Free Speech At The Crossroads

The voices of the many are being silenced by the interests of the few

JULIAN ASSANGE HAD HIS METTLE TESTED and was not found wanting. Thank God he stands today in relative freedom to speak, testament also to his incredible fortitude and endurance, and probably also due to a shifting narrative that no longer perceives him necessarily as an inconvenience or threat.

The tragedy before him and indeed us all, lies in the ready and tacit co-option of almost all "journalists" by the globalist Davos-gangsters, the UN pretenders, the EU authorities, the UK authorities, the US authorities, the Russian authorities, the Chinese CCP, the WHO, the WEF, all a vast semi-aligned opportunistic array of jackbooted parasites festering on the throat of humanity.

The "journalists" unfortunately long since deserted the room, and their role as the Fourth Estate has devolved rapidly into a co-opted, well paid and treacherous Fifth Column aligned with the techno-fascist globalist take-down. It appears beyond self-evident that the Western World, like China and its CCP, has become intoxicated, enamoured, seduced and dependent upon rank tyranny that seems to be edging toward a growing inclination toward atrocity. The addiction to power and control displayed by the kakistocracies is open betrayal, while the institutionalised medical ‘bafflement’ seems a very thin patina on atrocity.

Nevertheless, while so many people still remain oblivious, wishful and deluded, a growing number are rejecting the many dystopian narratives in play, and a tightening race is developing between freedom and tyranny, the finishing tape being 2030.

Julian Assange is yet another voice that cries out in the wilderness.

Preface

ON OCT 01, 2024, JULIAN ASSANGE READS AN IMPORTANT SPEECH to the Council of Europe human rights hearing in Strasbourg that has been published quite extensively, although I have not troubled to review whether or not manufactured State agitprop ‘media’ have covered it in any detail.

The speech is posted below and is worthy of attentive reading. One can see that Assange rightly labels the intolerable misdeeds of the US ‘deep state’ players, the UK and other international supporters.

However, what appears distressingly obvious through Assange’s address is his apparent consideration of Europe as a hive of journalistic integrity, a nexus of free speech and censorial freedom. This appears misplaced, or perhaps it is a tugging forelock requirement to obtain the platform?

Nonetheless, it appears starkly at odds with the increased stranglehold being imposed on free speech everywhere in Europe, in addition to the range of draconian ESG-like measures.

• European lawmakers, who salivated over Facebook “whistleblower” hearing, plot censorship ~ October 7, 2021

• European Commission threatens Twitter with a ban unless it abides by strict content censorship rules ~ December 1, 2022

• EU Lawmaker Threatens to Ban X Unless Musk Complies with Censorship Demands ~ August 20, 2024

• German Lawmaker Anton Hofreiter Proposes Blocking X and Taking Action Against Elon Musk for Non-Compliance with Censorship Demands ~ September 11, 2024

• EU’s Overreaching Censorship Champion Thierry Breton Quits ~ September 16, 2024

Attribution: Reclaim The Net

Acknowledgement to Bob Moran Art ~ www.bobmoran.co.uk

The Julian Assange Speech

Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, ladies and gentlemen, the transition from years of confinement in a maximum security prison to being here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and a surreal shift.

The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey. It strips away one sense of self leaving only the raw essence of existence. I am yet not fully equipped to speak about what I have endured, the relentless struggle to stay alive both physically and mentally, nor can I speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners.

I apologize in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect from such a distinguished forum. Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge. However, the gravity of this occasion and the weight of the issues at hand compel me to set aside my reservations and speak to you directly.

I have traveled a long way, literally and figuratively, to be before you today. Before our discussion or answering any questions you might have, I wish to thank the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) for its 2020 resolution which stated that my imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists and noticed that the UN special rapporteur on torture called for my release. I'm also grateful for PACE's 2021 statement expressing concern over credible reports that US officials discussed my assassination, again calling for my prompt release. And I commend the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee for commissioning a renowned rapporteur, Suna Aive's daughter, to investigate the circumstances surrounding my detention and conviction and the consequent implications for human rights.

However, like so many of the efforts made in my case, whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, UN officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists, or citizens, none of them should have been necessary. None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests, and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary, because without them, I never would have seen the light of day. This unprecedented global effort was needed because the legal protections, of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper, were not effective in any remotely reasonable time. I eventually chose freedom over unrealizable justice after being detained for years and facing a 175-year sentence with no effective remedy.

Justice, for me, is now precluded as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a Freedom of Information Act request over what it did to me as a result of its expedition request.

I want to be totally clear I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source and I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.

I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.

As I emerge from the dungeon of [London’s] Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible. And I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period, how expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished. I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth, and more self-censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the U.S. government's prosecution of me, it's crossing the Rubicon by internationally criminalizing journalism, to the chilled climate for freedom expression that exists now.

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream, to educate people about how the world works so that through understanding we might bring about something better. Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go. Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none. We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors about programs of assassination, rendition, torture, and mass surveillance. We revealed not just when and where these things happened, but frequently the policies, the agreements, and the structures behind them.

When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter to crew, eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers. The visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world. But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq, and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval.

The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world's dirty wars and secret operations is simple. Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right, and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest.

WikiLeaks' work was deeply rooted in the principles that this assembly stands for. Our journalism elevated freedom of information and the public's right to know. It found its natural operational home in Europe. I lived in Paris, and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers based in France, in Germany, and in Norway.

But 14 years ago, the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, Private First Class Manning, a U.S. intelligence analyst based in Iraq.The U.S. government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues. The U.S. government illicitly sent planes of agents to Iceland, paid bribes to an informer to steal our legal and journalistic work product, and without formal process, pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and to freeze our accounts.The U.K. government took part in some of this retribution.

Ultimately, this harassment was legally groundless. Obama's Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed. United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution. In January 2017 Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats, Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer, as U.S. Attorney General.

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties. It's spying on French and German leaders. It's spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole. We revealed the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.

CIA director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.

It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo's explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information.

My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife, and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six-month-old son's nappy. This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved. The CIA's targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organizations engage in transnational repression.

Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain. This assembly is no stranger to extraterritorial abuses by the CIA. PACE’s ground breaking report on CIA renditions in Europe exposed how the CIA operated secret detention centers and conducted unlawful renditions on European soil, violating human rights and international law.

In February this year, the alleged source of some of our CIA revelations, former CIA officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to 40 years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation. His windows are blacked out, and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it. These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay.

But transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes. The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and exhibition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe.

In Michael Pompeo's memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former CIA director bragged about how he pressured the US Attorney General to bring an the expedition case against me in response to our publications about the CIA. Indeed, acceding to Pompeo's requests, the US Attorney General reopened the investigation against me that Obama had closed and re-arrested Manning, this time as a witness. Manning was held in a prison for over a year, fined $1000 a day in a formal attempt to coerce her into providing secret testimony against me. She ended up attempting to take her own life.

We usually think of attempts to force journalists to testify against their sources, but Manning was now a source being forced to testify against their journalist. By December 2017, CIA Director Pompeo had got his way and the U.S. government issued a warrant to the UK for my extradition. The UK government kept the warrant secret from the public for two more years while it, the U.S. government, and the new President of Ecuador moved to shape the political, the legal, and the diplomatic grounds for my arrest.

When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without this, no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources of that a state aggressor can deploy. If the situation were not already bad enough, in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position.

Only U.S. citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the U.S. claims its Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey U.S. secrecy law with no defenses at all as far as the U.S. government is concerned.  

An American in Paris can talk about what the U.S. government is up to, perhaps. But for a French man in Paris, to do so is a crime with no defense, and he may be extradited just like me. Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit.  

The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalization of journalists in Russia. The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened. Transnational repression cannot become the norm here. As one of the world's two great norm-setting institutions, PACE must act. 

The criminalization of news gathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted by a foreign and power for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.   

The fundamental issue is simple. Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs. Journalism is not a crime. It is a pillar of a free and informed society.   

Mr. Chairman, distinguished delegates, if Europe is to have a future where the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few, but rights guaranteed to all, then it must act so that what has happened in my case never happens to anyone.   

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to this Assembly, to the Conservatives, Social Democrats, Liberals, Leftists, Greens and Independents who have supported me throughout this ordeal, and to the countless individuals who have advocated tirelessly for my release.   

It is heartening to know that in a world often divided by ideology and interests, there remains a shared commitment to the protection of essential human liberties.   

Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroad. I fear that unless institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation, it will be too late. Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

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For those interested, some further commentaries around the speech:

• After 14 Years of Confinement, Journalist Julian Assange Calls on Europe to Defend Freedom of Expression ~ Dan Frieth (Reclaim The Net)

• A Newly Free Julian Assange Speaks ~ Chip Gibbons (‘Jacobin’ a voice of the American left)

• Julian Assange speaks - a heart felt speech about his experience and our world Council of Europe human rights hearing in Strasbourg ~ Sarah Westall

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Loitering On The Ledge ~ incipient extinction?

Like the League of Nations before it, the UN (and its shadowy backers) appears poised to be consumed by the darkness of its growing self-inflicted hubris, having toppled into a wide crevasse of ideological pathology, one of manifest grasping over-reach that lies far beyond its founding principles, and one also that continues to lead the World unashamedly along multiple axes of division, exclusion and likely war. However, unlike the failure of the League of Nations, the failure of the UN seems an orchestrated requirement to progress a notion of one-world-government (a notion that has tacitly and quietly rejected or contested ………).

It appears an abyss of extinction in several ways, not least because it is engaging a host of unintended deleterious consequences but because it also appears to be laying claim to being the author of future salvation.

Fool me twice, springs to mind.

Such axes include religious, economic, identitarian and cultural lines, not to omit those severe outlying ideological poles that embrace Malthusian preoccupations and the derogation of established ethics, the sanctity of life, the rejection of ad hoc State implemented medical experimentation and medical ‘treatment’.

All of these axes cultivate and foster an excoriation of division and exclusion, the imposition of fear, and the censoring of free speech. Furthermore, the profoundly threatening removal of the freedom of cash, and the contrived intellectual and decision making surrogacy being asserted for AI should be major attention-getters, but instead join a long line - for most - of nothing to see here.

In this purposeful but incrementally destructive incoherence, the UN and its less obvious appendages aim to impose their manufactured illusion of global salvation ~ The WEF/Schwab-esque ‘Great Reset’, ‘One-World-Government’, ‘The 2030 Agenda’. They furnish both the problem and the solution, a well known tactic.

My guess is that the right hand of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), while clearly aligned to the left hand, has little detailed idea about what the left hand is actually doing. The left hand holds a variety of entities that are actively working in a uniquely focussed manner (2030) toward implementing globalist ideology, namely UNEP, ECOSOC, UNFCCC, WHO, UNESCO, Civil Society, and the WEF. These entities, somewhat at the edge and in the shadows, aim to cease playing games come 2030, the year nailed to the wall.

The 2030 flag pole on which they hoisted their petard is an attempt to realise the rainbow and unicorn fantasies of Marxist imbued global governance through public-private partnership, and through unelected, unelectable bureaucrats. The control knobs extend all the way down to municipal authorities who will divest themselves of democratic obligations under the pretext of an emergency. They will depend upon a variety of collaborateurs and the brutal suffocation of all unsanctioned media in order to maintain their unsustainable incoherence and ideological narrative.

In the current iteration of the supra-national proto-global State, namely the EU, the media and social media subjugation is already blindingly obvious, revealed by a growing plethora of clandestine administrative activities undertaken by corporate and governmental entities, including the police and intelligence agencies.

The signs of the times are upon us.

Klaus Schwab Champions the “Intelligent Age,” Despite Concerns Over Censorship and Surveillance ~ Didi Rankovic

Schwab does pay lip service to “risks” such as excessive automation in the workplace leaving huge amounts of people jobless, but he talks about it in terms of new opportunities, and seems to think politicians, education systems, etc., will “help people transition to new roles.”

What those “roles” may be, he doesn’t go into, except to note they will require “entirely different skill sets.”

If anything screams actual societal divisions, going forward – should Schwab’s predictions come true – it’s this. But he decides to treat this point as a minor problem.

And, there is one thing the WEF founder no doubt wants to present as far more concerning – and that is, “bias and misinformation” as a result of future sophisticated AI.

To A Counter Point ~ Long Live Freedom

Javier Gerardo Milei, President of the Argentine Republic, addresses the General Debate of the 79th Session of the General Assembly of the UN (New York, 24 -28 and 30 of September 2024).

Not a counter-point UNGA attendees would be entralled by, but one we should be paying very, very close attention to, despite the fact we are being perpetually distracted by the various manufactured narratives peddled by State agitprop and its DEADLY Pact For The Future: de-industrialisation, destitution, de-population, disease, demoralisation, depravity, delegitimisation, dependency, drugs, delinquency, degeneracy, death.