You may well have forgotten about Julian Assange. It’s been 11 years since he disappeared from public view—first into the claustrophobic seclusion of the Ecuadorian embassy and then, nearly five years later, to the maximum security Belmarsh prison. Out of sight, out of mind.
All that is about to change as he fights a last-ditch attempt in London’s High Court to prevent being extradited to America—and the strong likelihood of once more vanishing, this time into a state penitentiary for a very long time.
Why should we care?
There is no shortage of people who don’t, much. They may dislike Assange—and it has to be conceded that he has a unique ability to lose friends and alienate people. Many in the media don’t believe he’s a “proper” journalist, and therefore won’t lift a finger to defend him. Some will never forgive him for his role in leaking information about the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and accuse him of being Putin’s patsy.
And then there are people who have a touching faith in the secret corners of our state, and deplore anyone who lifts the lid. James Bond is a world-beating brand, even if the counter-narrative is sometimes more George Smiley or Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses. I will never forget a distinguished editor, at the height of the Edward Snowden revelations, writing: “If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest… who am I to disbelieve them?”
In other words, trust the state. If they say “jump”, your role is to ask “how high?”
But why would you? “The state”—don’t we know it?—routinely gets all kinds of things wrong. The same is, inevitably, true of the secret state, the security state, the deep state—whatever you want to call it.
Would you trust the police or security services to monitor all your communications and movements? Not if you’ve read any Orwell. Did you not notice the intelligence failures/embellishments that helped shape US and UK policy before the disastrous attack on Iraq in 2003? Really?
Were you blind to the proven allegations of torture and rendition during and after 9/11? Did you miss the findings of illegal surveillance in the wake of the Snowden revelations? Do you shrug when you read about the police or intelligence agencies penetrating protest groups, behaving in ways that form the subject of the UK’s ongoing undercover policing inquiry?
In other words, the security state—for all that it does good and necessary work—needs to be monitored and held to account. Especially as it has immense powers over the lives of individuals, including questions of life and death.
But any attempt at scrutiny, given that the shadowier parts of the state are bolstered by an increasingly prohibitive protective shield of law and punishment, is not easy.
...
More:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/p...n-assange-free
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty
Connect With Us