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THE SIEGE OF JULIAN ASSANGE - A SPECIAL INVESTIGATION |
The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated,
costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has
served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. Their
quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross
injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South
American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of
truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.
The persecution
of Julian Assange must end. Even the British government clearly
believes it must end. On 28 October, the deputy foreign minister, Hugo
Swire, told Parliament he would "actively welcome" the Swedish
prosecutor in London and "we would do absolutely everything to
facilitate that". The tone was impatient.
The Swedish prosecutor,
Marianne Ny, has refused to come to London to question Assange about
allegations of sexual misconduct in Stockholm in 2010 - even though
Swedish law allows for it and the procedure is routine for Sweden and
the UK. The documentary evidence of a threat to Assange's life and
freedom from the United States - should he leave the embassy - is
overwhelming. On May 14 this year, US court files revealed that a "multi
subject investigation" against Assange was "active and ongoing".
Ny
has never properly explained why she will not come to London, just as
the Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give
Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him on to the US under a
secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington. In December
2010, the Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed
his onward extradition to the US before the European Arrest Warrant was
issued.
Perhaps an explanation is that, contrary to its reputation
as a liberal bastion, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it
has allowed secret CIA "renditions" - including the illegal deportation
of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian
political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the UN Committee against
Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity
and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil
litigation and WikiLeaks cables. In the summer of 2010, Assange had been
in Sweden to talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the war in Afghanistan
- in which Sweden had forces under US command.
The Americans are
pursuing Assange because WikiLeaks exposed their epic crimes in
Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of
civilians, which they covered up; and their contempt for sovereignty and
international law, as demonstrated vividly in their leaked diplomatic
cables.
For his part in disclosing how US soldiers murdered Afghan
and Iraqi civilians, the heroic soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning
received a sentence of 35 years, having been held for more than a
thousand days in conditions which, according to the UN Special
Rapporteur, amounted to torture.
Few doubt that should the US get
their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of capture
and assassination became the currency of the political extremes in the
US following Vice-President Joe Biden's preposterous slur that Assange
was a "cyber-terrorist". Anyone doubting the kind of US ruthlessness he
can expect should remember the forcing down of the Bolivian president's
plane last year - wrongly believed to be carrying Edward Snowden.
According
to documents released by Snowden, Assange is on a "Manhunt target
list". Washington's bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is
"unprecedented in scale and nature". In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret
grand jury has spent four years attempting to contrive a crime for which
Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy. The First Amendment to the
US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. As
a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama lauded whistleblowers as
"part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from
reprisal". Under President Obama, more whistleblowers have been
prosecuted than under all other US presidents combined. Even before the
verdict was announced in the trial of Chelsea Manning, Obama had
pronounced the whisletblower guilty.
"Documents released by
WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England," wrote Al Burke, editor of the
online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and
dangers facing Assange, "clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently
submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to
civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to
be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to
the United States without due consideration of his legal rights."
There
are signs that the Swedish public and legal community do not support
prosecutor's Marianne Ny's intransigence. Once implacably hostile to
Assange, the Swedish press has published headlines such as: "Go to
London, for God's sake."
Why won't she? More to the point, why
won't she allow the Swedish court access to hundreds of SMS messages
that the police extracted from the phone of one of the two women
involved in the misconduct allegations? Why won't she hand them over to
Assange's Swedish lawyers? She says she is not legally required to do so
until a formal charge is laid and she has questioned him. Then, why
doesn't she question him?
This week, the Swedish Court of Appeal
will decide whether to order Ny to hand over the SMS messages; or the
matter will go to the Supreme Court and the European Court of Justice.
In high farce, Assange's Swedish lawyers have been allowed only to
"review" the SMS messages, which they had to memorise.
One of the
women's messages makes clear that she did not want any charges brought
against Assange, "but the police were keen on getting a hold on him".
She was "shocked" when they arrested him because she only "wanted him to
take [an HIV] test". She "did not want to accuse JA of anything" and
"it was the police who made up the charges". (In a witness statement,
she is quoted as saying that she had been "railroaded by police and
others around her".)
Neither woman claimed she had been raped.
Indeed, both have denied they were raped and one of them has since
tweeted, "I have not been raped." That they were manipulated by police
and their wishes ignored is evident - whatever their lawyers might say
now. Certainly, they are victims of a saga worthy of Kafka.
For
Assange, his only trial has been trial by media. On 20 August 2010, the
Swedish police opened a "rape investigation" and immediately - and
unlawfully - told the Stockholm tabloids that there was a warrant for
Assange's arrest for the "rape of two women". This was the news that
went round the world.
In Washington, a smiling US Defence
Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that the arrest "sounds like good
news to me". Twitter accounts associated with the Pentagon described
Assange as a "rapist" and a "fugitive".
Less than 24 hours later,
the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation.
She wasted no time in cancelling the arrest warrant, saying, "I don't
believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape." Four
days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying,
"There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever." The file was closed.
Enter
Claes Borgstrom, a high profile politician in the Social Democratic
Party then standing as a candidate in Sweden's imminent general
election. Within days of the chief prosecutor's dismissal of the case,
Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the
two women and had sought a different prosecutor in the city of
Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well. She, too,
was involved with the Social Democrats.
On 30 August, Assange
attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered all the
questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two
days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case. Borgstrom was
asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had
already been dismissed, citing one of the women as saying she had not
been raped. He replied, "Ah, but she is not a lawyer." Assange's
Australian barrister, James Catlin, responded, "This is a laughing
stock... it's as if they make it up as they go along."
On the day
Marianne Ny reactivated the case, the head of Sweden's military
intelligence service ("MUST") publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article
entitled "WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers." Assange was warned
that the Swedish intelligence service, SAP, had been told by its US
counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be
"cut off" if Sweden sheltered him.
For five weeks, Assange waited
in Sweden for the new investigation to take its course. The Guardian was
then on the brink of publishing the Iraq "War Logs", based on
WikiLeaks' disclosures, which Assange was to oversee. His lawyer in
Stockholm asked Ny if she had any objection to his leaving the country.
She said he was free to leave.
Inexplicably, as soon as he left
Sweden - at the height of media and public interest in the WikiLeaks
disclosures - Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol "red
alert" normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals. Put out in
five languages around the world, it ensured a media frenzy.
Assange
attended a police station in London, was arrested and spent ten days in
Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on £340,000 bail,
he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and
placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey
to the Supreme Court. He still had not been charged with any offence.
His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned by Ny in London,
pointing out that she had given him permission to leave Sweden. They
suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard used for that purpose. She
refused.
Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape
wrote: "The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind
which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for
having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars
and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction... The
authorities care so little about violence against women that they
manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is
available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via
Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation?
What are they afraid of?"
This question remained unanswered as Ny
deployed the European Arrest Warrant, a draconian product of the "war
on terror" supposedly designed to catch terrorists and organised
criminals. The EAW had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state
to provide any evidence of a crime. More than a thousand EAWs are issued
each month; only a few have anything to do with potential "terror"
charges. Most are issued for trivial offences, such as overdue bank
charges and fines. Many of those extradited face months in prison
without charge. There have been a number of shocking miscarriages of
justice, of which British judges have been highly critical.
The
Assange case finally reached the UK Supreme Court in May 2012. In a
judgement that upheld the EAW - whose rigid demands had left the courts
almost no room for manoeuvre - the judges found that European
prosecutors could issue extradition warrants in the UK without any
judicial oversight, even though Parliament intended otherwise. They made
clear that Parliament had been "misled" by the Blair government. The
court was split, 5-2, and consequently found against Assange.
However,
the Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, made one mistake. He applied the
Vienna Convention on treaty interpretation, allowing for state practice
to override the letter of the law. As Assange's barrister, Dinah Rose
QC, pointed out, this did not apply to the EAW.
The Supreme Court
only recognised this crucial error when it dealt with another appeal
against the EAW in November last year. The Assange decision had been
wrong, but it was too late to go back.
Assange's choice was stark:
extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it
would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity
for refuge and safety. Supported by most of Latin America, the
courageous government of Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis
of documented evidence and legal advice that he faced the prospect of
cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his
basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had
abandoned him and colluded with Washington. The Labor government of
prime minister Julia Gillard had even threatened to take away his
passport.
Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer who
represents Assange in London, wrote to the then Australian foreign
minister, Kevin Rudd: "Given the extent of the public discussion,
frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions... it is very hard
to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr.
Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of
potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two
different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own
country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in
circumstances that are highly politically charged."
It was not
until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce
received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she
raised. In a meeting I attended with her, the Australian Consul-General,
Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew "only what I read
in the newspapers" about the details of the case.
Meanwhile, the
prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice was drowned in a
vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal,
petty, vicious and inhuman attacks were aimed at a man not charged with
any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant
facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat
to Assange was a threat to all journalists, to freedom of speech, was
lost in the sordid and the ambitious.
Books were published, movie
deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of
WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he
was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while
WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. The editor of the Guardian, Alan
Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper
published, "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30
years". It became part of his marketing plan to raise the newspaper's
cover price.
With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a
hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book's
authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as
a "damaged personality" and "callous". They also revealed the secret
password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to
protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange
now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the
police outside, gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last
laugh".
The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons
Parliament will eventually vote on a reformed EAW. The draconian
catch-all used against him could not happen now; charges would have to
be brought and "questioning" would be insufficient grounds for
extradition. "His case has been won lock, stock and barrel," Gareth
Peirce told me, "these changes in the law mean that the UK now
recognises as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he
does not benefit. And the genuineness of Ecuador's offer of sanctuary is
not questioned by the UK or Sweden."
On 18 March 2008, a war on
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was foretold in a secret Pentagon document
prepared by the "Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch". It
described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of "trust" which is
WikiLeaks' "centre of gravity". This would be achieved with threats of
"exposure [and] criminal prosecution". Silencing and criminalising this
rare source of independent journalism was the aim, smear the method.
Hell hath no fury like great power scorned.
For important additional information, click on the following links:
http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/assange-could-face-espionage-trial-in-us-2154107.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ImXe_EQhUI http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/wikileaks_doj_05192014.pdf
Source: johnpilger.com
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