The Battles

The reputation of British justice now rests on the shoulders of the High Court in the life or death case of Julian Assange, writes John Pilger

I SAT in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Wednesday with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. On Wednesday, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege.

The barrister, Clair Dobbin, is in the pay of the regime in Washington, first Trump’s and then Biden’s. She is the United States’s hired gun, or ‘silk’, as she would prefer. Her target is Julian Assange, who has committed no crime and has performed an historic public service by exposing the criminal actions and secrets on which governments, especially those claiming to be democracies, base their authority.

For those who may have forgotten, WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments, such as Venezuela’s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Vault 7 campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your television set, into a spy in your midst.

WikiLeaks released almost a million documents from Russia which allowed Russian citizens to stand up for their rights. It revealed the Australian government had colluded with the United States against its own citizen, Assange. It named those Australian politicians who have ‘informed’ for the US. It made the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the rise of jihadism in US-armed states in the Gulf.

 

Those who take us to war

THERE is more: WikiLeaks disclosed the US campaign to suppress wages in sweatshop countries like Haiti, India’s campaign of torture in Kashmir, the British government’s secret agreement to shield ‘US interests’ in its official Iraq inquiry and the British Foreign Office’s plan to create a fake ‘marine protection zone’ in the Indian Ocean to cheat the Chagos islanders out of their right of return.

In other words, WikiLeaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the preordained, repetitive spin that fills newspapers and television screens. This is real journalism; and for the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in one form of incarceration or another, including Belmarsh prison, a horrific place.

Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent, and accountable.

On Wednesday, the United States sought the approval of Britain’s High Court to extend the terms of its appeal against a decision by a district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January to bar Assange’s extradition. Baraitser accepted the deeply disturbing evidence of a number of experts that Assange would be at great risk if he were incarcerated in the US’s infamous prison system.

Professor Michael Kopelman, a world authority on neuro-psychiatry, had said Assange would find a way to take his own life — the direct result of what professor Nils Melzer, the United Nations rapporteur on torture, described as the craven ‘mobbing’ of Assange by governments — and their media echoes.

Those of us who were in the Old Bailey last September to hear Kopelman’s evidence were shocked and moved. I sat with Julian’s father, John Shipton, whose head was in his hands. The court was also told about the discovery of a razor blade in Julian’s Belmarsh cell and that he had made desperate calls to the Samaritans and written notes and much else that filled us with more than sadness.

Watching the lead barrister acting for Washington, James Lewis — a man from a military background who deploys a cringingly theatrical ‘aha!’ formula with defence witnesses — reduce these facts to ‘malingering’ and smearing witnesses, especially Kopelman, we were heartened by Kopelman’s revealing response that Lewis’s abuse was ‘a bit rich’ as Lewis himself had sought to hire Kopelman’s expertise in another case.

 

No contradiction

LEWIS’S sidekick is Clair Dobbin, and Wednesday was her day. Completing the smearing of professor Kopelman was down to her. An American with some authority sat behind her in court.

Dobbin said Kopelman had ‘misled’ judge Baraister in September because he had not disclosed that Julian Assange and Stella Moris were partners, and their two young children, Gabriel and Max, were conceived during the period Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The implication was that this somehow lessened Kopelman’s medical diagnosis: that Julian, locked up in solitary in Belmarsh prison and facing extradition to the US on bogus ‘espionage’ charges, had suffered severe psychotic depression and had planned, if he had not already attempted, to take his own life.

For her part, judge Baraitser saw no contradiction. The full nature of the relationship between Stella and Julian had been explained to her in March 2020, and professor Kopelman had made full reference to it in his report in August 2020. So the judge and the court knew all about it before the main extradition hearing last September. In her judgement in January, Baraitser said this:

‘[Professor Kopelman] assessed Mr Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr Assange’s background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician and he was well aware of the possibility of exaggeration and malingering. I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.’

She added that she had ‘not been misled’ by the exclusion in Kopelman’s first report of the Stella-Julian relationship and that she understood that Kopelman was protecting the privacy of Stella and her two young children.

In fact, as I know well, the family’s safety was under constant threat to the point when an embassy security guard confessed he had been told to steal one of the baby’s nappies so that a CIA-contracted company could analyse its DNA. There has been a stream of unpublicised threats against Stella and her children.

 

Based on a fraudster

FOR the United States and its legal hirelings in London, damaging the credibility of a renowned expert by suggesting he withheld this information was a way, they no doubt reckoned, to rescue their crumbling case against Assange. In June, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin reported that a key prosecution witness against Assange has admitted fabricating his evidence. The one ‘hacking’ charge the Americans hoped to bring against Assange if they could get their hands on him depended on this source and witness, Sigurdur Thordarson, an FBI informant.

Thordarson had worked as a volunteer for WikiLeaks in Iceland between 2010 and 2011. In 2011, as several criminal charges were brought against him, he contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and offered to become an informant in return for immunity from all prosecution. It emerged that he was a convicted fraudster who embezzled $55,000 from WikiLeaks, and served two years in prison. In 2015, he was sentenced to three years for sex offences against teenage boys. The Washington Post described Thordarson’s credibility as the ‘core’ of the case against Assange.

On Wednesday, Lord Chief Justice Holroyde made no mention of this witness. His concern was that it was ‘arguable’ that judge Baraitser had attached too much weight to the evidence of professor Kopelman, a man revered in his field. He said it was ‘very unusual’ for an appeal court to have to reconsider evidence from an expert accepted by a lower court, but he agreed with Dobbin it was ‘misleading’ even though he accepted Kopelman’s ‘understandable human response’ to protect the privacy of Stella and the children.

If you can unravel the arcane logic of this, you have a better grasp than I who have sat through this case from the beginning. It is clear Kopelman misled nobody. Judge Baraitser — whose hostility to Assange personally was a presence in her court — said that she was not misled; it was not an issue; it did not matter. So why had Lord Chief Justice Holroyde spun the language with its weasel legalise and sent Julian back to his cell and its nightmares? There, he now waits for the High Court’s final decision in October — for Julian Assange, a life or death decision.

 

In the land of Magna Carta

AND why did Holroyde send Stella from the court trembling with anguish? Why is this case ‘unusual’? Why did he throw the gang of prosecutor-thugs at the department of justice in Washington — who got their big chance under Trump, having been rejected by Obama — a life raft as their rotting, corrupt case against a principled journalist sunk as surely as Titantic?

This does not necessarily mean that in October the full bench of the High Court will order Julian to be extradited. In the upper reaches of the masonry that is the British judiciary there are, I understand, still those who believe in real law and real justice from which the term ‘British justice’ takes its sanctified reputation in the land of the Magna Carta. It now rests on their ermined shoulders whether that history lives on or dies.

I sat with Stella in the court’s colonnade while she drafted words to say to the crowd of media and well-wishers outside in the sunshine. Clip-clopping along came Clair Dobbin, spruced, ponytail swinging, bearing her carton of files: a figure of certainty: she who said Julian Assange was ‘not so ill’ that he would consider suicide. How does she know?

Has Dobbin worked her way through the medieval maze at Belmarsh to sit with Julian in his yellow arm band, as professors Koppelman and Melzer have done, and Stella has done, and I have done? Never mind. The Americans have now ‘promised’ not to put him in a hellhole, just as they ‘promised’ not to torture Chelsea Manning, just as they promised….

And has she read the WikiLeaks’s leak of a Pentagon document dated March 15, 2009? This foretold the current war on journalism. US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy WikiLeaks’s and Julian Assange’s ‘centre of gravity’ with threats and ‘criminal prosecution’. Read all 32 pages and you are left in no doubt that silencing and criminalising independent journalism was the aim, smear the method.

I tried to catch Dobbin’s gaze, but she was on her way: job done.

Outside, Stella struggled to contain her emotion. This is one brave woman, as indeed her man is an exemplar of courage. ‘What has not been discussed today,’ said Stella, ‘is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and for Julian’s life. The constant threats and intimidation we endured for years, which has been terrorising us and has been terrorising Julian for 10 years. We have a right to live, we have a right to exist and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.’

 

Consortiumnews.com, August 12. John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London.

 Recommend:  Read this on the Tyee website, complete with the pictures.

I want to keep it for the purpose of making an analogy to what’s happening in Canada today in several different arenas.  Same thing.

A century ago, Dr. Peter Bryce demonstrated that residential schools were designed to kill. Canada’s government ignored him.

 Andrew Nikiforuk 2021-06-05  | TheTyee.ca

Tyee contributing editor Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more.

(Photo)

Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce was appointed Canada’s first chief officer of medical health in 1904. He toured residential schools and exposed them as disease incubators and superspreaders.

You have probably never heard of Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, but I can tell you this: he would not have been shocked or surprised by the discovery of a mass grave on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School last week.

He knew, like Faulkner, that the past is never dead. “It is not even past.”

For 15 years, Canada’s first chief officer of medical health repeatedly warned his superiors that the country’s disease-riddled residential schools had become glorified tuberculosis death camps. He courageously pressed for reforms.

But Bryce’s superiors didn’t listen. They didn’t want to know the truth, and made the physician’s job impossible as only bureaucrats can do.

And so, when Bryce left the government and was no longer oath-bound to secrecy, he wrote a 24-page exposé on the accelerated extinction of Indigenous people willfully being perpetrated in Canada’s residential schools. You can read it here.

Bryce titled his book The Story of a National Crime. The year was 1922.

Canada, a nation full of deep secrets and afflicted by selective memories, can no longer keep this “national crime” hidden anymore.

Nations can deny history, ignore history, minimize history, postpone history and even rewrite history.

But they can’t grow up without facing history for a simple reason. “Knowing the before lets you create a different after.”

The before started a century ago. Educated in Edinburgh, Toronto and Paris, the native of Mount Pleasant, Ontario took up the job of chief officer of medical health in 1904 for Immigration and Indian Affairs.

One of the first statistics that caught Bryce’s eye was this: First Nations reported very low levels of nervous disorders and alcoholism. But tuberculosis was eating their people alive.

The disease had a powerful colonial history. Prior to the eradication of the buffalo and the destruction of an entire ecosystem on the Canadian plains, tuberculosis was rare or non-existent. Although the fur trade had seeded the bacterium, it needed crowding, hunger and homelessness to erupt.

The federal government dutifully provided those conditions after the extermination of buffalo, the chief source of nutrition for many Indigenous peoples.

By withholding food rations, the government forced First Nations into signing treaties and herded 300 different nations into often inhospitable reserves where disease and the politics of starvation became their treaty companions.

As a result, TB began a terrible conquest of Indigenous peoples and helped, along with smallpox and other European microbes, to clear the plains for white settlement.

Cattle, the European replacement for buffalo, also carried a host of diseases including anthrax, brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis.

One infected cow, whether poached or purchased by the government, could infect 100 hungry and immunocompromised Indigenous people with the lung disease.

But the racist theory of the day held that Indigenous people were just weaker than Europeans or naturally inclined to get TB.

Bryce, an expert in the disease, didn’t believe the nonsense and proved it when the government asked him to inspect health conditions in residential schools in 1907.

The federal government set up the schools in 1883 as a colonial force to “assimilate” First Nations and turn them into farmers and fellow extractors of resources.

The schools were, pure and simple, a state-sanctioned tool to remove the culture and identity of subjugated people. The federal government wanted to do to First Nations what the British did to Highland Scots: dispossess them.

Bryce spent three months visiting 35 schools in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories (then including Saskatchewan and Alberta), all located in former buffalo country where people were now starving or undernourished. He found one indignity after another. The buildings were poorly-constructed firetraps with inadequate water supplies. Most had no infirmary. Or proper food supplies.

The schools’ poor ventilation combined with their prison-like atmosphere appalled Bryce. It was “almost as if the prime conditions for the outbreak of epidemics had been deliberately created.”

Bryce noted that the agents of colonialism, the teachers and church officials running the schools, were also reluctant to collection information on the fate of their pupils. He discovered why. In what is today Saskatchewan, of 31 students discharged from the notorious File Hills Indian Residential School in the previous 15 years, only nine had remained alive.

Bryce calculated that the residential schools acted as TB incubators and superspreaders. If children didn’t have TB before they arrived, they immediately contracted the disease in crowded dormitories where children weren’t even allowed to exercise.

And if they were too sick to occupy a desk, they were sent back to their communities, where they spread the disease in crowded reserve housing.

After questioning the principals of some of the schools, Bryce estimated that approximately one-quarter of all Indigenous children attending residential schools for the last 15 years had died from tuberculosis. He wrote that “of a total of 1,537 pupils reported upon, nearly 25 per cent are dead, of one school with an absolutely accurate statement, 69 per cent of ex-pupils are dead, and that everywhere the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis.”

In other words, residential schools typically prepared Indigenous children not for life but death.

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Superspreading conditions in crowded, poorly-ventilated Old Sun’s Alberta dormitory. Photo via General Synod Archives, Anglican Church of Canada.

Someone eventually leaked what became known as “the Bryce report” to the press where it produced this headline: “Schools Aid White Plague — Startling Death Rolls Revealed Among Indians — Absolute Inattention to the Bare Necessities of Health.”

But most Canadians did not know, care or understand.

Bryce ultimately recommended a dramatic prescription for Canada’s plague schools: supervised medical care (nurses and doctors), better nutrition and better ventilation. (Like COVID-19, tuberculosis is spread by aerosols.)

Bryce also thought the schools should be relocated closer to Indigenous communities. And he recommended that the government take over the schools outright and turn them into sanatoria where First Nations children would live instead of die.

Bryce was no opponent of the colonial order. It was merely that, as historian Adam J. Green notes, “Although assimilation would have certainly been the goal of Bryce’s Aboriginal policy, forced extinction was not.”

Yet neither the government nor churches were impressed by Bryce’s recommendations. They dithered and dallied and calculated the economic costs.

The government then performed the bare minimum “to remove the imputation that the department is careless of the interests of these children.” It set a few standards for diet and ventilation, banned tubercular students and increased the grant for the schools by a small amount. But the children still kept on dying.

Duncan Campbell Scott, the penny-pinching head of Indian Affairs, couldn’t see why the scandalous procession of Indigenous children from boarding schools to unmarked graves was so upsetting.

“When the peculiar conditions are taken into consideration, the department is doing as well as can be expected for the Indians, and to anything further would entail a very heavy expenditure, which, at present, I am not able to recommend.”

Bryce kept on fighting and compiling more statistics. In 1909, the official found more bleak conditions in Alberta. At one school more than 28 per cent of the children had perished, mostly from tuberculosis. Another study in Saskatchewan found 93 per cent of children in the Qu’appelle district were afflicted by TB.

Bryce could see no moral reason why the government could ever tolerate a TB “death rate” among First Nations two to three times higher “than that of an average Canadian community.”

But government didn’t care. By 1914, the Department of Indian Affairs had tired of Bryce’s statistics, and pointedly sidelined the chief medical officer.

Scott, then head of Indian Affairs, informed Bryce that his annual medical reports on TB and residential schools weren’t needed anymore. They cost too much, and the government didn’t really plan on doing anything with the information anyway.

And so the Canadian government, demonstrating a bent instinct for evasion and denial that persists to this very day, never asked Bryce to do any more work related to the Department of Indian Affairs.

Yet Bryce persisted. In a 1918 pamphlet that the government refused to publish, Bryce estimated that the Indigenous population, given the national birth rate, should have grown by 20,000 people between 1904 and 1917. Instead, it shrank by 1,600 — largely due to treatable diseases such as TB.

Irritated by Bryce’s conscience, the government refused to provide its health officer with any more mortality statistics on First Nations. A problem doesn’t exist if a government doesn’t record it.

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Residential school students at the Roman Catholic cemetery at Fort George, Quebec. Photo via the Deschatelets Archives.

In 1921, the federal government passed a law that forced Bryce to retire from federal service after 15 years as chief officer of medical health.

But the physician’s heart could not keep silent. The following year he published The Story of a National Crime: An Appeal for Justice for the Indians of Canada. It sold for 35 cents a copy. The book named names and documented the ongoing neglect, complacency and inaction that Bryce witnessed for 15 years.

What bothered Bryce most was the government’s refusal to act, let alone acknowledge the problem: 15 years after his first report, TB still killed children in residential schools at the same alarming rates documented in 1907.

Bryce also decried the implicit racism in the government’s TB response, which disturbingly mirrors in so many ways the current government’s unequal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Where’s the justice, asked Bryce, in a government that can only allocate $10,000 for the control and treatment of tuberculosis among 105,000 Indigenous people but provides more than $33,000 for the 100,000 white settlers of Ottawa just to handle the hospitalization of their TB victims?

How is it that the city of Hamilton could reduce TB by 75 per cent between 1904 and 1917, yet nothing had been done to keep TB from killing “a splendid race of warriors as the Blackfeet” in Alberta?

The “desire for power,” concluded Bryce, repeatedly over-rode “any higher consideration such as saving the lives of the Indians,” in Ottawa.

But little changed after the book’s publication. Health care for Indigenous people wouldn’t become a government priority for decades.

Until 1945, the minister of mines and resources remained officially responsible for the health of First Nations people, as though TB had become some perverse mineral.

In 1934, the doctor died while on a trip to the Caribbean.

Last year an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by Cindy Blackstock, a courageous advocate for Indigenous children, described Bryce as “the whistleblower on residential schools.”

An investigation into the legacy of residential schools and their survivors didn’t begin until a decade ago.

‘Neglected in Life, Dishonoured in Death’

In 2015 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported more than 3,000 confirmed deaths at the nation’s residential schools.

Government or church officials did not record the names of 32 per cent of the dead.

In half the cases, the government did not even disclose the cause of death.

In a quarter of cases, no gender was reported.

Most of the dead were never sent home for burial. Which brings us back to the mass grave in Kamloops.

Now you can’t say that you haven’t heard of Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce.

And now you can understand why he would not have been shocked or surprised by last week’s discovery.

He told the story of a national crime before our collective ears were willing to hear it.