Disclosure Watch: Day 31

With less than two weeks to go until the fourth attempt to put me on trial, we still have no disclosure.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Councillor Watch: Day 227

I hereby invite all Labour members of Durham County Council who believe me to be guilty of the criminal charges against me to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com and say so.

I would not be able to reply to those emails, but every day the names of those who had sent them to me would appear here. So far, I have received none.

Getting Boris Johnson Right

As we prepare for a decidedly non-Singaporean Budget, Boris Johnson knows that, when it comes to tipping the balance, then his appeal has always been to very left-wing voters indeed.

Johnson first became and then remained Mayor of London, against Ken Livingstone on both occasions, by taking the votes of enough people who must have voted for Livingstone twice.

In 2000, Livingstone had stood against an official Labour candidate and with the backing of an alliance of Trotskyist organisations, in what was probably the most successful Trotskyist intervention in electoral politics ever to have been staged anywhere in the world.

Yet eight years later, and again four years after that, many of those same voters preferred Johnson to Livingstone. And now, Johnson has an overall majority as Prime Minister because of the votes of people who had voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, and who would have done so again if it had not been for the Brexit that will not be an issue in 2024.

Although the Conservative Right has always known that he was not one of its own, it did make him Leader, also on the single issue of Brexit. But that was then, and this is now. If they did not like him in 2024, then they could always vote for Keir Starmer. Somebody really should.

But here along the old Red Wall, we have not exchanged one one-party state for another. Ours is the 2020 Vision of a new political party, a new think tank, a new weekly newspaper, a new monthly cultural review, a new quarterly academic journal, and so much else besides.

I will be standing for Parliament again here at North West Durham next time, so please give generously. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.

A Defining Case

Sir Keir Starmer is less critical of the Extradition Treaty than Boris Johnson is, writes John Cook: 

Just as Julian Assange fights extradition by the Trump administration in the court in Belmarsh, Sir Keir Starmer has weighed into the debate on the side of the US government. 

Assange’s legal team have been arguing that the Extradition Treaty is being abused in the pursuit of Trump’s ‘war on investigative journalism’. Jeremy Corbyn questioned Boris Johnson on the case in a recent prime minister’s question time. Even Johnson had to admit that the Treaty is ‘unbalanced’. 

In an astounding intervention in this debate Sir Keir Starmer has managed to repeat the arguments of the US prosecution and give a more resounding endorsement of the Treaty than the Tory Prime Minister. 

Sir Keir told the Huffington Post that the extradition system was ‘very good’ and that judges, in a no jury court, should be left alone to do their job. Yet this is a Treaty in which 200 people have been extradited from the UK to America and only 11 people have been extradited from America to the UK, as even Tory MP David Davis has pointed out.   

The dramatic case of Harry Dunne, the young motorcyclist mowed down and killed by CIA agent Anne Sacoolas who then fled back to the US to avoid justice, underlines how broken this Treaty is: innocent journalists face extradition while guilty CIA agents are protected from extradition by the Trump security state.

This is the state of affairs with which Starmer can see no fault. But Sir Keir does have plenty to say that is critical of the supporters of Julian Assange: ‘...all those in the Assange case or any other case, who say it’s all a big conspiracy are either missing the point that this is an independent judge-made decision or they are implying that our High Court judiciary is corrupt.’ 

Actually no one in the Assange case alleges it’s a conspiracy. Not least because the evidence that the Trump administration is out to extradite Assange for publishing anti-war material about Afghanistan and Iraq is part of the declared case of the US prosecution, stated in the open every day in the court at Belmarsh. 

And better legal minds than Sir Keir Starmer, lawyers who have built international reputations on defending rather than prosecuting the poor, outcast, and powerless, are arguing Assange’s case. Edward Fitzgerald QC said in court only this week that Assange is ‘anti-war and anti-imperialist’ and this is why the US is out to get him. 

Assange’s witnesses will include Noam Chomsky, and Paul Rogers of the Bradford University Peace Studies Centre. This case is one of the great political cases of the century, as John McDonnell recently said. 

It’s a defining case for the left, and Sir Keir, even while he is pitching for left-wing votes, has taken the most conservative position imaginable. This is what Labour Party members can expect from a Starmer leadership: unquestioning loyalty to the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic.

But they can also expect Sir Keir to be a dumb centrist who will be outmanoeuvred by the Tories. As Boris Johnson’s reply to Jeremy Corbyn’s parliamentary question showed, the Tories know the Extradition Treaty is in trouble. How they must be smirking as the gallant knight deploys all his supposed gravitas and authority to defend it. 

Meanwhile the most high profile victim of that act, on the very day of Sir Keir’s cosy interview, is strip-searched twice, handcuffed 11 times, moved between five different cells, and has his legal papers taken from him by the prison authorities.

Julian Assange Did What All Journalists Should Aspire To Do

Patrick Cockburn writes:

I was in Kabul in 2010 when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks first released a vast archive of classified US government documents, revealing what Washington really knew about what was happening in the world. 

I was particularly interested in one of these disclosures, which came in the shape of a video that the Pentagon had refused to release despite a Freedom of Information Act request. 

When WikiLeaks did release the video, it was obvious why the US generals had wanted to keep it secret.

Three years earlier, I had been in Baghdad when a US helicopter machine-gunned and fired rockets at a group of civilians on the ground who its pilots claimed were armed insurgents, killing or wounding many of them.

Journalists in Iraq were disbelieving about the US military’s claims because the dead included two reporters from the Reuters news agency. 

Nor was it likely that insurgents would have been walking in the open with their weapons when a US Apache helicopter was overhead. We could not prove anything until WikiLeaks made public the film from the Apache. 

Viewing it still has the power to shock: the pilots are cock-a-hoop as they hunt their prey, including people in a vehicle who stop to help the wounded, saying, “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” and, “Ha, ha, I hit them.” 

Anybody interested in why the US failed in Iraq should have a look. The WikiLeaks revelations in 2010 and in 2016 are the present-day equivalent of the release by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers, unmasking the true history of the US engagement in the Vietnam War. 

They are, in fact, of even greater significance because they are more wide-ranging and provide an entry point into the world as the US government really sees it. 

The disclosures were probably the greatest journalistic scoop in history, and newspapers such as The New York Times recognised this by the vast space they gave to the revelations. 

Corroboration of their importance has been grimly confirmed by the rage of the US security establishment and its overseas allies, and the furious determination with which they have pursued Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks. 

Daniel Ellsberg is rightly treated as a hero who revealed the truth about Vietnam, but Assange, whose actions were very similar to Ellsberg’s, is held in Belmarsh high-security prison. 

He faces a hearing in London this week to decide whether he will be extradited from the UK to the US on spying charges. 

If extradited, he stands a good chance of being sentenced to 175 years in the US prison system under the Espionage Act of 1917. 

Ever since Assange orchestrated the release of documents through WikiLeaks, he has been the target of repeated official attempts to discredit him or, at the very least, to muddy the waters in a case that should be all about freedom of speech. 

The initial bid to demonise Assange came immediately after the first release of documents, claiming that it would cost the lives of people who were named. 

The US government still argues that lives were put at risk by WikiLeaks, although it has never produced evidence for this.

On the contrary, the US counter-intelligence official who was in charge of the Pentagon’s investigation into the impact of the WikiLeaks disclosures admitted in evidence in 2013 that there was not a single instance of an individual being killed by enemy forces as a result of what WikiLeaks had done.

Brigadier General Robert Carr, head of the Pentagon’s Information Review Task Force, told the sentencing hearing for Chelsea Manning that his initial claim that an individual named by WikiLeaks had been killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan was incorrect.

“The name of the individual was not in the disclosures,” he admitted. 

On the day the WikiLeaks revelations were made public, I had a pre-arranged meeting in Kabul with a US official who asked what the coding on the top of the leaked papers was. 

When I read this out, he was dismissive about the extent to which the deep secrets of the US state were being revealed. I learned later the reason for his relaxed attitude. 

The database Manning had accessed was called SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router), which is a US military internet system. 

After 9/11, it was used to make sure that confidential information available to one part of the US government was available to others. 

The number of people with the right security clearance who could theoretically access SIPRNet was about 3 million, although the number with the correct password, while still substantial, would have been much fewer. 

The US government is not so naive as to put real secrets on a system whose purpose was to be open to so many people, including a low-ranking sergeant such as Chelsea Manning. 

Sensitive materials from defence attaches and the like were sent through alternative, more secure channels.

Had the US security services really been using a system as insecure as SIPRNet to send the names of those whose lives would be in danger if their identity were disclosed, they soon would have run short of recruits. 

The false accusation that lives had been lost, or could have been lost, because of WikiLeaks damaged Assange. 

More damaging by far are the allegations that he has faced of the rape and sexual molestation of two women in Sweden in 2010. 

He denies the allegations, but they have condemned him to permanent status as a pariah in the eyes of many.

The Swedish prosecutor discontinued the rape investigation last year because of time elapsed, but this makes no difference for those who feel that anything Assange has said or done is permanently tainted and that the WikiLeaks disclosures are only a tangential issue. 

Likewise, much of the media views Assange’s character and alleged behaviour as the only story worth covering. 

Although information about SIPRNet and General Carr’s evidence was published long ago, few journalists seem to be aware of this. 

But it is not because of anything that may have happened in Sweden that Assange is threatened with extradition to the US to face prosecution under the Espionage Act. 

The charges all relate to the release of government secrets, the sort of thing that all journalists should aspire to do, and many have done in Britain and the US without being subject to official sanctions. 

Compare the British government’s eagerness to detain Assange with its lack of interest in pursuing whoever leaked the secret cables of the British ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, to the Mail on Sunday last year. 

His negative comments about Donald Trump provoked an angry reaction from the president that forced Darroch to resign. 

Assange has made disclosures about the activities of the US government that are more significant than the revelations in the Pentagon Papers. 

That is why he has been pursued to this day, and his punishment is so much more severe than anything inflicted on Daniel Ellsberg.

Turning Death Into A Medical Treatment

Kevin Yuill is more right than wrong:

Spain and Portugal have both moved closer to legalising euthanasia (in which a physician actively brings about a patient’s death) and assisted dying (in which a physician provides the lethal means for a patient’s death). 

Earlier this month, the Spanish parliament passed a draft bill – supported by Spain’s Socialist government, the left-wing Unidas Podemos and the centre-right Ciudadanos – that will allow euthanasia and assisted dying in certain cases. 

And then, last week, the Portuguese parliament followed suit, and voted through several bills proposed by the ruling Socialist Party. These will legalise euthanasia and assisted dying for terminally ill people. 

There is still some way to go before these bills become law. In Spain, the prospective legislation will now be scrutinised by a parliamentary health committee, before heading to the Senate, and then back to the lower house for a final vote. 

And in Portugal, the parliament’s decision could still be vetoed by Portugal’s conservative president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. Although parliament could then override his decision if it wanted to. 

Nevertheless, these represent significant steps towards the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted dying in both nations. 

If the Spanish and Portuguese governments are successful, they will become the fourth and fifth countries in Europe to legalise euthansia, following the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. 

It should be noted that Spain’s and Portugal’s respective bills are not identical. 

The Spanish draft bill follows the example of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and mandates euthanasia or assisted dying as an option for someone whose life has become ‘unbearable’, due to a serious and incurable illness or a chronic, severe disability. 

His or her doctor would then have to agree with the patient to take this course, and obtain a second opinion from a colleague outside his team. After two weeks, the patient must repeat the initial request, which is then forwarded to a committee for assessment. 

The Portuguese proposal, which comprises five separate bills, is still to be pulled together into a single bill. This makes it difficult to tell at this stage what precisely the legislation will entail. 

What makes the respective developments in Portugal and Spain particularly significant is that, unlike the other European countries in which the right to die has been enshrined in law, these are historically Catholic countries. 

They have therefore long been dominated by traditional Catholic mores. The move to legalise euthanasia and assisted dying can be seen, therefore, as part of a broader attempt to continue to shake off the shackles of Catholicism and embrace a more socially liberal future. 

In this respect, legalising euthanasia and assisted dying follows moves over the past two decades to legalise abortion and gay marriage. It is seen as an opportunity for these two recently elected Socialist governments to flex their liberalising muscles, just as their predecessors did, and move towards a post-Catholic future. 

But while the legalisation of abortion, for example, ought to be celebrated as a victory for women’s reproductive rights and individual freedom, there are good reasons why we ought to resist the move to legalise euthanasia and assisted dying. 

Most obviously, legalising euthanasia and assisted dying can occasionally put pressure on individuals to opt for an early death. 

But there is a more fundamental problem. Legalising euthanasia and assisted dying creates a culture in which death is presented as a form of medical treatment. 

There is, of course, always talk of safeguards, of strict conditions that have to be met before allowing someone to be euthanised or to request assistance to die. 

But such safeguards are always breached, and the strict conditions are always relaxed. We know this because it has already happened in those countries that have legalised assisted dying and euthanasia. 

In Belgium and the Netherlands doctors now routinely end the lives of patients suffering from psychiatric illness, with no underlying physical illness. 

In Belgium, for example, 38-year-old Tine Nys was euthanised by doctors in 2010. Her psychiatric condition consisted of no more than a recent diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome. 

Her family, who have now taken the doctors to court, argue that Nys’s reason for seeking to end her life was no more than a failed relationship. They argue that that falls far short of the threshold of a ‘serious and incurable disorder’ required under Belgian law. 

Or take the ‘coffee euthanasia’ case in the Netherlands. It was revealed during a court case last year that a doctor slipped a sedative into the coffee of her patient, who had Alzheimer’s. 

She then attempted to administer a lethal drug, but her patient resisted, so the doctor enlisted the help of the patient’s family, who held the patient down while the doctor eventually managed to euthanise her. 

The doctor was cleared of unlawful killing on the grounds that the patient had consented to be euthanised, rather than be put in a care home, in a statement written four years before her death. 

Unsurprisingly, Dutch medical professionals are growing uneasy about the the extent to which euthanasia is used, in cases like the above, for those who are unable to consent. 

Medical ethicist Berna Van Baarsen recently resigned from a Dutch regional review board responsible for overseeing euthanasia. 

She criticised the growing frequency with which dementia sufferers are being euthanised on the basis of a written directive they are later unable to confirm orally after losing their faculties. 

Theo Boer, a medical ethicist at the University of Groningen, has even issued a warning to those nations considering legalisaing euthanasia and assisted dying: ‘Look closely at the Netherlands because this is where your country may be 20 years from now.’ 

Examples from outside Europe are also instructive. Canada legalised assisted suicide and euthanasia in 2016 after a woman in the advanced stages of motor-neurone disease took her plea to be euthanised to the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favour. 

Since then, the conditions that have to be met for someone to be euthanised, or to request assistance to die, have been consistently relaxed. 

The province of Quebec, for example, struck down the federal requirement that natural death be ‘reasonably foreseeable’ – that is, imminent. 

And Canada’s justice minister, David Lametti, has already signalled that he intends to expand the right to die to people suffering from psychological conditions or mental illness. 

Again and again a nation enshrines the right to die, stating that it is only to be exercised under strict conditions, and again and again those conditions are relaxed.

Death soon starts to appear as an all-too-acceptable solution to all sorts of medical conditions and, just as worryingly, emotional situations. 

Some in Spain and Portugal might feel that legalising euthanasia and assisted dying indicates the extent to which they have embraced a new era of post-Catholic freedom. 

But the right to die is not an expression of freedom. It is an expression of nihilism. It captures a growing sense that, for some, there is nothing left to live for. 

Of course, there are occasionally cases where killing for compassionate reasons is the right thing to do – there is, as Lord Sumption puts it, no need to change the law, but the infrequent need to break the existing one.

But the quest to legalise euthanasia, rather than addressing a burning need, merely expresses a deep cultural pessimism. We should resist it.

It Is Not Only Assange In The Dock, But Also Journalism Itself

Fraser Myers writes:

Nearly 10 years ago, in 2010, prosecutors in Sweden issued an international warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange, the silver-haired Australian co-founder of Wikileaks – a media outlet which publishes news leaks and classified information from anonymous sources. Assange was suspected of rape, three cases of sexual molestation, and illegal coercion. 

He famously fled the charges by holing himself up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The Ecuadorian government granted him diplomatic status, allowing him to evade arrest. 

He maintained that his biggest fear was that, in being arrested, he could face extradition to the US. Clearly, that fear has been vindicated. Assange’s extradition hearing began in London on Monday. 

The Swedish investigation against Assange was dropped at the end of last year, following a review of the evidence. The outstanding cases against him now relate entirely to his work with Wikileaks – in other words, to his journalism. 

Assange faces 18 criminal charges in the US, including violating espionage laws. If convicted of all charges, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison. 

US authorities had been investigating Assange since at least 2010, when Wikileaks published its most significant series of leaks. These included the ‘Collateral Murder’ footage, the ‘Afghan War Diary’, the ‘Iraq War logs’ and the US State Department’s diplomatic cables. 

The leaks generated an enormous number of stories that were reported by practically every newspaper in the free world.

Three years later, according to the Washington Post, Justice Department officials gathering evidence on Assange said he was unlikely to be prosecuted for publishing the leaks, because then they ‘would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organisations and writers who published classified material, including the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper’. 

It was a different story for Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning – the source of the leaks in question, who worked for the US Army and had access to classified databases. Via Wikileaks, Manning leaked over 750,000 classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents. 

For this, Manning was convicted under the Espionage Act (among others) and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment, though the sentence was commuted by President Obama after six years. 

The Espionage Act was also used on numerous occasions by Obama’s Justice Department to prosecute government officials who leaked to journalists. 

According to the New York Times, in its eight years the Obama administration ‘prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined’. 

But even in an era of government hostility to press freedom, charges were not then brought against Assange for his journalism. 

While it is bad enough that whistleblowers are being prosecuted for making the truth public, what is even more terrifying about the Assange case is that the current Justice Department, under Donald Trump, has the publisher of the leaks in its sights. 

‘For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information’, said Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union in response to Assange’s indictment. 

It gets worse. The case against Assange seeks to present routine journalistic practice as spying. 

He is essentially accused of cultivating a source (Manning in this case) and persuading them to disclose more information. He is also charged with helping Manning to remain anonymous. 

These are normal and sensible things for a journalist to do. They are absolute necessities for investigative journalists to obtain the most information possible and to keep their sources safe – and even more so when your journalism concerns a body as powerful as the US security state. 

The extradition hearings are taking place in Woolwich Crown Court, which is adjoined to HMP Belmarsh and is usually used for terrorism cases. Assange is clearly being treated as an enemy of the state. 

On Monday, the judge asked if the prosecution was arguing that it was not only illegal to ‘aid and abet’ Manning (that is, to collaborate in a normal way that journalists do with sources), but also to ‘obtain’ the leaks, full stop. 

Several reports note that the prosecution was taken aback by this question, but it eventually agreed that, yes, obtaining classified documents could in itself be illegal. 

The implications for all journalists here could not be more clear. If this is held to be true than the Guardian and the New York Times were also involved in a ‘criminal conspiracy’ for working alongside Wikileaks. 

And if this is the standard going forward then every big news organisation would be guilty of committing treasonous crimes. 

As the trial continues, there will be a lot of noise about the potential national-security implications of the leaks, Assange’s ‘problematic’ personality, and whether or not he is a ‘real’ journalist. 

These questions are now irrelevant. It is not only Assange in the dock, but also journalism itself.