Tribunal to combat disinformation on the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is facing another extradition hearing on 27-28 October. The US authorities are appealing an earlier ruling that Assange should not be extradited to the US on health and safety grounds.
Now the US and its allies are to be put on ‘trial’ by a tribunal. They are accused of committing atrocities, for example in Iraq, and of torture at Guantánamo Bay. While the tribunal possesses no legal powers, it’s intention is to set the record straight and demonstrate that Assange is not the criminal here.
The tribunal – referred to as the Belmarsh Tribunal, after the prison where Assange continues to be held – will commence proceedings on 22 October. There are 20 members of the tribunal, including:
- Historian Tariq Ali
- Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
- Former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa
- Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
- Former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon
- Award-winning film maker Ken Loach
- Hellenic parliament member Yanis Varoufakis
- Investigative Journalist Il Fatto Quotidiano Stefania Maurizi
What it’s all about
Via a press release, Tariq Ali explains the tribunal’s origins:
The Tribunal takes inspiration from the Sartre-Russell Tribunal, of which I was also a member. In 1966, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre issued a call for a War Crimes Tribunal to try the United States for crimes against humanity in their conduct of the war in Vietnam. A number of us were sent to North Vietnam to observe and record the attacks on civilians. I spent six weeks under the bombs, an experience that shaped the rest of my life.
“The tribunal convened in Stockholm in 1967. The jury members included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, Vladimir Dedijer, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, and David Dellinger, among others. The aim was not legal but moral: to bring the crimes to the notice of the public.
“In London on 22 October 2021, we will do the same. Assange must be freed and the many crimes of the War on Terror placed centre stage.”
Read on...
Jeremy Corbyn says it’s all about accountability:
Wikileaks exposed crimes of US empire in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. At the Belmarsh Tribunal, we will turn the world the right way up, placing crimes of war, torture, kidnapping and a litany of other gross human rights abuses on trial.
The perpetrators of these crimes walk free, often still prominent public figures in the US, U.K. and elsewhere. They should be held accountable for the lives they destroyed and the futures they stole.
To understand why the imprisonment of Assange is a travesty of justice, it’s important to appreciate some of the many crimes, including war crimes, exposed by WikiLeaks.
War crimes
As reported on by The Canary, during one of Assange’s extradition hearings Reprieve human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith provided details of some of the war crimes committed by the US.
In a March 2019 article, the Canary’s John McEvoy reported that “according to a highly sensitive 2006 UK military report into Iraq, UK and US war planning “ran counter to potential Geneva Convention obligations””. He added how a “US cable from April 2009 [published by WikiLeaks] shows UK business secretary Peter Mandelson “pushing British oil and other corporate interests in Iraq””. A “2009 cable also reveals that the government of former PM Gordon Brown “put measures in place to protect [US] interests” during the Chilcot inquiry into the invasion of Iraq”. Another “US cable also shows how the US and UK governments “rigged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to stop it being able to hold [Tony] Blair and [George W.] Bush accountable for the crime of aggression over Iraq””.
In 2018, journalist Mark Curtis reported that a WikiLeaks published cable revealed that former foreign secretary David Miliband helped “the US to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at US bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year”.
More allegations
In 2016, The Canary reported on several allegations of US war crimes based on testimony given by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Another article in The Canary referred to a cable published by WikiLeaks that “suggested that the US had intended to convince Spanish officials to interfere with the National Court’s judicial independence”. This was in connection with an allegation “that the [six US officials] accused conspired with criminal intent to construct a legal framework to permit interrogation techniques and detentions in violation of international law”. The cable shows that the US secretly pressurised the Spanish government to ensure no prosecutions took place.
The Canary also reported on allegations of a cover-up relating to hundreds of UK war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. These included UK involvement in the use of torture centres in both countries. One such centre was Camp Nama where it’s alleged:
British soldiers and airmen helped operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion. Many of the detainees were brought there by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons.
Britain was also implicated in the extraordinary rendition (kidnapping and imprisonment) of detainees.
Underestimating deaths
As for the number of Iraqis killed during the war, The Canary reported on figures far higher than the official estimates.
According to journalist Nafeez Ahmed:
the US-led war from 1991 to 2003 killed 1.9 million Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million: totalling just under 3 million Iraqis dead over two decades.
Ahmed added that the overall figures of fatalities from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s – from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation – constituted:
around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the ‘war on terror’), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.
Back to front
The prosecution of Assange is arguably political. Indeed, journalist John McEvoy points out how mass media has responded to recent news of a plot to kill Assange with “ghoulish indifference”.
UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has commented how Assange has been “systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed”. In other words, the Belmarsh Tribunal will at the very least help remind us that it’s the perpetrators of war crimes who should be prosecuted – not the person who helped reveal those crimes.
As such, Assange should be released forthwith.
Featured image via Veterans for Peace / Wikimedia Commons
We know everyone is suffering under the Tories - but the Canary is a vital weapon in our fight back, and we need your support
The Canary Workers’ Co-op knows life is hard. The Tories are waging a class war against us we’re all having to fight. But like trade unions and community organising, truly independent working-class media is a vital weapon in our armoury.
The Canary doesn’t have the budget of the corporate media. In fact, our income is over 1,000 times less than the Guardian’s. What we do have is a radical agenda that disrupts power and amplifies marginalised communities. But we can only do this with our readers’ support.
So please, help us continue to spread messages of resistance and hope. Even the smallest donation would mean the world to us.
-
Show Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to leave a comment.Join the conversationPlease read our comment moderation policy here.
I wish they would all take their personal safety seriously! They are shitting on Keef and the Unilateral Commission’s patch! They are messing with some seriously deranged, dangerous Terrorists! USA, is only the second worst Terrorist organisation, by a fine margine to, Israel in the First!
They really should not be walking about as though 2015 to 2020 and GE17 & GE19 never happened! There are dark forces at play that made the above and Julian Assange happen, they won’t like pissing on their parade and shitting on their patch, a great deal!
Still! BRAVO! Kudos to them, I hope they make some impact and another step closer to undoing The Starmersstruppen’s hard work and lies!
It’s hard to understand how Stooge 3, The UK, are still holding Julian, on an entirely baseless and collapsed case!?
I wonder who will suffer the most “bloodied noses”, from Wikileaks, once Julian is released, I hope, or the dust settles, I think, will it be the Conservative Party TORIES or the Neo-New-Labour Party TORIES? I reckon by far the latter has a lot more to lose in greater volumes of it, even if we look at Blair and Starmer alone, that’s just looking at the stuff already leaked and in the public domain. Let’s see what happens at the tribunal, hopefully some kind of an impact via the grapevine.
I agree with you. It’s time to free Julian and for Biden to come to his senses here in the US and stop trying to get the UK to send him here. Free Julian now!
If ever evidence of why Great Britain is no longer Great, view this national embarrassment..
The Tories will never be forgiven for this just as Blair will never be forgiven for making us a poodle….
The tragedy of course is that the Tribunal will have little or no effect.
The lapdog media will ignore the tribunal and it’s findings and vilify the members of the tribunal.
The media is owned by corporate war mongers and they will follow orders to the letter.
That’s not to say that it shouldn’t still go ahead, if anything that should be the main reason for having the tribunal in the first place.
There should and must be a body that examines this unnecessary and devastating war, so that there s a permanent record of the atrocities committed by the US and in particular the UK armed forces.
Then at least some people may stop believing the lie, that we have armed forces that are balanced and just or that the war was in any way justified.
Future generations will need at least one source that will tell the truth, even if they will have trouble finding it.
I fear you are spot on. It will be a few people on social media and the indie news and that will be it.
The PEOPLE have sold themselves out for absolutely nothing, Free and Manufactured Consent given with open hands, now they are blind and deaf to facts and truth, only able to think through MSM and MSSM, and only able to think about the latest iPhone/Galaxy S, Latest Acrylics for their fingers, latest Fast/Furious clip on mudguards, etc, etc, etc.
There are certain decisions made by the ‘Unilateral Commission’ that no force on earth can currently change, Jeremy Corbyn was never going to be PM, Julian Assange is either going to US or not coming out of Belmarsh alive, Keef Stalin will be the next PM of the UK, The USA, Israel and UK, aka The 3 Stooges, and allies can wave a hand at the UN & ICC and say piss off, beggars the question ‘Who are the UN/ICC behind closed doors!’
With regards to the tribunal and how it is conducted and what facts are laid out in the table it might be the ‘Unilateral Commission’ or one of their puppets, who kicks up a stink about something a bit too close for comfort and accidentally kick it into their own controlled MSM domain.
Bah, wishful thinking let’s see what happens and how British “Justice” deals with an innocent man and a completely collapsed case, only fact that is still standing is that the USA wants him in Guantanamo!
This is all about fearmongering by the tiniest handful of “War Pigs”: “Speak/Share the TRUTH, and this is what happens to YOU!”
Imagine that group as our Cabinet, instead of the current bunch.
You might cry.
I agree with everything above, the article, and previous comments. It’s good to know there ARE still good people in the world.
We might be excused for wondering if we watch corporate media.
Sadly Gnu, the good people have become the enemy of the ‘state’ and the number one target of the Criminal Elites/Establishment.
With both leading Parties Full of Reagan/Thatcher’s flavour of Neoliberalism, it will take many years to change. I wonder if The PEOPLE are Scared or Sleeping! I think scared and perfectly divided, look for example the Anti-Trump protest since then the fearmongering and division has been turned up a notch and ‘we’ are scattered and afraid.
Then on The “Left” we are our own worse animes, falling out at the drop of a hat, we could battle together 2015 to 2020 and be on good terms and say something, a thought, belief, idea, etc and you are blocked, no explanation or discussion, utter, utter madness.Imagine being on a battle field with someone like that.
We need to drop our shit forget about “The Left” and “The Working Class” both meaningless in the modern world and focus on The PEOPLE. There are The PEOPLE (Poor to Rich), The Criminal Elites/Establishment and The Criminal Elites/Establishment’s Puppets (Poor to Rich), and they are by far the minority, just good at corruption, keeping us divided, addicted to MSM, MSSM, Materialism and Manufactured Consent.
All we need to do is Unite across our differences and work together until Good People are celebrated once again, rather than Hunted Down.
HEAR!!! HEAR!!!
“Us an Them”!
Thanks to Canary and Tom Coburg for bringing this to public attention. However, no matter how many papers I read, I fear that this is near the only place I will hear about its deliberations or findings!