The Twilight of Russiagate, Part 1: The Urgency of Freeing Julian Assange
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s health is in a perilous state, according to knowledgeable friends, relations, and independent experts. For his sake, and in the interest of press freedom around the world, it’s vital that his supporters fight to liberate him immediately.
For most of the time since his forcible removal from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on April 11 of this year, the WikiLeaks publisher has been an inmate at Britain’s notorious Belmarsh high-security prison, where he’s currently serving a punitive 50-week sentence for a bail violation — a charge that would typically incur a small fine. The district judge who delivered the sentence flaunted his personal bias and animus toward the accused by denouncing Assange as a “narcissist who cannot see beyond his own selfish interest.”
Though they can write him, physical access to Assange is difficult for most of his allies. Troubling reports about his physical and mental condition include the detailed assessment of UN special rapporteur and torture expert Nils Melzer. Accompanied by a psychiatrist and a forensic analyst, Melzer visited the embattled journalist in early May.
“Mr Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture,” said Melzer in a UN statement — for which circumstances he blames the governments of the UK, US, Sweden, and Ecuador.
Speaking to RT America host and Pulitzer laureate Chris Hedges, Melzer outlined the relevant symptoms:
“What we’re talking about is severe traumatization; chronic anxiety; intense, constant stress; an inability to relax, to focus, to think in a structured, straight line. Someone who is in a constant hyper-stimulated state, and can no longer relax.”
In a radio interview with ABC Adelaide, Melzer expressed concern that Assange could die in prison.
“What we see is that his health condition is currently deteriorating to the point that he cannot even appear at a court hearing. This is not prosecution; this is persecution and it has to stop here and it has to stop now.”
This month, investigative journalist John Pilger visited Assange and reported his own profound concern for the WikiLeaks founder’s health. This represents a shift in Pilger’s tone that is itself cause for alarm; in recent years, Pilger has consistently emphasized Assange’s resiliency and strength of character despite the inhumane treatment he has been forced to endure.
Assange’s father, John Shipton, has similarly warned that his son is emaciated and suffering severe anxiety.
Though deeply upsetting, the situation Melzer, Pilger, and Shipton describe should come as no surprise. Assange has been confined inside a small chamber for most of the last seven years, with inadequate medical attention and little if any access to sunlight. His present plight, and the inability of his supporters and advocates to obtain timely intelligence about it, is a source of stress for all parties concerned. Given that Assange’s indisposition is a direct result of the violations of his human rights, it would be no exaggeration to call his death in custody — God forbid — an act of state murder or assassination.
Moreover, while Assange’s well-being must remain top of mind, there is far more at stake than his personal fate. The link between his rights and our own is inextricable.
Meaningful popular sovereignty can’t abide the ongoing persecution and psychological torture of a publisher for, in effect, having provided the public with information about what their governments do in their name. Such information is a resource that every democratic polity needs in order to soundly govern itself, and without which democracy has no meaning. Indeed, one could argue Assange’s personal health is analogous to the present state of democracy worldwide — a system of governance imperiled by adversaries who pose as its defenders.
Swedish sexual misconduct allegations: the gateway to Washington
Recently, a Swedish court rejected a request by prosecutors for a European Arrest Warrant that would have facilitated Assange’s extradition from the UK to Sweden to face questioning over sexual allegations. While this can’t be described as “good news” per se, it’s a minor break in the lawlessness and abuse of process that have characterized his ordeal since 2010, and even more so over the past year.
But the fact an EAW has been denied for now doesn’t necessarily preclude the issue of another in future.
To put it mildly, Swedish prosecutors’ handling of the Assange case has been questionable all along, and inconsistent with the right of an accused person to have legal matters adjudicated within a reasonable timeframe. Those who might protest that Assange’s accuser, Anna Ardin, also deserves consideration are right: the needless delays and questionable procedural conduct have afforded no benefit to her either.
Like a vampire, the Swedish inquiry has repeatedly “died” only to rise from the grave.
Assange cooperated with investigators insofar as he reasonably could when the allegations first arose in 2010. He gave an interview to police while in Stockholm, and voluntarily remained in the country for nearly a month during the investigative process. Far from having “fled justice,” Assange left Stockholm for the UK only upon receiving permission to do so from the head prosecutor, Marianne Ny.
Ny proceeded to issue an arrest warrant for Assange later the same year. A European Arrest Warrant — normally reserved for terrorists and violent criminals — soon followed.
Assange surrendered himself to UK police, and was released from custody on bail as he awaited extradition hearings. Having exhausted all attempts to avoid extradition through this judicial process, he eventually breached his bail conditions to apply for political asylum at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.
As Assange and his lawyers have often explained, the WikiLeaks founder did this not to avoid extradition to Sweden per se, but rather rendition to the US to face indictment over WikiLeaks’ publications, an outcome against which Swedish authorities have always refused to guarantee. Their stubbornness is disconcerting, and even more so when one considers Sweden’s past involvement in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.
The concern about onward extradition to the US was further validated by the former Ecuadoran government of Rafael Correa when it approved Assange’s application for asylum in 2012. Among the factors Quito considered were credible leaks of information about a US grand jury that had convened to prosecute the WikiLeaks publisher as early as 2010.
Swedish prosecutors have the authority to charge and question suspects in absentia, but have refrained from doing so in Assange’s case, offering at best incoherent explanations for this. After years of stonewalling, they finally agreed to interview Assange at London’s Ecuadoran embassy in 2016, following which they again suspended the investigation. They’ve now queried Assange multiple times and shut down the investigation of him twice. There’s no public indication of new developments in the case over the intervening years, and little reason to believe further questioning of Assange would bring more relevant information to light so long after the fact.
The reason for Assange’s protracted confinement in the Ecuadoran embassy in London is that British authorities have consistently denied him safe passage out of the country. This prompted a UN committee of experts to rule in 2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily detained by the UK — a finding the British government duly disregarded.
Correspondence between British and Swedish prosecutors, released in 2018 through a freedom of information lawsuit by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, indicates that while the Swedes hoped to drop the case against Assange as early as August 2012, their British counterparts pressured them to keep it going.
Responding to a press report that Sweden could drop the proceeding and the EAW against Assange, the UK Crown Prosecution Service official wrote “Don’t you dare get cold feet!” and hinted that the situation was not being treated as a normal extradition case.
The CPS also destroyed key e-mails, and advised Ny against visiting London to question the WikiLeaks founder there. Her resistance to doing so at the CPS’s urging ultimately delayed resolution of the case, and provided a pretext for Assange’s arbitrary detention.
Trump regime continues a grand jury process Obama started
Though a grand jury initially convened under former president Barack Obama’s watch, the administration declined to prosecute WikiLeaks because of what Department of Justice officials termed “the New York Times problem”: as the activities of WikiLeaks in soliciting and publishing classified information doesn’t meaningfully differ from what legacy media organizations like the Times routinely do, it’s near impossible to prosecute Assange and his associates without creating a precedent that could jeopardize protections of freedom of the press in the US Constitution’s first amendment. To this correct assessment, a further concern must be added: that the extraterritorial nature of the Assange case means journalists who expose the crimes and secrets of foreign governments, especially but not exclusively that of the US, are in danger of persecution and imprisonment virtually everywhere on earth.
The regime of Trump, in many ways more reactionary than its predecessor and openly hostile to news organizations in general, has evinced less concern about this. That said, the bloodlust against Assange is clearly bipartisan inside the Beltway, with major figues in both parties celebrating the prospect of the journalist’s rendition to the US. This list notably includes Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency in 2016, Hillary Clinton, who would be president in the likeliest alternative scenario.
“I think it’s ironic that [Assange] is the only foreigner whom this administration would welcome to the United States,” joked Clinton in response to news of his arrest.
Washington’s pseudo-legal pursuit of Assange is intimately linked to the re-incarceration of Chelsea Manning and the state larceny of her savings, and the summary revocation of Assange’s Ecuadoran citizenship and surrender of his personal effects to the US by the current government in Quito. The handover of Assange’s belongings represents a search and seizure of very dubious legality, with US authorities likely hoping to uncover incriminating evidence among their contents. Manning’s detention implies that Washington not only intends to capture Assange by exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, but to bring an additional indictment against him beyond the Espionage Act charges it has already publicized — which on their own carry a possible sentence up to 175 years.
It’s inconceivable that the US government would bother to exercise its power to detain and fine Manning, in an effort to compel her testimony before a grand jury, unless it planned further charges against Assange.
High stakes in British courts
Britain’s recently departed foreign secretary Sajid Javid announced in June that he had signed off on Assange’s extradition to the US, clearing another legal hurdle to that outcome and leaving it in the hands of the British judiciary. A date has been set for the extradition hearing to begin in February 2020. Unfortunately, the presiding judge, Emma Arbuthnot, is in conflict of interest; her husband Baron James Arbuthnot, whose named is mentioned in documents WikiLeaks exposed, is a Conservative member of the House of Lords with ties to the British armed forces and defence contractors, and a history of overseeing British military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet there is as yet no sign that she will recuse herself.
For Assange, therefore, the prospect of avoiding extradition may hinge on the success of an appeal to a higher court. It’s imperative that he not be extradited to the US, where he can expect a rigged trial and life in prison, if not worse.
States and media conspire to aggravate Assange’s ordeal
The long-running character assassination of the WikiLeaks publisher has been a joint project of the governments of the US, UK, Sweden, and as of more recently, the Moreno regime in Ecuador, along with prominent public figures and legacy news media. In the US and allied states, media-political discourse around the matter has included many brazen falsehoods and defamatory allegations, baseless disavowals of the fact that Assange is a journalist and denunciation of him as a “terrorist,” calls for his assassination, and the assertion that WikiLeaks is a “non-state hostile intelligence service” not entitled to First Amendment protection.
Melzer believes this animus from powerful and highly influential public figures, along with the ever-present threat of politically motivated prosecution, has contributed to Assange’s life-threatening ordeal.
A bitter cocktail of professional jealousy and snooty disdain has long coloured legacy media coverage of Assange’s plight. Revealingly, among the most consistently malicious of Assange’s detractors are The Guardian and The New York Times, news organizations that have collaborated with Wikileaks on important news stories in the recent past.
In an op-ed published June 26, Melzer offers a remarkable confession and insight into how this discourse around Assange shaped his own frame of mind.
“Like most of the public, I had been subconsciously poisoned by the relentless smear campaign [against Assange], which had been disseminated over the years…But once I looked into the facts of this case, what I found filled me with repulsion and disbelief.
“In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed.”
Melzer’s article addresses various falsehoods amplified over the years by public figures and media outlets. He claims he submitted it for consideration to several very reputable news organizations, including the Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Telegraph, Newsweek, and the Sydney Morning Herald, all of which declined to publish it.
It’s telling that after years of disparaging Assange with frequently defamatory and unverified innuendo, legacy media tend to clam up in the face of exculpatory evidence and expertise, and have provided little if any ongoing coverage of his frightening indisposition.
One of the more persistent and spiteful accusations legacy media have leveled against Assange is his supposed indifference to the plight of personnel working clandestinely on behalf of western governments who are named or otherwise exposed by WikiLeaks publications. The hackneyed argument that Assange “isn’t a real journalist” is typically rooted in this perception, which originated in a comment Assange allegedly made to a Guardian journalist. But the basis for this belief was recently challenged by Australian investigative journalist Mark Davis.
As the director of the documentary Inside WikiLeaks (2010), Davis was an eyewitness to the relevant period of collaboration between Assange and journalists from the Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel related to the Afghan War Logs. Davis suggests that if anyone was cavalier about the prospect of informants or covert operatives being killed, it was journalists from the legacy news organizations, not Assange. (The video of Davis’ speech begins at 46:20 of this episode of CN Live, a production of independent media outlet Consortium News.) According to Davis, Assange in fact dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and effort — single-handedly — to redacting tens of thousands of names of individuals who could be endangered by the releases.
Davis also made the explosive allegations that the Times, Guardian, and Spiegel attempted to set Assange and WikiLeaks up, and insulate themselves from legal fallout, by attributing the initial publication of the Afghan War Logs to WikiLeaks. Thus, there is no morally defensible reason why Assange should be incarcerated while his former legacy media collaborators are free.
Since the summer of 2016, accusations that Assange “interfered” in the 2016 US election on behalf of Trump, by releasing — with the supposed connivance of Russian intelligence — information harmful to the campaign of Clinton, has driven the rage against Assange of many liberal journalists and news organizations to new heights of acrimony and irrationality. This tide of bile includes a handful of especially notable smear pieces by the New York Times, the Guardian, and CNN.
What’s perhaps most striking about such articles is the profound contempt their authors show for WikiLeaks’ publication of truthful information in the public interest. Said another way, the journalists behind these stories appear to revile the actual practice of journalism.
In my upcoming posts in this series, I’ll have much more to offer about the “scandal” termed Russiagate, its many facets, implications and moral and logical failings, and the role of both establishment and nominally progressive media in driving and sustaining it.
I argue that though the Russiagate narrative has been presented to liberal audiences in the US and elsewhere as the chief expression of #resistance to Trump and his presidency, it is in fact primarily intended to tar Assange and WikiLeaks and the principles they represent. The promoters of Russiagate, led by Clinton and her sympathizers, have sought to attribute the grotesque reign of Trump to WikiLeaks’ journalism. In turn, these Russiagaters aim to undermine support among liberals and leftists for values like transparency and accountability in politics and government; freedom of expression; opposition to war and empire; and journalism that exposes the machinations of the national security state, instead of colluding with it to condition and manipulate public opinion.
Some liberal Russiagaters even have the temerity to blame Assange for his own persecution at the hands of Trump, the president WikiLeaks’s publications supposedly helped elect. Among other important considerations, this perspective ignores Clinton’s deep antipathy to Assange and amenability to his prosecution by the Trump regime.
In the mean time, I urge you to write and speak out about the situation of Julian Assange, call or write your political representative demanding action, pitch an op-ed to your local newspaper, and become involved in actions to raise awareness and pressure the responsible political authorities. Follow Twitter accounts like @couragefound and @DefendAssange for updates, and donate to the WikiLeaks legal defence fund at https://defend.wikileaks.org/. Visit the World Socialist Web Site to learn about and participate in organizing public demonstrations in support of Assange and Manning, or create one of your own.
To save Assange’s life, and protect press freedom and democracy from being reduced to empty buzzwords, time is very much of the essence.
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Over the last few months, I’ve been researching and writing about the origins of Russiagate, and its links to (among other important issues) the pseudo-legal persecution of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. However, the piece I’ve been working on has grown far too long for a single post, so I’ve decided to break it into pieces that I hope my readers will find easier to digest.
There is no more urgent aspect of this story than the present situation of Assange, which is why I opted to start there.
If you found this piece helpful, I encourage you to share it on social media and check out my previous posts on Medium. If you’re able to help support my work through paypal.me/KyleFarquharson, I would greatly appreciate that too.
