The treatment being handed out to Julian Assange would be called a farce if there were anything the least bit funny about it.
The WikiLeaks founder has returned to a UK court for the beginning of extradition proceedings against him by the US government. This was initially on 17 charges under the US’ Espionage Act and one computer charge, carrying a total of 175 years prison. Other accusations have since been added to round out the indictment, some very recently.
From the start, the Assange case has utterly exposed the ludicrous claims to justice of the extradition system. This session was no exception.
With the COVID-19 pandemic ending public court hearings, numerous NGOs and other non-journalist observers were last week offered the chance to dial in to the hearings. This was withdrawn without notice, leaving a vastly reduced scrutiny of the case.
The hearing was plagued by connection problems between multiple locations, as all such hearings have been plagued, in a state that spends several billion pounds on satellite and computer surveillance of millions of people.
The charges against Assange are based on multiple instances of alleged assistance to Chelsea Manning in 2010 in bypassing password encryption of the several hundred thousand files that would go on to form Cablegate and other archives.
The US department of justice added extra material to the 18-count indictment in June. These weren’t extra charges; simply accusations designed to add to the existing charges, largely accusations that Assange had been encouraging people to break into government sources at hacking conferences from 2009 onwards.
The hearing yesterday in London was to determine if Assange would oppose the extradition (he did!), and to set proceedings. Assange’s team sought to delay matters in order to have time to deal with the material added to the indictment.
This was refused, even though client-lawyer access is proving near impossible. The hearing is now expected to last several weeks, a decision will take months more, and there will then be an appeal by the losing side.
Well, ordinarily the decision would take months. But don’t be surprised if the initial decision is fast-tracked. The UK establishment wants to hustle him in shackles onto a plane to DC as fast as possible, and the pressure from without and within the judiciary will be enormous.
A panel of more than 150 international lawyers and judges have argued that the extradition request is illegal, should be thrown out, and is based on essentially political charges in breach of UK and international treaties.
The degree of support Assange got from Corbyn Labour is now gone; current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service when Assange was threatened with extradition to Sweden, and there is no love lost.
Both major parties here are silent about the treatment of an Australian journalist, with the campaign left to current and ex-politicians acting independently, from Kevin Rudd to George Christensen and Andrew Wilkie.
Nor can he expect much support from the fourth estate. The UK is battening down into a post-liberal order, as is the West. The Murdoch papers and others on the right have featured the occasional article worrying as to whether the Assange case criminalises journalism. But by and large they have battened down to national security.
That’s to be expected. As COVID-19 drives the world towards a crisis of globalisation, and of the powers that enforce it, the struggle to contain dissent is getting very brutal indeed.
Since that is in part due to the epochal effect that the Cablegate releases had in 2010, permanently undermining the occult legitimacy of the nation-state and its right to presume secrecy rather than openness in any given process.
The fact that Assange is being pursued to the end of time — the 175 year sentence is like a death sentence, designed to cast pure terror by its scale and the threat of isolation it portends — is a measure of this threat, and it makes it all the more incumbent on those who partnered with WikiLeaks in Cablegate, and benefited from it, to mount a full defence.
The absence of such by The Guardian and The New York Times, a few editorials aside, is telling.
The Guardian especially has hung Assange out to dry multiple times, with distorted and false reporting, mostly by journalists who’d worked on the Cablegate project. How can it leave a co-publisher it shafted to this judicial rendition and not make a front page campaign about it?
It’s shameful, and for journalism shows a dangerous lack of self-awareness.
WikiLeaks, by one measure at least, kicked off this period of history, in which the gangsterish rule of the Iraq War and ’08 crash period was held to account.
States responded with a turn to the grinding machine of national security, supercharged with illiberal populism. If you think two years on remand in a terrorist holding jail and no access to lawyers for a decade-old exposure of power is something out of the past, you’re looking in the wrong direction.
How can the media better support Julian Assange? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
The persecution of Assange is designed to take as long as possible and to be as public as possible. Like the suffering inflicted at the gulags of Manus and Nauru. Like severed heads stuck on high poles outside castle walls. The corporate state wants us to understand what we risk if they dare to challenge its power.
Troo dat!
The expert witness declaration by Mark Feldstein is available online. It has some excellent rebuttals to the nonsense argument that Julian is not a journalist.
Thanks for following this trial. The Mainstream media’s non-coverage of Julian’s plight is beyond disgraceful.
Watch them scramble to cover the China/Aust journo story today. Now, they’re concerned. Because China. Pathetic.
You’re spot on. Not a single line regarding Assange in today’s Guardian. However, the NYT has a report.
Truly terrifying in its implications. I can sense the weight of this on your mind Guy Rundle: not one gag.
If memory serves, the fist Wiki-Leaks article concerned obvious corruption in Kenya; ferreting off UN funds for personal gain was just
the beginning. Ok Kenya is not alone there. Hillary (the same) gushed over the story and reckoned Assange a “master”. The second story
concerned impropriety in the USA. Hillary went through 180 degrees. Such ought to have been a lesson for Assange but, like Wilde (taking
on a marquess for god’s sake), he reckoned himself invincible or at least bulletproof.
A book and a few .pdfs have been written by former colleagues at Wiki-Leaks and flattering to Julian they are not. His most admirable trait is his “my way or highway” attitude and it tends to go downhill from there.
Speaking for my self I would not have hid under a bed at an Embassy. I would have confronted a Swedish court – to say nothing of the witnesses – and ensured that the hearing was based on facts and not Brett Kavanaugh type “evidence”. The risk of extradition from the UK is a good deal higher that from Sweden.
Assange’s personal deficiencies aside, the unifying theme when we include Manning and Snowden was that the NCA (etc.) was in breach
of existing legislation and all the three did was point it out. That perspective has not (from what I have seen) been reflected in any mainstream media. In fact the opposite has been the case – with disparaging remarks to all three.
Lastly, (for now), there has been a good deal to say over the control of HK by the PRC (one could hardly call it an annexation) but in typical duplicitous form, the media has been selective there too. If a uniform set of ethics were applied consistency to events from Assange to arrested personnel by the PRC police the issues would become much more lucid. However, in the case of the West (read Assange), such is the last thing that governments and the mainstream press desire. It is all about Orwellian control nowadays.
Ah ! The Assange case – UK court – the British version of Novichock.