Craig Murray is a former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who blew the whistle and exposed the torture program of the Uzbek government (which included boiling people to death) as well as the United Kingdom’s complicity and participation in that program. As soon as he went public with the information about the abuses he was fired and accused of gross corruption, an accusation that proved to be made up. He has since worked as an independent journalist and has been a strident voice speaking up in support of persecuted truthtellers around the world. He was the only journalist allowed into the public gallery during Julian Assange extradition trial and has penned a number of incredible reports from the proceedings exposing the sham trial. He has since been engrossed in and remains active in defense of Julian Assange. We spoke with him on November 25th 2022 while he was attending the conference Reading the Word=Reading the World organized by Pekarna Magdalenske mreže in Maribor, Slovenia.
Hello Mr. Murray. Julian Assange is currently incarcerated and is fighting extradition from the UK to the US and it seems that the UK will stop at nothing to complete this extradition. But it is also clear that the US has been exerting significant pressure to induce the UK to extradite him. What is it about Julian Assange that makes the US so interested in him?
There are a number of things. On the very obvious level, he was responsible for publishing the largest-ever leak of US official documents. That in itself is a feat of journalism that is a challenge to the established order. Then also you have to look at what lies behind that, and why these documents were so critically important. They were related specifically to American military and foreign policy and to the casual way with which the US breached international law, breached humanitarian law, and committed war crimes. Given that the US projects this image of the model power in the world, the defender of the rules-based order. When you have all this practical evidence of the American soldiers entering Afghan homes and shooting families while they are sleeping, of American helicopters shooting up journalists, American drone operators laughing as they kill civilians, and the torture happening in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in an organized way around the world, that attacks the fundamental self-belief of the American system where they honestly believe, they genuinely, actually believe they are the moral power in the world and everybody else is evil. Julian held up a mirror to them, he showed them their own stuff. Nothing published was written by him, what he published were their own documents. By showing them their image in the mirror he outraged the American state.
One of the beliefs in the western world is that we live in societies operating under the rule of law and yet from your reports from the court in the Old Bailey it seems as if you are describing a state hell-bent on committing injustice while hiding behind a veil of legality. Is this perception correct?
I think the single most fundamental example is the fact that under the UK/US extradition treaty political extradition is not allowed. That is specifically prohibited in the treaty and yet in Assange’s case, it is clearly a political extradition. To get around this the court has argued that the extradition treaty has no force in UK law because it is not domestic legislation, and they claim that international law does not apply to domestic law. But if the treaty has no force how can you extradite Assange then, because the treaty is the only legal authority for extraditing him. So they are saying that when the treaty says no political extradition is allowed it has no force. On the other hand, when it says it is legal to extradite Julian, then it does have force. So some clauses of the same treaty have legal force and others don’t. That is such a crazy logical contradiction right at the basis of the whole process that you realize very quickly that there is no coherent intellectual basis to what they are doing. And they do not even want to pretend there is a coherent basis. They are merely attempting to carry out a political fait accompli. And the whole judicial process is fake.
My other favorite example is the testimony of Mr. El-Masri who had been kidnapped by the CIA and taken away and tortured. Tortured terribly including with razorblades on the genitals for months before he was eventually returned to Germany, never charged with anything. Mr. El-Masri won his case in the European Court of Human Rights. He won the case against the CIA. Legally there is no doubt his ordeal was real; the ECHR had settled that question. But when he gave evidence in the Assange case the judge ruled that he was not allowed to say, and nobody was allowed to say, that the US committed torture. It was not even allowed to be alleged. Assange’s defense was not allowed to say it even though everybody knows the US is guilty of torture and extraordinary rendition. To have a process where the judge rules that it must not be mentioned is just astonishing. You sit there and things happen before you and it is hard to believe that it is happening. You cannot believe you are hearing this.
There were dozens of moments like that, where the power of the state was simply deployed in this Kafkaesque fashion. Where the court decreed that things that are obviously true must not be spoken.
Do you think the fact that this case is so obviously conducted against everything that a legal process should be is also being done as an intimidation tactic to other people who might follow in Assange’s footsteps? So in that way, it can function as a legal facade to people who are vaguely acquainted with the process but also serve as a terrifying example of what the state is willing to do for the people who are following the process closely.
I think that is absolutely correct. I think it is an example of where the state is not even pretending to be just. The state is showing its ability to crush and kill an individual who crosses it. To destroy them intellectually, morally, and physically. And it is doing that on purpose before our very eyes to demonstrate its power in order to intimidate other people. There is no genuine pretense that this is justice. The state is merely saying, we have this power; we don’t care what you think; we can do this to you.
It turned out that the US apparently planned to just murder Assange.
Those plans were made when he was still the recipient of political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. They thought it might not be possible to get him out of the embassy and arrest him. Mike Pompeo in particular was extremely keen on the idea of assassinating Julian while he was running the CIA. There were also plans to kidnap him and take him to the US.
These are crazy ideas. The idea that you can be murdered for publishing something. Not only for publishing something, but publishing something nobody denies is true. Nobody is making any claim, not even the US, that Wikileaks published false information. They admit that everything Wikileaks has published is true. It is very hard living in a world knowing that is the case. That for publishing true information you can be killed.
The media’s response to these proceedings is also very interesting. This is a journalist, a publisher, one of their own, one would think, and he is being dragged through this Kafkaesque trial and a state’s plot to murder him. And yet the response is quite muted. For a long time, even the supposed leftist media piled on to him and published all manner of fake and lurid stories about him. They disparaged his “disheveled” look and published made-up stories like him smearing feces on the walls in the Embassy and other stories. How does that come about? One would expect they would act in defense of one of their own and yet they seemed to be doing the opposite.
The media reaction has been extremely disappointing. Part of that is because they don’t see themselves at risk. They have no intention of publishing anything that embarrasses the United States. So they think; oh, this is some mad lefty and I am not a mad lefty therefore nothing will happen to me. It is only in the last year or two that the more intellectual journalists and the leadership of the major publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian have changed from attacking Assange all the time to saying; Ok he is a very bad man, but journalism is important. They have started to realize at some level that the same legislation and the same arguments can be used against them if in the future they publish any secrets or classified documents. And of course, that is true and if Julian is guilty of espionage then so are The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and New York Times because at the end of the day they published the same information he published. So there is some realization of that but it is tempered by the thought that what they are doing to Julian is terrible, but they would never do that to me. I think most journalists feel entirely safe. They feel the state won’t touch them. It’s just the “extremists” like Julian that need to worry. Until they feel genuinely in danger themselves I don’t think we will see serious change.
What of Julian Assange’s project, Wikileaks? At the start of this travail in 2010 Wikileaks was very much in focus, even celebrated for doing more scoops than probably all the other media combined. Now however it seems it has disappeared from media discourse completely. Is the work continuing without Assange?
The project very much continues and Wikileaks continues to publish whistleblower material. It is true that it hasn’t had a big high-profile scoop for the last couple of years. The last one was probably the Vault 7 revelations. There had been others and often they are ones that don’t really catch the attention of the western media but catch a lot of attention elsewhere. Like the Saudi Diplomatic Cables, which didn’t get much attention from the western media, partially because they concern Saudi Arabia and so were hushed up because Saudis are big money spenders and advertisers, so the western media rarely take them on. Partly of course because the source material was all in Arabic and so had limited interest outside the Arab world. Who knows when the next explosive revelation will come. They carry on their work, they haven’t stopped working.
It is fair to say that of course there has been a chilling effect. Chelsea Manning went to jail, Julian went to jail, I am tangentially connected but I also went to jail. People don’t want to go to jail and so there has been a realization that if you go to Wikileaks the state is going to come after you particularly hard. It would be crazy to pretend that doesn’t have a certain chilling effect.
Despite the media not doing its job informing people what is really at stake, or indeed even informing people of the basic facts of the matter, people seem to be more and more engaged in actually fighting for his release. Thousands gathered in October to form a live chain around the parliament. Does the movement grow, and do you see it having an effect on policies to the point that they might pressure the government into releasing him?
I think definitely. The movement is growing, I have no doubt about that at all. I have been campaigning for 12 years, ever since he was arrested. And I see bigger, better informed, and more sympathetic audiences than I saw a couple of years ago. Also, there is increased involvement of young people. Generally, there is an increasingly better understanding of the issues that are at stake and that is very important. We are beginning to see that it is beginning to feed into the attitudes of governments worldwide. In Australia, in South America, in Europe, there are signs of the establishment beginning to shift. Particularly the establishment liberal media in every major state is switching from either hostile or ambivalent positions to supporting Julian Assange. A lot of progress is being made. The public climate of understanding is much better and I am buoyed by the reception I get as I go around speaking. How much progress needs to be made and how you make the popular will influence the political class and get them to do something is a much bigger question.
What could people do to join the movement? How does one organize to help support Assange, especially for people not in the UK or the US?
There are Assange groups worldwide in many places and in many surprising places. There is a good chance there is already a local Assange group. Even if there isn’t you can still raise the issue with the groups of which you are already a member and ask for it to take a public position on Assange. Of course, you can take part in street activism or in other public activities designed to bring attention and if you can get local media attention for those it helps the cause.
There is also the question of lobbying; of writing to your members of parliament, your ministers. People think it is a dull thing to do but actually, it is surprisingly effective because for most members of parliament their number one interest in their whole life is to get elected again and keep their job. If a number of people write to them on one subject suddenly they realize that their constituents are really interested in this, and they must do something about it or they might not vote for them again. I’ve seen it many times and it is interesting that it does not take a huge volume of letters from a variety of people. If they think there is a lot of public interest they will respond. It is not too hard to organize that. There are ways forward and there are things people can do. All these individual activities add up.
Once you get five or six people together you can start local actions and that develops its own dynamic. People in the group will have different ideas about what to do and things grow. Activism is a great thing in itself. You may well find that the group formed initially on climate change starts to get active on Julian Assange as well. It can also be the other way around. You may form a group of friends because you are worried about Assange and you might become active on different social issues as well.
I think there is a real danger that in this consumerist society we get divorced from the community of peers and we lose a lot of social empathy so I think that activism is a good in itself. Personally, I do believe that we will get Julian freed. It is very similar to the campaign for the release of Nelson Mandela. It was worldwide and it created an enormous amount of pressure and it ultimately succeeded. Maybe it will take some time but for everybody involved, the acts of doing things for the right reasons, to try to affect society, to be socially involved, to be reaching out to people in your community for interests beyond your own personal interests. I think that will improve your life and improve your community’s life so I think the action itself is a virtue.
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