by BINOY KAMPMARK
Selected days for commemoration serve one fundamental purpose. Centrally, they acknowledge the forgotten or neglected, while proposing to do nothing about it. It’s the priest’s confession, the chance for absolution before the next round of soiling.
These occasions are often money-making exercises for canny businesses — the days put aside to remember mothers and fathers, for instance. But there is no money to be made in saving writers, publishers, whistleblowers and journalists from the avenging police state.
World Press Freedom Day, having limped on for three decades, is particularly fraught in this regard. It remains particularly loathsome, not least for giving politicians an opportunity to leave flimsy offerings at its shrine. These often come from the powerful, the very same figures responsible for demeaning and attacking those brave scribblers who do, every so often, show how the game is played.
Every year, we see reactions often uneven and almost always hypocritical. The treatment of U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich is the stellar example for 2023. Here was the caged victim-hero scribbler, held in the remorseless clutches of the Russian Bear.
It gave U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken an opportunity to do the usual cartwheel.
His 3 May press statement reads:
‘Far too many governments use repression to silence free expression, including through reprisals against journalists for simply doing their jobs. We again call on Russian authorities to immediately release Wall Street reporter Gershkovich and all other journalists held for exercising freedom of expression.’
What, then, of the Australian publisher and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange?
With unintended, bleak irony, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also thought it fitting to rope in the secretary at a World Press Freedom Day event organised in conjunction with the Washington Post. Talking to his interlocutor, the Post’s David Ignatius, Blinken spoke of efforts to “fight back and push back around the world to help journalists, who, in one way or another, are facing intimidation, coercion, persecution, prosecution, surveillance”.
This seemed grimly comical, given that the United States, through its agencies, has engaged in intimidation, coercion, persecution, prosecution and surveillance against Assange, whose scalp it continues to seek with salivating expectation.
In the course of the event, Ignatius and Blinken encountered Code Pink activists Medea Benjamin and Tighe Barry. Both were keen to test the secretary’s lofty assessments of Washington’s stance on free expression and journalistic practice. “Excuse me, we can’t use this day without calling for the freedom of Julian Assange,” exclaimed Benjamin, storming the stage where the two men were engaged in bland conversation. A bemused Ignatius duly approved of Benjamin’s eviction by three burly minders, seeing it all as part of “freedom of expression”.
According to Washington Post chief CIA stenographer David Ignatius, “freedom of expression” is when 3 men each twice the weight of @medeabenjamin aggressively hoist her off stage for calling out the US government prosecution of Julian Assange as they posture about press freedom. pic.twitter.com/m9xUSOtbhp — Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) May 3, 2023
Barry’s own assessment of the whole show summed matters up:
“Two hours and not one word about journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by Israeli occupation forces in Palestine, not one word about Julian Assange.”
Others from the U.S. State Department were also found wanting. A department press briefing from Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesperson, opened with comments about World Press Freedom Day. He echoed the belief in “the importance of a free press. It’s a — we believe a bedrock of democracy”.
Then came a question from Matt Lee of Associated Press:
“…whether or not the State Department regards Julian Assange as a journalist who is — who would be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day?”
Patel’s response did not deviate from the views of his superiors:
“The State Department thinks that Mr Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history.”
With dutiful adherence to a narrative worn and extensively disproved in Assange’s extradition trial proceedings, Patel spoke of actions that “risked serious harm to U.S. national security to the benefit of our adversaries” (there was none) and subjected “human sources to grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention” (no evidence has ever been adduced by the Department of Justice on this point).
When confronted with Gershkovich’s detention as a precedent the U.S. was potentially emulating regarding the publisher, Patel insisted the cases were “very, very different”. The U.S. did not “go around arbitrarily detaining people, and the judicial oversight and checks and balances that we have in our system versus the Russian system are a little bit different”.
Patel has obviously not familiarised himself with those totemic, lugubrious reminders of the U.S. justice system: Alexandria Detention Center (ADC) and the ADX Florence Supermax prison. Or, for that matter, discussions within the U.S. intelligence services on how to abduct or assassinate Assange, where checks and levers are conspicuously absent.
Independent Australia for more