Assange: Enema of the State
by John Kendall Hawkins
Crikey, he gives them the shits.
Hillary once said -- even before the 2016 election --"Can't we just drone him?"
Maybe you're thinking she was just joking, like Obama that time at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2010, when he cracked that he'd take out the Jonas Brothers with a Predator drone strike, if they got grabby with his daughters. Laughter all around. Of course, the joke was on them, because there was no drone warfare program at the time, WINK. Obama wouldn't acknowledge the existence of such drone usage until he zapped out Anwar al-Awlaki a year later, and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman,shortly thereafter, both Americans. (America made it a family trifecta when a US raid in Yemen killed Al Awlaki's 8-year-old American daughter, Nora, a week after Trump's inauguration.)
The MSM darn near bust a gut. (The joke's been told over and over since. Punch line here.)
Julian Assange had warmed the Press up nearly a month earlier when he released the top secret "Collateral Murder" video into the wilds of the public imagination. You could hear all kinds of laughter from the gunship soldiers machine-gunning away at civilians, like Chuck Connors, Russian mole, in the film Embassy. Rat-a-tat-tat! Who knew the War on Terror could be so funny? You don't even want to call The Hague and file a report, you're laughing so hard.
And he followed up that gag with a bing-bang-boom fusillade: the Afghan War Logs (all those unreported haw-haw casualties); the Iraq War Logs had Abu rolling over in his graib, with laughter; Cablegate released all that global goss and started the Arab Spring (Tunisia 2011); the Guanta'namo Files-- so many Code Reds the bulls went insane; the Spy Files demonstrated "the industrialization of global mass surveillance"-- what an effing hoot; the Syria Files made Assad shoot off laughing gas at the rebels; elites fell over themselves, like drunken clowns, when Assange published "the secret draft of the TransPacific Partnership (TPP)"; the Saudi Cables brought on the Curly Shuffle in Riyadh.
You almost couldn't believe that a guy who one wag once described as having had a "wild" Tom Sawyer-like" childhood could cause so much angst. Why, he even spent his early years in an honest-to-goodness Jumping Frog of Calaveras County atmosphere on a small island, called Magnetic. How could he be found so unattractive by so many? When he moved to mainland Oz for his teen years he became John Connor, where he had his whole future in the rearview mirror, and spent his time in MILNET "hacking Pentagon generals' emails," he tells Ai WeiWei in the new collection of testimonials and supportive documents that make up In Defense of Julian Assange edited by Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler (OR Books, 2019).
Assange was determined to rip off the veil of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) from an early age. And it's another peculiarity that he, along with fellow Aussie John Pilger, have been so successful in penetrating to the core of the fascist heart that drives American foreign policy. Peculiar, because Australia, unlike America, has no Bill of Rights, so no fire in the belly for constitutional protections, and the press here is weak and getting weaker--thanks to the recent passage of "retention" laws that seem very much like the US Espionage Act that Assange will face in America. Yet, Pilger, in an interview with ex-CIA operative, Duane Clarridge, has totally exposed the ugly, roaring heart of Empire. Assange has laid out its blueprints.
So much has been written, movies have been made, you could make the case that Assange's life is over-exposed, and that, ironically, this champion of personal privacy and governmental transparency, hasn't had any real alone-time for quite a while and has been swarmed with layers of surveillance designed to break his spirit. Outside the Ecuadorian embassy police spent years poised to pounce. Inside, there microphones and cameras everywhere. "It was the Truman Show," Assange is quoted in the book.
In the introduction to In Defense, Nils Melzer, a special UN rapporteur on torture, declared after visiting Assange May 2019 at Belmarsh that:
In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.
Clearly, the State intends on having the last laugh. Sadists like their punch lines.
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