[governance] Assange v Obama at the UN

[Riaz K Tayob]

(The best use of time spent at the UN in my memory...)

http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-of-Julian-Assange.html

Transcript of Julian Assange Address to the UN

Published: Thursday 27 September 3am BST

Transcript of Julian Assange’s Address to the UN on Human Rights - given
on Wednesday 26th September - Proofed from live speech

Foreign Minister Patino, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen.

I speak to you today as a free man, because despite having been detained
for 659 days without charge, I am free in the most basic and important
sense. I am free to speak my mind.

This freedom exists because the nation of Ecuador has granted me
political asylum and other nations have rallied to support its decision.

And it is because of Article 19 of the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights that WikiLeaks is able to "receive and
impart information... through any media, and any medium and regardless
of frontiers". And it is because of Article 14.1 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights which enshrines the right to seek asylum
from persecution, and the 1951 Refugee Convention and other conventions
produced by the United Nations that I am able to be protected along with
others from political persecution.

It is thanks to the United Nations that I am able to exercise my
inalienable right to seek protection from the arbitrary and excessive
actions taken by governments against me and the staff and supporters of
my organisation. It is because of the absolute prohibition on torture
enshrined in customary international law and the UN Convention Against
Torture that we stand firmly to denounce torture and war crimes, as an
organisation, regardless of who the perpetrators are.

I would like to thank the courtesy afforded to me by the Government of
Ecuador in providing me with the space here today speak once again at
the UN, in circumstances very different to my intervention in the
Universal Periodic Review in Geneva.

Almost two years ago today, I spoke there about our work uncovering the
torture and killing of over 100,000 Iraqi citizens.

But today I want to tell you an American story.

I want to tell you the story of a young American soldier in Iraq.

The soldier was born in Cresent Oaklahoma to a Welsh mother and US Navy
father. His parents fell in love. His father was stationed at a US
military base in Wales.

The soldier showed early promise as a boy, winning top prize at science
fairs 3 years in a row.

He believed in the truth, and like all of us, hated hypocrisy.

He believed in liberty and the right for all of us to pursue happiness.
He believed in the values that founded an independent United States. He
believed in Madison, he believed in Jefferson and he believed in Paine.
Like many teenagers, he was unsure what to do with his life, but he knew
he wanted to defend his country and he knew he wanted to learn about the
world. He entered the US military and, like his father, trained as an
intelligence analyst.

In late 2009, aged 21, he was deployed to Iraq.

There, it is alleged, he saw a US military that often did not follow the
rule of law, and in fact, engaged in murder and supported political
corruption.

It is alleged, it was there, in Baghdad, in 2010 that he gave to
WikiLeaks, and to the world, details that exposed the torture of Iraqis,
the murder of journalists and the detailed records of over 120,000
civilian killings in Iraq and in Afghanistan. He is also alleged to have
given WikiLeaks 251,000 US diplomatic cables, which then went on to help
trigger the Arab Spring. This young soldier’s name is Bradley Manning.

Allegedly betrayed by an informer, he was then imprisoned in Baghdad,
imprisoned in Kuwait, and imprisoned in Virginia, where he was kept for
9 months in isolation and subject to severe abuse. The UN Special
Rapporteur for Torture, Juan Mendez, investigated and formally found
against the United States.

Hillary Clinton’s spokesman resigned. Bradley Manning, science fair
all-star, soldier and patriot was degraded, abused and psychologically
tortured by his own government. He was charged with a death penalty
offence. These things happened to him, as the US government tried to
break him, to force him to testify against WikiLeaks and me.

As of today Bradley Manning has been detained without trial for 856 days.

The legal maximum in the US military is 120 days.

The US administration is trying to erect a national regime of secrecy. A
national regime of obfuscation.

A regime where any government employee revealing sensitive information
to a media organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or
for espionage and journalists from a media organization with them.

We should not underestimate the scale of the investigation which has
happened into WikiLeaks. I only wish I could say that Bradley Manning
was the only victim of the situation. But the assault on WikiLeaks in
relation to that matter and others has produced an investigation that
Australian diplomats say is without precedent in its scale and nature.
That the US government called a "whole of government investigation."
Those government agencies identified so far as a matter of public record
having been involved in this investigation include: the Department of
Defense, Centcom, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the US Army Criminal
Investigation Division, the United States Forces in Iraq, the First Army
Division, The US Army Computer Crimes Investigative Unit, the CCIU, the
Second Army Cyber-Command. And within those three separate intelligence
investigations, the Department of Justice, most significantly, and its
US Grand Jury in Alexandria Virginia, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, which now has, according to court testimony early this
year produced a file of 42,135 pages into WikiLeaks, of which less than
8000 concern Bradley Manning. The Department of State, the Department of
State’s Diplomatic Security Services. In addition we have been
investigated by the Office of the Director General of National
Intelligence, the ODNI, the Director of National Counterintelligence
Executive, the Central Intelligence Agency, the House Oversight
Committee, the National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the
PIAB - the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

The Department of Justice spokesperson Dean Boyd confirmed in July 2012
that the Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks is ongoing.

For all Barack Obama’s fine words yesterday, and there were many of
them, fine words, it is his administration that boasts on his campaign
website of criminalizing more speech that all previous US presidents
combined.

I am reminded of the phrase: "the audacity of hope."

Who can say that the President of the United States is not audacious?

Was it not audacity for the United States government to take credit for
the last two years’ avalanche of progress?

Was it not audacious to say, on Tuesday, that the "United States
supported the forces of change" in the Arab Spring?

Tunisian history did not begin in December 2010.

And Mohammed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so that Barack Obama
could be reelected.

His death was an emblem of the despair he had to endure under the Ben
Ali regime.

The world knew, after reading WikiLeaks publications, that the Ben Ali
regime and its government had for long years enjoyed the indifference,
if not the support, of the United States - in full knowledge of its
excesses and its crimes.

So it must come as a surprise to Tunisians that the United States
supported the forces of change in their country.

It must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American
teargas out of their eyes that the US administration supported change in
Egypt.

It must come as a surprise to those who heard Hillary Clinton insist
that Mubarak’s regime was "stable," and when it was clear to everyone
that it was not, that its hated intelligence chief, Sueilman, who we
proved the US knew was a torturer, should take the realm.

It must come as a surprise to all those Egyptians who heard Vice
President Joseph Biden declare that Hosni Mubarak was a democrat and
that Julian Assange was a high tech terrorist.

It is disrespectful to the dead and incarcerated of the Bahrain uprising
to claim that the United States "supported the forces of change."

This is indeed audacity.

Who can say that it is not audacious that the President - concerned to
appear leaderly - looks back on this sea change - the people’s change -
and calls it his own?

But we can take heart here too, because it means that the White House
has seen that this progress is inevitable.

In this "season of progress" the president has seen which way the wind
is blowing.

And he must now pretend that it is his adminstration that made it blow.

Very well. This is better than the alternative - to drift into
irrelevance as the world moves on.

We must be clear here.

The United States is not the enemy.

Its government is not uniform. In some cases good people in the United
States supported the forces of change. And perhaps Barack Obama
personally was one of them.

But in others, and en masse, early on, it actively opposed them.

This is a matter of historical record.

And it is not fair and it is not appropriate for the President to
distort that record for political gain, or for the sake of uttering fine
words.

Credit should be given where it is due, but it should be withheld where
it is not.

And as for the fine words.

They are fine words.

And we commend and agree with these fine words.

We agree when President Obama said yesterday that people can resolve
their differences peacefully.

We agree that diplomacy can take the place of war.

And we agree that this is an interdependent world, that all of us have a
stake in.

We agree that freedom and self-determination are not merely American or
Western values, but universal values.

And we agree with the President when he says that we must speak honestly
if we are serious about these ideals.

But fine words languish without commensurate actions.

President Obama spoke out strongly in favour of the freedom of expression.

"Those in power," he said, "have to resist the temptation to crack down
on dissent."

There are times for words and there are times for action. The time for
words has run out.

It is time for the US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks, to cease
its persecution of our people, and to cease its persecution of our
alleged sources.

It is time for President Obama do the right thing, and join the forces
of change, not in fine words but in fine deeds.
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