Solidarity with Julian Assange
Speech given by Susan Banaszewski, a member of the Anti-War Committee, at an event organized by the Twin Cities Assange Defense on April 9th, 2022.
This Wednesday April 6th marked the 12th anniversary of WikiLeaks’ release of the Collateral Murder film depicting a 2007 massacre of Iraqis by American troops. It’s hard to forget the horror you feel the first time you watch this video, as you assume the vantage point of American soldiers murdering journalists and children from a helicopter. They laugh and joke with each other as they watch innocent people desperately crawl to save themselves & their loved ones, as if the killers are boys playing a video game in the basement or kids burning ants with a magnifying glass. It’s one thing to know your government kills civilians in your name, it’s another to witness the perverse cruelty as it is carried out.
This video, part of Chelsea Manning’s massive leak of reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, was neither the first nor last time Assange’s journalism exposed both the veiled power and barbarism with which the US operates, but it was one of the most influential. These files exposed numerous lies and atrocities: the US-led coalition forces in Iraq had lied in numerous instances about having killed combatants, rather than civilians, and that they had been concealing death totals. The US condoned & facilitated murder, rape, and torture by Iraqi coalition forces, in addition to their own countless atrocities. They revealed that in Iraq “The majority of the deaths […] are civilian deaths. That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six-year period.”
This revelation of the truth of the Iraq war is largely the official justification for Assange’s current imprisonment but his other reporting increased the ire of the US security state and their decades-long determination to silence him, with the CIA even plotting to kill him: The Guantanamo files revealed torture practices including prisoners being waterboarded over 100 times in a single month; shoddy evidence obtained via torture to justify detainment; that some detainees were children; that some were known to captors to be held for no reason at all yet remained captive for years, now decades. He embarrassed the DNC and Hillary Clinton, revealing the corruption of the US electoral system & elites. A thorn in the side of the CIA and NSA, he exposed again and again the extent of their repression & surveillance tactics and persistence in illegally spying on American citizens and intimidating even friendly governments and international organizations to strengthen the US stranglehold on the world.
While Assange has been in prison, through WikiLeaks and the many people he has inspired, his project of truth-telling continues. Thanks to WikiLeaks, journalists at the anti-imperialist site The Grayzone and others work to tirelessly expose how the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons‘ official reports on the alleged chemical attacks by the Syrian government were coerced and manipulated to justify the US’s war on and illegal occupation of Syria.
Assange knew the danger he would be undertaking when he set out to provoke the highest levels of power in the world. After he had sacrificed his privacy, liberty, and wellbeing he refused to be silenced; he knew the world needed his reporting now more than ever. One of the most powerful principles set forth by Assange is that courage is contagious. His courage continues to inspire movements across the world. It is our duty as anti-imperialists to fight for Julian: for transparency, humanity, justice, and his freedom, taken from him by the US government and its allies. The anti-war movement in America must unite and take action to demand his immediate release and pardon. We cannot accept smears on his character or view him as a lost cause. The threat to Assange is a threat to the entire anti-war movement at home and abroad and we need to fight the extradition as Julian would: at any cost.
No tapping our phones, No reading our mail,
Free our Brother Assange from jail.