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US Lawmakers Renew Call for Biden to Drop Charges Against Julian Assange
"The bottom line is that journalism is not a crime," said Rep. Jim McGovern. "The stakes are too high for us to remain silent."
Nov 09, 2023
Imploring the Biden administration to "not pursue an unnecessary prosecution that risks criminalizing common journalistic practices," a bipartisan group of 16 U.S. lawmakers have signed a letter dated Wednesday to President Joe Biden urging him to end the attempted extradition of Julian Assange and drop all charges against the jailed publisher.
"Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, faces multiple charges under the Espionage Act due to his role in publishing classified documents about the U.S. State Department, Guantánamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," states the letter, which is led by Reps. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). "He has been detained on remand in London since 2019 and is pending extradition to the U.S., having lost his appeal of the extradition order in the courts of the United Kingdom."
Assange—who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues—published materials, many of them provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, exposing U.S. and allied war crimes, including the "Collateral Murder" video showing a U.S. Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs.
"Deep concerns about this case have been repeatedly expressed by international media outlets, human rights, and press freedom advocates, and members of Congress," the lawmakers wrote. "In April of this year... members of the House argued to Attorney General Merrick Garland that 'every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home.'"
The new letter has been signed by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Az.), Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Matthew Rosendale (R-Mont.), and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Ina message last month inviting congressional colleagues to sign the letter, McGovern and Massie explained that their goal is"to strongly encourage the Biden administration to withdraw the U.S. extradition request currently pending against Australian publisher Julian Assange and halt all prosecutorial proceedings against him as soon as possible."
McGovern said last month in a statement to The Intercept that "the bottom line is that journalism is not a crime."
"The work reporters do is about transparency, trust, and speaking truth to power," he added. "When they are unjustly targeted, we all suffer the consequences. The stakes are too high for us to remain silent."
The new letter follows last month's official state visit of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, an Assange supporter who raised the jailed journalist's case with President Joe Biden, insisting that "enough is enough." A cross-party delegation of Australian lawmakers also traveled to the U.S. ahead of Albanese's visit in an effort to pressure the Biden administration "to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange."
Imploring Americans to put themselves in Australian shoes, former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce told reporters after meeting with U.S. officials during the lawmakers' trip: "Imagine if the Australian government said, 'Hey you in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as far as we're concerned, you committed a crime, and you're going to Canberra where we're going to send you to jail for 175 years,' you'd be up us like a rat up a drainpipe."
According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in London's notorious maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, where he is now.
If fully convicted of the Espionage Act charges, Assange—who fathered two children with attorney Stella Morris, whom he married last year, while holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy—could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.
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Ben & Jerry's, CodePink Co-Founders Arrested in DC Demanding Freedom for Julian Assange
"It seems to me," said Ben Cohen, "that, right now, unless things change, and unless we change them, freedom of the press is going up in smoke."
Jul 06, 2023
Ben Cohen, the co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's, and Jodie Evans, who co-founded the peace group CodePink, were arrested Thursday outside Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. for blocking an entrance to the building to protest the U.S. government's prosecution of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Cohen and Evans were arrested while other demonstrators chanted slogans demanding freedom for Assange, the 52-year-old Australian facing extradition from the United Kingdom to the U.S., where he has been charged with Espionage Act violations and could be imprisoned for up to 175 years if convicted on all counts.
"It's outrageous. Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent. And yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years."
"It's outrageous. Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent. And yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years. That is torture," Cohen said during the protest. "He revealed the truth, and for that he is suffering, and... we need to do whatever we can to help him, and to help preserve democracy, which is based on freedom of the press."
"It seems to me that, right now, unless things change, and unless we change them, freedom of the press is going up in smoke," Cohen asserted before lighting an effigy of the Bill of Rights in four places.
"One for each year that... Assange has been held in solitary confinement," he explained.
Evans asked, "Why do we have freedom of the press?"
"Because there needs to be someone reporting the truth about the violence of power," she said. "When you don't have freedom of the press and no one's telling the truth, it weaponizes your capacity to feel, to have compassion and empathy."
"If you don't have the full story and if your heart is being manipulated with lies, then we're all lost," Evans added. "How can we have peace in the world if we're just drowning in lies?"'
Assange—who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues—published classified U.S. government documents, many of them provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Some of the files exposed U.S. and allied war crimes, including the "Collateral Murder" video showing a U.S. Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs.
According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in Belmarsh Prison, where he is now.
After a U.K. court last month rejected Assange's appeal against his extradition order to the United States, press freedom groups renewed calls for U.S. President Joe Biden to drop the charges against him.
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Drawings by Guantánamo 'Forever Prisoner' Abu Zubaydah Expose Details of US Torture
The co-author of an "explosive" new report featuring the prisoner's work said that "his drawings are the ultimate repudiation of the failure and abuses of torture."
May 11, 2023
A report published this week featuring previously unreleased drawings by Abu Zubaydah—a 52-year-old Saudi who has been imprisoned by the United States for more than 20 years at CIA "black sites" and Guantánamo Bay—offers new insight into torture suffered by a man caught up in a case of mistaken identity.
The report—entitled American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo—is based on sketches and descriptions by Zubaydah and other War on Terror torture victims and was led by Seton Hall University law professor Mark Denbeaux and University of California, San Francisco psychiatry professor Jess Ghannam, with the help of Seton Hall law students.
"Despite the efforts of the federal government, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, to conceal evidence of the actual operation of the 'enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) deployed on detainees in dark sites and at Guantánamo, a steady drumbeat of disclosures has provided an unparalleled view into this disgraceful episode in the nation's history," the report states.
"Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people."
The report notes that Zubaydah's drawings "viscerally convey the brutal reality the CIA sought to hide with its calculated destruction of video recordings of torture conducted by its agents," and "dovetail with the recent accounts of Dr. James Mitchell, a chief architect of the torture regime, who both wrote a book on EITs and testified in hearings on Guantánamo."
"These sources, together with the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, provide the most complete—and compelling—account to date of America's torture program" in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the publication states.
\u201c\ud83d\udc40 Previously unseen drawings show the various torture methods used by the CIA against Abu Zubaydah, including physical/sexual assault, waterboarding, and more. \n\nContrary to their claims, the report details how the FBI was complicit in his and other detainees' torture.\u201d— CAGE (@CAGE) 1683816713
Born in Saudi Arabia, Zubaydah moved to the West Bank in Israeli-occupied Palestine as a teenager. He was captured by CIA, FBI, and Pakistani intelligence agents in Pakistan in late March 2002. Shot in the thigh, testicle, and stomach during the raid that led to his capture, Zubaydah—who was mistaken for a high-ranking al-Qaeda member—was transferred to CIA "black sites" in Pakistan, Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Northern Africa, and Diego Garcia. In September 2006, he was sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he remains imprisoned.
Zubaydah was the first so-called "high-value" detainee to be tortured by U.S. agents, who treated him as a human guinea pig.
"Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people," Denbeaux told The Guardian, which on Thursday posted the report along with an articleby Ed Pilkington on Zubaydah's experience.
Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet gave the green light for U.S. agents to torture Zubaydah—even after learning that the prisoner was cooperative. During one discussion on the matter, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly remarked: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
\u201cImagine: 21 yrs without trial in #CIA black sites and #Guantanamo; entire medieval torture program created to \u201cbreak\u201d him but they found no #AlQaeda link & no #9/11 prior knowledge. In fact, he\u2019s compensated by 3 EU nations for facilitating CIA torture 1/ https://t.co/8KhD6nPX2m\u201d— Moazzam Begg (@Moazzam Begg) 1683807758
Zubaydah was subjected to the interrupted drowning technique known as "waterboarding" 83 times; rape under the pretext of "rectal feeding"; shackling in excruciating "stress positions"; sleep, sensory, and food deprivation; confinement in small boxes; exposure to extreme temperatures and loud music; death threats; beatings and being slammed into walls; sexual and religious humiliation; and other abuses.
Most of the torture techniques approved by the George W. Bush administration—which included waterboarding, deprivation, stress positions, the use of loud music and dogs, slamming into walls, solitary confinement, and exposure to extreme temperatures—are illegal under both domestic and international law.
In addition to these approved EITs, U.S. military and intelligence personnel subjected terrorism detainees—many of them innocent men, women, and children—to additional abuses, including homicide, rape, imprisonment of relatives as bargaining chips, exposure to sometimes lethally extreme temperatures, and brutal beatings.
"Sexual assault was never approved, nudity was never approved, humiliation by having women present was never approved, and nor was subjecting someone to prolonged torture to the point of exhaustion or worse," Denbeaux told The Guardian.
"Prisoners died of torture at Asadadad, Bagram, and Gardez in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, Camp Whitehorse, Basra, Mosul, Tikrit, Bucca, and an unidentified facility in Iraq."
According to a 2005 report by the National Library of Medicine—a federal agency—based on reviews of military documents, 26 War on Terror detainees died as a result of "criminal homicide," although the paper did not say how many prisoners died on the battlefield or while in U.S. custody.
"Prisoners died of torture at Asadadad, Bagram, and Gardez in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, Camp Whitehorse, Basra, Mosul, Tikrit, Bucca, and an unidentified facility in Iraq," the report stated. "These cases do not include deaths due to medical neglect, mortar attacks on prisons, or the shootings of rioting prisoners."
Zubaydah has never been charged with any crime or tried. He is what's known as a "forever prisoner," as the U.S. has no plans to release him.
Last month, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for Zubaydah's immediate release while asserting that his continued imprisonment violates the "fundamental rules of international law" and "may constitute crimes against humanity."
\u201cCredit to @ClareDalyMEP for amplifying the UN Working Grp on Arbitrary Detention's decision in our client #AbuZubaydah's case, calling for EU states to step up and offer resettlement. Urgent action needed to end crimes against humanity, torture & arbitrary detention. #Guantanamo\u201d— Helen Duffy (@Helen Duffy) 1683811253
Thirty men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo. Only one has been convicted of a crime. Ten have cases pending before what former military prosecutors have called "rigged" military tribunals, while 16 have been approved or recommended for release.
The administration of President Joe Biden—who has expressed intent to close Guantánamo—has overseen the transfer of a handful of Gitmo prisoners to third countries.
Denbeaux said that "Abu Zubaydah is the poster child for America's torture program."
"He was the first person to be tortured, having been approved by the Department of Justice based on facts that the CIA knew to be false," Denbeaux noted. "His drawings are the ultimate repudiation of the failure and abuses of torture."
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