Support Julian Assange

by CaTV – 4 may 2012

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Like a lot of Australians, I was not just disappointed but actually shocked by the attitude of Julia Gillard and her government – many of the senior members of government – to Julian Assange and the major Wikileaks release of 250,000 documents that started in 2010.

It was an emotive response to a number of factors; one of which being “those leaks”, that were published a few days before. They were the ones that named Mark Arbib as an informer, an insider who informed on the workings of our government to a foreign power. It might be an ally, but it’s still a foreign power, and you don’t do that. You don’t tell a foreign power what’s going on inside your own government… Imagine that the other way round; if Australian Intelligence had been receiving information about the internal workings of Obama’s government, and sending it back to Canberra. This would have been… you can imagine the reaction in the US. The fact that there was virtually no reaction illustrates the servant-master relationship; post-colonial relationship; NEO-colonial relationship that we have with the United States.

We are the willing Deputy Sheriff, and nothing has illustrated that more than the reaction Julia Gillard had when she claimed, completely wrongly – and the woman’s a LAWYER, for God’s sake – that Julian Assange was in breach of the law and that he had done something illegal. Then it was put to the federal police and what did they say? “No, he hasn’t broken any law”.

The other terrible thing at that time, was that Attorney General McClelland said that he would examine the state of Assange’s passport, as though he might not be allowed back into Australia – a last refuge, one would have thought, if the forces of authority are hunting him throughout the world. But what does the Australian government do? It says we’ll examine his passport to see if he can be kept out. The last person they did something like that to was Wilfred Burchett, so presumably they see Assange, in his own way, as as dangerous as Burchett – the last thing we had as a real renegade journalist – who didn’t take the government’s orders and reported as he wished. But that was decades ago…

So is Assange the new bête noir of the Australian government? Presumably he is.

My feeling about Julian Assange is that he should be celebrated. He is someone who has gone off in pursuit of truth. That’s all. He’s like Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, which showed the dark side of the Vietnam War (it was all the dark side really) and Assange; what he’s been trying to do is to get papers which will show the unseen side of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. From a journalistic point of view, you have to remember that these wars have not been reported. They have gone UNREPORTED. Why is that? The last wars that were reported in any way objectively… the last one was Vietnam, where reporters were on the ground as free agents and could report what they saw. A number of them died in that process, but they got the news out as they saw it. Read the rest of this entry »