 220 and 16
Labour, 6 SNP, 2 Plaid Cymru, 1 Green and even 1 Democratic Unionist Party MP
signed EDM 719.
However what proved palatable to a
Democratic Unionist MP was a step too far for the ginger nut who represents
Brighton Kemptown.
I did not envisage that
my request would prove controversial given that EDM 220 simply related to the
refusal of the government and prison authorities to allow an online meeting
between MPs and Assange. EDM 719 merely affirmed ‘its commitment to press freedom and public-interest journalism’.
Innocuous in the extreme.
So I was staggered
when Moyle’s PA, Carla May Kavanagh, on Moyle’s behalf, responded that since MPs ‘cannot interfere with decisions made by the courts,
he is unable to comment on an ongoing legal matter.’ This was
a non-sequitur. The whole point of MPs is that they can comment. The EDMs made
no mention of any legal matters. But I was assured that ‘Lloyd believes it is very important that we protect freedom of the
press’.
In other words Moyle believes
press freedom is important but refuses to say anything about a case that
directly threatens press freedom. This is the dishonesty that I’ve come to
expect from Moyle.
I responded demanding an answer
from Moyle directly not his PA, pointing out that ‘If Lloyd actually means what he says then he cannot help but speak out
against the treatment of Assange.’ I asked whether Moyle’s support for
freedom of the press was merely ‘an empty
pious phrase designed to placate myself and others’. I gave him 7 days to
respond before I went public with his craven response.
MPs have every right
to comment on judicial bias, of which there is a surfeit in this case and that ‘Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell, Chris Mullin, Joan Maynard and many other
socialist Labour MPs have spoken out against judicial bias and irregularities
in the past.’
Moyle’s cowardice is
based on the idea of judicial neutrality whereas judges are highly political,
reactionary members of the Establishment. Moyle’s response demonstrates that
the left in Parliament today has no class base or analysis. It consists of middle
class careerists and nonentities like Moyle who, will occasionally make radical
gestures.
Stung by my response,
Moyle wrote that ‘I have no
interest in taking up or commenting further on Assange and I will not be
singing (sic!) EDMs on it.’ And just in case I was under any doubt he made
clear that he ‘intended to publicly say
nothing on this issue.’
I responded by quoting veteran
journalist John Pilger that:
if WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is
extradited to the US “no journalist who challenges power will be safe”.
This double-barrelled
twerp is a hypocrite. At the 2021 Labour Party Conference Moyle had taken a day
trip to the left when he addressed the annual rally of the Socialist Campaign
Group. He told the audience that ‘this
has been a goddamn awful conference with a goddamn awful leadership.’
Clearly he had been
drinking too much or imbibing something stronger because he laid into Starmer
personally describing him as
‘not a
politician for the Labour Party. I’m afraid that is a reality.... No politician
worth their salt would wage an internal war on the party when we have one of
the worst governments in history’.
Moyle has always been
an opportunist and his next statement provoked newspaper headlines and a
complaint by the so-called Labour Against
Anti-Semitism. Referring to those who had been purged from the Labour Party
Moyle said:
“I was struck
by members who feel alone in our party at the moment. I want to apologise, from
me in particular, because if we have made you feel like you are alone, if we
have not reached out our arms enough in these tough times when you are being
purged or set up with false allegations, I not only apologise, I will endeavour
to do better because we have to support each other. ”
Of course Moyle meant
none of it. The Zionist press went crazy and Guido Fawkes, the Tory libel sheet,
reported
that the Whips Office were considering removing the whip from Moyle. Moyle must
have panicked. The Chair of Kemptown Labour Party, Colin Piper told members
that Lloyd was unlikely to be allowed to stand at the next election. It was
panic stations for someone whose only concern in life is his own career.
Moyle is not
alone. Labour history is littered with MPs who prioritised their own career
over their socialist principles. The
number of Tony Benns, Jeremy Corbyns, Tam Dalyells and Joan Maynards are few
and far between.
The hypocrisy of
Moyle’s promise to ‘reach out his arms’ to
those who are purged is breaktaking given that he scabbed on me and other
members of Brighton Labour Party. He had written in secret to the anti-Corbyn
General Secretary Iain McNicol urging that my expulsion be sped up, despite the
party having voted to support me!
The full correspondence can be seen here.
Lloyd Moyle's protective arms did not reach as far as Amanda Bishop
Nor had Moyle made an
exception for me. Amanda Bishop, a White anti-apartheid exile from South Africa
had suggested in response to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations and the
suspension of a Black member of the Labour Party, Alexander Braithwaite, that
we should march to a Hove synagogue. Now this might not have been the brightest
idea but was it anti-Semitic?
Moyle wrote secret letters, in defiance of Brighton Labour policy to the witchhunters about my responding to the JLM witchhunters
It was Zionist groups
calling themselves Jewish who were responsible for the racist suspension of
Alex. So it was quite understandable. And why is a march to a synagogue anti-Semitic
anyway?
What was racist was suspending the only Black woman, Alex Braithwaite on false accusations of antisemitism, not calling for a march on a synagogue
Was I anti-Christian when
I took part in a march and picket outside a Worthing evangelical church for
organising pickets to harass women at Brighton’s abortion clinic? I think not.
Putting the faces of 3 right-wing councillors on this fun Chanukah video was 'antisemitic'
Likewise Moyle also
condemned a working class young Labour member Daniel Harris for putting the
faces of 3 right-wing councillors on a fun video. Apparently this was anti-Semitic! Why? Because according
to former MP Ivor Caplin, a war criminal who was Defence Minister at the time
of the Iraq War invasion, two of the 3 councillors ‘had significant Jewish connections’In other words all
3, including Caroline‘poison’ Penn were non-Jewish. But in the frenzied ‘anti-Semitism’
affair everything could be anti-Semitic, except genuine anti-Semitism.
Daniel Harris was victimised and Lloyd Moyle joined in
This is not the first blog that has featured Moyle. See
No
one Better Represents the Opportunism and Lack of Principle of the Campaign
Group of MPs than Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle
Lloyd
Russell-Moyle – the Double Barrelled Hypocrite who was imposed as Chair of
Brighton & Hove Labour Party
No
sooner had Lloyd-Russell Moyle MP Apologised for Supporting the Purge of
Socialists from the Labour Party than he Recanted!
Unfortunately Labour breeds
opportunists and charlatans like Moyle, who say one thing to get selected and
spend the rest of their career feathering their own nest.
Moyle
also had another consideration when refusing to be associated with Assange.
Starmer was personally responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service’s attempt
to extradite Assange. Starmer had worked hand in glove with the Americans and
Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder in order to secure an extradition by false
pretences to Sweden on bogus rape charges.
When the
Swedes were thinking of dropping the case because of lack of evidence, a CPS barrister
wrote back ‘don’t you dare get cold feet’.
Clearly their interest in the case had nothing to do with the actual issue
of attempted rape.
The last
thing Moyle wanted to do was to antagonise Herr Stürmer any further. He had
already openly mocked Labour’s robotic leader in his speech to the SCG rally
when he said that ‘the problem is that he
[Starmer] might be a very nice man...’ then pausing and giving a nod and a wink to
his audience who were shouting their hate of the man.
But I
will leave this rank opportunist, parliamentary and political lightweight, who
has made a career out of throwing red meat to Labour Party members whilst
reassuring the party establishment that he was really one of them.
Under
Corbyn Moyle was a Corbyn supporter and under Starmer he is a Starmer
supporter. No doubt if Boris Johnson were leader of the Labour Party Moyle
would have pledged his unswerving allegiance to him too. He is a man for all
seasons and none. A fair-weather socialist who first sees which way the wind is
blowing before making his mind up on an issue.
Let me
turn by way of contrast to a man who has demonstrated his integrity and
honesty. I refer to the Nils
Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture who has brought out a
remarkable book The
Trial of Julian Assange which should be compulsory reading for anyone who
values democratic rights in a society that is rapidly moving to the
authoritarian right with one piece of legislation after another whittling away
our right to protest. There is an excellent review
of the book by Jonathan Cook.
Among the
main points Melzer makes is that:
i.
The
United States is determined to make an example of Assange for the treasure
trove of secrets Wikileaks revealed concerning US war crimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan. In particular the ‘Collateral Murder’ video
which shows a helicopter machine gunning civilians on a square in Baghdad in
July 2007. 12 people were murdered including two Reuters journalists, Namir
Nour El Deen and Saeed Chmagh.
ii.
The
Swedish case of rape, as Melzer, a Professor of International Law at Glasgow
University and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law, made clear
was bogus from beginning to end. It was the police who suggested rape not the
women.
iii.
Assange,
on a speaking tour to Sweden, slept with two women, S and A. Assange, who is on
the autistic spectrum, was certainly insensitive in the way he treated both
women and by all accounts was extremely sexist. But he was not a rapist and at
no stage did they make such an accusation. In the case of S he ignored her
concerns over whether he might be HIV positive and it was only reluctantly that
he agreed to have an HIV test. In the case of A Assange had wanted to have
unprotected sex and she suspected that he deliberately ripped open a condom.
However this remained a suspicion.
iv.
Both
women went to the Swedish Police with their concerns and they were told that
even if they did not want to press charges of rape the police certainly did.
There were a number of serious irregularities, such as interviewing the women
by phone and not notifying Assange or his lawyer as to what the charges
were. Nor were the defence allowed to
see the women’s statements.
v.
The
Chief Prosecutor for Stockholm, Eva Finne cancelled the initial arrest warrant
and issued a statement that ‘I do not
believe there is any reason to suspect him of rape.’ In the case of S she dropped the investigation
altogether and threw the police charges out but the women’s publicly appointed
lawyer, Claes Borgström, was a deceitful and ambitious social democrat, who had
been embroiled as defence counsel in a case of wrongful convictions whereby a man
confessed to 8 murders he didn’t commit, spending 20 years in prison as a
result. Borgström was later sacked by the women.
vi.
The
original interview with S was ‘amended’ without S being consulted. This was used as the basis of the appeal to Marianne
Ny, Director of Public Prosecutions, a personal friend of Borgström.
This amended statement was the basis of the successful appeal to reinstate the
case.
vii. When Assange was interviewed by the
Police, it was promptly leaked to the press despite promises to the contrary.
Assange stayed on in Sweden for an extra month but the moment he took a flight
out of Sweden an Interpol Arrest Warrant was issued thus giving the impression
that he was fleeing justice.
viii. It is clear that throughout his stay
Assange was being monitored and that the US was interested in getting him. For
example all his credit cards were cancelled whilst he was away and it doesn’t
take much guessing as to who would or could put pressure on the card issuers.
a.
It
isn’t surprising that the authorities seized on rape with such alacrity because
nothing was better designed to discredit Assange. Many on the left who should have known better
recoiled when they heard what he’d been charged with.
ix.
Assange,
when he reached London, was immediately subject to extradition proceedings to
Sweden. Assange had no problem in surrendering to the Swedes but he also
suspected that this was a ruse and that he would be rendered to the United
States from Britain.
x.
Assange
sought assurances from Sweden that this would not happen but the Swedes refused
to give such assurances. It was clear that the rape charges were a charade. Contrary
to many peoples’ impressions, Sweden was no longer the country of Olaf Palme,
the assassinated Premier who had been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Sweden, as we are seeing
with its NATO application, has a very close relationship with US Intelligence
and was involved in the rendering of 2 men to the United States in order that
they could be tortured and questioned.
xi.
Assange
suspected, correctly as it turned out, that the United US was preparing
proceedings against him. A secret Grand
Jury was empanelled. It was this that forced Assange to seek asylum in the
Ecuadorian Embassy.
The Guardian
A word
should be said about the role of the press, in particular the Guardian which
had a whole series of exposes as a result of Assange such as The
looting of Kenya, Wikileaks:
reaction to the Collateral Murder video, 'All
lies': how the US military covered up gunning down two journalists in Iraq.
But
then, when the heat was turned up and Assange fled into the Ecuadorian Embassy,
the Guardian turned on Assange like a venomous snake and betrayed him. Various
Guardian journalists vented their spleen on Assange like the bizarre tweet from
ex-Guardian ‘journalist’ Suzanna Moore, who has now decamped to The Telegraph,
about Assange stuffing himself with ‘flattened guinea pigs’ calling him a ‘massive
turd’. I guess Moore never did irony
well.
But
the Lord Haw Haw prize for yellow journalism surely goes to James Ball, who had
worked with Assange. Ball wrote
in January 2018, a mere 16 months before he was kidnapped from the Embassy,
that ‘The only barrier to Julian Assange
leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride’. Not content with this prediction, our
latter day Nostradamus went on to predict that
‘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’.
Ball should
be given the Nick Cohen Journalist of the Year Prize.
This fake MI5 sourced story is still up on The Guardian's web site
But
even Ball and his fellow Guardian Presstitutes were outdone by Luke Harding and
Dan Collyns who wrote
that ‘Manafort held secret talks with
Assange in Ecuadorian embassy’. Manafort was Trump’s ex campaign manager, convicted
of various felonies in the US.
There
was no truth in the story. It was clearly planted by the intelligence services.
No attempt was made to check the story. The Ecuadorian Embassy was swarming
with CCTV and CIA cameras and listening devices. Every visitor had to sign in. Assange himself was restricted by this time
to very few visitors. If Manafort had
visited Assange the evidence would have been everywhere yet despite being asked
to either put up the proof or take the story down, the Guardian’s Editor
Katherine Viner has refused to do so.
Luke
Harding is known an MI5/ MI6 asset. He is the Guardian’s Russia correspondent
and was a conduit for CIA false intelligence that Trump had been elected
because of Russia whereas Trump was elected because the Democrat leadership
cheated Bernie Sanders in the primaries in order to get the detested Hilary
Clinton selected.
Aaron Mate Destroys Luke Harding's Fantasies
Harding
wrote a book Collusion full of innuendo
but when he was interviewed
by Aaron Mate on this he came unstuck as he could not verify any of his
allegations. In the end he stormed out. If you enjoy watching a Guardian
Presstitute destroyed then this is the video.
The
Guardian in the form of ex-Editor Alan Rusbridger provided one account, albeit
dated, WikiLeaks:
The Guardian's role in the biggest leak in the history of the world in
January 2011.
The
Guardian today is a discredited ‘liberal’ paper that led on the false ‘anti-Semitism’
attacks on Corbyn.
The
fact that Lloyd Russell-Moyle takes his political lead on Assange from what are
effectively intelligence plants says everything one needs to know about him.
Assange personally
A lot of
the attacks on Assange has been viciously personal and have failed to separate
out the person, flawed as he is, from the invaluable role that he performed. A
good example of this is the interview
with British journalist and former ghostwriter for Assange Andrew O’Hagan. O’Hagan
wrote that
“Julian scorns
all attempts at social graces. He marches through doors and leave women in his
wake. He talks over everybody. And all his life he has depended on being the
impish one, the eccentric one, the boy with a bag full of Einstein who enjoyed
climbing trees. But as a forty-year old, that’s less charming.” There are so
many quotable lines. “His pride could engulf the room in flames.”
I have no
way of knowing if this is true. But even were it true, bearing in mind Assange’s
autism, so what? Are a lack of social
graces a crime meriting 3 years in Belmarsh and false and trumped up
accusations of rape? It would seem that British journalists, the James Balls of
this world allow their own egos to intrude on what is, by any account a monstrous
injustice.
It has
always been my view that Assange made the wrong decision when jumping bail and
seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy. I suspect it was a decision made on
impulse.
Assange
was right about the US preparing a secret indictment and the rape charges in
Sweden being bogus. However Sweden would
not have been able to just drop the charges the moment Assange landed there.
They would have followed them through and Assange would undoubtedly have been
acquitted given there was no evidence.
If at
that point Sweden had tried to extradite Assange to the United States there
would have grown up, both in Sweden and world wide a massive campaign against
his forcible extradition to face Espionage charges. It is only my own view but
we are now where we are and when faced with the behaviour of despicable cowards
like the Lloyd Moyles of this world we can only redouble our efforts.
Tony
Greenstein
You can
get involved with the Assange Defence Campaign here. and can see my
correspondence with Moyle (11-18.5.22) here.
