Friends,
Can you join us in a Free
Chelsea demonstration outside the U.S. District Courthouse in Alexandria,
Virginia to challenge the judge who has jailed Chelsea Manning a second time
for contempt? It will take place from noon to 1 PM on Thursday, June 6. If
interested, let me know.
Kagiso,
Max
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
From the start, Assange faced political persecution
commondreams.org/views/2019/05/29/endless-procedural-abuses-show-julian-assange-case-was-never-about-law
It is
astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable
people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by
hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.”
That
short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it,
as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the
past decade – or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the
corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly
liberal outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC.
At the
weekend, a Guardian editorial – the paper’s official
voice and probably the segment most scrutinised by senior staff – made just
such a false claim:
Then
there is the rape charge that Mr. Assange faced in Sweden and which led him to
seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place.
The
fact that the Guardian, supposedly the British media’s chief defender of
liberal values, can make this error-strewn statement after nearly a decade of
Assange-related coverage is simply astounding. And that it can make such a
statement days after the US finally admitted that it wants to lock up Assange for
175 years on bogus "espionage" charges – a hand anyone who wasn’t
being wilfully blind always knew the US was preparing to play – is still more
shocking.
Assange
faces no charges in Sweden yet, let alone "rape charges." As former
UK ambassador Craig Murray recently explained, the Guardian has been misleading
readers by falsely claiming that an attempt by a Swedish
prosecutor to extradite Assange – even though the move has not received the
Swedish judiciary’s approval – is the same as his arrest on rape charges. It
isn’t.
Also,
Assange did not seek sanctuary in the embassay to evade the Swedish
investigation. No state in the world gives a non-citizen political
asylum to avoid a rape trial. The asylum was granted
on political grounds. Ecuador rightly accepted Assange’s concerns
that the US would seek his extradition and lock him out of sight for the rest
of his life.
Assange,
of course, has been proven – yet again – decisively right by recent
developments.
Trapped
in herd-think
The
fact that so many ordinary people keep making these basic errors has a very
obvious explanation. It is because the corporate media keep making these
errors.
These
are not the kind of mistakes that can be explained away as an example of what
one journalist has termed the problem of “churnalism”: the
fact that journalists, chasing breaking news in offices depleted of staff by
budget cuts, are too overworked to cover stories properly.
British
journalists have had many years to get the facts straight. In an era of social
media, journalists at the Guardian and the BBC have been bombarded by readers
and activists with messages telling them how they are getting basic facts wrong
in the Assange case. But the journalists keep doing it anyway. They are trapped
in a herd-think entirely divorced from reality.
Rather
than listen to experts, or common sense, these “journalists” keep regurgitating
the talking points of the British security state, which are as good as
identical to the talking points of the US security state.
What
is so striking in the Assange coverage is the sheer number of legal anomalies
in his case – and these have been accumulating relentlessly from the very
start. Almost nothing in his case has gone according to the normal rules of
legal procedure. And yet that very revealing fact is never noticed or commented
on by the corporate media. You need to have a blind spot the size of Langley,
Virginia, not to notice it.
If
Assange wasn’t the head of Wikileaks, if he hadn’t embarrassed the most
important western states and their leaders by divulging their secrets and
crimes, if he hadn’t created a platform that allows whistleblowers to reveal
the outrages committed by the western power establishment, if he hadn’t
undermined that establishment’s control over information dissemination, none of
the last 10 years would have followed the course it did.
If
Assange had not provided us with an information revolution that undermines the
narrative matrix created to serve the US security state, two Swedish women –
unhappy with Assange’s sexual etiquette – would have gotten exactly what they
said in their witness statements they wanted: pressure from
the Swedish authorities to make him take an HIV test to give them peace of
mind.
He
would have been allowed back to the UK (as he in fact was allowed to do by the
Swedish prosecutor) and would have gotten on with developing and refining the
Wikileaks project. That would have helped all of us to become more critically
aware of how we are being manipulated – not only by our security services but
also by the corporate media that so often act as their mouthpiece.
Which
is precisely why that did not happen and why Assange has been under some form
of detention since 2010. Since then, his ability to perform his role as exposer
of serial high-level state crimes has been ever more impeded – to the point now
that he may never be able to oversee and direct Wikileaks ever again.
His
current situation – locked up in Belmarsh high-security prison, in solitary
confinement and deprived of access to a computer and all meaningful contact
with the outside world – is so far based solely on the fact that he committed a
minor infraction, breaching his police bail. Such a violation, committed by
anyone else, almost never incurs prosecution, let alone a lengthy
jail sentence.
So
here is a far from complete list – aided by the research of John Pilger, Craig
Murray and Caitlin Johnstone – of some of the most glaring anomalies in
Assange’s legal troubles. There are 17 of them below. Each might conceivably
have been possible in isolation. But taken together they are overwhelming
evidence that this was never about enforcing the law. From the start, Assange
faced political persecution.
No
judicial authority
* In
late summer 2010, neither of the two Swedish women alleged Assange had raped
them when they made police statements. They went together to the police
station after finding out that Assange had slept with them both only a matter
of days apart and wanted him to be forced to take an HIV test. One of the
women, SW, refused to sign the police statement when she understood the police
were seeking an indictment for rape. The investigation relating to the second
woman, AA, was for a sexual assault specific to Sweden. A condom produced by AA
that she says Assange tore during sex was found to have neither her nor
Assange’s DNA on it, undermining her credibility.
*
Sweden’s strict laws protecting suspects during preliminary investigations were
violated by the Swedish media to smear Assange as a rapist. In response, the
Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took charge and quickly cancelled the investigation: “I don’t believe
there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” She later
concluded: “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”
* The
case was revived by another prosecutor, Marianne Ny, during which time Assange
was questioned and spent more than a month in Sweden waiting for developments
in the case. He was then told by prosecutors that he was free to leave for the
UK, suggesting that any offence they believed he had committed was not
considered serious enough to detain him in Sweden. Nonetheless, shortly
afterwards, Interpol issued a Red Notice for Assange, usually
reserved for terrorists and dangerous criminals.
* The
UK supreme court approved an extradition to Sweden based on a European Arrest
Warrant (EAW) in 2010, despite the fact that it was not signed by a “judicial
authority,” only by the Swedish prosecutor. The terms of the EAW agreement
were amended by the UK government shortly
after the Assange ruling to make sure such an abuse of legal procedure never
occurred again.
* The
UK supreme court also approved Assange’s extradition even though Swedish
authorities refused to offer an assurance that he
would not be extradited onwards to the US, where a grand jury was already formulating
draconian charges in secret against him under the Espionage Act. The US
similarly refused to give an assurance they would not seek his extradition.
* In
these circumstances, Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in London in summer
2012, seeking political asylum. That was after the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne
Ny, blocked Assange’s chance to appeal to
the European Court of Human Rights.
*
Australia not only refused Assange, a citizen, any help during his long ordeal,
but prime minister Julia Gillard even threatened to strip Assange of his
citizenship, until it was pointed out that it would be illegal for Australia to
do so.
*
Britain, meanwhile, not only surrounded the embassy with a large police force
at great public expense, but William Hague, the foreign secretary, threatened
to tear up the Vienna Convention, violating
Ecuador’s diplomatic territory by sending UK police into the embassy to arrest
Assange.
Six
years of heel-dragging
*
Although Assange was still formally under investigation, Ny refused to come to
London to interview him, despite similar interviews having been conducted by
Swedish prosecutors 44 times in the UK in the period Assange was
denied that right.
* In
2016, international legal experts in the United Nations Working Group on
Arbitrary Detention, which adjudicates on whether governments have complied
with human rights obligations, ruled that Assange was being detained unlawfully
by Britain and Sweden. Although both countries participated in the UN
investigation, and had given the tribunal vocal support when other countries
were found guilty of human rights violations, they steadfastly ignored its
ruling in favour of Assange. UK Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond, flat-out
lied in claiming the UN panel was “made up of lay people and not lawyers”. The
tribunal comprises leading experts in international law, as is clear from their CVs. Nonetheless, the
lie became Britain’s official response to the UN ruling. The
British media performed no better. A Guardian editorial dismissed the verdict as nothing more than a
“publicity stunt.”
* Ny
finally relented on interviewing Assange in November 2016, coming to London
after six years of heel-dragging. However, she barred Assange’s lawyer from being
present. That was a gross irregularity that Ny was due to be questioned about in May 2017 by a
Stockholm judge. Apparently rather than face those questions, Ny decided
to close the investigation against Assange
the very same day.
* In
fact, correspondence that was later revealed under a Freedom of Information
request shows that the British prosecution service, the CPS, pressured the
Swedish prosecutor not to come to the London to interview Assange through 2010
and 2011, thereby creating the embassy standoff.
*
Also, the CPS destroyed most of the incriminating correspondence to circumvent
the FoI requests. The emails that surfaced did so only because some copies were
accidentally overlooked in the destruction spree. Those emails were bad enough.
They show that in 2013 Sweden had wanted to drop the case against Assange but
had come under strong British pressure to continue the pretence of seeking his
extradition. There are emails from the CPS stating, “Don’t you
dare” drop the case, and most revealing of all: “Please do not think this case
is being dealt with as just another extradition.”
* It
also emerged that Marianne Ny had deleted an email she received from the
FBI.
*
Despite his interview with Ny taking place in late 2016, Assange was not
subsequently charged in absentia – an option Sweden could have pursued if it
had thought the evidence was strong enough.
*
After Sweden dropped the investigation against Assange, his lawyers sought last
year to get the British arrest warrant for his bail breach dropped. They had
good grounds, both because the allegations over which he’d been bailed had been
dropped by Sweden and because he had justifiable cause to seek asylum given the
apparent US interest in extraditing him and locking him up for life for political
crimes. His lawyers could also argue convincingly that the time he had spent in
confinement, first under house arrest and then in the embassy, was more than
equivalent to time, if any, that needed to be served for the bail infringement.
However, the judge, Emma Arbuthnot, rejected the Assange team’s strong legal
arguments. She was hardly a dispassionate observer. In fact, in a properly
ordered world she should have recused herself, given that she is the wife of a
government whip, who was also a business partner of a former head of MI6,
Britain’s version of the CIA.
*
Assange’s legal rights were again flagrantly violated last week, with the
collusion of Ecuador and the UK, when US prosecutors were allowed to seize
Assange’s personal items from the embassy while his lawyers and UN officials
were denied the right to be present.
Information
dark ages
Even
now, as the US prepares its case to lock Assange away for the rest of his life,
most are still refusing to join the dots. Chelsea Manning has been repeatedly
jailed, and is now facing ruinous fines for every day she refuses to testify
against Assange as the US desperately seeks to prop up its bogus espionage
claims. In Medieval times, the authorities were more honest: they simply put
people on the rack.
Back
in 2017, when the rest of the media were still pretending this was all about
Assange fleeing Swedish “justice”, John Pilger noted:
In 2008, a secret Pentagon document
prepared by the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch" foretold
a detailed plan to discredit WikiLeaks and smear Assange personally. The
"mission" was to destroy the "trust" that was WikiLeaks’
"centre of gravity." This would be achieved with threats of
"exposure [and] criminal prosecution.” Silencing and criminalising such an
unpredictable source of truth-telling was the aim."
According to Australian diplomatic
cables, Washington’s bid to get Assange is “unprecedented in scale and
nature...”
The US Justice Department has contrived
charges of “espionage”, “conspiracy to commit espionage”, “conversion” (theft
of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and
general “conspiracy”. The favoured Espionage Act, which was meant to deter
pacifists and conscientious objectors during World War One, has provisions for
life imprisonment and the death penalty. …
In 2015, a federal court in Washington
blocked the release of all information about the “national security”
investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would
harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rothstein,
said it was necessary to show “appropriate deference to the executive in
matters of national security.” This is a kangaroo court.
All of
this information was available to any journalist or newspaper that cared
to search it out and wished to publicise it. And yet not one corporate media
outlet has done so over the past nine years. Instead they have shored up a
series of preposterous US and UK state narratives designed to keep Assange behind
bars and propel the rest of us back into the information dark ages.
Our work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel
free to republish and share widely.
Jonathan Cook won
the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books
are Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto
Press) and Disappearing
Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed
Books). His website is here.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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