Independent journalist John Pilger spoke on "Breaking Australia's silence: WikiLeaks and freedom" at a public forum on 16 March 2011 at the Sydney Town Hall.
The event was staged by the Sydney Peace Foundation, Amnesty International, Stop the War Coalition, and supported by the City of Sydney.
Chaired by Mary Kostakidis, it featured speeches by John Pilger, Andrew Wilkie MP (the only serving Western intelligence officer to expose the truth about the Iraq invasion) and Julian Burnside, QC, defender of universal human rights under the law.
Pilger began his remarks by citing leaked documents from the British Defence Ministry and the Pentagon, in which WikiLeaks was described as a threat due to its exposure of the secret dealings of government.
The Pentagon document, dated March 2008, called for a campaign to "destroy WikiLeaks' centre of gravity, its public trust" through "threats of exposure and criminal prosecution."
Pilger told the audience: "The real threat is not WikiLeaks or Julian Assange, but you. The real threat is you finding out the truth about those who pretend to be democratic, and to act in your interests, and to promote a peaceful world. The real threat is you being able to call your government to account."
Pilger proceeded to call for the broadest political action in defence of Assange and WikiLeaks. "Unless we make our voices heard now," he said, "Julian Assange is likely to end up in a Kafkaesque judicial system in the US, which is now so corrupted that not a single detainee since 9/11 has been accorded any redress in America's courts, including innocent people detained for years and tortured."
Pilger announced the presence in the front row of the audience of former Guantánamo Bay detainee David Hicks, provoking lengthy, thunderous applause.
David Hicks, who was seized in Afghanistan during the 2001 US invasion, was imprisoned as an "enemy combatant" for six years. He suffered severe abuse and torture, with the full support of the former Howard conservative government in Australia. He only secured his release by pleading guilty to the fabricated terrorism charges levelled against him by a US military court, in exchange for transfer to an Australian prison and a short sentence.
"Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have broken no law and are charged with no crime, and yet it's clear the Gillard government is trying to do to Assange what Howard did to David Hicks," Pilger said. As WikiLeaks began publishing leaked US diplomatic cables, Gillard publicly denounced Assange's actions as "illegal", while Attorney-General Robert McClelland declared that the Labor government would cooperate with efforts to prosecute him in the US.
Pilger noted the recent revelations that the Gillard government had gone so far as to secretly investigate whether Assange could be charged with treason under Australian law.
Pacific Media Centre
