written by Lissa Johnson New Matilda edited by O Society Mar 27, 2019

Ever wonder why left wing trolls hate Julian Assange so much? And why maybe youre more questioning? Ever tried to get to the bottom of a government-run propaganda campaign and found your synapses misfiring? The final in a five-part series by clinical psychologist Dr Lissa Johnson explains the science behind smear, and how and why it works.

Earlier this month, on March 10th, it came to widespread attention via the New York Times (NYT) that a recent explosive instalment in the Venezuela regime change narrative was false. Major news outlets had been reporting for over two weeks that forces loyal to Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, had set an aid convoy ablaze, on February 23rd.

US Senator Marco Rubio immediately spread the exciting regime-change news via Twitter, announcing that Maduro must pay a high price, amid emerging scenes of blazing food and medicine. Other US officials echoed Rubios sentiments on Twitter, including National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the head of USAid Mark Green, calling Maduro a sick tyrant who uses masked thugs to commit violent attacks against life saving aid.

Clearly a little carried away, Vice President Mike Pence chimed in, gushing that Maduro the tyrantdanced as his henchmen burned food and medicine.

US news stars and think tank luminaries got on board wrote Glenn Greenwald, branding the Venezuelan president evil and his military animals and criminals. Senator Diane Feinstein called for Maduro to step down.

CNN even told its audiences that CNN reporters had witnessed the attack first hand.

The false story, reported Greenwald, changed everything politicians who had beenreluctant to support regime change began issuing statements now supportive of it.

In reality, however, what actually happened on February 23rdisanti-Maduro protesters, on the same anti-Maduro side as the USA, threw Molotov cocktails at the aid convoy, setting it on fire.

They didnt mean to though, according to the NYT. The flaming rag just came loose and flew in the wrong direction. Because mixing up Molotov cocktails, setting them alight, standing beside an aid convoy and throwing them could happen to anyone.

Except Maduros guys. If they had done it, they would still be animals.

Significantly for those interested in accurate news, a detail omitted in the NYT report is that from the very day the official lie began making the rounds, independent journalists had broken the real story.

Over two weeks before the NYT report, Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone Project posted an article, on February 24th, explaining that the evidence pointed in the exact opposite direction to the official narrative. The same day, journalist Dan Cohen posted a video showing an opposition protester, not Maduros forces, throwing a Molotov cocktail in the direction of the aid truck.

CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS and the rest of the establishment media failed to run Cohen and Blumenthals reports. Another well-known news service did, however, giving its audiences the real scoop, from the start.

And which news service was that? It was RT.

Glenn Greenwald wrote, Please tell me: who was acting here as lying propagandists and agents of State TV, and who was acting like a journalist trying to understand and report the truth?

He added, Every major war of the last several decades has begun the same way: the US government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large US media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing to air questioning or dissent.

Even after the NYT story ran, the corporate media barely blinked. Yet it was the first time in 20 yearsthat the NYT had contradicted an official regime change lie according to Mark Weisbrot of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research. Which was newsworthy in itself. (In fairness to those behind the lie, which was ham-fisted, impulsive and slightly overdone, the liars were ad-libbing. It was a fortuitous Twitter opportunity, not a plan years in the making like WMDs.)

Meanwhile, as all of this unfolded, the worlds leading source of accurate information about war, Wikileaks, came under heightened pursuit by the US government.

First, Chelsea Manning, responsible for some of the most explosive truths about recent Western wars, was sent to jail. Again. This time Manning had been imprisoned for refusing to take part in a Grand Jury investigation into Wikileaks, on the grounds that doing so violated her First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights. She said, I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.

In response, 20 German members of the Bundestag stood publicly in support of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks.

On her refusal to testify, Manning noted that she had already given all relevant evidence at her court martial in 2013, adding that she was concerned about being forced to backtrack on the truth. Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Elsberg said, They want her to contradict her earlier sworn testimony that she behaved in relation to WikiLeaks exactly as she would have to The New York Times or The Washington Post.

The Grand Jury seeking to force Chelsea Manning to testify is investigating Julian Assange and Wikileaks,most likely for exposing lies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, based in part on Chelsea Mannings leaks.

As outlined in parts 2 and 3 of this series, if the Trump Department of Justice (DoJ) succeeds in prosecuting Julian Assange in this way, any journalists who seek to expose the official lies and secrets of US governments had better watch out. Such a prosecution would be the first time that a publisher has been criminalised for publishing classified information. The precedent that it would set risks criminalising journalism. So say leading legal minds left and right, including current and former counsel for the NYT.

US extradition would also flout international and human rights law, including the rules of asylum. To emphasise this, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recently issued a statement in which it forcefully declared to Ecuador Ecuador has the international obligation not to surrender Assange to the United States.

No doubt aware of the legal obligations and dangers, however, when he was Attorney General in 2017 Jeff Sessions declared Assanges arrest a priority. On the implications for journalism in general Sessions declined to rule out prosecuting other media outlets in Wikileaks wake.

As CIA director, Mike Pompeo similarly confirmed that the CIA was working to take down Wikileaks. Pompeo added that along with Wikileaks his administration would pursue with great vigour other small media organisations.

In the latest instalment of this pursuit, Trumps nominee for Ambassador to Ecuador, Michael J. Fitzpatrick said during his confirmation hearings that Julian Assanges hostile activity was a problem, and letting it drag on much longer would continue to harm our interests, and I believe harm Ecuadors interests as well.

Throughout, one thing is clear. The corporate media is covering none of these issues with the focus and priority they deserve: not Mannings imprisonment, not the ramping up of the Trump administrations pursuit of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, not the legal implications, not the increasing support for Wikileaks from democratic and human rights organisations, nor the significance of the latest official lie in a long string of official lies supporting wars.

Perhaps the official silence stems from the fact that all of these issues converge around a simple central point, which the corporate media cannot afford to address, by virtue of their complicity. Wars need lies.

Which is a key reason the US government needs to get its hands on Julian Assange.

Mobilising populations for war

Social psychologist Kevin Durrheim and his colleagues note that when elites wish to start a war, before they can commit any violence populations need to be mobilized because they generally dont want war. The psychologists quote George Creel, propagandist for the US Committee for Public Information, who said that the mind of the people must be mobilised [for war]as well as its man-power.

Support for regime change, for instance, must be mustered with tales of criminals and animals setting fire to an aid convoy. When the real story is that corporate interests want to steal a sovereign countrys oil, an alternate reality must be laid down.

Just as an alternate reality must be created when the national security state wants to shut down national security reporting and investigative journalism via Wikileaks.

In other words, propaganda is required.

Propaganda, according to Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at The University of Sheffield involves the organised, systematic and intentional manipulation of information in ways that either distorts peoples perception of reality or pushes them to behave in ways they would not otherwise do. Such as supporting wars for oil.

In a 2018 book chapter, Robinson writes propaganda emanates not only from government and corporate PR firms, but also think tanks, NGOs, and the so-called deep state including the intelligence services. (Who normally, incidentally, do a much better job than Pence et al did on the burning aid fiasco.)

Consistent with this, in 2008, as Wikileaks came onto the media scene, the Cyber Counterintelligence branch of the US Defence Department (DoD) outlined a plan to attack the trust at Wikileaks centre of gravity.

How?

According to the CIA website, counterintelligence operations, such the DoD mission against Wikileaks, seek to leverage insights into adversary vulnerabilities. As noted in previous installments of this series, in the case of the war on Wikileaks, those vulnerabilities have included the vulnerabilities in the information processing systems of all human beings.

It is our own vulnerabilities, as media consumers, that have been leveraged and exploited in the counterintelligence campaign against Wikileaks, turning reality upside down such that censorship is a bastion of democracy and free speech a menace to be overcome.

In part 4 of this series I explored the motivational vulnerabilities that have been exploited in that endeavour, affecting which propaganda realities are proffered and when. In this, the final instalment, I shall explore the more technical, efficiency-oriented vulnerabilities, which are exploited in all major propaganda offensives, particularly pro-war campaigns, affecting how propaganda is deployed.

As discussed in part 4, the key motivational vulnerabilities that have been leveraged in the propaganda offensive against Julian Assange and Wikileaks have concerned system justification, or the drive to view ones social systems as good, right, fair and just; derogation of moral advocates or the impulse to hit social critics with a shit-filled sock, to use Joseph McCarthys words; the motive for shared reality or to align reality-perception with those around us; susceptibility to group-based psychological processes, particularly when afraid; and the tendency to switch off and trust authorities when confused.

Psychological characteristics likely to foster such vulnerabilities include high needs for order, structure, certainty and control, low tolerance for confusion, a proneness to self-deception, concern with social image, a tendency towards group-based, us-versus-them biases, and elitist aspirations.

Conversely, characteristics fostering motivational resistance to elite narratives, such as those regarding Wikileaks and Julian Assange, are likely to involve lower needs for order, structure, certainty and control, a desire to get to the bottom of confusing stories, lower levels of self-deception, less investment in social image, a greater inclination to take others on their merits rather than viewing them in group-based terms, and less elitist aspirations.

Like all psychological characterisations, needless to say, these are approximations from which individuals will vary. No-one is a walking average of psychological research. Nevertheless, they describe broad psychological ball-parks in which motivational vulnerability or resistance to elite propaganda on Julian Assange and Wikileaks (and Russiagate) might be expected to reside.

Reality on the fly

If these are the motivational vulnerabilities fostering susceptibility to propaganda narratives on Julian Assange, what are the technical vulnerabilities? Once a narrative has been laid in motivationally receptive ground, how is it consolidated and entrenched? What tactics encourage it to take root, like watering a propaganda seed after planting?

Once propaganda narratives have been seeded, reality-processing mechanisms fostering speed and efficiency are leveraged, causing the propaganda narratives to feel real, over time, to the brain. Narratives are repeated incessantly, for example, fostering fluent processing, which the brain takes as a quick and dirty indicator of reality, or truth. Accordingly, endless repetition is a key tactic of propaganda.

In short, whereas motivational, meaning-oriented vulnerabilities determine which propaganda narratives are planted and when, technical, efficiency-oriented vulnerabilities determine how propaganda narratives are administered, deployed and maintained.

But why does the reality-processing system prioritise efficiency, often at accuracys expense, creating susceptibility to propaganda?

Because in order to cope with the vast quantity of information coming at us on a daily basis, our brains take shortcuts, without which our information processing systems would overload. These unconscious shortcuts often sacrifice careful, thorough, accurate processing for speed, creating ideal opportunities to hoodwink the brain.

The vulnerabilities exploited at the technical level are fairly generic, reflecting built-in features of reality-processing for almost everyone, and therefore are less apt than meaning-oriented processes to differ from one person to the next.

As a result, the tactics designed to exploit technical vulnerabilities are virtually identical across propaganda campaigns, whether those campaigns support war on journalism by targeting Julian Assange, or war on a people by targeting their leader. Once you recognise the simple strategies and why they work, you are equipped to spot a serious propaganda offensive a mile away.

So if technical vulnerabilities in reality-perception are ubiquitous and generic, is everyone equally susceptible, at a technical level, to propaganda?

No. Fortunately. Despite our common vulnerabilities there are still some states of mind and circumstances that foster propaganda-resistance, even technically speaking. If you have read this far in this series (for purposes other than trolling) you likely possess such a state of mind, as shall become clear.

Meanwhile, what technical vulnerabilities have been exploited in the smear campaign against Julian Assange and Wikileaks? And how?

Pairing and tagging: a psychological bullseye

So that we can manage our enormous information load, the brain is prone to simplistically and unconsciously tagging familiar people and things good or bad. It does this using positive and negative emotions, known as affective tags. The process serves to guide our responses to objects and entities around us within milliseconds, before we have had time to even think, facilitating fluid and efficient responding.

As guides through reality, emotions have the advantage that they are extremely fast and powerful. They can exert their influence within 15 milliseconds, whereas conscious decision-making doesnt kick in until around 1,000 milliseconds, 985 milliseconds later.

Emotions also carry a wealth of information in powerful shorthand form, alerting us immediately that something may be dangerous, unfair, suspicious, trustworthy, untrustworthy, friendly or hostile and so-on. This enables us to approach or avoid, attack or protect, abandon or assist as appropriate, before engaging in any conscious appraisal. It is an invaluable ability under conditions of high demand.

And while this arrangement may seem sub-optimal, with emotions leading the information-processing stream, and conscious deliberation in the wake behind the boat, much of the time it works well. Emotion-driven processing, for instance, enables us to navigate a fluid path through the enormously complex and information-rich experience that is social interaction.

Moreover, damage to brain areas governing emotion causes deficits in problem solving, not advantages, even for problems based on probability, and even when memory, attention, learning and intelligence remain intact.

However, in propaganda, as in advertising and other forms of opinion-shaping, the brains penchant for pairing and tagging is readily exploited, whether to sell products, agendas or wars.

Whereas in advertising products are positively tagged, in pro-war propaganda the tagging mechanism is deployed to pin an emotional bullseye to a targets head. The target against whom propagandists wish to mobilise for attack need simply be paired repeatedly with an emotion that supports a violent response. The most powerfully mobilising emotions in this regard are fear, rage and hate. Anger, revulsion and callousness will also do.

As has been observed by others in the wake of the horrific massacre at a Christchurch Mosque on March 15th, this very tactic has been deployed against Muslim people for years, in order to support wholesale Western slaughter throughout the Middle East.

Specifically, the emotions aroused by 9/11 and channelled into the War on Terror have simultaneously been used to tag Muslim people in general as dangerous and bad. This has been achieved by repeatedly and spuriously pairing Islam with violent extremism, pinning an emotional and literal bullseye on the heads of millions of innocent Middle Eastern human beings.

In psychological research, just a single news article mentioning 9/11, or warning of unspecified future Islamic fundamentalist attack drives sufficient collective angst to feed forgiveness of US atrocities in Iraq. In the real world, regularly pairing Islam with terrorism has helped to kill between 500,000 and 1.3 to 2 million people since 9/11.

The perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre departed from the social contract that is war by taking the violent response into his own hands, rather than leaving it to the state. According to the norms of war, massacres such as Christchurch are to be conducted with state-owned weapons, at the states discretion, in distant lands, rather than at home where the carnage will be experienced up close, for what it really is.

When the contract goes as planned, the simple strategy of pairing Islam with extremism incites enough members of Western populations to feel sufficient fear and rage, or mere callous disregard, that they look the other way while 10,000 to 40,000 Christchurch massacres are enacted throughout the Middle East, in their names.

The trouble with Wikileaks, from the point of view of war, is that it interferes with all of that, psychologically speaking. In 2010 when Wikileaks released the Collateral Murder video and the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, Western populations could not continue to look away.

It is difficult for propagandists to exploit the brains tendency towards simplistic affective tagging (we good, they bad), when Wikileaks shows Western publics the human reality of war: the general squalor of war as Assange described the Afghan War Diary. The continuous small events, thecontinuous deaths of children. The thousands of potential war crimes that constitute a war.

Similarly, video footage of US troops nonchalantly gunning down parents in front of their children, along with Reuters journalists and their rescuers, is enough to humanise targets and blast emotional holes in the most concerted propaganda effort.

And so it was, after interfering with pro-war propaganda in this way, that the secret Grand Jury investigation into Julian Assange commenced in 2010. It is the same Grand Jury that continues to this day. In tandem with that Grand Jury, an FBI-led whole-of-government operation was launched into Wikileaks in 2010, and Assange was placed on an NSA manhunting target list.

During the course of the investigation, in 2011 Fred Burton, then Vice President for Counterterrorism at the private security firm Stratfor, wrote, Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. Hell be eating cat food forever.

Why? Because, according to Burton, Assange is a peacenik.

Should the Grand Jury get its way, and should Julian Assange face secret charges for his peacenik activity exposing war crimes propagandists around the world will sleep easier at night.

Because, as discussed in part 2, to sustain the pro-war propaganda narratives that feed the propaganda tags, contradictory material must be kept at bay. Across all levels of propaganda whether motivational or technical omission is a critical component.

Which means that Wikileaks and other independent media must be shut down if war propagandists are to do their jobs unencumbered. An isolated bit of regime-change truth in the NYT is one thing. But Wikileaks is quite another.

Unless war propagandists can maintain a monopoly on the truth, wars will not continue to rage and human beings will not be slaughtered with impunity.

Which is what a functioning plutocracy is all about.

All the better to silence you with

In order to mobilise complicity with such a project, and defend propaganda from the facts, Julian Assange has been psychologically targeted for destruction just like any other adversary. Just as Islam has been paired with terrorism, so has Wikileaks, inciting some in Western populations to look the other way while Julian Assange has been arbitrarily detained and persecuted.

In the context of Russiagate, alleged hacking is paired with reminders of Pearl Harbour and 9/11, seeking to directly mobilise emotions supportive of a proportionate retaliatory response.

To mobilise populations for retaliation, including against information rebellions on the internet battlefield, terror and threat-based tags are invaluable. In psychological studies, fear and distress following terrorist attacks, for instance, are associated with a desire for revenge. Fear and threat also boost support for authoritarian policies, including punishment of protest and dissent. All the better to silence you with.

In the latest efforts to whip up revenge-boosting, dissent-busting fear and threat, perhaps the most blatant pairing and tagging efforts have surrounded Russia. The two-part tropes Russian aggression, Russian interference, Russian hacking Russian collusion and Russian meddling have circulated non-stop for nearly two full years.

The threats that Russia is depicted as posing in the underlying hacked-our-democracy narrative concern threats to American culture, society and way of life. Psychologists call such threats symbolic threats.

Importantly for pro-war agendas, in psychological studies, groups viewed as a symbolic threat are also viewed as less human. Viewing others as less human, in turn, fosters indifference to suffering and support for violence, discrimination and abuse, including war.

As part of this process, moral disengagement comes into play, whereby dehumanized group members are excluded from the moral community; one feels no obligation to apply moral standards that are reserved for the fully human to them.

All the better to persecute you with. While ignoring two UN rulings based on human rights law and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Given the violent, dehumanising and morally corrosive role of symbolic threat, its feverish and relentless coupling with Russia, from the moment of Trumps election, gave Russiagate away as a propaganda onslaught from the get-go. As did the two-dimensional black-and-white cartoon-cutout Russian villain, all the better to tag a propaganda target with.

Read more:
The Psychology Of Getting Julian Assange Part 5: War ...

It was meant to be a routine visit by a journalist to another journalist. Instead, I found myself locked in a cold, surveilled room for over an hour by Ecuadorian officials, as a furious argument raged between the countrys ambassador and Julian Assange on Monday.

The room was inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Julian Assange currently lives under the ostensible protection of political asylum. Yet the WikiLeaks publisher was barred from entering the room, where he was supposed to join me for a pre-approved meeting, because he refused to submit to a full-body search and continuous surveillance.

In the fireworks that followed, Assange accused the ambassador of being an agent of the United States government.

The crackdown on visitors was felt before I even entered the embassy. Its the third time Ive visited in the past year, and each time the atmosphere seems progressively worse.

Just like my previous visit, since new rules for visitors were enacted, I couldnt take my phone into the meeting without giving the Ecuadorian officials a swathe of data. If you want to take it in with you, they request its brand, model, serial number, IMEI number, and telephone number. I was also advised that Ecuador could not be trusted to hold my phone while I met with Assange, so I left it behind and walked to the embassy phoneless, several minutes early to make sure I was on time.

When I arrived, embassy staff checked my passport and letter of approval and pointed at the time on the letter. I was six minutes early. Instead of allowing me to wait inside, they told me to come back at the appropriate time despite knowing that I did not have a phone or watch on me.

When I visited for the first time, which I believe was a year ago to the day, the atmosphere was far more welcoming. The staff and ambassador that were there during my first visit have since been replaced.

After being searched, the staff directed me into the conference room, where two large visible cameras were pointed at the table. Those were there last time too. I knew the drill or so I thought. They reminded me multiple times that my visit was only approved until 5 p.m. and that I would need to leave on the dot.

Just doing my job, the staff member told me.

A few moments later Assange walked by the door, but could not enter. Embassy staff demanded that he submit to a full-body scan with a metal detector before allowing him in the room. They have not done this with any other visitor in the nearly seven years that he has lived there, including during my previous visits.

I dont want to do the body scan. It is undignified and not appropriate, I heard Assange say. I am just trying to have a private meeting with a journalist.

The door was slammed shut by someone from the embassy. I decided to sit and wait.

Not only would they not let Assange in to see me without a body-scan, they also forced his lawyer to be scanned before he could come in to update me on the situation.

After roughly 20 minutes, the lawyer came in and informed me that they were demanding to search Assange. Moreover, we would not be permitted to talk anywhere outside the highly-surveilled room where the Ecuadorians had confined me. Agreeing to these draconian terms would set a bad precedent so he was unsure if the meeting would go ahead. After appraising me of the situation, he left the room.

A bit later, I decided to leave the room myself for an update from embassy staff. I quickly discovered that the door was locked from the outside. So I went to the second door that was locked too. That was when I realized that Ecuadorian officials had deliberately imprisoned me in a room.

As this ominous realization dawned on me, I heard a dramatic confrontation unfolding outside.

What are you frightened of in relation to me meeting with a journalist? What is the embassy afraid of? Assange asks. I cant hear the response.

Assange is arguing that as a political refugee the embassy has a duty to protect him not to treat him as a prisoner.

Is this a prison? Assange asks.

Its not, they reply. You know its not.

The visit to the publisher had, in fact, become eerily similar to visits I have made to inmates at federal penitentiaries in the US. It seemed our government was getting what they wanted from Ecuador, as a former senior State Department official told Buzzfeed in January, as far as were concerned, hes in jail.

Assange, clearly agitated, demands to know why are you surveilling me speaking to a US journalist? Do you think its unreasonable for me to expect privacy when I meet with a journalist? Why are you silent?

The embassy staff member responded that he cant say anything.

Why cant you say anything? Dont you have an excuse? What is the basis? Why are you surveilling an American journalist? What reason should we tell her? Assange asks.

The conversation becomes hard to hear, as I am still locked in the room.

Assanges lawyer is also being searched again outside the room, though I can only hear bits and pieces of that conversation. He comes back in with a glass of water and tells me to hang tight. I feel like a prisoner receiving a visit. Finally, someone from the embassy comes in and tells me that I need to go to the lobby so that the ambassador could meet with Assange in the room. The room with the cameras and the bugs.

I see Assange in passing in the lobby and say hi, but its cut short as he is directed to the conference room.

Still phoneless, I glance at a clock and notice that its 4:19pm. I was locked in the room for over an hour.

Sitting in the lobby I hear much of the conversation, so I begin to take notes.

Is this a prison? This is how you treat a prisoner, not a political refugee! Assange demands.

Ambassador Jaime Alberto Marchnretorts, saying its for our protection, and to protect you!

At this point, clearly frustrated, Assange asserts: I am trying to have a private conversation with a journalist. I am also a journalist and youre stopping me from doing my work. How can I safely relay my mistreatment and the illegality going on here to this journalist while under surveillance?

One of the issues, it seemed, is that Assange wanted to bring a small radio into the conference room to muffle our voices, so the microphones surveilling the room wouldnt pick up what we were saying as easily. There also appears to be concern that he will share stories with other journalists now that they have him muzzled and gagged.

You are preventing this journalist from meeting with me in any other room, Assange says, but only part of the conversation is audible at this point as someone cleaning decided they needed to jingle keys and make a ton of noise for several minutes.

You have been illegally surveilling me, Assange sternly insists.

I want you to shut up, the ambassador says.

I know you want me to shut up the Ecuadorian president has already gagged me, Assange fired back. I am banned from producing journalism.

Assange isnt wrong. On March 28, 2018, Ecuador caved to pressure from the United States government to isolate Assange by revoking his right to have visitors, make phone calls or use the internet. In order to have his visits and internet restored, he was presented with a nine-page document that outlined limitations and restrictions on what he would be able to do and say online.

Ecuadorian President Lenn Moreno publicly said that Assange is gagged from writing political opinion including about US and Spanish policies. This obviously destroyed his ability to work as a journalist and publisher. He told AP: if Mr. Assange promises to stop emitting opinions on the politics of friendly nations like Spain or the United States then we have no problem with him going online. He and the foreign minister have publicly repeated the statement many times, even going as far as to say that Assange cannot talk about his treatment in the embassy.

In an interview with El Pais in July, President Moreno also said that his ideal solution is that Assange may enjoy being extradited, if the UK promises that the US will not kill him.

The argument continued to escalate. Assange brought up the fact that Ecuador allowed people with diplomatic immunity to be questioned by the US government in January. It is, of course, highly unusual for a sovereign nation to permit foreign officials to question its diplomatic personnel over diplomatic work, the confidentiality of which is protected by international law.

You are acting as an agent of the United States government and preventing me from speaking with a US journalist about these violations, Assange demanded. What kind of sovereign state allows its ambassadors to be interrogated by another nation? No self respecting state does that!

You have been working with the US government against me, its disgraceful! You are an agent of the US government, and there will be consequences for your illegal acts, Assange continues.

He points out that the ambassador has put his own privacy at risk with his efforts to assist their spying on him. (For many years, there had been a white noise machine in the conference room, to protect the ambassador and other officials during sensitive conversations it has now been removed).

The embassys own equipment that was used to protect you was removed to help them [the U.S. government] spy on me.

Ironically, if they still had that equipment in place I would not have overheard everything to be able to write this very article.

As the conversation intensified, the staff member who had answered the door and searched me noticed that I was taking notes and turned on a loud television. He kept turning the volume up until the conversation in the conference room was completely drowned out. He also turned on a loud fan, despite the fact that the embassy was very cold.

At around 4:45pm, Marchn and several other men stormed out of the conference room. I attempted to ask the ambassador if the Embassys behavior was specific to me, or if they planned to give all visitors the same sinister treatment. He ignored me and rushed into another room.

Finally, Assange comes out and I am able to give him a hug and speak to him briefly in the lobby. Unfortunately, there was only about eight minutes left of our two-hour scheduled visit time and the limit was still being enforced.

At 4:58, a member of the staff came over and informed us that if we want to talk, it must be done in the conference room and that we only have two minutes left. We stared at him blankly then began to say our goodbyes.

My departure was so rushed that I ended up leaving my passport in the embassy, but thankfully the staff ran out and gave it to me.

You can read more about the Stasi-style surveillance at the embassy in my article about our visit in January. More up-to-date background information about what is currently going on with WikiLeaks and Assange can be found here and here.

UPDATE: WikiLeaks has confirmed this story.

Read the original here:
EXCLUSIVE: Ecuador Imprisons US Journalist In Room As ...

Nomination for the 2019 Galizia prize for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information

The Courage Foundation nominates Julian Assange for the 2019 Galizia Prize for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information.

Julian Assange merits this award on the following grounds:

Julian Assange is the only publisher and journalist in the EU formally found to be arbitrarily detained by the UN Human Rights System, which has repeatedly called for his release, most recently on 21 December 2018. He is in dire circumstances, faces imminent termination of his asylum, extradition and life in a US prison for publishing the truth about US wars, and has been gagged and isolated since March 28, 2018. He has been kept in the UK from his young family in France for eight years (where he lived before being arbitrarily detained in the UK), has not seen the sun for almost seven years, and has been found by the United Nations to be subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

If given to Julian Assange, this award will immediately act as a force to push against his gagging and isolation and help him to resist US determination to extradite him from the UK for publishing the truth.

As Daphne Caruana Galizia herself wrote:

If America could burn Julian Assange at the stake, it would do so. That is the real sadness of what this situation has revealed: that when it comes down to shutting up those who inconvenience us, were all brothers and sisters under the skin. It is just a matter of degree. China jails Liu Xiaobo and the United States tries to do the same to Julian Assange.

The political persecution of Julian Assange resulted in his formal recognition as a refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention in 2012, but he has been prevented from enjoying his asylum status because the UK has unlawfully kept him in a situation of arbitrary detention, according two formal findings by the United Nations.

Mounting US pressure and a new government in Ecuador mean that he is at imminent risk of losing his internationally protected status. The Trump administration has sharply intensified its efforts to silence WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have confirmed that secret charges have been brought against Julian Assange over his publications on the US government. This week, Chelsea Manning announced she would refuse to cooperate with US authorities which have called her to testify before the WikiLeaks Grand Jury, and she is likely once again be imprisoned as a result. This development introduces a dangerous situation: it introduces the extraordinary precedent of a source being compelled to testify against a journalist for publishing true information about the government.

News broke in January that Ecuador colluded this year with the US government to have the US officials interrogate nearly a dozen Ecuadorian diplomats in London about Julian Assange. Meanwhile, all the diplomats at the Embassy have been replaced and his asylum has transformed into a highly surveilled form of imprisonment.

The New York Times has reported that Ecuadors new President proposed to the US immediately on taking office an exchange in which Ecuador would hand over Julian Assange to secure US debt relief. Ecuador secured $4.2 billion in US backed IMF debt relief on 21 February. Medical practitioners who have seen Julian Assange during this time have denounced his deteriorating health situation and called for him to be able to access appropriate health facilities.

The increased intensity of the persecution against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has prompted numerous members of the human rights community to denounce the actions being taken against him. Dinah PoKempner, Legal Counsel of Human Rights Watch, tweeted in April that

Whether it agrees or not with what Julian Assange says, Ecuadors denying him access to the Internet as well as to visitors is incompatible with its grant of asylum. His refuge in the embassy looks more and more like solitary confinement.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire, who Ecuador prevented from visiting Assange, stated that

I know of no other country where an asylee is held with no sunlight, no exercise, no visitors, no computer, no phone calls, yet all this is happening in the heart of London in the Ecuadorian Embassy, to an innocent man, Julian Assange, now in his 8th year of illegal and arbitrary detention by the United Kingdom Government.

There is consensus in the international human rights community that the US extradition of Julian Assange should be opposed. The future of the free press hangs in the balance while the UKs role in trapping Mr. Assange, without charge, over the past nine years, while ignoring UN findings and repeated calls for his release, augurs badly for Mr. Assanges ability to win a future extradition battle in the UK.

In the context of Ecuadors shifting geopolitical alliances and improper cooperation with the US governments prosecution of its asylee, an independent recognition of his persecuted status through this award will make a material difference to Julian Assanges legal and political ability to resist his extradition to the US.

Julian Assanges extradition to the United States would carry serious consequences for press freedom in Europe generally, given the extraterritorial dimension of the US prosecution. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that Julian Assange can be prosecuted because he is not protected by the US Constitution, given that he is a foreigner whose work occurred outside US territory. The publications over which the US seeks to prosecute Mr. Assange (allegedly provided by Chelsea Manning) were published from Europe, in collaboration with European media organisations, while Julian Assange was in Europe.

The US seeks to apply its laws to European journalists and publishers and at the same time strip them of all US constitutional protections, effectively turning Europe into a legal Guantanamo bay, where US criminal law is asserted, but US rights are withheld. If the US succeeds in prosecuting Julian Assange, a non-US publisher and journalist, for revealing information the US says is secret, this would open the flood gates to an extremely dangerous precedent: his co-publishers at Der Spiegel, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Espresso, the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and Channel 4, among others, all risk extradition to the US, and it will have a chilling effect on the press and national security reporting.

When news broke of Assanges indictment in November 2018, the Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, observed that it is

[d]eeply troubling if the Trump administration, which has shown little regard for media freedom, would charge Assange for receiving from a government official and publishing classified informationexactly what journalists do all the time.

The New York Times has stated:

An indictment centering on the publication of information of public interest would create a precedent with profound implications for press freedoms.

James Goodale, who was the lawyer representing the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, put it succinctly:

the prosecution of Assange goes a step further. Hes not a source, he is a publisher who received information from sources. The danger to journalists cant be overstated.

David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, has stated:

Prosecuting Assange would be dangerously problematic from the perspective of press freedom and should be strongly opposed.

Julian Assange applied his skills as an investigative journalist and cryptographer to protect journalistic sources, by inventing secure online dropboxes to anonymise sources. Even if one views his contribution to whistleblower protection from this prism alone, Julian Assange has done more to protect whistleblowers than any other individual person. But this effort to protect whistleblowers also permeates Mr. Assanges work with WikiLeaks.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden stated on WikiLeaks:

They are absolutely fearless in putting principles above politics their efforts to build a transnational culture of transparency and source protection are extraordinary they run towards the risks everyone else runs away from and in a time when government control of information can be ruthless, I think that represents a vital example of how to preserve old freedoms in a new age.

Julian Assange himself advocated for two decades for the institutional recognition of the persecution faced by journalists and their sources, and has argued that this recognition makes a material difference to the fate of the persecuted. By contrast, silencing and imprisonment deters others who are weighing up whether to take the courageous step to blow the whistle. Julian Assange has played a pivotal role in protecting whistleblowers and promoting free access to information by being the founding member of the Courage Foundation (he resigned in 2015 due to his circumstances). He also played a crucial role in the establishment of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Icelandic Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, personally drafting model legislation to protect whistleblowers in journalists. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have also advised on policies to protect sources and whistleblowers, including through submissions to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech (see below).

Julian Assange directed the 2013 rescue of whistleblower Edward Snowden from US extradition from Hong Kong, managed his successful asylum process and deployed and funded WikiLeaks Investigations Editor Sarah Harrison to personally guide Snowden through the entire process. Harrisons courage was recognised through the award of the SPDs International Willy Brandt prize For Special Political Courage in 2015.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have won numerous major journalism prizes, including Australias highest journalistic honour (equivalent to the Pulitzer), the Walkley prize for The Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism, The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (UK), the Index on Censorship and The Economists New Media Award, the Amnesty International New Media Award, and has been nominated for the UN Mandela Prize (2015) and the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize (nominated by Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire). Wikileaks journalists, including Julian Assange, are long standing members of their respective national journalist unions and WikiLeaks has been repeatedly found by courts to be a media organization.

The WikiLeaks model, which preserves the integrity of the original archive, has ushered in a golden era of in-depth journalistic investigations. WikiLeaks receives censored and restricted documents anonymously after Julian Assange invented the first anonymous secure online submission system for documents from journalistic sources. For years it was the only such system of its kind, but secure anonymous dropboxes are now seen as essential for many major news and human rights organisations.

WikiLeaks publications have been cited in tens of thousands of articles and academic papers and have been used in numerous court cases promoting human rights and human rights defenders. For example, documents published by WikiLeaks were successfully used this month in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the UKs illegal depopulation of the Chagos Islands, which where cleared to make way for a giant US military base at the largest Island, Diego Garcia. The Islanders have been fighting for decades for recognition.

Julian Assange pioneered large international collaborations to secure maximum spread and contextual analysis of large whistleblower leaks. For Cablegate, WikiLeaks entered into partnerships with 110 different media organisations and continues to establish partnerships in its publications. This model has since been replicated in other international media collaborations with significant successes, such as the Panama Papers.

The WikiLeaks model, which preserves the integrity of the original archive, has also broken new ground the preservation of subjugated history. For example, documents published by Julian Assange have been used by petitioners to prove that they were subjected to extraordinary rendition by the CIA from Macedonia before the European Court of Human Rights (German citizen El-Masri v Macedonia; Assanges publications were cited six times in the successful judgement), to free persons falsely accused of terrorism in Pakistan, as well as before the International Court of Justice in the recent Advisory Opinion in relation to the Chagos Islands case. The UK Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that Assanges publications of US diplomatic cables are admissable as evidence in UK courts.

His contribution to bringing serious wrongdoing to light and empowering human rights victims has led to Julian Assange being recognised as a Human Rights Defender. On 21 December 2018, UN Special Rapporter for the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, Michel Forst, called for his immediate release: It is time that Mr. Assange, who has already paid a high price for peacefully exercising his rights to freedom of opinion, expression and information, and to promote the right to truth in the public interest, recovers his freedom.

Julian Assanges work in exposing war crimes and the cost of war has earned his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in consecutive years. In February 2019, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire announced that she had nominated him for this years Peace Prize.

Julian Assange has published over 10 million documents with a perfect verification record. One of his first major releases was the a copy of the Guantanamo Bay prison camps 2003 Standard Operating Procedures for the US Army. WikiLeaks soon released allegations of illegality by the Swiss Bank Julius Baer, Sarah Palins Yahoo emails, the secret bibles of Scientology and the membership list of the far-right British National Party. In 2010, WikiLeaks came to global attention by publishing tens of thousands of classified documents from the United States, from the US Armys suppressed video evidence of helicopter gunners in Collateral Murder who killed a Reuters photojournalist and his driver, to the Afghan War Diaries and the Iraq War Logs, which documented more than 100,000 occupation related civilian killings, to Cablegate, the State Department diplomatic cables. This was followed in 2011 by the Gitmo Files documents on 767 of the 779 prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

WikiLeaks has published the Global Intelligence Files (5 million emails from intelligence contractor Stratfor), Spy Files: Russia, two million files from Syrian political elites, the Saudi Cables (hundreds of thousands of files from the Saudi Foreign Ministry) as well the key draft leaks and analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade (TPP) and the Trade in Service Agreement (TISA). In 2016, WikiLeaks published over 57,000 documents from Turkeys Minister of Energy, who is President Recep Tayyip Erdoans son-in-law, revealing extensive corruption and leading to WikiLeaks being officially banned in Turkey. WikiLeaks publications have revealed extensive information on the the disasterous war on Libya and proof of US knowledge of Saudi and Quatari govenrment backing of ISIS and Al Nusra in Syria. One of WikiLeaks most recent investigations, in collaboration with major European media, revealed a corrupt arms deal between French state-owned company and the United Arab Emirates.

In the European context, Julian Assange notably revealed that the USs National Security Agency and the CIA targeted:

He also published original US intercepts from French senior officials concerning:

Selected Books and Articles by Julian Assange

Washington Post, WikiLeaks has the same mission as The Post and the Times by Julian Assange, 11 April 2017

WikiLeaks, Assange Statement on the Eve of the US Election 8 October 2016

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to the US Empire, Verso, 2016

Introduction The Wikileaks Files: The World According to the US Empire by Julian Assange, Verso, 26 August 2015

Libration, WikiLeaks: les toits des ambassades amricaines ont des oreilles, la preuve Par Pierre Alonso, Jean-Marc Manach et Julian Assange, 3 Juillet 2015

Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Exopressions study on the protection of sources and whistleblowers, by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, 22 June 2015

When Google Met WikiLeaks, OR Books, 2014

Newsweek, Google is not what it seems, by Julian Assange, 23 October 2014

New York Times, The Banality of Dont Be Evil by Julian Assange, 1 June 2013

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, OR Books, 2012

WikiLeaks, Assange Statement on the First Day of Manning Trial, 3 June 2013

Edward Snowden stated on WikiLeaks contribution to journalism:

Their mere existence has stiffened the spines of institutions in many countries, because editors know if they shy away from an important but controversial story, they could be scooped by the global alternative to the national press.

Julian Assanges undisputed role in transforming the informational space over the past ten years has made him a primary target of information warfare, intelligence actions and US prosecution.

The United Nations stated in December:

It is time that Mr. Assange, who has already paid a high price for peacefully exercising his rights to freedom of opinion, expression and information, and to promote the right to truth in the public interest, recovers his freedom

Julian Assange has already paid too high price for his work. Without substantial European institutional recognition of the severity of his persecution he is highly likely to be extradited to the United States given the increasingly close nature of the US-UK relationship and the accelerating diminution of respect for legal rights and due process in both of these two states.

This is the last year that Julian Assange is eligible for the award, given the UKs imminent exit from the European Union, which exposes him to additional uncertainty and jeopardy. The Courage Foundation urges the jury to give this years award to Julian Assange, which will armour him against a difficult battle ahead against the forces that seek to silence him, and with him, all that this award stands for.

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Courage nominates Julian Assange for the 2019 Galizia Prize