Julian Assange is the most important political prisoner in the world. He is currently in Britain's high-security Berlmarsh prison charged by the United States with 18 criminal charges that could sentence him to up to 175 years in prison. The United States demands extradition to try him, and the London Courts issued the formal extradition order in April 2022, which was ratified by the Secretary of the Interior of the United Kingdom, Priti Patel, who in June 2022 signed the order to extradite him.
On February 20 and 21, 2024, the High Court in London must decide whether to give Julian, his family and a team of lawyers the opportunity to appeal the extradition decision made by the British Justice. For this reason, on the 20th there will be a world day to demand his freedom. From La Marx International we oppose the extradition of Julian Assange, and we demand his immediate freedom, which is why we join the international call under the slogan Free Assange!
Marxists defend Assange's Freedom
Julian Assange is imprisoned and detained for defending democratic freedoms and civil rights that were under threat around the world during the Bush Administration between 2001-2009. After the attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration took advantage of the global "shock" caused by the events to launch a global political, economic and military counteroffensive against workers. and the people of the world.
Bush Administration officials called this strategy the "Project for a New American Century" (PNAC). They stated that the world's great problem was "terrorism," and that a "global war on terror" had to be launched. . To do this, the Bush Administration pointed out the existence of an "axis of evil" made up of Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, and Syria that had to be defeated.
In turn, the Bush Administration stated that the countries of the "axis of evil" had "Weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) that they could use to carry out attacks equal to or more terrible than the PNAC September 11 attack. To achieve this objective, it established a major military operation to prepare a far-reaching and long-term war, with the aim of putting a stop to the revolutionary processes in the Middle East with the aim of disciplining the workers and peoples of the world.
In turn, the PNAC strategy sought to overcome the serious crisis that opened in capitalism in the year 2000. In that year the crisis reached Wall Street as a result of the crisis of the LTCM (Long Term Management Capital) investment fund, the explosion of the "dot.com" bubble, and the bankruptcy of Enron that brought the crisis to the heart of global capitalism and plunged the economy into recession. The objective of imperialism was to carry out a burning of capital that would allow us to overcome the crisis, but it was impossible for the Bush Administration to carry out this strategy with the opposition of the North American people. To muzzle the people of the United States, the PNAC strategy included the constitution of a repressive regime: The Patriot Act regime.
The specter of the Patriot Act regime
The Bush government attempted to establish a deeply undemocratic regime within the United States based on the Patriot Act, which sought to limit the democratic freedoms of the US people and silence any voice that wanted to oppose it. The Patriot Act regime was a de facto constitutional reform, which put the Executive Branch, the army and the security services at the center of the US political regime, attempting to erase with a stroke of the pen the historical democratic achievements of the North American people.
Seeking to install the closest thing to a military dictatorship, the PNAC attempted to impose a regime change through a set of laws and decrees that produced a significant curtailment of democratic freedoms, an attack on immigrants, especially those of Muslim origin, and the criminalization of The opponents. The PNAC involved a broad definition of "terrorist" that encompassed almost all activists in the world, and the enactment of "anti-terrorist laws" that were passed in all countries of the world imposed by imperialism, NATO, and the UN.
The Amendments that enshrine the freedoms of the United States Constitution were suspended, the Authorization for Use of Force (AUMF) was issued, which changed the historical rule that only Parliament can declare war, from which war was declared. The president can dictate by decree, which left the United States Parliament reduced to a decoration. Military courts were created, with which the authority of the judiciary disappeared in one fell swoop, replaced by courts run directly by the Pentagon that tried prisoners imprisoned for "terrorism". The "Department of Homeland Security" (HS, Homeland Security) was created , a bureaucracy with thousands of officials that acted as a parallel government, and an immense system of clandestine prisons managed by the Pentagon and the President called "Black Sites."
The first 20 prisoners arrived at Guantánamo on January 11, 2002, but Guantánamo was only a small part of a huge system of detention camps that began to develop globally and included more than 100 prisons around the world with 25 in Afghanistan. , 20 in Iraq, 50 in 28 other countries, and 17 ships as floating prisons. Among the best known were Bagram in Afghanistan; Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper in Iraq; the Temara interrogation center in Morocco; etc
The PNAC involved the privatization of the United States Army, the massive use of mercenaries with private armies to assassinate, kill or torture children, women, the elderly, and any vulnerable sector of the people, what Donald Rumsfeld, the head of the Pentagon, called the "use of unconventional capabilities". The Blackwater private army was created under the leadership of white supremacist Erik Prince. The Pentagon's Northern Command (USSC North Command) was created, which absorbed the armed forces of Canada and Mexico, thereby erasing the sovereignty of both nations with a stroke of a pen.
In turn, global and massive espionage was established by the NSA (National Security Agency) through the intervention of telephones and the Internet globally. Thousands of telephone numbers and internet accounts of presidents, legislators, judges, citizens, social and political organizations, etc. They were intervened with the excuse of "detecting terrorists" violating all the guarantees and civil rights of the entire world.
The PNAC was a strategy at the service of dealing a hard blow to the North American people and the struggles of the people of the world who dared to challenge the power of the capitalist powers , promoted from the US, but adopted by all the governments and capitalist states of the world. in a political-military front that was articulated around NATO and the military Coalition that carried out the invasion of Iraq.
In 2001, NATO took over Afghanistan, defeated the Second Palestinian Intifada, and began the invasion of Iraq in 2003. With the capture of Baghdad, George W. Bush declared the triumph of the PNAC from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln with the phrase "Mission Accomplished". It seemed that the PNAC and the Patriot Act regime were going to impose themselves as a dictatorship in the United States, and globally. But the plans of the Administration and the Neo Conservative fascist lunatics that made up the Bush Administration government had to face a revolution that shook the entire world against their plans.
Soon a tremendous global struggle against the PNAC and the Patriot Act regime broke out with massive mobilizations in Europe against the war, in the United States for freedoms, which were combined with the National Liberation War of the people of Iraq. One of the visible heads of this entire movement against the PNAC and the Patriot Act regime was Julian Assange who appeared as one of the most important visible heads facing the espionage and censorship that the specter of the Patriot Act regime tried to impose on the whole world.
Julian Assange visible head of the global opposition to the PNAC
When the Bush Administration began the PNAC offensive, Julian Assange was a 30-year-old Australian hacker and programmer who, as a teenager, had been a member of a hacker group called International Subversives, which advocated for free software and the Internet, which led to that in 1991 the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home. In 2006, Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, a website dedicated to exposing the serious violations of human rights and civil liberties committed by the PNAC and the Patriot Act regime.
At that time there was strong censorship and repression of all press, culture, book publishing and the internet. The libraries were requisitioned, and there could not be books among them that favored "terrorism", for example the Koran was banned . There were no images of the Iraq War, television networks like CNN were prohibited from showing images. On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks published a video from July 14, 2007 in which US soldiers were seen shooting Reuters reporter Namir Noor-Eldeen, his assistant and 9 people from an Apache helicopter, a publication that shocked to the world and put the US military apparatus in check.
On July 25, 2010, the newspapers The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel made public a set of some 92,000 documents on the Afghanistan War from the years between 2004 and 2009, which came to them through WikiLeaks. The documents included events that until now were not known, such as civilian casualties caused by United States soldiers, connections between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban. The United States accused WikiLeaks of endangering civilian lives, but Julian Assange responded that the White House was informed a week before publication.
On October 22, 2010, WikiLeaks made public the " Iraq War Logs" , 391,831 documents leaked from the Pentagon (headquarters of the United States Department of Defense) about the Iraq War and its occupation between on January 1, 2004 and December 31, 2009. These documents revealed the systematic use of torture, death tolls in Iraq, and death tolls in the invading coalition forces. The Guardian reported that on October 21 it had received all the documents, and on October 22, 2010 Al Jazeera, half an hour ahead of schedule, released the leak to the entire world, considered "the largest leak of classified documents in history."
According to Julian Assange, the published Iraq War documents reflect the truth of the Iraq War with hundreds of reports alleging abuse, torture, rape and even murder systematically carried out by the police and army allied to the invading forces. The reports, supported by medical evidence, describe the situation of prisoners being blindfolded, tied up, receiving blows, lashes and enduring electric shocks, all of which is known to the Pentagon, the military and political authorities of the United States and NATO.
Julian Assange public speech
On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks leaked to the international press a collection of 251.18735 cables or communications between the US State Department and its embassies around the world, and on April 25, 2011, WikiLeaks released photographs and reports about the interrogations that took place in the Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, where human rights were violated. It was revealed that Afghan and Pakistani people had been imprisoned without any trial and that there were prisoners as young as 14 years old.
On March 7, 2017, Wikileaks leaked a program for hacking phones, computers and televisions by United States espionage and the CIA, including a program called "Year Zero", which included computer weapons to hack phones and devices. produced by American companies, such as Apple's iPhone, Google's Android system, Microsoft's Windows or Samsung televisions with Internet connection, which became covert microphones through which to spy on their users.
The leak of diplomatic documents from the United States, the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon revealed the crisis of the Pentagon, the United States Armed Forces, and its security services. The existence of divisions and crises within these institutions was evident, leading different sectors to make incriminating documents public by secretly sending them to Wikileaks. The leaks revealed the imperialist policy that affected many countries with cables related to Bolivia, or the extrajudicial executions in Colombia called "false positives", etc. It soon became known that American soldier Bradley Manning helped WikiLeaks access and disclose more than half a million classified US documents that revealed abuses within the Pentagon towards soldiers, and especially women.
Julian Assange's activity was the tip of the iceberg of an enormous global movement. The PNAC counteroffensive and the NATO armies suffered a beating from the national liberation struggle of the people of Iraq and the Middle East who carried out a system of urban guerrilla warfare, similar to what we see today in the National Liberation War of the Ukrainian people, or the people of Palestine. The military defeat of NATO opened the Pentagon crisis, the confrontation of the high command with the government over the promotion of the head of the Pentagon Donald Rumsfeld to mercenary armies such as Blackwater, which was combined with a gigantic global mass mobilization.
In the United States, vast sectors defended democratic rights, like many of the most oppressed sectors such as African Americans against the Bush government's horrific response to Hurricane Katrina, or the mobilization of Latinos on May 1, 2006. The defeat of the PNAC led to the crisis of the Bush government, and in fact the country was in the hands of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton parliamentary commission that organized the electoral transition from the Bush government to the Obama government.
The defeat of the PNAC and the Patriot Act regime meant the triumph of the Fourth American Revolution. The first was the independence of 1783, the second was the Civil War of 1865 that unified the country and abolished slavery, while the third was the Civil Rights Movement that defeated the racial segregation regime and was combined with the mobilizations which, together with the struggle of the Vietnamese people, caused the imperialist defeat in Vietnam. The triumph of the 4th American Revolution opened a world revolutionary situation that we are experiencing, and triggered all the new social, political and economic movements and processes that we are experiencing in the 21st century.
With the triumph of the American Revolution, capitalism exploded. Global Corporations went bankrupt after the 2006 defeat of the US military and the NATO Coalition. The disaster that caused the explosion of the subprime bubble with fifty financial companies in bankruptcy, and millions of embargoes was combined with the political crisis of the Bush government, which led to an African-American president coming to power for the first time, forming a government as "progressive" as possible with an African American: Barak Obama. In this way the imperialist circles tried to stop the revolutionary rise by making the masses believe that the oppressed had come to power.
The crisis of capitalism of the years 2007/08 bankrupted Global Corporations and Wall Street. The bankruptcy was so serious that imperialism had to take measures of historic magnitude such as the Bailouts . With the Bailouts, world imperialism sought to rescue the bankers and owners of the Global Corporations and after the G20 Summit in London in 2009, all the capitalist governments of the world implemented and supported the bailouts. But as poverty, misery, and inequality skyrocketed, revolutionary waves began to break out globally .
After the withdrawal of the NATO armies that began in 2010, the Arab Spring broke out in the Middle East, a process that was part of a global revolutionary wave that included general strikes in Greece, the Indignados movement in Spain, the 11-M Movement in Chile, massive worker strikes in China centered in the province of Guandong. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) broke out, a mass movement with its epicenter in youth that exploded throughout the country, occupying squares in states, counties, and cities in protest.
The effects of the North American Revolution were more than visible. It was incredible and exciting to observe that when the events of September 11, 2001 occurred, the south of the Manhattan neighborhood in New York was a mountain of rubble and the Pentagon was master of the situation, carrying out a campaign of terror. Only 10 years later, that same area of southern Manhattan was a breeding ground for hundreds of activists who organized and united through social networks to fight against capitalism. Occupy Wall Street launched the slogan "we are the 99 percent ", a movement that represented an immense advance in the consciousness of a sector of the mass movement that aimed to denounce and confront the dominant classes identified as the "1 for hundred".
On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, United States, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American boy, was murdered. When the Sanford Police released George Zimmerman, Trayvon's murderer, a wave of indignation and mobilizations erupted that shook the country and became global. Three African American activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, launched the call Black Lives Matter (BLM in English, "Black Lives Matter") that quickly spread throughout the country and achieved mass mobilizations. The movement took up the fighting tradition of the Black Panthers, Malcom X, or Martin Luther King.
In October 2017, complaints from women victims of sexual assault and harassment began, targeting, among others, the American film producer and executive Harvey Weinstein. This is how the #Me Too Movement began and expanded the 4th wave of the feminist movement that achieved victories such as legal abortion in Ireland and Argentina and imposed the battle against sexual harassment and abuse that expanded to the music industry, the sciences, academia, workplaces, politics, etc. The development of all these movements, and how the defeat of the PNAC occurred are elements that have been analyzed in the text "The XXI Century American Revolution" by Daniel Campos, where they were studied more closely and thoroughly.
The criminalization and persecution of Julian Assange
BLM incorporated a new element that had not been sufficiently deepened in Occupy: self-defense and armed self-organization to confront the repression of the police and state forces.
The second revolutionary wave that began in 2019 resumed the experience of developing self-defense and popular armies led by women against ISIS in Rojava in northern Syria , self-defense in the mobilizations in Lebanon and Iraq, the emergence of the Front Line bodies in the revolutions in Hong Kong, Chile and Colombia starting in 2019, which would be deepened in 2021, as well as the formation of detachments of Partisans in the National Liberation Revolution of Ukraine to fight against the Putin's occupation armies.
The 3rd revolutionary wave began in March 2022 when Putin's invasion of Ukraine was defeated. But the entire revolutionary wave combined the struggle of the most oppressed sectors with the rise of the working class: The phenomenon of "New Unionism" in the United States, the rebirth of the phenomenon of unionization, and the emergence of thousands of new union leaders, was They triggered protests by food processing plant workers, drivers, carpenters, Hollywood technicians, university assistant professors, etc. One of its most important milestones was the triumph of Amazon workers in Staten Island, Amazon's only logistics center in New York, which triggered a wave of new union activists throughout the country. All of these movements were joined by the 3rd Intifada, the movement of the armed popular militias of Palestine, which on October 7, 2023, defeated the Zionist armies.
Imperialism was not going to forgive Julian Assange for having been one of the visible heads of the revolution that launched all these social movements against capitalism and imperialism. First, they invented causes of sexual abuse against him, which the English justice itself recognized were false, with the aim of silencing him and imprisoning him. Then the persecution began, Julian requested asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, but then the capitalist government of Lenin Moreno suspended Julian's protection, and the London police took him prisoner. Then, the United States justice requested extradition. None of the great "left forces" or the Progressive International (PI) with its court of legislators and officials developed an operation to protect Julian. On the contrary, Julian found himself helpless and helpless when the imperialist states went looking for him.
For all this, on February 20 we must mobilize around the world for the Freedom of Julian Assange. The only real and effective support that Julian has is the support of the workers, people, social, popular and democratic organizations of the world. We Marxists will be in the front row in this fight in each country. A single cry must travel the world: "Free Assange!" until he achieves his well-deserved freedom.
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