Julian Assange is finally free.
For more than 14 years I fought for his freedom and his rights as a journalist to publish the truth and reveal it to the public. We learned on Monday evening that he would be released and allowed to return home. He will not be subjected to further harassment or threats from the US government. Although 14 years of his life were stolen by the government, yes, war criminals, they never managed to get hold of him.
On the day I posted $2010 in bail to help secure his release in 20.000, I wrote why I did it and why I believe we owe him our eternal gratitude for exposing the truth about America's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope that one day this country of ours will apologize for torturing him. In the meantime, let's all draw from him the kind of courage that is needed in the darkest times of aggression and the financing of slaughter abroad with our tax money. I also hope that the vital and energetic journalism that exists to expose the lies and protect us, the citizens, from those who want to abolish our democracy will soon return to us.
So far, it's a really happy day. Be well, Julian. And know that the good people of this world will never forget your sacrifice.
Why I bailed for Julian Assange
(post originally published on December 14, 2010)
Yesterday at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London, lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange submitted a document to the judge stating that I have put up $20.000 of my own money to help pay bail to get Assange out of prison.
Moreover, I am publicly offering the help of my website, servers, domains, and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose crimes planned in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were led to war against Iraq based on lies. The dead are now in the hundreds of thousands. Just imagine if the people who planned this war crime in 2002 had to count on WikiLeaks. Maybe their plans wouldn't work out. They thought they could slip through just because they were guaranteed secrecy. That guarantee has now been taken away from them and I hope they will never be able to operate in secret again.
Why is WikiLeaks, having done such important work for the public, now under such fierce attack? Because he exposed and shamed those who covered up the truth. The attack on WikiLeaks and Assange transcends everything:
- Senator Joe Lieberman (Gore's Democratic running mate in the 2000 election) says WikiLeaks "violated the Espionage Act."
- The New Yorker's George Packer calls Assange "super-secretive, hypersensitive, [and] megalomaniac."
- Sarah Palin claims that he is an "anti-American operative with bloody hands" who we should prosecute "just like the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."
- Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said of Assange on Fox: "A dead man can't expose things...there's only one way to do it: shoot the son of a bitch illegally."
- Republican Mary Matalin says that he is "a psychopath, a sociopath... He is a terrorist."
- Republican Peter King calls WikiLeaks a "terrorist organization."
Well, actually, it is! They exist to terrorize liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and others. Maybe the next war won't be so easy because things have changed – and now it's Big Brother who's being watched… we're watching him!
WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shedding light on all this. Certain voices in the corporate media have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("They have published little new!") or portray WikiLeaks members as mere anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists in part because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. Corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their jobs. There is no more time or money for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want these stories exposed. They like their secrets kept… as secrets.
Imagine how different our world would be if WikiLeaks existed 10 years ago. Look at this one photo.
This is President George W. Bush, who will receive the "secret" document on August 6, 2001 - just one month before 11/XNUMX. The title of the document read: "Bin Laden determined to attack on US soil." The pages said that the FBI had discovered "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for kidnappings." Mr. Bush chose to ignore it and spent the next four weeks fishing.
But if that document was leaked, how would you or I react? What would Congress or the FAA do? Wouldn't there be a greater chance that someone somewhere would do something if we all knew about Bin Laden's upcoming attack with hijacked planes?
But at the time, only a few people had access to that document. Since the secret was kept, the instructor of the flight school in San Diego, who noticed that the two Saudi students were not interested in learning how to perform take-off or landing, saw nothing strange about it and did nothing to notify any authorities. If he had heard about Bin Laden's threat through the media, maybe he would have called the FBI? (Read this one Text (former FBI agent Colleen Rowley on her belief that if WikiLeaks had existed in 2001, the 11/XNUMX attacks could have been prevented.)
Or what if the public had been able to read Dick Cheney's "secret" memos in 2003 as he pressured the CIA to fabricate the "facts" he needed to make a false case for war? If WikiLeaks had then discovered that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, do you think the war would have been started - or rather, wouldn't there have been calls for Cheney's arrest?
Openness, transparency - these are some of the few weapons that citizens have to protect themselves from the powerful and corrupt. What if, in the days after August 4, 1964—after the Pentagon lied that the North Vietnamese had attacked one of our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin—WikiLeaks had existed to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? My guess is that 58.000 of our soldiers (and two million Vietnamese) might be alive today.
Instead, the secrets killed them.
I've joined filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and journalist Jemima Khan in paying bail for Julian Assange – and we hope the judge will accept it and grant his release today.
Could WikiLeaks cause some unintended damage to diplomatic negotiations and US interests in the world? Maybe. But that's the price you pay when you and your government take us to war based on lies. It's a punishment for your bad behavior: someone has to turn on all the lights so we can see what you're up to. You simply cannot be trusted anymore. So every dispatch, every email you write is now an acceptable target. Sorry, but it's your own fault. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can come up with the next big lie if they know they might be exposed.
And that's the best thing WikiLeaks has done. The result of WikiLeaks' actions, god bless them, will be to save lives. And each of you who joins me in support is doing a true act of patriotism. Period.
I stand in absentia today with Julian Assange in London and ask the judge to release him. With the bail money we deposited, we are ready to guarantee his return to court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.
Michael Moore
(PS You can read the statement I filed yesterday [December 13, 2010] with the court in London here.)
* * *
That December 2010, three days after I wrote that statement and filed my bail portion with the court, Julian Assange was granted bail by the court. Assange then went on to appeal to the British courts. After 18 months, faced with the certainty of extradition, he entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London and requested asylum. In April 2019, after almost seven years, when he left the embassy of Ecuador, the British authorities immediately arrested and imprisoned him at the request of the United States for extradition and trial in the USA. He has been in Britain's maximum-security Belmarsh prison for more than five years, fighting extradition to the United States. British courts, however, have refused to hand Assange over to the Americans - in part because British law, as in most Western democracies, prohibits the extradition of prisoners to any country that has the death penalty. His case dragged through both the Trump and Biden administrations until finally the US government relented and agreed to a plea deal that would have freed Assange immediately and allowed him to return home to Australia.
So far, neither the US Justice Department nor the British government has sought to arrest those who led both countries into invading Iraq by fraudulently and falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11/XNUMX attacks.
In addition, when Assange breached his bail conditions and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, the British court informed me that he would not return the $20.000. They assure me, however, that the British government used my input to finally help write the first written constitution for the United Kingdom - something they've been promising to do since June 1215.
(MichaelMoore.com; Peščanik.net, translation: M. Jovanović)
Bonus video:
