The Moral Right to Govern

The arrest of Julian Assange for absconding while on bail from a UK court; (a charge that normally requires a non custodial ( non-prison) sentence) and his proposed extradition to the United States for ‘conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer network in 2010″ alongside Chelsea Manning, raises important issues , not only for journalistic freedom, but also puts into question the right of those in power to have any moral capacity to make any decisions for the publics they supposedly represent . Assange’s real crime is that his website Wikileaks exposed, and continues to expose, the criminal behaviour of state actors.

The U.K. judge, Judge Michael Snow, presiding over Assange’s arrest, made the highly unprofessional and unscrupulously biased comment when describing Assange in his legal judgement as a “narcissist, who can’t get beyond his own selfish interests” and found him guilty of failing to surrender to bail in 2012. No doubt “Justice” Snow, considered it contemptable that an upstart colonial boy like Assange should challenge his imperial betters in such an unseemly way. The personal characterization of Julian Assange by Judge Michael Snow was “highly improper,” Mads Andenas, former UN special rapporteur on arbitrary detention noted. Should being a narcissist ever become a chargeable crime then certainly most judges and every politician would be spending long periods in incarceration. As Craig Murray notes: One key fact gave away Snow’s enormous prejudice. Julian Assange said nothing during the whole brief proceedings, other than to say “Not guilty” twice, and to ask a one sentence question about why the charges were changed midway through this sham “trial”. Yet Judge Michael Snow condemned Assange as “narcissistic”. There was nothing that happened in Snow’s brief court hearing that could conceivably have given rise to that opinion. It was plainly something he brought with him into the courtroom, and had read or heard in the mainstream media or picked up in his club. It was in short the very definition of prejudice, and “Judge” Michael Snow and his summary judgement is a total disgrace.

Its noted that the current prime minister of the U.K. Theresa May stated in related to Assange’s arrest that “This goes to show that in the United Kingdom, no one is above the law”. . One assumes that May will therefore proceed to the nearest Police Station to confess her direct complicity in genocide in Yemen, and that her predecessor Cameron will come forward to be charged with war crimes in Libya and Syria and that the ever determinedly evil Tony Blair will finally confess to his monumental war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.

Similarly the media’s constant attempts prior to Assange’s arrest over the previous 6 years to characterize him as some objectionable human being; including his not emptying the kitty litter for his little cat (who was voluntarily extradited to safety in November 2018) , or his personal hygiene (one wonders how much those journalists might smell after being incarcerated in virtual solitary confinement for 7 years?) clearly demonstrates the depths to which Western mainstream journalism has sunk, and its cosy-ing up to “intelligence’ services determined to punish and get rid of Assange. ( as well as the extensive limitations of its case in attempting to justify locking Assange up). One can expect the (linked) type of response from newspapers like the Daily Mail, but Mainstream media’s attempts to character assassinate

Assange have continued after his arrest. Note the language in this screenshot from the ‘respectable’ news outlet Reuters from 12th April 2019 , stating that Assange was being indited for sexual offences (charges which as the U.N. has noted, were dropped almost two years ago). Wikipedia notes: ‘On 19 May 2017, the Swedish chief prosecutor applied to the Stockholm District Court to rescind the arrest warrant for Julian Assange,^[39] effectively ceasing their investigation against Julian Assange.^[40] The case may be reinstated until the expiration of the statute of limitations. Additionally, Britain’s arrest warrant pertaining to bail violations remains open. In 2013, Sweden tried to drop Assange extradition but the English Crown Prosecution Service dissuaded them from doing so.^[41]‘

There appears to be some not inconsiderable discrepancy between the intent and motives of the two women involved in the Swedish rape cases and the Swedish prosecution’s account of events.

Or we can note another ‘respectable’ media U.K. outlet, with its ongoing wild accusations ( screenshot below) that Assange and Wikileaks were somehow

connected to Russia’s “military intelligence spy agency” who supposedly ( without a shred of evidence) had hacked the U.S. Democratic Party’s servers, exposing the very real corruption within the party to ‘select” Hilary Clinton as a presidential hopeful..

The numerous attempts by the UK Justice system to force Sweden to maintain its prosecution case for rape against Assange, despite their clear resistance, is one more line of evidence of conspiracy against justice by those currently in power in the United Kingdom. Ms. Agnes Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions tweeted that the expulsion of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London exposed him to “risks of serious human rights violations”.

However it should be noted that the U.K.; like its ‘partner’ the U.S. , takes no cognizance of its extensive human rights violations, as it is apparently above international law. In December 2018 the U.N. has noted that the U. K. should: ‘abide by its international obligations” and allow Mr. Assange safe passage out of the embassy.

“States that are based upon, and promote the rule of law, do not like to be confronted with their own violations of the law, that is understandable. But when they honestly admit these violations, they do honour the very spirit of the rule of law, earn enhanced respect for doing so, and set worldwide commendable examples,” said a statement released by the Working Group.

In December 2015, the Working Group concluded in its opinion No. 54/2015 that Mr. Assange – who at the time had a European arrest warrant issued against him for an allegation of crimes committed in Sweden ‑ was being arbitrarily deprived of his freedom and demanded that he be released.

“Under international law, pre-trial detention must be only imposed in limited instances. Detention during investigations must be even more limited, especially in the absence of any charge” said the experts. “The Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr. Assange’s continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offense that cannot post facto justify the more than 6 years confinement that he has been subjected to since he sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador.”

“Mr. Assange should be able to exercise his right to freedom of movement in an unhindered manner, in accordance with the human rights conventions the UK has ratified,” the experts added.

Of course it should be remembered that those U.K. and U.S. people in positions of power are the very same people who ultimately will face extradition to The Hague and life-time imprisonment for their war crimes and facilitation of genocide in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now Yemen, and whom Wikileaks has exposed as genocidal abnd corrupt psychopaths, time and time again.

It is now high time for the public in both the United States and the United Kingdom, to acknowledge that those who rule those two nations (and who view themselves as the ‘elite’ despite all the evidence to the contrary of their minimal vision and intelligence), are simply parasites who have no moral right to rule. That in fact they are the people who need to be in the dock now for their well documented war-crimes and murders of many millions of people world-wide in their corrupt drive for power and more money.

They are in fact truly psychopaths.

Perhaps the conclusion can best be left to a quote from President Roosevelt in 1944 and recently re-quoted by the courageous and articulate Richard Falk: It seems apt to recall President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 message on German war crimes directed at the German people in the midst of World War II: “Hitler is committing war crimes in the name of the German people. I ask every German and every man everywhere under German domination to show the world by his action that in his heart he does not share these insane criminal desires. Let him hide the victims, help them to get over their borders, and do what they can to save them from the Nazi hangman. I ask him also to keep watch and to record the evidence that will one day be used to convict the guilty.” (emphasis added) Is this not precisely what Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange have been doing?

As Richard Falk notes, the attempt to extradite Assange to answer for his access to, and publication of, criminal wrongdoing by state actors, and thereby muzzle the release of further information on state criminal activity, is indisputably an international act of criminality in itself.

https://defend.wikileaks.org/take-action/

Links

https://www.rt.com/news/456290-assange-uk-judicial-system-us/

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/754-assange-indictment/d093e7dc7982f7fe4c24/optimized/full.pdf#page=1

https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/04/1036491