Wikileaks founder will remain in Belmarsh prison while judges seek further meaningless ‘assurances’ from US

The High Court has this morning again denied justice to persecuted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Despite admitting that the US is denying Assange’s rights to free speech and is pursuing him in a way that it would not pursue one of its own citizens, judges have decided to keep Assange in Belmarsh prison while it asks for further ‘assurances’ that the US will not kill him – even though there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.

Shamefully, the court has also declined to admit fresh evidence of US plots to assassinate him, claiming that the evidence is irrelevant because the US’s incentive to murder Assange would not apply if it had him in custody, as Declassified UK has pointed out:

Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.

The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.

Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn

— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024

The extradition case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century in US retaliation for Wikileaks exposing its war crimes in Iraq and as a deterrent to other journalists who might expose its crimes in future.

Shame on the UK and its travesty of justice and democracy. Free Julian Assange. Protect real journalism.

SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.

If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.

A report from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) outlines how the government agency has been encouraging governments, tech platforms, establishment media outlets and advertisers to work together to censor huge swaths of the Internet. The 97-page “disinformation primer,” obtained by conservative firm America First Legal under the Freedom of Information Act, purports to be fighting fake news. However, much of the organization’s focus appears to be on preventing individuals from finding information online that challenges official narratives and leads to increased questioning of the system more generally.

The document calls for regulating video games and online message boards, steering individuals away from alternative media and back towards more elite-friendly sites, and for governments to work with advertisers to cripple organizations that refuse to toe official lines financially. Furthermore, it highlights government-backed fact-checking groups like Bellingcat, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council as leaders in the fight against disinformation, despite the fact that those groups have close connections to the national security state, which is an overwhelming conflict of interest.

The news that a government agency is promoting such a program is worrying enough. However, we shall also see how USAID itself has promoted fake news to push for regime change abroad.

Misinformation – and Inconvenient Facts

USAID’s primer identifies three kinds of information that it wishes to combat. In addition to misinformation (false information spread by those who believe it to be true) and disinformation (false information proliferated with intent to deceive), it states that “malinformation” is also a serious threat. Malinformation is speech that is factually correct but has been deemed misleading or taken out of context. Under this broad definition, any reporting or arguments, no matter their accuracy, could potentially be throttled online if it is deemed unhelpful or inconvenient to USAID and its interests.

While the report spends much time condemning enemy nations – particularly Russia and China – USAID appears much more concerned with clamping down on independent media and open spaces where alternative information and opinions can be found. As they write:

Discussions on disinformation and misinformation often revolve around assumptions of state actors driving the issue. However, problematic information more regularly originates from networks of alternative sites and anonymous individuals who have created their own ‘alt media’ online spaces.”

The report identifies platforms like Reddit, Discord and 4Chan as “conspiracy websites” that can help groups create “populist expertise” to develop alternative opinions and challenge official U.S. government narratives. These, alongside gaming websites, must be challenged and marginalized.

While wishing to stop disinformation is, in principle, a noble goal, the past decade has seen U.S. government agencies work hand-in-glove with Silicon Valley corporations to throttle the reach of alternative media that scrutinize and challenge their power and prop up establishment outlets that bolster Washington’s ambitions. All of this has been done under the banner of fighting fake news. MintPress News has been under constant attack from these groups, particularly since the 2016 election. This is hinted at in the report, which bemoans that “Because traditional information systems are failing, some opinion leaders are casting doubt on the media.”

Ruining Those Who Go Against Us

Chief among the methods USAID outlines to suppress independent media is what it calls “advertiser outreach” – in effect, threatening advertisers into cutting ties with marginal or niche websites. “In order to disrupt the funding and financial incentive to disinform, attention has also turned to the advertising industry, particularly with online advertising,” the report explains. “Cutting this financial support found in the ad-tech space” would, it continues,

[O]bstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online. Efforts have been made to inform advertisers of their risks, such as the threat to brand safety by being placed next to objectionable content, through conducting research and assessments of online media content.”

Additionally, USAID states it hopes to “redirect funding to higher-quality news domains, improve regulatory and market environments, and support innovative and sustainable models for increasing revenues and reach.” In other words, it wants to use its power to move consumers away from alternative media and back into legacy news outlets that have seen a massive cratering in public trust precisely because viewers have been exposed to online content that highlights how poorly they cover the news. The report takes as a given that the establishment press are standard-bearers for truth rather than gigantic, multibillion-dollar international empires with long histories of publishing demonstrably false or biased stories.

Another recommended method is to “psychologically inoculate” the population, “prebunking” disinformation before it arises by predicting it and taking steps against it before it occurs. This might include “discrediting the brand, the credibility and reputation of those making false allegations” – a line that might suggest launching attacks against whomever USAID deems bad actors.

The report also suggests tracking users who view mis-, dis- or malinformation and redirecting them to curated YouTube videos debunking or arguing against those positions.

The Election That Broke The System

The Internet and social media were not always the powerful political and social force they are today. But by the 2008 and 2012 elections, they had grown influential enough to prove decisive. Barack Obama’s team skillfully microtargeted voters on Facebook and other sites, helping him to two successive terms in the White House.

However, by 2016, the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis left tens of millions of Americans angry and desperate. Populist forces from both the left and the right arose to challenge the political consensus. While the Democrats were able to successfully neutralize any left-wing challengers, Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and score an unlikely electoral victory despite virtually the entire establishment media endorsing his opponent.

Trump’s success alarmed the establishment in Washington, which quickly identified social and alternative media as the key driving force behind Trump’s victory. The Internet, they decided, was far too powerful to be left alone. It was no longer a fringe space but a major driving force in shaping public imagination and debate.

In the wake of the 2016 election, a huge campaign against the scourge of fake news was launched, as platforms like Google, Facebook and YouTube changed their algorithms in order to demote “marginal” content and promote authoritative sources. The upshot of this, however, was that high-quality alternative news sites saw their traffic decimated overnight, and establishment media like CNN and NBC News, which had been failing in the online arena, were promoted to the top of the search results.

One example of this was the case of PropOrNot, a shadowy group that claimed to have used sophisticated analytical software to identify hundreds of websites that were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” Included on the list were WikiLeaks and (then) Trump-supporting websites like The Drudge Report, libertarian vehicles like Antiwar.com and The Ron Paul Institute, and a host of more left-aligned outlets such as Truthout and The Black Agenda Report. MintPress News was also included. Therefore, while PropOrNot’s list did include many fake news websites, it also represented a blacklist of dozens of sites critical of the establishment Beltway.

PropOrNot’s findings were heralded and signal-boosted the world over by establishment media, keen to see their rivals censored. The mounting pressure led Google and other platforms to drastically alter their algorithms to suppress alternative media. Almost overnight, MintPress News lost around 90% of its Google search traffic and over 99% of its reach on Facebook.

However, it was not just radical alternative media that were punished. Democracy Now! saw its Google search traffic fall by 36%, and The Intercept fell by 19%. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in an interview that his platform intentionally throttled traffic to liberal news outlet Mother Jones explicitly because of its mildly left-of-center outlook.

It is now known that PropOrNot was not a neutral, independent organization but was very likely the creation of Michael Weiss, a nonresident senior fellow at NATO think tank the Atlantic Council. Thus, the whole hysteria about (foreign) government interference in elections was sparked by a quasi-governmental organization itself.

Since 2016, social media platforms have moved increasingly closer to the U.S. national security state. MintPress News investigations have uncovered how hundreds of former agents from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and the State Department now work in key positions at Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter, helping to shape those companies’ content policies. Some USAID officials have made the jump to social media as well. Mike Bradow, for example, left his job as deputy director of policy at USAID in 2020 to become a misinformation policy manager at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The Home of Coups and Disinformation

The revelations about how a government agency wishes to push such a radical censorship agenda are alarming enough. Worse still, USAID itself has a long track record of promoting disinformation in order to advance U.S. interests.

In 2021, the organization was behind an attempted Color Revolution (a pro-U.S. insurrection) in Cuba. USAID has long interfered in Cuban politics, devising a myriad of schemes, including infiltrating the country’s hip-hop scene and attempting to organize it as a revolutionary, anti-government force.

Eleven years earlier, USAID secretly created a Cuban social media app called Zunzuneo. None of the app’s tens of thousands of users were aware that the U.S. government had secretly designed and marketed it to them. The idea was to create a great service that would take over Cuba and slowly start feeding the population regime-change propaganda and directing them to protests and “smart mobs” aimed at triggering the overthrow of the government.

USAID was also intimately involved in the 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela, which saw the temporary overthrow of democratically-elected president Hugo Chavez and his replacement with a pro-U.S. dictator. Since then, USAID has consistently attempted to subvert Venezuelan democracy, including by funding self-declared president Juan Guaidó. The organization was even at the center of a disastrous 2019 stunt where U.S.-backed figures attempted to drive trucks full of USAID “aid” into the country, only to light the cargo on fire themselves and blame the government. Few in Venezuela or abroad fell for their performance.

Strange Friends and Worrying Enemies

The report sets its sights on gamers and online video games, calling for them to be regulated in the same manner as social media platforms. Extremists, they note, can spread false information on gaming platforms such as Twitch, which “enable users to coordinate to grow followers and spread content to large social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.” “In this way, platforms that cater to very niche and small audiences have significant influence,” they explain.

It also warns that satire can be a major source of misinformation. While this is potentially true, the past decade has seen notable satirists that critique power and the status quo, such as Lee Camp, chased off multiple platforms, suggesting that certain types of satire might pique the ire of censors far more than others.

Perhaps almost as worrying as what USAID designates as problematic areas in need of regulation is whom it identifies as the “good guys” in the fight against false information. One of them is the Atlantic Council, the Defense Department-funded think tank with no fewer than seven former heads of the C.I.A. on its board. The Atlantic Council was founded as a NATO offshoot project and still acts as the organization’s intellectual headquarters. Yet USAID describes them simply as a “nonpartisan organization that galvanizes U.S. leadership and engagement in the world, with allies and partners, to shape solutions to global challenges,” lauding them for their “international work” and their “democratic defense against disinformation.”

Other groups identified as leading the fight against disinformation are Graphika and Bellingcat, two more groups that purport to be independent fact-checkers. However, as MintPress has previously detailed, they are quietly funded by the U.S. government and serve as mouthpieces for Washington, disseminating reports attacking official enemies and casting Western nations as leading the fight against misinformation.

In addition to this, the report mentions the German Marshall Fund’s Hamilton 2.0 dashboard as a useful tool, despite the fact that the previous Hamilton dashboard was very publicly exposed as useless in identifying Russian bots and fake information. As the Twitter Files revealed, Twitter/X’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, complained that the Hamilton dashboard caught barely any Russian bots and that virtually any conservative American, Canadian or British person was liable to be labeled as such. Roth dismissed the Hamilton dashboard as complete “bullshit.”

While the Hamilton dashboard was ineffective at identifying genuine sources of fake news, it certainly did provide some form of intellectual justification for suppressing large numbers of people who challenged the establishment status quo from social media. And that is a microcosm of the larger fact-checking and anti-fake news industry as a whole. Trust in media and public institutions, more generally, has been crumbling for decades. But the response from Washington has not been to attempt to win back the public’s support. Rather, it has attempted to stamp out any alternative ideas or means of communication in order to maintain its grip on power. The release of this report into the public domain and the revelations about how USAID understands misinformation and wishes to deal with it will likely do nothing to repair public confidence in the government. In fact, it is clear to see why they did not want this released in the first place.

Feature photo | An Agency for International Development flag flies in front of USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C. Graeme Sloan | Sipa via AP

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

The post USAID’s Disinformation Primer: Global Censorship in the Name of Democracy appeared first on MintPress News.

Conservative MPs Miriam Cates and Ranil Jayawardena attended the European Congress of Families conference (ECF) which ran from 15-17 September 2023 in Croatia, as speakers in a programme that included members of far-right parties, organisations designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as hate groups, and several of those named in a European Parliament report into the funding of religious extremism with dark money from the US radical right and Russia.

Both Cates and Jayawardena were outliers at the ECF for not having publicly called for a rolling back of sexuality and reproductive rights, and they have distanced themselves from the more strident positions of the recently rebranded and Russian-funded World Congress of Families.

However, Cates' speeches at other conferences and the manifesto of her New Social Covenant initiative include some of the same motifs used by the anti-gender movement.

In the Background: a Hundred Million Dollar Network

Tip Of The Iceberg (TOTI), a report published in 2021 by the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, assembled financial data between 2009 to 2018 to detail how more than $707million was funnelled into a network of more than 50 anti-gender actors operating in Europe with the intention of rolling back human rights in sexuality and reproduction under the guise of supporting the traditional family.          

A key organisation in this network bridging the US and Russia is the World Congress of Families (WCF) which rebranded in 2016 with its umbrella organisation the International Organization for the Family (IOF). One of ECF’s headline speakers was the IOF's chairman Brian Brown, other speakers included IOF members Keith Mason and Allan C Carlson, WCF founder and International Secretary.

Brian Brown, who is also on the board of another key organisation, CitizenGO, is on TOTI’s list of the thirteen most influential individuals in the anti-gender network. TOTI’s section on Russian “laundromats” covers Brown’s involvement with WCF board member Alexey Komov.

Komov serves as the External Relations Representative of the Russian Orthodox Church , is a board member of CitizenGO and is the focal point for international projects at the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, since its founder, the oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, was banned from Europe and much of the West due to sanctions after the annexation of Crimea. US intelligence services considered Malofeev to be “Putin’s right arm for operations of political interference in Europe”.

In total the report identifies $186,400,000 of Russian funding for anti-gender activities with $77,300,000 from the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation.

Demonstrating its close ties to Putin’s regime, in 2014 the WCF was due to gather in Moscow, inside the Kremlin Palace, but because of international sanctions, the WCF rebranded the event as the “Large Families and the Future of Humanity Forum”, while keeping the same location, date, speakers and participants.

The largest European funder of anti-gender activities is the Jerome Lejeune Foundation (JLF) which spent $120,167,509 in the time period covered by the report. David G Lejeune who established the foundation’s US chapter, and was its President from March 2017 to February 2023, was a speaker at the ECF conference.

Another ECF speaker, David Ibáñez, represented Political Network for Values (PNfV), an ultra-conservative platform that connects far-right politicians and activists from Europe, Latin America, US and Africa, and is yet another influential organisation named in TOTI, receiving funding from the JLF.

PNfV has hosted events sponsored by organisations designated as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups by the SPLC, according to an analysis by Ipas, an international organisation working to advance sexual and reproductive rights. Among the groups are Family Watch International, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), The Center for Family and Human Rights and the IOF. ADF provided $23,300,000 in funding to the network identified by TOTI.

Sharon Slater, the head of Family Watch International and a PNfV board member, was revealed by openDemocracy to have been deeply involved in the political organising behind the infamous Uganda law that criminalises LGBTQ+ people.

PNfV has close links to Hungarian politics, having previously been chaired by a former minister and member of the country’s parliament, Katalin Novák, who left her position with the organisation in 2022 to be sworn in as Hungary’s President. In 2020 the Hungarian Government provided $140,000 to PNfV and the next PNfV Trans-Atlantic Summit in November 2021 was held in the Hungarian Parliament.

Another speaker, Nicola Speranza, is Secretary General of the Federation of Catholic Family Associations, which is listed by TOTI as an anti-gender organisation and has produced joint reports with the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM). The ECPM has hosted events against abortion, surrogacy and in support of “reintegrative therapy”, a rebranded version of gay conversion therapy.

Diego von Stauffenberg, founding member of Crossroads Pro-Life, was at the ECF conference representing Rivada Networks, a US-based communications technology business financially backed by Peter Thiel.

Right Wing Connections

The ECF conference featured numerous European politicians from the hard and far-right: Margarita De La Pisa Carrión, Victor González Coello de Portugal and Hermann Tertsch are all members of the Spanish far-right Vox Party which is named by TOTI as a beneficiary of anti-gender funding and is described as the “political expression” of CitizenGO and HazteOir, “one of the most important organisations on the far-right political spectrum” due to its extensive social media activity.

Three members of Georgio Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party, Eugenia Maria Roccella Minister for Family, Natality and Equal Opportunities, Nicola Procaccini MEP, and Cinzia Pellegrino of the Italian Senate also spoke at the event. 

Croatian MP Ladislav Ilčić, whose party openly advocates for a ban on abortion and artificial reproduction, was also a speaker at the conference. He has claimed “health education in schools is used to introduce homosexual propaganda” because “It teaches the children that homosexual acts are equally valuable and natural as heterosexual”, continuing “The Church condemns behaviour of homosexuals as evil and it has the right to say it.”

Also speaking was another Croatian MP, Vesna Vučemilović from the Homeland Movement, a coalition of minor right-wing and far-right parties which opposes abortion and same-sex marriage.

Jayawardena and Cates were approached for comment and asked what the values of the IOF are, as they understand them.

Jayawardena’s office replied, “Ranil was present for a short part of the conference – to set out his own views – and our records do not indicate that he shared a platform with anyone representing the International Organisation of the Family.”

Cates’ office was also keen to stress that speaking at the conference didn’t constitute sharing a platform with other speakers. “She spoke on a panel.  Nobody from that organisation was on the panel.  They were all MPs or MEPs.”

Up to 2,000 gather for ‘last chance’ to stop disgraced US case allowed so far by courts – but system seems stacked against Wikileaks founder, press freedom and public’s right to know

Protestors outside the court on Tuesday

Up to two thousand protesters gathered to demonstrate outside the Royal Courts of Justice today in London, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his legal team are fighting in what may be their last chance to avoid his extradition to the US, where the Biden administration wants to lock him in a high-security prison for the rest of his life for the ‘crime’ of exposing the actions of the US military.

Wikileaks embarrassed the US by revealing the wanton slaughter of Iraqi civilians – and the US wants its vengeance. To the UK’s shame, successive UK governments and courts have been all too eager to let the Americans have their way, despite the US case collapsing in disgrace when its main witness to Assange’s supposed ‘hacking’ of US systems admitted he had been lying the whole time – and plots by senior US officials to assassinate him. The admission should have seen the US laughed out of court, but UK judges granted its request anyway.

Protesters massed to show their solidarity with the Australian journalist, who has been imprisoned in Belmarsh prison since 2019 after a long effective incarceration in the Ecuadorian embassy while the UK and US governments conspired against him and even bugged supposedly sacrosanct meetings with his lawyers:

Wikileaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson gave the protest crowd a lunchtime update on the ‘absurd’ proceedings, which kept observers down to a handful despite the importance of the case, preventing even human rights groups from attending:

As with all the hearings so far, the case against Julian Assange appears to be stacked. After the farce of the collapsed US case being granted anyway, Assange’s appeal was denied by a judge with deep security service connections.

In the current case, one of the two judges was a lawyer for the Secret Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Defence, with clearance for access to ‘top secret’ information – and the other judge is the twin sister of right-wing former BBC chair Richard Sharpe, who resigned after an inquiry into his arrangement of an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson before his appointment.

Activist Steve Price, who represented Skwawkbox at the demo, summarised the day:

On a cold day thousands gathered to lobby the court and raise public awareness of this situation. This morning at the RCJ, the chant of the day was “There’s only one decision – no extradition!” The demo was noisy, very colourful, with a visible but low-key police presence and many passing drivers honking horns in solidarity.

Speakers included three Labour MPs – Richard Burgon, Zara Sultana and Apsana Begum, alongside Chris Hedges, Andrew Feinstein, Stella Assange and Julian’s brother and father, as well as lawyers, Reporters without Borders (RwB) and Wikileaks’ editor-in-chief. John Pilger, the great Australian journalist, was remembered with great affection.

Julian’s brother said the Australian Parliament voted by two thirds criticising the UK and USA and demanding he be released and returned to his home country. Two of the lawyers, as well as RwB noted that this case has enormous implications for freedom of the press globally and there are obvious parallels with how journalists have been deliberately targeted by Israel in Gaza.

The magistrate back in January 2021 decided Julian should be released solely on the grounds that he might kill himself, but this was overturned by the Home Secretary. There are a number of legal grounds his team will advocate for refusing the extradition. He has been detained in Belmarsh (in solitary confinement) for nearly 5 years, spent 7 years before that confined in the Ecuadorian Embassy. His health has deteriorated, it’s a form of torture, they’re slowly killing him. He is believed to be too ill to attend court today?

They want to extradite him for the crime of journalism, for exposing their hypocrisy, their dirty secrets, their war crimes.

Keir Starmer, the ‘human rights lawyer’, as he never tires of reminding everyone, has never spoken in Assange’s defence. As Director of Public Prosecutions, his actions are murky – because the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) destroyed its records of them and destroyed notes of what it destroyed. However, it is known that in the case of another extradition the US wanted – that of autistic hacker Gary McKinnon – Starmer flew in a rage to the US to apologise to his US government contacts as soon as then-PM Theresa May quashed the extradition on humanitarian grounds. The CPS and Sweden also destroyed records of their communications when the CPS was pressuring Sweden to continue to pursue Assange’s extradition there – no doubt a stepping stone to getting him to the US – on discredited rape allegations. Despite the destruction of evidence, it is known that the CPS told Swedish counterparts not to ‘dare’ drop its request and refused Sweden’s offer to come and interview Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Assange’s family and team have asked everyone who can make it to the court to continue demonstrating throughout the duration of the hearing to try to keep up pressure on the authorities. The Establishment’s relentless assault on Julian Assange is a war not just against him, but against press freedom and the right of the public to know what its supposed representatives are doing and to hold them to account.

The UK justice system has a last chance to show it is fit for purpose. If it happens, it looks as though justice will have to be wrung out of it. Absolute solidarity with Julian Assange and all persecuted journalists everywhere.

SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.

If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.