Many people I have talked to in the last year say Julian Assange ‘deserves’ to be extradited to the United States. They say he can’t evade the law and now it has caught up with him he has faced ‘due process’ and lost his case. They say things that sound like the accusation made by Fintan O’Toole yesterday in The Irish Times:
Assange’s personal behaviour, especially towards women, is, to put it mildly, unappealing. And in recent years, he has allowed his WikiLeaks platform to service Vladimir Putin’s assaults on democracy.
The accusations that Assange raped or sexually assaulted two women in Sweden in 2010 continue to hang over him. The original complaint to the police that consensual, protected sex became non-consensual when a condom was removed or tampered with is still a sexual offence and a very serious accusation. Assange always said he would cooperate with the investigation and Sweden’s refusal to interview him on the charges without assurances of extradition lay at the heart of his eventual efforts to flee bail in the UK.
According to Prof. Nils Melzer’s two-year investigation Assange stayed in Sweden in 2010, making a statement to the police denying the allegation (after reading about in the press) and waited three weeks to be interviewed by the public prosecutor who delayed a meeting repeatedly. When Assange asked through his lawyer if he could attend a conference in Berlin he was given written permission to leave, yet on the day he left the Swedish authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. Other odd details include the disappearance of Assange’s laptop from checked baggage on the flight to Berlin which Scandinavian Airlines refused to investigate. Assange continued to London where he was made aware of an extradition request from the US. He asked for assurances he would not be extradited by the Swedes, an assurance they would not give. This led to his house arrest and flight to the Ecuadorian Embassy after the (then) Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa offered him asylum. They had got on well together in a televised interview (well worth watching here) in May 2012. President Correa, who had suffered a US-backed attempted coup, said ‘Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted’ (Julian Assange Show Episode 6). The twelve episodes of the Julian Assange Show also reveal that he is a capable journalist and skilled interviewer with a good sense of humour, as well as publisher of secrets governments and corporations around the world do not want to the public to read about.
The second accusation that Assange had been cooperating with Russia to discredit Hilary Clinton in her election campaign in 2016 is another damaging claim. It is true to the extent that through Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks (which, unbeknownst to Assange at the time were fronts for Russian military intelligence service GRU) Wikileaks leaked information including 20,000 pages of hacked emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta which revealed a questionable relationship between the Clinton Foundation and its donors. Emails revealed Clinton schmoozing with powerful interests on Wall Street and her ties to wealthy campaign contributors alongside somewhat underhand manoeuvres against Bernie Sanders. These leaks were more embarrassing than really damaging, although the Mueller Investigation into Russian interference in the election shows communication from Assange to associates where he brands Clinton as ‘’a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.” Elsewhere, Assange describes the election between Trump and Clinton as like choosing between ‘cholera or gonorrhea’. However, it seems Assange thought Trump unlikely to win and he was happy to release leaks when Clinton was pulling ahead in the polls, so there may be some truth to the claim that Assange was leaking in a way designed to damage her.
Claims that other leaks (such as Diplomatic cables and other documents supplied by Chelsea Manning) put the lives of security personnel at risk have been denied by Wikileaks who argue they made strenuous efforts to redact names. They claim it was a Guardian journalist who leaked a password to unredacted material and that they had tried to warn then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in person of this issue. They also say that no evidence has ever been brought forward to show how their leaks led to anyone being killed or hurt.
The sexual accusations may have been quietly dropped but the charges of espionage remain. Assange’s prosecution hangs, to some extent, on defining what Wikileaks does as ‘espionage’ rather than journalism, publishing or protecting whistle-blowers.
Show trail of the century
Meanwhile, his extradition hearings in the United kingdom have been described by those who have attended as a ‘show trial’ with Assange strip-searched, shackled and then silenced behind bullet proof glass where he has listened to pre-written rulings as in a Soviet era court, without any mainstream media reporting of the details of the trial. Apart from being held in conditions described as psychological torture by the UN expert on torture, he has not been able to prepare his case and his judges, one with alleged conflicts of interest, appear totally uninterested in issues of freedom of speech. As John Pilger, who has attended the trials and visited Assange has noted:
For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as “heath care”. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first, he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire. (Pilger – The Political Show Trial of the Century)
In the UK Assange faced solitary lock-up for 23 hours a day in Belmarsh without exercise or showers. He has suffered a stroke as a result of the ongoing ordeal and may well face worse conditions in the United States. There, law experts have argued he faces a kangaroo court in Virginia and the rest of his life in a high security jail. Assange has already spent eleven years in confinement and more than two years isolated in a maximum-security prison designed for our most dangerous prisoners. The US no longer tries to hide the fact they consider him a political prisoner who they must seize and punish as an example to others. Former CIA director then secretary for defence under Obama, Leon Panetta, summarised the American government’s response:
“All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those that were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing.”
As Fintal O’Toole admits in his backhanded defence of Assange ‘charging journalists with spying is a favourite trick of authoritarian regimes’. If we agree that the US government must send a warning to whistleblowers, that we did not need to know about the crimes of governments around the world, or of corruption in high places, then we must also agree that ‘he deserves to be extradited’ and face the fact that we are not so different from Russia or other authoritarian regimes around the world where critics also disappear.
For more on this story, try foreign news sources such as Germany’s DW as this most important story of our time has effectively disappeared in the British media.
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