Puppets and Puppet Masters

Chris Hedges

This is the speech of Chris Hedges This was done in front of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., on October 8, 2022, at a demonstration called to revoke the U.S. government's request to extradite Julian Assange.

Translated and adapted by Rubens Turkienicz exclusively for Brasil 247 

WASHINGTON, DC - Merrick Garland (U.S. Attorney General) and those who work at the Department of Justice are the puppets, not the puppet masters. They are the façade, the fiction of the long-standing Julian Assange's pursuit It has something to do with justice. Just like the Supreme Court in London, they perform an elaborate judicial pantomime. They debate mysterious legal nuances to distract the public from the Dickensonian farce in which a man who committed no crime, who is not a US citizen, can be extradited under the Espionage Act and sentenced to life in prison by the bravest and most consequential journalism of our generation.

The engine driving the lynching of Julian isn't here on Pennsylvania Avenue [headquarters of the U.S. Department of Justice]. It's in Langley, Virginia, located in a complex we'll never be allowed to surround – the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It's operated by a secret internal state, which we can't rely on, in the mad pursuit of empire and cruel exploitation.

The US has undergone a slow-motion corporate coup. They are no longer a functioning democracy. The true centers of power, in the corporate, military, and national security sectors, have been humiliated and shamed by WikiLeaks. Their war crimes, lies, and conspiracies to crush the democratic aspirations of the vulnerable and the poor, and their rampant corruption, both here and around the world, have been exposed in thousands of leaked documents.

We cannot fight for Julian unless we are clear about who we are fighting against. This is something far worse than a corrupt judiciary. It is the billionaire class, which orchestrated social inequality that rivals Pharaonic Egypt, which has internally seized all the levers of power and made us the most spied on, monitored, observed, and photographed population in human history. When the government is watching you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word freedom. This is a master-slave relationship. Obviously, Julian has long been a target, but when Wikileaks published the document known as Vault 7He, who exposed the 'hacking' tools the CIA uses to monitor our phones, televisions, and even cars – and journalism itself – was condemned to crucifixion. The goal is to shut down any investigations into the inner workings of power that could hold the ruling class accountable for its crimes, eradicate public opinion, and replace it with the jargon offered to the masses.

I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent on the outer fringes of empire in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. I am acutely aware of the savagery of empire, of how the brutal tools of repression are first tested in what Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the EarthWholesale surveillance. Torture. Coups d'état. Secret torture sites. Obscure propaganda. Militarized police. Assassinations. Wars. Once these tools are perfected on people of color and foreigners, they migrate back to the homeland. By emptying our country from within through deindustrialization, austerity, deregulation, wage stagnation, the abolition of unions, massive spending on war and intelligence, a refusal to address the climate emergency, and a virtual tax boycott for the wealthiest individuals and corporations, these predators intend to keep us in servitude, victims of a neofeudalism Corporate. And they perfected their Orwellian instruments of control. The tyranny imposed on others is imposed on us as well.

From its inception, the CIA carried out assassinations, coups d'état, torture and espionage and illegal abuses – including of US citizens, whose activities were exposed in 1975 by the hearings of the Church Committee in the Federal Senate and in the hearings in Pike Committee From the House of Representatives. All these crimes, especially after the attacks of 09/11/2001, have returned with a vengeance. The CIA is a rogue and paramilitary organization that is not held accountable for its actions, that has its own armed units and a drone program, death squads, and a vast archipelago of secret torture sites where kidnapped victims are tortured and disappeared.

The USA allocate A secret budget of approximately US$ billions per year to conceal various types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, and other intelligence agencies – generally those that remain outside the scrutiny of Congress. The CIA has a well-oiled apparatus for kidnapping, torturing, and assassinating targets worldwide – since they had mounted a 24-hour video surveillance system of Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which is the reason why they discussed Quite naturally, his kidnapping and assassination. This is his business. After examining the heavily redacted documents that the CIA released to his committee, Senator Frank Church defined the “clandestine activityThe CIA described it as "a semantic cover for assassination, coercion, blackmail, bribery and the spreading of lies," and by associating itself with known international torturers and terrorists.

All despotic regimes mask state persecution with sham judicial procedures. The show trials and troikas in Stalin's Soviet Union. The delusional Nazi judges in fascist Germany. The protests in Mao's China. State crimes are camouflaged by false legalities; they are judicial farces. 

If Julian is extradited and sentenced, and given the Lubianka-like tendencies of the Eastern Judicial District of Virginia, which is a almost certainThis means that those of us who publish classified materials, as I did when I worked for The New York Times, will become criminals. This means that an iron curtain will be drawn to mask abuses of power. This means that the state – which, through Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), anti-terrorism laws, and the Espionage Act – has created our native version of Stalin's Article 58, by which one can to imprison Anyone, anywhere in the world, who dares to commit the crime of telling the truth.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight against powerful underground forces that, by demanding Julian's extradition and life imprisonment, have declared war on journalism.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight for the restoration of the rule of law and democracy.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to dismantle the Stasi-like [East German secret police] wholesale surveillance state erected throughout the West.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to take down – and allow me to repeat this word, for the benefit of those in the FBI and Homeland Security who came here to monitor us – to tear down The corporate state is needed to create a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, which will take care of the best among us instead of persecuting them.

You can watch a video of the event. hereThis speech is recorded at 3:34 in the video.

You can also watch my interview with Julian's father, John Shipton. here.