A former employee of a Spanish security firm has told Julian Assange’s extradition hearing of a plan to abduct and even poison the Australian as part of a widespread surveillance operation said to have been ordered by an associate of US President Donald Trump.
This revelation, concerning an Australian citizen who is facing 175 years in jail on espionage charges, made it to page 23 of The Sydney Morning Herald.
In The Australian, it was given a small corner on page nine in the world news section, beneath a page of analysis on the first presidential debate.
Yet the story would appear to have everything. Witnesses fearful for their lives alleging a conspiracy, tangentially involving the US president, to poison or kidnap a significant Australian figure.
Reports on the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexander Navalny, allegedly by the Russian government, got higher billing than Assange in the SMH (on top of an opinion piece declaring Navalny a hero).
This is typical of the coverage of the Assange case. You can’t accuse the mainstream media of exactly ignoring the case, but it generally comes “mid-paper” (in print and online). It’s just another thing that’s happening in the world. But isn’t the trial of a Walkley award winner a case about press freedom?
Compare this to the blanket front page coverage that followed the Right to Know campaign, where mainstream media outlets talked about the impediments they themselves regularly encounter on account of national security laws they otherwise cheer on.
This is not exactly surprising from News Corp, which, despite dedicating hundreds of thousands of words to free speech when it concerns 18C or late cartoonist Bill Leak, seems to have decided early on that Assange was bad news.
See for example the sneering coverage of his revelations in Cut and Paste, or the republished Times column saying Assange was at home with despots and crackpots.
What’s more interesting is the muted coverage in the Nine papers. Save a January opinion piece from Bob Carr (who doesn’t have the most consistent approach to this issue either), there appears to have been no word of explicit defence (even in principle) from the papers all year.
Just before the collegiate back-slapping of the Right To Know campaign, Nine responded to his arrest by publishing a piece which insisted Assange is “not a journalist”.
Which must be news to former journalist Philip Dorling, who, back in 2010, published piece after piece after piece in the then-Fairfax papers all based on the work of WikiLeaks.
If it was good enough for the SMH and The Age back then, what about now?
Has the media betrayed Julian Assange? How do we turn the tide? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section
Julian Assange is in many ways an unappealing character, arrogant, narcissistic, a womaniser. Nevertheless he is an Aussie and the failure of successive Australian governments to plead his case and fight on his behalf is scandalous. He has already been judged guilty in an American kangaroo court and faces life long incarceration there.
When the wife of an American service man drove the wrong way down a British highway and ran into and killed an innocent UK citizen, she fled the country and America has refused to send her back to face trial. Like so many things to do with America, there is one rule for Americans citizens and another for anyone else.
Assange did the world an almighty service by revealing the indifference and cover up of many war crimes committed in America’s illegal wars in the Middle East. He is clearly a broken man and any consign punishment for his so called offence has long been paid by his blighted life Post Sweden. He deserves vastly more support of our press and our government ministers who are too pusillanimous to face down the vindictive American administration.
If the UK government permit Assange’s extradition they should also offer up Prince Andrew.
They’ll probably swap him for some chlorinated chicken
Our hypocrisy on the Assange case is nothing new, unfortunately.
Remember David Hicks?
His US military lawyers assigned to his defence could not believe how the Australian Government was prepared to let him swing.
Ultimately Hicks was largely exonerated and then compensated by us taxpayers.
Then look at the moral compass of our Attorneys General; Ruddock (remember he locked up Gold Coast doctor M Haneef?), then Brandis (happy to see Hicks die in Gutanamo) and now Porter.
Porter will readily hand Assange over to a US execution squad.
I still don’t understand how a non-citizen of the US can be tried for something done outside the US. I get how extra-territorial laws (eg paedophile) can be applied outside to Australian citizens but they don’t apply to US citizens.
If Assange had made it back to Australia, would our govt extradite him to face trial in the US? Of course not, but they are doing nothing to stop it from a third country.
If you not think that this country would have extradited Assange you must have forgotten both PM Gillard & FM Carr many appalling statements on the matter.
Well called. Convenient amnesia!
It was Ben Chifley who said, “There is nothing harder to find than yesterdays paper”.
Not extradite him?
You cannot be serious.
Dougz – may I offer up another?
Mamdouh Habib and his torture in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay after rendition from Pakistan.
I recommend his book, “My Story – the tale of a terrorist who wasn’t”.
If anyone needs further proof that we are little more than a pathetic vassal state of the US.
Read this book!
Agree. Australian Foreign Policy is a craven and cowardly one. This case is clear evidence of our moral failure.
And remember the interference against East Timor in the Timor Sea fiasco.
It was also Australian RAF pilots flying the choppers while PNG troops were killing innocent men, women and children on Bouganville. Hardly a peep about that. They didn’t want to upset the suits at Rio Tinto.
Journos these days must only pick the low hanging fruit otherwise they’ll have a black mark next to their name via the various ‘media officers’ and Chiefs of Staff around the traps. And they all seem to be aligned with the big end of town, whether they are Labor or Liberal staffers.
At least Crikey tries to have a crack.
The persecution of Assange uses the path of one corrupt government doing the bidding of another.
I had to click the link to be sure, but I could tell it would be the Greste article. It still amazes me that a man jailed by a government for doing journalism penned it.
Greste is a real traitor to journalism, we should have left him prison in the middle east.
But the cowardice of other media outlets in the face of US threats (duplicated by our cowardly government) is just disgusting.
Oh, he definitely still deserved to get helped out of that jam, I wouldn’t go that far. A shame it doesn’t look like it was done for any particular principle on journalism or protection of citizens, as we see with Assange.
Greste will forever be in my ‘no click zone’, however.
He’s now in a safe & comfy academic sinecure – almost as if on call to provide ponderous boilerplate bromides when required by the Establishment.
Absolutely no quid pro quo involved there, then.
Arguments can be made against Assange, but to me none of these matter. Arguing one way or the other about it does not change the fact he is an Australian citizen who is being held.
Unlike the University of Melbourne academic, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who is stuck in a prison in Iran, or the ISIS brides and babies, who are stuck in Syria, Assange is in England! One of our allies. So all of the difficulties associated with retrieval, are not present.
However, our government has so little regard, they literally do worse than nothing. For example, a few days ago they approved 300 visas for students from Iran to move here and study while Australia pays. This kind of gift is bizarre, given that one of our University of Melbourne academics is being held in prison over there! So we don’t just do nothing… we actually do worse! We give presents and are prepared to let countries take our people and then give them hundreds of thousands in free education!
Our government is probably signing up beneficial trade agreements for the Euro-less Britain as we speak! Our government not only does nothing in response to the shameful imprisonment of our citizens… it carries on regardless… handing over, visas, free education, beneficial trade deals… while these same countries illegitimately hold our citizens. All of these gifts should stop. All deals should stop. The government should be refusing to play ball until these countries give our people back.
The “Australian press” (in reality the propaganda arm of the neo-liberal corporate state), nonetheless, still cling to their self-appointed role of representing the vast unthinking, deodorised mediocrities of the suburban slave class. As such, Julian Assange, who is an amoral outlier, radical and intellectual, friend of Varoufakis and Zizek, doesn’t fit the narrative of bland, bourgeois consumerist complicity that the mainstream media are desperate to perpetuate.
A round of applause, Rev. And, in recognition, another ‘fun fact’, or two!
On Tuesday of this week, John Radcliffe, Director of the US “DNI”, declassified some documents relating to ‘Russiagate’. You remember Russiagate? The ‘gate’ that pushed the notion Wikileaks had obtained the DNC Clinton campaign emails from the Russians, with the Russians using Wikileaks to assist Trump in his efforts to beat Clinton to the WH.
One headline on those declassified documents goes like this;
“Hillary Clinton cooked up Russiagate to smear Trump & distract from her own scandals, declassified docs suggest”
If you go through some of the detail in those declassified doc’s, which I have, and then put together a time line e.g. of when various ‘drops’ started appearing at outlets like the NYT’s and CNN (incl ‘Guest Appearances’ by people ‘close to the Clinton campaign’, such as Robbie Mook), it’s a very neat fit. In fact, it could hardly be neater.
Then, to add to the ‘narrative’, Comey testified to a Senate hearing this week, on ‘Russiagate’, where he didn’t seem to remember much at all; ‘I do not recall’ on ‘rinse and repeat’.
However, the conclusions drawn by the Senate looked like this;
“The FBI ignored exculpatory evidence, altered documents from the CIA, had interviews where the sub-source disavowed the accuracy of the document, and never submitted any of that information to the court!”
You may also be able to recall, when Russiagate was in full swing, Wannabe Madam President Clinton asking, re Assange; ‘Can’t we just drone the guy?’
And, within the context of young Charles’ piece, above, when Mrs Jones, Sarah Ferguson, interviewed (while starry eyed) Clinton on 4 Corners, after which the Executive Producer, Sally Neighbour, was so moved by Clinton’s presentation of Assange, she hit her twitter account and referred to Assange as “Putin’s BITCH”.
So, Sally Neighbour’s a ‘journalist’, is she?