Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is suffering significant psychological torture and abuse in the London prison where he is being held, and his life is now at risk, according to an independent UN rights expert. A senior member of his legal team believes Assange may not live until the end of the extradition process.

Assange mumbled, stuttered, and struggled to say his own name and date of birth when he appeared in court on October 21. The Wikileaks founder is being subjected to long drawn-out psychological torture as he battles to prevent his extradition to the United States where he faces a slew of espionage charges, warns Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.

Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr. Assanges continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life, Melzer said in a statement on Friday.

His physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration, writes former British ambassador Craig Murray, who was present at the October hearing. When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both his difficulty in making it was very evident; it was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought Until yesterday I had always been quietly skeptical of those who claimed that Julians treatment amounted to torture and skeptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness.

One of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable, writes Murray.

Melzer, who is not speaking on behalf of the UN, visited Belmarsh prison in May and conducted an extensive review of Assanges physical and psychological condition. Melzer told the AFP news agency that his increased alarm is based on new medically relevant information received from reliable sources that indicate Assanges health has entered a downward spiral of progressively severe anxiety, stress and helplessness typical for persons exposed to prolonged isolation and constant arbitrariness.

While the precise evolution is difficult to predict with certainty, this pattern of symptoms can quickly develop into a life-threatening situation involving cardiovascular breakdown or nervous collapse, he told AFP.

Assange is kept in complete isolation for 23 hours a day, and permitted 45 minutes exercise. When he has to be moved, guards clear the corridors and lock all cells to guarantee he has no contact with any other prisoner outside the exercise period.

Assange continues to be detained under oppressive conditions of isolation and surveillance, not justified by his detention status, said Melzer, who pointed out that Assange completed his prison sentence for violating his British bail terms and is being held exclusively in relation to the pending extradition request from the United States.

The US charges that Assange, an Australian citizen, violated the U.S. Espionage Act in 2010 when he published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. Those leaks include the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, the Collateral Murder video, and classified U.S. State Department cables. For her role, Manning was court martialed and sentenced to 35 years in prison. After serving seven and a half years of the sentence, Manning received a pardon from President Obama, but he has since been jailed again for his refusal to testify against Assange.

The U.S. has claimed that Wikileaks publications have caused the deaths of Americans serving overseas. But no evidence has ever surfaced to prove this, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2010 that such claims were significantly overwrought.

Nevertheless, the U.S. wants Assange because the information he published was deeply embarrassing to the government. The British courts have already signed off on an extradition order and he will remain behind bars until the hearing, which isnt until early next year, according to The New York Times.

And curiously, even though mainstream media once heralded Assanges publications, there is substantially less coverage of his current plight, former CIA officer Raymond McGovern told The American Conservative.

To McGovern, the timing of the U.S. decision to press charges is particularly suspect; charges were announced right after Assange published that the CIA has cyber-tools that can leave a false digital footprint. McGovern, who had visited Assange during his seven-year asylum in thethe Ecuadoran embassy, has been a vocal supporter since the beginning.

The CIA can hack into a system and make it look like the Russians did it, said McGovern. This challenges the official narrative that Russians hacked the DNC server, exposing Hillary Clintons emails. Imagine that.

The October hearing was Assanges first public appearance since May. Illness has prevented him from attending previous hearings.

The UK ignored earlier pleas that to protect Assanges health and dignity, Melzer said, and his condition has progressed to the point where his life was now at risk.

In fact, when Melzer tried to raise the alarm in the media, The Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Canberra Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times,The Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek all refused to publish his op-ed.

Instead of addressing Assanges health, what we have seen from the UK government is outright contempt for Mr. Assanges rights and integrity, said Melzer. Despite the medical urgency of my appeal, and the seriousness of the alleged violations, the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.

Assange has lost 33 pounds during his imprisonment, according to Australian filmmaker John Pilger. He attended the hearing and has visited Assange in Belmarsh prison.

To see him in court struggling to say his name, and his date of birth, was really very moving, said Pilger. When Julian did try to speak, and to say that basically he was being denied the very tools with which to prepare his case, he was denied the right to call his American lawyer. He was denied the right to have any kind of word processor or laptop. He was denied his own notes and manuscripts.

Assanges access to legal counsel and documents has been severely obstructed undermining his most fundamental right to prepare his defense, charged Melzer.

The judge refused to grant Assanges request to delay the February trial.

The lack of legal process in the hearing was profoundly upsetting, to watch unfold, writes Murray, because it is a naked demonstration of the power of the state.

Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed, writes Murray. If the state can do this, then who is next?

Barbara Boland isThe American Conservatives foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her on Twitter@BBatDC.

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Will Julian Assange Die in Prison? - The American Conservative

During a Trump campaign rally in Lexington, Kentucky on Monday, the state's junior senator, Rand Paul, stopped by to offer a spirited defense of his party's leader and an unsubtle threat to those he considers enemies. "We also now know the name of the whistleblower," Paul said triumphantly, referring to the intelligence community official who reported on Trump's efforts to coerce Ukraine's president to open a politically-motivated investigation of former vice president Joe Biden. After questioning the whistleblower's motivations and suggesting that he be dragged before Congress as a "material witness" in the matter, the senator pointed directly at the assembled TV cameras. "I say tonight to the media: Do your job and print his name!"

Trump, who has asserted a right to "learn everything about" the whistleblower and issued a similar call for their public testimony earlier that day, smirked as he joined in the crowd's applause. "Wow, that was excellent," he said after Paul concluded his performance. "He's a warrior."

Within the right-wing media ecosystem, efforts to out the whistleblower have been underway for some time already. Multiple outlets have provided valuable signal boosts to unconfirmed reports identifying an individual who allegedly filed the complaint, digging up old school photos to accompany their stories on the subject. Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill have reportedly invoked the person's name in closed-door impeachment hearings, and circulated a dossier of information about their biography, professional history, and alleged links to Democratic politicians and members of the Deep State.

Paul, a self-proclaimed libertarian who made a crusade against warrantless surveillance a key feature of his 2016 presidential campaign, used to be an occasional advocate for strengthening whistleblower protection laws and institutions. When government contractors "see something wrong," he said at a conference in 2014, "they should be able to report it without repercussions. Even today, his web site still contains vestiges of a pro-whistleblower worldview that he apparently held before the Trump era made that worldview politically inconvenient. Last week, he even tweeted to his 2.6 million followers a link that included the name in question, calling it "imperative" that lawmakers subpoena the person and have the chance to interrogate them under oath. What was a fringe movement to out the alleged Ukraine whistleblower has gone mainstream.

Shoddy protections for whistleblowers in the United States are neither a new nor a partisan problem. In a 2011 feature for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer profiled the "surprising relentlessness" with which the Obama administration prosecuted leaks, a trend she characterized as at odds with his praise of whistleblowers as "often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government." Two years later, U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden fled the country after publishing thousands of documents describing, among other things, the government's clandestine efforts to spy on other countries and its own citizens. He has since explained that the laws shielding whistleblowers from retaliation were too convoluted for him to trust, and that he felt there were "no proper channels" through which he could report what he knew. For publishing documents that exposed the extent of civilian deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning received a 35-year prison sentence; she served about seven years of it before then-President Obama commuted the balance in 2017.

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How Rand Paul's Calls to Out the Ukraine Whistleblower Make America Less Safe - GQ

By John W. Whitehead*

What happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most sacred rights.Speak up now or wake up one morning to the silence of a new kind of tyranny.The choice is ours.John Pilger, investigative journalist

All of us are in danger.

In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, there is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose reach has gone global.

The Deep State has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.

Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike are being terrorized, traumatized, tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.

Take Julian Assange, for example.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaksa website that published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sourceswas arrested on April 11, 2019, on charges of helping US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and leak more than 700,000 classifiedmilitary documents that portray the US government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among theleaked Manning materialwere theCollateral Murder video(April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantnamo files (April 2011).

TheCollateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two US AH-64 Apache helicoptersengaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The drivers two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by US forces, suffered serious injuries.

This is morally wrong.

It shouldnt matter which nation is responsible for these atrocities: there is no defense for such evil perpetrated in the name of profit margins andwar profiteering.

In true Orwellian fashion, however, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machines seedy underbelly.

Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prisonin solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a daypending extradition to the US, where if convicted, he could be sentenced to175 years in prison.

Whatever is being done to Assange behind those prison wallspsychological torture, forced drugging, prolonged isolation, intimidation, surveillanceits wearing him down.

In court appearances, the 48-year-old Assange appears disoriented, haggard and zombie-like.

Its not just Assange who is being made to suffer, however.

Manning, who was jailed for seven years for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, was arrested in March 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury about Assange, placed in solitary confinement for almost a month,sentenced to remain in jail either until she agrees to testify or until the grand jurys 18-month term expires, and fined$1,000 for every day she remains in custody, a chillingand financially cripplingexample of the governments heavy-handed efforts to weaponize fines and jail terms as a means of forcing dissidents to fall in line.

This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

Make no mistake: the government is waging war on journalists and whistleblowers for disclosing information relating to government misconduct that is within the publics right to know.

Yet while this targeted campaignaided, abetted and advanced by the Deep States international alliancesis unfolding during President Trumps watch, it began with the Obama Administrations decision to revive the antiquated, hundred-year-oldEspionage Act, which was intended to punish government spies, and insteaduse it to prosecute government whistleblowers.

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has not merely continued the Obama Administrations attack on whistleblowers. It hasinjected this war on truth-tellers and truth-seekers with steroidsand let it loose on the First Amendment.

Heres the thing: we desperately need more scrutiny and transparency, not less, in order to shed light on government actions and make the obscure, least transparent reaches of government accessible and accountable.

Of course, transparency is futile without a populace that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law.

For this reason, it is vital thatcitizens have the right to criticize the government without fear.

Thats where the First Amendment comes in. The First Amendment gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

The governments ongoing war on whistleblowers and journalists is not merely a legalistic exercise over whether these individuals are part of a protected class under the Constitution. Its a struggle that speaks to the very real question of how long we the people will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

Partisan politics have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We dont have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights ofallindividuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

What the First Amendment protectsand a healthy constitutional republic requiresare citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

As I make clear in my bookBattlefield America: The War on the American People, the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

Be warned: this quintessential freedom wont be much good to anyone if the government makes good on its promise to make an example of Assange as a warning to other journalists intent on helping whistleblowers disclose government corruption.

As George Orwell recognized, In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

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A New Kind Of Tyranny: The Global State's War On Those Who Speak Truth To Power OpEd - Eurasia Review

Remember 2010? For me that was a pretty important year. It was the year I sold my digital marketing business. While I would continue to actively work in the industry for another three years, for methings were never the same as they were in 2010.

Looking back, I realize thats pretty well true for most of us. We were more innocent and more hopeful. We still believed that theInternet would be the solution, not the problem.

In 2010, two big trends were jointly reshaping our notions of being connected. Early in that year, former Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meekerlaid them out for us in her State of the Internet report.

Back then, just three years after the introduction of the iPhone, internet usage from mobile devices hadnt evenreached double digits as a percentage of overall traffic. Meeker knew this was going to change, and quickly. She saw mobile adoption on track to be the steepest tech adoption curve in history.

She was right. Today, over 60% of internet usage is on a mobile device.

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The other defining trend was social media. Even then, Facebook had about 600 million users, or just under 10% of theworlds population. When you had a platform that big, connecting that many people, you just knew the consequences would be significant. There were some pretty rosy predictions for the impact ofsocial media.

Of course, its the stuff you cant predict that will bite you. As I said, we were a little nave.

One trend that Meeker didnt predict was thenasty issue of data ownership. We were just starting to become aware of the looming issue of internet privacy.

The biggest internet-related story of 2010 was WikiLeaks. In February, JulianAssanges site started releasing 260,000 sensitive diplomatic cables sent to it by Chelsea Manning, a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq. According to the governments of the world, this was anillegal release of classified material, tantamount to an act of espionage.

According to public opinion, this was shit finally rolling uphill. We reveled in the revelations. Wikileaksand Julian Assange was taking it to the man.

That budding sense of optimism continued throughout the year. By December of 2010, the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government protests,uprisings, and armed rebellions, had begun. This was our virtual vindication. The awesome power of social media was a blinding light to shine on the darkest nooks and crannies of despotism andtyranny.

The digital future was clear and bright. We would triumph thanks to technology. The Internet had helped put Obama in the White House. It had toppled corrupt regimes.

A decadelater, were shell-shocked to discover that the internet is the source of a whole new kind of corruption.

The rigidly digitized ideals of Zuckerberg, Page, Brin et al seemed to be a callto arms: transparency; a free and open, friction-free digital market; the sharing economy; a vast social network that would connect humanity in ways never imagined; connected devices in our pockets.In 2010, all things seemed possible. And we were nave enough to believe that those things would all be good and moral and in our best interests.

But soon, we were smelling the stenchthat came from Silicon Valley. Those ideals were subverted into an outright attack on our privacy. Democratic elections were sold to the highest bidder. Ideals evaporated under the pressure of profitmargins and expanding power.

Those impossibly bright, impossibly young billionaire CEOs of 10 years ago are now testifying in front of Congress. The corporate culture of many tech companiesreeks like a frat house on Sunday morning.

Is there a lesson to be learned? I hope so.

I think its this: Technology wont do the heavy lifting for us. It is a tool subjectto our own frailty. It amplifies what it is to be human. It wont eliminate greed or corruption, unless we continually steer it in that direction.

And I use the term wedeliberately. We have to hold tech companies to a higher standard. We have to be more discerning of what we agree to. We have to start demanding better treatment, and not be willing to trade ourrights away with the click of an accept button.

A lot of what could have been slipped through our fingers in the last 10 years. It shouldnt have happened -- not on our watch.

Visit link:
Looking Back At A Decade That's 99.44% Done 11/05/2019 - MediaPost Communications

04/11/2019 - Italys Marco Ferrari has gathered seven whistleblowers and combined their stories into one narrative

The term "whistleblower" has recently become a household word around the globe, thanks to important political figures such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, each of whom have had at least two documentaries made about them. But our societies have seen honest people denouncing bribery attempts in many fields for much longer than that. And in Italy, where corruption is practically a time-honoured tradition, in the last three years, 723 people have reported it, according to Never Whistle Alone, the second feature-length documentary by Italian writer-director Marco Ferrari, which had its world premiere in DOK Leipzig's Next Masters competition.

Ferrari gathered seven whistleblowers public-service employees, auditors, a garbage-disposal accountant, a research professor and even an archaeologist and combined their stories into one narrative. Already, this decision informs us that corruption is systemic it is a feature of, rather than a bug in, Italy's complex administration.

The film is split into five chapters, and alternates interviews with the seven protagonists with dramatisations of what they are saying to the camera. Sat behind office desks, they describe their experiences in the second person: "You are early and you wait Finally, the director arrives and you shake hands" Next up, we see three people meeting in a park, in blurry hidden-camera style.

This is followed by a segment in which another protagonist picks up the story at the place where the previous one left off, and despite the fact that they work in different fields, their words, in most cases, seem to follow on naturally. This impression is strengthened by some unified dramatisation, in which the whistleblower is always played by the same person. However, some of the high-ranking corrupt officials are played by different actors, taking into account the nature of the job and their respective ages.

While the story itself and the mechanism of corruption will be far from surprising to anyone mildly interested in the topic, Never Whistle Alone, for the most part, tidily breaks all of this down along a timeline that the average viewer will certainly not be fully aware of. There is, though, a lack of clarity between the chapters describing what happens after the whistleblower has denounced the corrupt officials to the police and is instructed to meet them wearing a wire, and the part when he or she returns to work to find that they have been transferred to another office.

This may be the result of the decision to combine all of the stories into one, which certainly amplifies the urgency of their words, but discrepancies between their cases still exist. Also, the decision to sync the lips of the actors in the dramatised parts exactly to the words of the whistleblowers creates a dissonance when they speak in more general terms and we are watching actors in very specific situations.

Regardless, this is a high-octane, fast-moving, immensely engaging investigative documentary that details an important topic, and does so with the decisive goal of creating palpable tension. This approach is further strengthened by the intensely atmospheric and ever-present sound design and music by Francesco Leali and Alessandro Branca, of Milan-based trio OPUS 3000.

Never Whistle Alone is a co-production by Italy's Candy Glass and Basement, and the Netherlands VPRO. Deckert Distribution has the international rights.

Link:
Review: Never Whistle Alone - Cineuropa