Julian Assange is a strange inkblot test for official Australia. For the official secrets culture of Canberra, Assange is so confronting as to be incomprehensible.

Since WikiLeaks burst on the world, official Canberra hasnt wanted to find meaning in Assange or grapple with his Australian identity. Much simpler to damn and ignore.

The rest of Australia has had a dozen years to form an Assange view. But in Canberra the secrets culture means that no real Assange answer comes. Canberra still lives the horror of Cablegate in 2010, when Wikileaks began releasing secret cables from 274 US diplomatic missions.

The paradox, as Phillip Adams dryly observes, is that Australia gave birth to the two most powerful media figures in the world: Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange. Both creating global empires from provincial beginnings. Both seen as dangerous, problematic. Both blamed for changing the course of history.

Murdoch and Assange share the outsider perspective of Australia. Both have had a significant impact on the United States the way America understands itself and the way the world thinks about America. Both are interlopers who shook the established media order. Murdoch did his first revolution in Australia, then in Britain, and now in the United States where hes become an American citizen. Long gone from Australia, Assange fights extradition to America.

In the United States, Assange might well be cleared by a court because of the Constitutions First Amendment and its guarantee of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.

In Australia, by contrast, this Australian citizen would be in jail. Theres no ifs or buts about the way the official secrets culture would deal with a heretic like Assange. Itd be little use to argue for press freedom or, indeed, that WikiLeaks largely released material that was embarrassing to governments and militaries but has been of little lasting security harm.

In Australia, the High Court could find only an implied right of free speech in the constitution in 1992, and even that implied right has been questioned as not settled law.

The hesitation about free speech is the twin of Canberras secrets culture. See that culture as defined by one of the capitals longest-serving journalists, Jack Waterford, former editor of The Canberra Times, who argues the primary purpose of laws against leaking has been to conceal bureaucratic incompetence and double dealing, and hypocrisy, political cupidity and criminality by Australian politicians, soldiers and intelligence officers.

In official Canberra, the default setting is secrecy. The internal struggle and argument is always about how much should be made public. The culture loves the TOP SECRET stamp and then asserts the need to enforce absolute secrecy. As Waterford notes: No modern common law state has laws so draconian, and court processes defying almost every principle of natural justice. It is what we have come to when the guardians are allowed to be their own guardians.

In ending the Commonwealth prosecution of the Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery over the release of classified information about spying on East Timor, the attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, opted for justice not secrecy. But it was a rare moment for an Australian politician to look beyond the mystique of the TOP SECRET label.

The enduring Canberra truth about the Collaery case was the four years the system spent pursuing the prosecution to serve the secrecy taboo.

Canberras secrets culture struggles with the way that US First Amendment norms have shaped journalism here and in much of the world. The long-established freedoms of the US become contested, implied rights in Australia. No wonder Canberra has a hard time comprehending Assange. In this town, the secrecy obsession feeds on security fears. This prompted a remarkable moment in Australian journalism in 2019 when major newspapersblacked out their front pagesto protest at theculture of secrecy. Raiding journalists both Australian and Chinese is one element of how Australia seeks security.

This official culture is challenged on many levels by the Enlightenment-on-steroids force of the First Amendment, one of the most revolutionary bits of political/legal language ever laid down by statute a key marker of the US as the most successful-ever revolutionary state.

Back in 2011, I wrote a column about Wikileaks and the US First Amendment:

If Julian Assange ends up before a US court, the bludgeon aimed at his head will be the WW1-inspired blunt instrument, the 1917 Espionage Act. His best shield will be the protection of free speech and the press in the First Amendment. The US would try to nail Assange for enabling the mass leakage of secrets. Assange would claim the protection of being a publisher, no different to the New York Times.

That column about Assange as journalist/publisher was picked up by US academics creating an encyclopedia on the First Amendment. The argument that Assange was doing First Amendment work to reveal dark secrets will grow ever louder in the struggle over his threatened extradition from Britain to the US to face the clearly preposterous sentence of 175 years in prison for espionage.

The preposterous line is from Philip Johnston, assistant editor of Londons The Telegraph, that newspaper bulwark of Toryism and John Bull Britishness. Things are stirring in Britain when even The Telegraph worries about a proxy vendetta against an irksome exposer of nefarious state activities, as Johnston writes:

There is an unmistakeable sense that Assange is being punished because he took the lid off some of the appalling activities of the US military to stop similar investigations in future. The British governments acquiescence in this enterprise is worrying and came before the publication of a British Bill of Rights which is due to enshrine a commitment to free speech as one of its central provisions.

So, centuries after America got a Bill of Rights, Britain contemplates something similar. Take your pick whether thats a radical or conservative move. Nothing similar is in view in Australia.

Australias government has been mute about Assange because hes such a challenge to its official secrets culture. And because Assange so discomfited its great ally, the US. Not least of that discomfit is that Assange challenges America using its own magnificent First Amendment values.

If Prime Minister Anthony Albanese acts on his belief that enough is enough in the Assange case, hell have to do more than persuade Washington. Hell also have to push against the norms and nostrums of Canberra.

Graeme Dobell was made a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in 2011 for his distinguished contribution to journalism through his reporting on politics and international affairs. He has been a journalist since 1971.

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Julian Assange Questions Australia - Australian Institute of ...

More than 70 members of the German parliament from four political parties have called on US President Joe Biden and the British government to stop the impending deportation of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from the UK to the US to face espionage charges.

"Journalists must not be persecuted or punished for their work anywhere in the world," the Bundestag deputies wrote in an open letter. "In the interest of press freedom as well as for humanitarian reasons in view of his poor state of health, Julian Assange must be released without delay."

Assange has been imprisoned in the UK since April 2019, when the government of Ecuador, which had hosted him in its London embassy for seven years, withdrew his political asylum.

A subsequent legal process and court trial ended on June 17, when British Home Secretary Priti Patel granted the US's extradition request. Assange's lawyers are currently appealing the minister's decision.

"A free press is one of the fundamental components of each and every democracy," the Bundestag members wrote. "We are very concerned about the deterrent effect that Assange's extradition and conviction could have on press freedom and investigative journalism around the world."

Members of all three German government coalition parties have signed the letter the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) as well as several representatives of the opposition socialist Left Party.The letter was not signed by members of the opposition conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) or the far-right populists from the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In a statement to DW, one of the signatories, SPD human rights spokesman Frank Schwabe, said: "The situation is very clear. Julian Assange does not belong in a prison, and he certainly shouldn't be deported to a country where he is threatened with a draconian punishment. For me this is a question of the credibility of our important mutual understanding of human rights."

Christian Mihr, head of the German branch of Reporters Without Borders, saidhe hoped the German government would take the parliamentarians' message on board. "I hope the government recognizes it ... when elected representatives send such a strong signal, and that they take it seriously and position themselves clearly to Joe Biden," he told DW.

Should he be found guilty under the Espionage Act, Assange could face 175 years in prison in the United States. Through the Wikileaks platform, Assange was instrumental in leaking evidence of alleged war crimes committed by the US military in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Wikileaks also published confidential Democratic Party emails during the 2016 US election campaign.

Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Assange on sexual assault allegations in 2010, though the investigation was eventually dropped when the statute of limitations expired whilehe remained in the Ecuadoran embassy.

In 2019, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, visited Assange in Belmarsh prison in London and concluded that his treatment by the UK, US, and Ecuadoran governments amounted to psychological torture.

DW has reached out to the German Foreign Ministry for a reaction.So far, the German government has held the position that it has no reason to doubt the integrity of the British extradition process.

A petition opposing the "psychological torture" of Assange has been approved by the Bundestag's petitions committee, the Left Party parliamentary group announced in Berlin on Wednesday. Left-wing politicians see the committee's vote as a demand that the German governmenttake action to secure Assange's release.

Green MP Corinna Rueffer welcomed the German lawmakers' action on Twitter as an act to strengthen press freedom.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

This is a breaking news story and will be updated as more reactions come in.

While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.

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German MPs demand release of Julian Assange

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held a well-attended online public meeting on Sunday, Oppose British extradition order: Fight to free Julian Assange! More than 200 people tuned in from across Australia, as well as Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The meeting is available to view in full below.

The meeting was called in response to British Home Secretary Priti Patels announcement that her government had approved the extradition of Assange to the United States, where he faces 175 years imprisonment for exposing US-led war crimes. With almost all legal avenues in the British courts exhausted, the announcement underscores that the fight to free the WikiLeaks founder is increasingly urgent.

The following resolution was passed without opposition at the meeting:

This meeting condemns the persecution of Julian Assange by the American, British, Australian and Swedish governments for exposing the war crimes of the US and its allies. We demand that the Australian government end its collaboration with the legal travesty to railroad Assange into the US courts and instead use all its diplomatic and other powers to secure his immediate and unconditional release.

SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp chaired the meeting, with reports delivered by World Socialist Web Site writers Eric London and Oscar Grenfell. Following the speakers, the meeting featured a lively discussion as the panel responded to questions and comments from the diverse and highly engaged audience.

Crisp emphasised that what must be fought for, as the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and SEP have done from the outset, is the mobilisation of the working class to come to the defence of this courageous journalist.

Crisp and the other speakers explained that this is the opposite of the bankrupt perspective of making plaintive appeals to official politicians, including the newly elected Labor government in Australia, former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn or Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

These layers are all in agreement over the need to silence figures like Assange in order to suppress opposition to the war agenda, under conditions where the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is rapidly advancing towards a global conflagration.

Crisp drew the critical parallel between Assange and Dr. David Berger, an Australian general practitioner whose medical registration is under threat due to his criticism of the homicidal let it rip COVID-19 policies embraced by all Australian governments.

London, a national committee member of the SEP in the United States and a writer for the WSWS, declared: The institution that is primarily responsible for everything that has happened to Assange is the government of the United States and its two component parts, the Democratic and Republican parties.

The population, London explained, cannot be allowed to come within a ten-foot pole of the truth, under conditions where the US fight for democracy means bringing the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe with Russia, starving billions of people and triggering mass hunger in the midst of the worlds worst pandemic in centuries.

The assault on democratic rights by the US ruling elite is no less acute in the domestic arena. Eighteen months on from Trump and the Republicans January 6, 2021 attempt to establish a fascistic presidential dictatorship by force, London noted, all the main conspirators are free and plotting a second attempt for the next elections in 2024.

The Democrats, London said, insist on saving the Republican Party and promoting illusions of national unity, which are completely shattered by the reality of life in the US: Daily mass shootings, police killings and reactionary decisions from the courts.

For these reasons, London explained, such a political establishment cannot tolerate freedom for the likes of Julian Assange.

London stressed the need for the fight for Assanges freedom to be based on a fight to mobilise the international working class, in which there is an unprecedented upsurge in response to rapid increases in the cost of living and widespread shortages of food and other essentials. This was sharply expressed in developments over the weekend in Sri Lanka, where masses of protesters occupied the presidential palace, forcing the resignation of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe.

Oscar Grenfell, a member of the SEP (Australia) national committee and a writer for the WSWS, warned that any illusions that the newly elected federal government of Anthony Albanese will do anything to aid Assange are a complete dead end.

Labors position on Assange is very clear, Grenfell said. Its identical to that of the former Liberal government.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and Defence Minister Richard Marles have all refused to employ the diplomatic powers they have to free Assange, although such powers have been used in the past to aid Australian citizens being persecuted abroad.

Grenfell explained that Labors refusal to defend Assange was based on its full support for American imperialisms plans to dominate the world through conflict with Russia and China.

Grenfell noted that Labor and Coalition governments could not have thrown Assange to the wolves as they did, without political assistance. This came from the Greens and the pseudo-left, who promoted the frame-up of Assange through the Swedish sexual misconduct investigation, which was always a sham.

The critical issue for defenders of Assange, Grenfell concluded, is to turn to the emerging movement of the global working class, and to explain the connection between Assanges plight and the social and democratic rights of the working class.

In response to questions and comments from attendees, the panelists reiterated the necessity to understand the persecution of Assange in its political and historical context.

Grenfell said: Weve never viewed the Assange case as a single issue, separate from whats taking place more broadly.

None of the increasing attacks on the working class, including war, the pandemic or the persecution of Assange, could be understood as the product of individual proclivities or moral failings, he continued.

The most basic social and democratic rights of working people are incompatible with a society dominated by the banks, big business and a vast military intelligence apparatus. This, Grenfell explained, meant the only solution was a struggle against the capitalist system itself.

In response to a question about the silence of the unions on the persecution of Assange, Crisp noted the refusal of the unions to raise the protection and defence of their own members from COVID-19, just as they have they no concern for the health and wellbeing of Assange.

Crisp explained: These are not organisations that defend the interests of the working class, so they do not defend the interests of Julian Assange, who speaks the truth and speaks to inform broad sections of people about what goes on behind closed doors, what goes on that the media refuses to report.

In response to questions over whether the fight to free Assange could be taken forward through appeals to left figures such as Jeremy Corbyn, London noted, Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, a period during which Julian Assange was in London, in the embassy. We have to be ruthless in exposing all of those who had any opportunity and refused, as Corbyn did, to lift a finger to help Julian Assange.

Rather than appeals to such figures, London stressed, what is required is a powerful united movement of the working class that aims to defend democratic rights and the likes of Julian Assange by attacking the source, capitalism. That requires socialist revolution. Thats the only way that Assange can be protected, thats the only way that world war can be prevented and thats what the perspective of the Socialist Equality Party is aimed at achieving.

The SEP urges all defenders of democratic rights and opponents of imperialist war to get involved and join the fight to free Julian Assange. Contact the SEP today and sign up for the Free Assange Newsletter below.

Sign up for the Free Assange Newsletter

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Strong response to SEP online meeting on the fight to free Julian Assange - WSWS

For Americans, the US invasion of Iraq was set like an elaborate game. US forces were to bravely buckle up and eliminate the enemies of democracy in Iraq. Propaganda was pouring in from all sides about Iraqs Weapons of Mass destruction and more.

And Americans were encouraged to cheer on the forces as we joined them in spirit, thousands of miles away in nearly everything we did, even in the games we played. Games such as the Iraqi Most-Wanted card game which was promoted back then in 2003. These cards were officially named personality identification playing cards and had on them the pictures of the Iraqi regime officials that the US military was aiming to heroically eliminate.

Of course, as those of us familiar with politics and propaganda could already predict, years later, it was discovered that not only was Iraq void of WMDs but in reality, it was the American forces who were a threat to Iraqis, not the other way around! Then we read on secret American prisons and all kinds of unbelievable torture methods.

And so, as a result of these crimes, a person continues to serve time in prison. Strangely enough, that person is not any of those who initiated the offensive on Iraq. Instead, hes the man behind exposing American crimes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay: A whistleblower called Julian Assange.

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The Brave Behind Bars - Press TV

Last Friday, Labor government Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced that he was ending the prosecution of Bernard Collaery, a lawyer who had been charged with breaching national security laws by allegedly exposing Australian spying on East Timor.

The end of the prosecution, which was launched in 2018, is no doubt welcome news to Collaery and his supporters.

The 78-year-old, who is a widely-respected barrister and prominent political figure, has been subjected to state harassment and persecution for the best part of a decade. His only supposed crime was bringing to light the unlawful actions of the intelligence agencies, as part of Australias neo-colonial bullying and thuggery in the Pacific.

Dreyfus order, however, will do nothing to end the onslaught against whistleblowers as well as journalists who publish information deemed to be of national security significance.

In a press conference outlining the decision, Dreyfus made this plain. Governments must protect secrets, and this government remains steadfast in our commitment to keep Australians safe by keeping secrets out of the wrong hands, he declared.

The attorney-general emphasised that he was not establishing any sort of precedent for an end to whistleblower prosecutions. The Collaery case was exceptional, he insisted.

The government has given no indication that it will drop other such cases. David McBride, a former military lawyer, is being prosecuted for allegedly exposing Australian war crimes in Afghanistan. Charges carrying a maximum-sentence of ten years imprisonment remain against Richard Boyle, who is accused of revealing the aggressive debt-collection practices of the Australian Taxation Office.

Labor is also fully committed to the draconian legislation under which Collaery was being prosecuted.

The barrister faced five charges under the Intelligence Services Act, passed in 2001 by Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition. The laws aim to outlaw any exposure of the activities of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the countrys foreign spy agency.

Collaerys defence lawyers argued that the legislations secrecy provisions were voided, by the fact that the conduct of ASIS that had been revealed was unlawful. The prosecution insisted that there was no such public interest defence. In other words, even illegal actions by the spy agency were protected on national security grounds.

The federal Liberal-National Coalition government and the prosecution also attempted to hold most of Collaerys trial in complete secrecy. They invoked provisions of the National Security Information Act, which permits court proceedings to be entirely closed, if national security material is being discussed. The attorney-general has sweeping powers to recommend a case be heard in such a Kafkaesque manner. That legislation was also passed by Labor in 2004.

While in opposition, Labor did not oppose the Collaery prosecution, giving the Coalition government a green-light to proceed with it.

More broadly, the Collaery case has highlighted militarist policies and dirty-tricks operations, implicating the entire political and state apparatus, including Labor.

Collaery first became involved in the matter, when he represented an ASIS employee known only as Witness K, in a 2008 workplace dispute. Witness K, a lifelong intelligence agent, allegedly revealed to Collaery that in 2004 he had been involved in a spying operation against East Timor.

ASIS had secretly bugged cabinet meetings of the East Timorese government. The material was then used by the Australian government, on behalf of major corporations, in negotiations aimed at securing favorable access to massive oil and gas deposits in the Timor Gap.

The material was particularly explosive because it exposed the predatory, imperialist character of Australias military intervention into East Timor in 1999. At that time, the Howard Coalition government, Labor and the entire official media, insisted that it was necessary to send troops to the Pacific nation to protect civilians against Indonesian militias.

The Collaery revelations made clear that in reality, all of Australias dealings in East Timor had been aimed at securing dominance over the strategically-important nation and its significant natural resources as East Timors nominal independence was established.

The spying information was reported in the media in 2013, with Collaery accused of passing on the revelations to Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalists. The same year, Collaery and Witness K testified at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, providing evidence in support of an East Timorese legal case against the bugging.

The then Coalition government responded with 2013 police raids against Witness K and Collaery. Witness K was prosecuted under national security laws, pleading guilty last year after court proceedings held entirely in secret.

Most significantly, Dreyfus decision was not motivated by any intention to end Australias dirty-tricks operations and meddling in the Pacific. Instead, Dreyfus and the Labor government as a whole are intensifying Australias aggressive intervention in the region, directed against China.

Dreyfus stated that All prosecutions involve a balancing of interests. The balance of interests can change over time. This is such a case. He added, My decision was informed by the government's commitment to Australia's national security and our relations with our neighbours.

The language is vague and includes the usual rhetoric about neighbours. But what Dreyfus was really raising was that the prosecution of Collaery, which East Timor has consistently denounced, risked complicating the Labor governments drive to dominate the Pacific on behalf of American imperialism.

Since coming to office less than two months ago, this has been a major focus of the new government. During the May election itself, Labor led the charge in a hysterical frenzy over the signing of a security pact between China and the Solomon Islands. This was the greatest foreign policy failure in the Pacific since World War Two, Labor declared.

It made those statements, under conditions where the US administration of President Joe Biden and the Liberal-National Coalition government threatened the Solomons with military intervention, if China were to establish a permanent defence presence there.

Labors new Foreign Minister Penny Wong has continued this line. In a series of visits throughout the Pacific, she has threatened the impoverished Pacific Islands with consequences if they turn away from the US and Australia and orient to China.

The kind of intrigues exposed by Witness K, are no doubt integral to this aggressive campaign. The Pacific is viewed as a central arena of the US-led confrontation with China, the key front in American imperialisms drive to dominate Eurasia and hence the world.

This militarist program is incompatible with democratic rights. Labor supported the intelligence legislation, under which Witness K and Collaery faced prosecution, as it did all of the anti-terror laws associated with the war on terror and the neo-colonial occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then in 2018, as part of the current war policies against China, Labor joined with the Coalition to pass sweeping foreign interference laws. In addition to potentially illegalising much anti-war activity, the legislation contained expanded provisions for the prosecution of whistleblowers, as well as journalists who expose national security material, with penalties of up to life imprisonment (see: Australias new espionage laws target whistleblowers and political opponents).

In a 2018 interview, Andrew Hastie, then the Coalitions chair of the joint parliamentary intelligence and security committee, said the laws were necessary to prevent radical transparency and to stymie those seeking to get secrets from the United States.

Hastie added: Radical transparency is Julian Assange dumping a whole bunch of Commonwealth secrets out for public consumption.

Labor did not differ from this attack on WikiLeaks publisher Assange, as it passed laws specifically designed to prevent the sort of journalistic exposures with which he was identified.

Since then, Assange has been charged with 17 Espionage Act offenses by the United States, which is seeking his extradition from Britain. He faces 175 years in a US prison, for exposing US-led war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Labor government has rejected demands that it secure Assanges freedom, as a persecuted Australian citizen and journalist.

Join the SEP campaign against anti-democratic electoral laws!

The working class must have a political voice, which the Australian ruling class is seeking to stifle with this legislation.

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Australian government drops charges for lawyer who exposed spying on East Timor, but maintains anti-whistleblower laws - WSWS