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CURRENT POLITICS - Wikileaks - Ecuador |
| Don't Let Lying Dogs Sleep Speech
outside the British High Commission, Canberra, 17 August 2012. To say that one loves truth can be
no more than a pious platitude. Indeed, we need to be wary of maxims such as
‘The truth will make us free’. The reality is several times more complicated.
What can set us on the path to being freer is the struggle for the truth,
especially the battle to communicate the truth beyond a few experts. On top of
that hard task is the fact that truth-tellers are likely to end up in prison,
Bradley Manning being a prime example. His incarceration is a physical expression
of the emotional damage suffered by all whistle-blowers. Without Bradley Manning, it is much
less likely that the US war-machine would be after Wikileaks. Manning is a
hero, displaying extraordinary moral and physical courage in withstanding
months of soft torture to get him to rat. His reason for passing on the US
government documents is why the world needs a Wikileaks. He had evidence of
criminality. He told his superiors. They did nothing. In refusing to ‘obey
orders’, and thus be complicit in those crimes, he made the material available
to the world. Manning lived out the legend about
George Washington’s response when his mother asked him whether he had chopped
down the cherry-tree: ‘Mother, I cannot tell a lie.’ Successive US governments
seem incapable of doing anything else. Their addiction to black propaganda extends to
their allies in the UK, Sweden and Australia. As the US journalist and
precursor of Wikileaks, I.F. ‘Izzy’ Stone used to put it: ‘All governments are
run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.’ Earlier this week, UK Foreign Secretary
William Hague said that Assange was ‘facing criminal charges’ in Sweden, which
is a bare-faced lie. The ‘special relationship’ between the US and UK is not
affected by changeovers from Labour to Conservative administrations in
Whitehall, as Blair demonstrated with the invasion of Iraq. UK governments are
as alarmed as is the CIA at the prospect of endless exposures of its crimes from
Wikileaks-style bodies. At the same time, the Swedish
politician driving the investigation in Stockholm was talking about ‘rape’. The
ABC maintains a version of that slander by reporting that Assange is wanted for
questioning about ‘sexual assault’, as if violence or some kind of coercion had
taken place. It is a tribute to the good sense of a majority of Australians that
the nature of the possible offence has broken through this campaign of character
assassination. The conduct at issue is best described as misconduct and is not
any kind of criminal offence in the UK, the US or Australia. However, even if
Assange had never gone to Sweden, the US authorities would have come up with
some way of diverting attention from their crimes onto him, as they have tried
with his family background and with Manning’s sexuality. The tactic aims to
fool people into believing that what goes on inside the heads of that pair is
more important than the crimes they spotlight. As much as we need to counter the black
propaganda from overseas, our target has to be the liars in the ALP
administration and the Australian-based media. Prime minister Gillard opened
the lying with the allegation that Assange had engaged in criminal activities
by releasing ‘top secret’ material. Since the Federal Police blew that charge
out of the water, she has taken refuge in the claim that Australia cannot
‘interfere’ in legal processes elsewhere. That line is hard to square with
interventions in Indonesia over drug traffickers and in Libya on behalf of a
War Crimes lawyer. The big lie concerns what the
government has been doing by way of consular and diplomatic contact.
Attorney-General Roxon and Foreign Minister Carr point to the occasions on
which officials have approached Assange or his legal team. What they don’t own
up to is what they are telling the US and UK authorities. Once a
Wikileaks-style body publishes the traffic concerning Assange, Australian politicians
and diplomats again will have a tough time maintaining their current positions
as anything more than a morass of mendacity. That exposure has started with information
secured by the Fairfax media. We might ask why that content was not freely
available in the first place. From the Washington Embassy, agent of US influence
Beazley has had one concern above all others. He and Gillard have been pleading
for at least a few hours notice of any overt moves by the US of A against
Assange. The lickspittles need that time to get their lies straight. A second foretaste of what to expect from
the high-level emails came this week when freedom-of-information requests got the
assessments from the Department of Defence about the allegation that the
Wikileaks had endangered the lives or safety of Australian forces in
Afghanistan. The report showed that there was no evidence for that claim. The
danger, according to Defence, was that the revelations would further reduce
support for the war. Hence, the commitment depends on keeping the truth about
corruption and criminalities from the public. The case for keeping some
diplomacy top-secret is once more shown to be a cover for deceit. The wars in the Middle East point to the
context needed to make sense of the ALP’s subservience to the US over Wikileaks.
As ever, Canberra is giving the war machine what it wants with the Marine base
in Darwin, a base for drones out of Katherine and greater access to HMAS
Sterling near Perth. Tose sell=outs were announced during a parade of sycophancy
during the Obama visit last October which sickened even unquestioning
supporters of the Alliance. The enthusiasm for the ‘American Alliance’ voiced
by Gillard and Co. keeps quiet about its core component, namely, the
intelligence-sharing network set up in the late 1940s. Publishing secrets is a
low level of code-breaking. Assange fears for his life if tried
under the US Patriot Act. No doubt, his fears extend beyond any military
commission at Guantanamo to what is likely to befall him on the streets of
Quito. Should he get to Ecuador, he will not be safe from the US. They will
never give up. Alongside the secret Grand Jury in Virginia preparing to indite
him, he will know that Washington will also be preparing to oversee his murder.
Wherever he goes, he will be a target for an assassination team. The US military set up its School of
Assassins (aka the School of the Americas) to train Latin American officers to
murder tens of thousands of trade unionists and other progressives, including
Catholic nuns and a bishop. Indeed, Even had President Correa refused Assange’s
request for asylum he would be watching over his shoulder for an ‘accident’ to
his aircraft and for a US-backed coup against his socially progressive administration.
He survived a police revolt in October 2010. The US faces a continent-wide
challenge to its control of resources and markets. Washington backed the failed
coup against Chavez in Venezuela in 2002. Two soft coups have succeeded since 2009.
More covert actions are in the pipeline to make ‘democracy safe for oil’. The record shows that there is nothing
the rich and powerful won’t do to hang onto their privileges. Why should anyone
be amazed at the UK threat to enter Ecuador’s embassy when British governments
have been invading countries for hundreds of years, most recently Iraq.
Australia’s indigenous people can testify to that tradition. Reflecting on the hope that the truth will
set us free, we encounter Edward Said’s saying that the duty of the intellectual
is to speak truth to power. That obligation is never confined to intellectuals.
No one has done more than Bradley Manning to fulfill that moral imperative. So,
what should we all be saying to the rich and powerful, that One Percent? First,
we must join in telling them what they do not like to hear; even more, we must
chorus what they do not want the rest of us to know. ‘Telling the truth’, whether to power
or to the powerless, is not enough. Diluting the super-saturated solution of
falsehoods that passes for ‘the news’ is valuable only to the extent that it helps
to break the power of the US war machine as the advance guard of corporate
plunder of the creativity of human labour and of the wealth of nature. That
goal has brought us together in Canberra this afternoon in support of
governments such as Ecuador’s that display the self-respect so lacking in British
High Commission behind us and the national gasworks on the hill in front of us. |