I Discuss Julian Assange’s Council of Europe Testimony and Social Media Censorship with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

4.10.24

A composite image of Julian Assange at the Council of Europe on October 1, 2024, and an image about social media censorship.

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On Wednesday, I was delighted to talk once more with Chris Cook, for his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, which has been running weekly since 1999, and, in Chris’ words, “providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.” Chris first found me about 15 years ago, and has interviewed me regularly ever since, and if you’d like to hear our 30-minute interview, as well as an interview with the Canadian journalist, author, and activist Yves Engler, you can find it here on the Gorilla Radio Substack page.

My interviews with Chris often deal with the main focus of my work, the seemingly uncloseable prison at Guantánamo Bay, although we’ve also discussed numerous other topics over the years, including, over the last year, the grotesque genocide being undertaken by the State of Israel in the Gaza Strip.

We’ve also spoken frequently about Julian Assange, with whom I worked on WikiLeaks’ release of the Guantánamo Files in 2011, and much of our interview on Wednesday was taken up with a discussion of Julian’s testimony at a hearing of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg on Monday.

This was his first public appearance since he was unexpectedly released, in June, from Belmarsh maximum-security prison in south east London, where he had held in almost total isolation for five years, fighting his proposed extradition to the US, and I wrote about it in an article on Monday, At Council of Europe, Julian Assange Defends the Importance of Journalism, Warns of US Overreach and Acknowledges He “Chose Freedom Over Unrealizable Justice”.

It was good to talk to Chris about what Julian said, and our impressions of how he was, and what the future might hold for him in a world that has clearly not changed for the better since he first lost his freedom, and I hope that you have time to listen to it.

I also spoke about two particular epidemics of outrageous social media censorship that have impacted on my ability to communicate with my many friends and followers on Facebook over the last three months, as three posts linking to my website were removed in July, and three more were removed last month — two again linking to my website, and the other to the Close Guantánamo website that I’ve been running for the last 13 years.

Both episodes demonstrated a pronounced escalation in the arbitrary and heavy-handed censorship for which Meta, Facebook’s owner, has developed a reputation over many years, especially in relation to posts, pages and individuals critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

I first started writing articles critical of Israel after October 7, 2023, when its genocidal intent became immediately apparent, as did the shameful fawning support extended to it by most of the countries of west, but I largely had no problems with censorship until July, when, not uncoincidentally, the three posts removed all dealt with Israel and Gaza, one linking to an article on my website promoting a previous interview with Chris that included a discussion of Israel’s brutal and unaccountable torture prisons for Palestinians, another about a podcast in which “warmongering” was mentioned, and another about the death toll in Gaza.

The censorship is alarming enough, of course, as it always comes out of the blue, like a violent ambush in what is suddenly hostile territory, without any adequate reasons given, and with no meaningful way of challenging the decisions taken by badly-programmed bots run by the unaccountable elite of Facebook’s high command, hiding in their fortress HQ and making sure, as they have done from the very beginning, that it is impossible to communicate directly with them in any way.

The reasons given by Facebook for removing my posts were that they contravened community standards regarding cybersecurity, or, in one case, community standards regarding spam, both of which were patently absurd. I never received any response to my efforts to contact Facebook to complain, through a deliberately cursory and inadequate tick-box process, and only one of the posts was subsequently restored, again without any explanation or notification.

The July clampdown appears to have been telegraphed in advance, when Facebook stated publicly that it was taking measures to tackle abuse of the word Zionism, but then proceeded to ban anything that was critical of Israel at all. It was a blunt demonstration of the success, over many years, of efforts by powerful and influential organizations promoting Israel, and their many servants in politics and the media, to equate any criticism whatsoever of the actions of the State of Israel with antisemitism.

In the UK, this manifested itself via the persecution of Jeremy Corbyn, when he was the leader of the Labour Party, via an invented antisemitism scandal, and his eventual removal, to be replaced by the troubling and virulently pro-Israeli figure of Keir Starmer (and most of his cabinet), while in the US decades of spending by organizations including AIPAC have ensured that huge numbers of lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, have been paid to take on board the fundamental message that Israel’s interests are more important than those of the US itself.

In September, a new tsunami of censorship saw posts removed that, for the first time, linked to the main focus of my work — Guantánamo. This was particularly alarming because Guantánamo had previously seemed to be largely off-limits to those programming the censors, essentially on the basis that it’s not regarded as contentious because no one really cares about it.

The other post that was removed linked to an article on my website promoting ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, the new album of original protest music by my band The Four Fathers. This seemed so inexplicable that a few people who responded to the posts that, since July, I’ve been regularly publishing after my posts have removed, containing screenshots of the spurious reasons given, questioned whether it was because the word “resistance” has now been banned, which struck me as a suitably dystopian possibility.

Chris picked up on this particular act of arbitrary censorship, allowing me to promote the album, which I’ve embedded below, if you’re interested, and also allowing me to explain how, on X, I responded by pointing out that we were now, apparently, “the band who’d been banned”, for nothing more than performing songs about climate change, the Grenfell Tower fire, Guantánamo, and the persecution of Julian Assange.

My posts about having posts removed struck a chord with many of those in my Facebook community, who, unsurprisingly, reported countless other examples of their posts being removed — also for patently ridiculous reasons, and often involving what seemed to be the deliberate suppression of efforts to share the voices of other commentators and analysts on the left.

I’ve tried to reach out to journalists, academics and lawyers covering social media censorship to interest them in looking at these recent spates of extreme censorship, but have so far received no replies. This particular problem seems to have largely flown under the mainstream media radar, even though, as I see it, it represents social media landscapes that have become arbitrary, unaccountable online police states, treating those who use their platforms with contempt, and with complete indifference to how disruptive their remote, secretive and throughly inadequate monitoring processes are, and how biased or flawed they are in determining what should and shouldn’t be allowed.

Sadly, as we all also know, rampant enthusiasts for genocide are rarely suppressed, and nor, in general, are other voices on the far-right, all of which makes it even more alarming that persistent and dishonest efforts to silence anyone who opposes the many crimes of our political and media establishments from the left are being so regularly silenced.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

5 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    In my latest article, I link to and discuss my recent interview with Chris Cook on his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada. Chris and I have spoken regularly about many topics, and in our latest discussion we spoke about Julian Assange’s extraordinary testimony at a hearing of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg on Monday, in what was his first public appearance since he regained his freedom in June.

    We also spoke about social media censorship, which I have experienced in two sweeping, arbitrary and fundamentally dishonest clampdowns in July and September, but which I won’t discuss here, hoping instead that you’ll listen to the show and read the more detailed explanation in my article, which also includes a link to the new album by The Four Fathers, a collection of protest songs that was also caught up in the censorship dragnet, making us, briefly, “the band that was banned.”

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:

    Thank you, Andy! Love the photo of Assange! I look forward to reading your article. Also, f*ck censorship.

  3. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks, Natalia. I found the photo on the Council of Europe website – actually, a very sweet photo that also included Stella. I hope you like the article. https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/julian-assange-to-attend-a-pace-hearing-in-strasbourg-on-his-detention-and-conviction-and-their-chilling-effect-on-human-rights-1

  4. Andy Worthington says...

    John Ely wrote:

    I remember searching through the web soon after the complaints were filed about the two women in Sweden. One was apparently a one time NGO worker in Cuba. Who knows if this is true, but the whole affair has always had a stink about it …

  5. Andy Worthington says...

    It’s pretty clear to me, John, that when our leaders want to discredit someone, there are two routes to doing so that allow them to blacken someone’s name regardless of the truth – one involves sex scandals, and the other involves false claims of antisemitism.

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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