Throughout Amal Clooney’s statement Jeremy Hunt sat impassively, as though the elephant in the room had

not been named. Conference attendees helped him out, by declining to ask him how Amal Clooney’s legal
caution squared with his earlier pledge to support the extradition of Julian Assange.

Should the UK comply with the US extradition request, according to Professor of International Law and UN
Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, Julian Assange faces absolutely no chance of a fair trial. What he
can expect in the US, Melzer warns, is a politicised show trial, with what Professor Melzer describes as
gravely concerning risks of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Risks of a politicised US show trial for Australian journalists jailed on UK soil, however, failed to capture the
attention of the Media Freedom conference.

Apart from one Australian journalist’s question about Julian Assange to Peter Greste and a statement from
the floor by Reporters Without Borders, Amal Clooney’s single sentence on the subject (as important and
informative as her sentence was) appeared to be the sum total of the conference discussion of Julian
Assange.

For his part, Peter Greste backtracked on former denunciations of Julian Assange, noting that the Wikileaks
founder is part of an ecosystem of “whistleblowing, accountability and publishing of journalism”, which “we
need to be protecting as a whole”. The Secretary General of Reporters without Borders added that the case
of Julian Assange “has huge implications for press freedom”.

Notably, no-one at the conference saw fit to mention the T-word. Entirely absent from the two days of
discussion was the UN Rapporteur on Torture’s assessment that Julian Assange has suffered nearly a
decade of psychological torture, for journalism. Nils Melzer reports that Julian Assange has been the victim
of prolonged state-sanctioned abuse, as a result of his publishing activities, in the form of “mobbing” by so-
called democratic states: the US, UK, Sweden and Ecuador, with the complicity of the Australian government.

Of these five states, the three with the power to end Julian Assange’s political persecution were conference
attendees: the US, UK and Australia. Yet none of those countries’ delegates, whether Jeremy Hunt,
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Pyne or the US State Department representative, mentioned Julian
Assange at all. Nor were they asked any questions on Julian Assange’s case by any journalists in
attendance, to my knowledge.

Foreign Minister Senator Marise

Payne.
The only such question, it seems, came from a journalist who had been denied entry to the conference.

Barnaby Nerberka, of RT’s video agency Ruptly, asked Jeremy Hunt for his position on Julian Assange’s
freedom en route to the conference. Jeremy Hunt declined to reply.

Once safely inside, having excluded RT and Sputnik from the event, neither Hunt nor any other politicians
were under any pressure whatsoever to explain their government’s involvement in the psychological torture
of Julian Assange.

A warning to all

The state-sanctioned mobbing of Julian Assange, the likes of which Professor Melzer has not seen in his 20
years investigating torture, has involved abuse of both legal and political process to pursue, harass and
defame the Wikileaks founder. This sustained assault has been augmented by a vicious and baseless smear
campaign, conducted through the media, to alienate public support and to hound, humiliate and intimidate
Julian Assange, including multiple calls for his assassination.

Treatment such as this, Melzer warns, “aims straight at the destruction of your innermost self, albeit without
leaving a physical trace… Through relentless over-stimulation, confusion and stress, it eventually causes
total exhaustion, cardiovascular failure and nervous collapse”.

So much for the UK Foreign Office commitment to the safety and protection of journalists.

Having endured years of such abuse, Professor Melzer has found Julian Assange to be suffering the
inevitable psychological and physical consequences, including severe stress and trauma, to the extent that
he may die in prison.

Why?

For reporting this event, and for documenting tens of thousands of other civilian killings like it, by US forces
and US authorities, it is Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning who sit in jail. Neither of them charged with
harming a living soul. Both of them tortured. For other people’s crimes..

Because in 2010 US forces gunned down 2 Reuters journalists on assignment in Baghdad, before gunning
down their victims’ rescuers, and shooting two children who watched, helpless, from a van. Upon viewing
footage of the slayings, one US soldier described the killings as typical of “daily routine in Iraq for seven
years”.

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are tortured because those responsible for atrocities in Iraq and
Afghanistan – and elsewhere – prefer to slaughter and torture behind closed doors. Julian Assange and
Chelsea Manning are the bodies strung up in the town square, as a warning to all: keep your mouths shut.
 Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins

Those media organisations and journalists who heed this warning may gain entry to events such as the
Global Conference for Media Freedom. Those who ignore it will not.

More importantly, as Amal Clooney and Nils Melzer warn, Assange’s persecution, if allowed to stand, will
criminalise the truth and journalism worldwide, leaving those in power to commit their crimes with impunity.
This, adds Melzer, will seal democracy’s fate, by ushering “unrestrained tyranny” in through the “backdoor of
our own complacency”.

And complacency, as the psychology profession knows, is the bedrock of atrocity and collective violence.

Agents and accomplices

Collective violence, such as torturing a publisher for journalism, requires more than persecuting authorities,
mobbing states and media smear campaigns to survive. Those who orchestrate and perpetrate state-
sanctioned violence depend crucially and fundamentally upon one other thing. That thing is bystanders.

Atrocity does not take place without passive, complacent, compliant bystanders: citizens watching silently,
declining to take a stand, even as their leaders say one thing at global media conferences and do precisely
the reverse in the real world.
The only such question, it seems, came from a journalist who had been denied entry to the conference.

Barnaby Nerberka, of RT’s video agency Ruptly, asked Jeremy Hunt for his position on Julian Assange’s
freedom en route to the conference. Jeremy Hunt declined to reply.

Once safely inside, having excluded RT and Sputnik from the event, neither Hunt nor any other politicians
were under any pressure whatsoever to explain their government’s involvement in the psychological torture
of Julian Assange.

A warning to all

The state-sanctioned mobbing of Julian Assange, the likes of which Professor Melzer has not seen in his 20
years investigating torture, has involved abuse of both legal and political process to pursue, harass and
defame the Wikileaks founder. This sustained assault has been augmented by a vicious and baseless smear
campaign, conducted through the media, to alienate public support and to hound, humiliate and intimidate
Julian Assange, including multiple calls for his assassination.

Treatment such as this, Melzer warns, “aims straight at the destruction of your innermost self, albeit without
leaving a physical trace… Through relentless over-stimulation, confusion and stress, it eventually causes
total exhaustion, cardiovascular failure and nervous collapse”.

So much for the UK Foreign Office commitment to the safety and protection of journalists.

Having endured years of such abuse, Professor Melzer has found Julian Assange to be suffering the
inevitable psychological and physical consequences, including severe stress and trauma, to the extent that
he may die in prison.

Why?

For reporting this event, and for documenting tens of thousands of other civilian killings like it, by US forces
and US authorities, it is Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning who sit in jail. Neither of them charged with
harming a living soul. Both of them tortured. For other people’s crimes..

Because in 2010 US forces gunned down 2 Reuters journalists on assignment in Baghdad, before gunning
down their victims’ rescuers, and shooting two children who watched, helpless, from a van. Upon viewing
footage of the slayings, one US soldier described the killings as typical of “daily routine in Iraq for seven
years”.

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are tortured because those responsible for atrocities in Iraq and
Afghanistan – and elsewhere – prefer to slaughter and torture behind closed doors. Julian Assange and
Chelsea Manning are the bodies strung up in the town square, as a warning to all: keep your mouths shut.
are complicit”, their silence fuelling ever graver abuses along a “continuum of destruction”.

And the silence, it must be said, was deafening at the Global Media Freedom Conference in London.
Reporting on day 1, major Australian outlets including the Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC and SBS,
omitted Amal Clooney’s statement on Julian Assange from their coverage of her address.

In fact, The Canary notes that “ few corporate outlets have covered Clooney’s intervention on Wikileaks” at
all, adding, “Clooney actually brought universal values to the Foreign Office’s media freedom event. It was a
breath of fresh air at what has mostly otherwise felt like an Orwellian nightmare.”

Collateral Murder (video)

Silence also reigned over the recent refusal of major Western outlets to publish Special Rapporteur Nils
Melzer’s Op Ed “Demasking The Torture of Julian Assange”. Nils Melzer, the world’s designated expert on
torture, who also happens to write elegantly and eloquently, was forced to publish his article on the blogging
site Medium. ‘Why?’ would have been a pertinent discussion topic at the Foreign Office event.

Likewise, silence surrounded the staggering and ongoing media blackout of a damning leak from the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The leak reveals OPCW complicity in the
staging of a crime scene to justify military aggression in Syria. In other words, the promotion of fake evidence
supporting war. Again.
Why no mainstream media coverage of this explosive leak, other than Tucker Carlson on Fox News? What is
going on? Why are truths about war always relegated to independent and alternative media platforms? Is
Western establishment media really ‘free’ to depart from official narratives on war? Why not?
Like listening passively to Kitty Genovese’s screams, none of these questions were asked at the Global
Conference on Media Freedom. The pro-war requirements of contemporary Western journalism, and the
lives and deaths on the receiving end, went undiscussed.

Don’t make me do it

Under certain circumstances bystanders will do more than simply observe. They will participate, helping to
perpetrate the atrocity themselves. To investigate who and when, in the early 1960s Stanley Milgram
conducted his now famous series of experiments on torture and obedience to authority.

Milgram designed a paradigm in which subjects were led to believe that they were administering increasingly
severe electric shocks to a fellow human being, up to and including a lethal 450 volts. Psychiatrists at the
time predicted that only a pathological minority, less than one percent, would inflict the maximum shock
available.

Milgram found, however, that 65 percent of people were willing to administer electric shocks up to and
including the final voltage. All that it took to elicit their complicity was an official-looking man in a white lab
coat, issuing stern instructions in authoritative tones. Even the sound of their victims crying out in pain failed
to prevent the majority from following orders. Some subjects wept themselves as they complied, placing their
deference to authority above their own distress.

The Milgram paradigm has been replicated many times, illuminating the dark side of obedience, whereby
“individual morality breaks down in presence of authority”.

Add fearful conformity to the mix (for which McCarthyism is tailor-made), an environment in which brutality is
normalised (such as the mobbing of Julian Assange), and dehumanisation (as in the smear campaign
against him), and you have what psychologists call an ‘atrocity generating situation’.

The psychology profession, of course, intended these insights as warnings, not instruction manuals. In a
2000 paper titled “The Psychology of Evil”, to combat atrocity and collective violence, Stanford psychologist
Philip Zimbardo warned citizens to “dissent, disobey, rebel”. Some conference participants, for example,
painted a dove with the message “Free Assange” at the centre of a collective muralcommissioned by the
Foreign Office, to mark the conference end.

Throughout history, Niz Melzer notes, disobedient dissidence has brought about “lasting political change,
liberation from oppression, and the empowerment of the people”.

In our hands

Yet here we are in 2019, collectively torturing Julian Assange for journalism, with our collective backs turned
on the atrocities that he exposed, while the perpetrating authorities – governments and establishment media
– place themselves above reproach on a global conference stage.

All the psychological ingredients of collective violence are in play, rendering populations complacently
obedient to the authorities that are torturing Julian Assange, with all that his torture entails.

These are the same authorities that have killed upwards of 1 million people in Iraq alone since 2003, and at
least hundreds of thousands of others across the Middle East, while displacing, immiserating and
traumatising countless millions more.

That figure for Julian Assange and Wikileaks is zero.

They are the same authorities demanding secrecy, waging war on dissent and raiding journalists offices and
homes.

They are the same authorities that dragged Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in April this year,
in violation of international law, Ecuadorian law and the Refugee Convention, before throwing him into
‘Britain’s Guantanamo Bay’ for 50 weeks, over the “pseudo-legal concoction” of minor bail infringement. A
bail infringement, moreover, that was attached to a closed investigation at the time. An investigation in which
no charges were ever laid. And for which Sweden recently declined to re-issue the arrest warrant.

Go figure, as Professor Melzer has aptly observed.

They are also, needless to say, the same authorities that have appointed themselves arbiters of Global
Media Freedom, claiming the mandate to define the challenges to journalism worldwide, and frame the
solutions.

As these elites grandstand and strut their impunity, award-winning journalist Julian Assange enters his 49th
year of life in Belmarsh Prison, battling the effects of years of psychological torture, while simultaneously
battling US extradition, alone in his cell without access to a computer for 23 hours a day, unable to
adequately prepare his defence as is his human right.

Belmarsh Prison in the UK. (IMAGE: Anders Sandberg,

Flickr)
 And those of us on the outside watching silently are keeping him there. We are all part of this system of
collective violence, whether we like it or not.

If there was any lingering hope that we might divest ourselves of the responsibility to speak up, and trust UK
authorities to sort things out, here is another piece of information that has been studiously sidelined by our
not-so-free press.
One of the UK judges in Julian Assange’s case is married to a former Tory politician who was named in
multiple Wikileaks documents, and who possesses military-industrial and intelligence ties including “to a
former head of MI6 who oversaw the ‘sexed-up’ dossier that led to the Iraq War”. His wife, judgeBaroness
Emma Arbuthnot, has reportedly declined to step down from Julian Assange’s case, despite the obvious
conflict of interest.

So much, once again, for the UK Government’s commitment to the safety and protection of journalists.

At the hands of the UK Government and Her Majesty’s pleasure, journalist Julian Assange is in the fight of
his life. He cannot fight that fight from Belmarsh Prison alone. He has been immobilised by the states that
are persecuting him. Stripped of his human rights. His legal rights. His political rights.

He needs us. He needs those of us with rights and freedoms to exercise them while we still can, to break the
cycle of collective violence and fight back.

We have been warned by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer that Julian Assange may die in
prison. If he does, with him will go our chance to become a society that doesn’t torture its journalists to death.

The Global Conference for Media Freedom is here to obscure that fact, by lulling us into a state of self-
deceptive, self-congratulatory complacency. One of its key functions has been to offer perception-
management cover for the states and institutions that are persecuting Julian Assange. That persecution, like
a Stanley Milgram experiment, will go as far as we allow it to go.

If there is one thing that the Global Conference on Media Freedom made clear, it is this: Julian Assange’s
life, the media freedom it represents, and the lives of those around the world who need their truths told, are
in our hands.

If you would like to take a stand against torture and the criminalisation of journalism, you can donate to
Wikileaks’ defence fund here. For other actions that you can take see here, here, here and here.
VIDEO 3 FROM THE MEETING

VIDEO 4 FROM THE MEETING

VIDEO 5 FROM THE MEETING

VIDEO 6 FROM THE MEETING

VIDEO 7 FROM THE MEETING

Kate Hopkins at Oxford Union (video)

Tommy Robinson’s Long Walk - to court and to prison - with Katie Hopkins. (video)

What does the elite press say to these statements by David Rockefeller?

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications
whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40
years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to
the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards
a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely
preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.” ― David Rockefeller“

For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-
publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate
influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are
part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and
me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global
political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
― David Rockefeller
WHO and WHAT is behind it all ? : >

The bottom line is for the people to regain their original, moral principles, which have intentionally been
watered out over the past generations by our press, TV, and other media owned by the
Illuminati/Bilderberger Group, corrupting our morals by making misbehavior acceptable to our society. Only in
this way shall we conquer this oncoming wave of evil.

Commentary:

Administrator

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