May 20, 2017
By: John Pilger
Source: http://johnpilger.com/articles/getting-julian-assange-the-untold-story
By: John Pilger
Source: http://johnpilger.com/articles/getting-julian-assange-the-untold-story
Julian Assange has been
vindicated because the Swedish case against him was corrupt. The prosecutor,
Marianne Ny, obstructed justice and should be prosecuted. Her obsession with
Assange not only embarrassed her colleagues and the judiciary but exposed the
Swedish state's collusion with the United States in its crimes of war and
"rendition".
Had Assange not sought
refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he would have been on his way to
the kind of American torture pit Chelsea Manning had to endure.
This prospect was obscured
by the grim farce played out in Sweden. "It's a laughing stock," said
James Catlin, one of Assange's Australian lawyers. "It is as if they make
it up as they go along".
It may have seemed that
way, but there was always serious purpose. 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.
Perhaps this was understandable.
WikiLeaks has exposed the way America dominates much of human affairs,
including its epic crimes, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale,
often homicidal killing of civilians and the contempt for sovereignty and
international law.
These disclosures are
protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. As a presidential
candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor of constitutional law, lauded
whistle blowers as "part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be
protected from reprisal".
In 2012, the Obama campaign
boasted on its website that Obama had prosecuted more whistleblowers in his
first term than all other US presidents combined. Before Chelsea Manning had
even received a trial, Obama had publicly pronounced her guilty.
Few serious observers doubt
that should the US get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him.
According to documents released by Edward Snowden, he is on a "Manhunt
target list". Threats of his kidnapping and assassination became almost political
and media currency in the US following then Vice-President Joe Biden's
preposterous slur that the WikiLeaks founder was a "cyber-terrorist".
Hillary Clinton, the
destroyer of Libya and, as WikiLeaks revealed last year, the secret supporter
and personal beneficiary of forces underwriting ISIS, proposed her own
expedient solution: "Can't we just drone this guy."
According to Australian
diplomatic cables, Washington's bid to get Assange is "unprecedented in
scale and nature". In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has sought
for almost seven years to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted.
This is not easy.
The First Amendment
protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers, whether it is the editor
of the New York Times or the editor of WikiLeaks. The very notion of free
speech is described as America's " founding virtue" or, as Thomas
Jefferson called it, "our currency".
Faced with this hurdle, 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.
Assange's ability to defend
himself in such a Kafkaesque world has been severely limited by the US
declaring his case a state secret. 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.
For Assange, his trial has
been trial by media. On August 20, 2010, when the Swedish police opened a
"rape investigation", they coordinated it, unlawfully, with the
Stockholm tabloids. The front pages said Assange had been accused of the
"rape of two women". The word "rape" can have a very
different legal meaning in Sweden than in Britain; a pernicious false reality
became the news that went round the world.
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."
Enter Claes Borgstrom, a
highly contentious figure 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
Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well, personally and
politically.
On 30 August, Assange
attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered 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.
At a press conference,
Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it
had already been dismissed. The reporter cited one of the women as saying she had
not been raped. He replied, "Ah, but she is not a lawyer."
On the day that Marianne Ny
reactivated the case, the head of Sweden's military intelligence service -
which has the acronym MUST - publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article
entitled "WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers [under US command in
Afghanistan]".
Both the Swedish prime
minister and foreign minister attacked Assange, who had been charged with no
crime. Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO, 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 renewed "rape 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 in
London.
Finally, he was allowed him
to leave. As soon as he had left, Marianne Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant
and an Interpol "red alert" normally used for terrorists and
dangerous criminals.
Assange attended a police
station in London, was duly 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 in
London, by video or personally, pointing out that Marianne Ny had given him
permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard
commonly used by the Swedish and other European authorities for that purpose.
She refused.
For almost seven years,
while Sweden has questioned forty-four people in the UK in connection with
police investigations, Ny refused to question Assange and so advance her case.
Writing in the Swedish
press, a former Swedish prosecutor, Rolf Hillegren, accused Ny of losing all
impartiality. He described her personal investment in the case as
"abnormal" and demanded she be replaced.
Assange asked the Swedish
authorities for a guarantee that he would not be "rendered" to the US
if he was extradited to Sweden. This was refused. In December 2010, The
Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward
extradition to the US.
Contrary to its reputation
as a bastion of liberal enlightenment, 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 in
WikiLeaks cables.
"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
that faced 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."
The war on Assange now
intensified. Marianne Ny refused to allow his Swedish lawyers, and the Swedish
courts, access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police had extracted from
the phone of one of the two women involved in the "rape" allegations.
Ny said she was not legally
required to reveal this critical evidence until a formal charge was laid and
she had questioned him. Then, why wouldn't she question him? Catch-22.
When she announced last
week that she was dropping the Assange case, she made no mention of the
evidence that would destroy it. One of
the SMS messages makes clear that one of the women 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 denied they were raped and one of them has since
tweeted, "I have not been raped." The women were manipulated by
police - whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they, too, are the
victims of this sinister saga.
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?"
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 government of tiny Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis
of documented evidence 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 the
then prime minister, Julia Gillard, had even threatened to take away his
Australian passport - until it was pointed out to her that this would be
unlawful.
The renowned human rights
lawyer, Gareth Peirce, 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.
In 2011, in Sydney, I spent
several hours with a conservative Member of Australia's Federal Parliament,
Malcolm Turnbull. We discussed the threats to Assange and their wider
implications for freedom of speech and justice, and why Australia was obliged
to stand by him. Turnbull then had a reputation as a free speech advocate. He
is now the Prime Minister of Australia.
I gave him Gareth Peirce's
letter about the threat to Assange's rights and life. He said the situation was
clearly appalling and promised to take it up with the Gillard government. Only
his silence followed.
For almost seven years,
this epic miscarriage of justice has been drowned in a vituperative campaign against
the WikiLeaks founder. There are few precedents. Deeply personal, petty,
vicious and inhuman attacks have been 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, and to the principle of free speech, was lost in the sordid
and the ambitious. I would call it anti-journalism.
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 previous 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". Yet no attempt was made to protect the Guardian's provider and
source. Instead, the "scoop" became part of a 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".
Journalism students might
well study this period to understand that the most ubiquitous source of
"fake news" is from within a media self-ordained with a false
respectability and an extension of the authority and power it claims to
challenge but courts and protects.
The presumption of
innocence was not a consideration in Kirsty Wark's memorable BBC live-on-air
interrogation in 2010. "Why don't you just apologise to the women?"
she demanded of Assange, followed by: "Do we have your word of honour that
you won't abscond?"
On the BBC's Today
programme, John Humphrys bellowed: "Are you a sexual predator?"
Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded
to know how many women he had slept with.
"Would even Fox News
have descended to that level?" wondered the American historian William
Blum. "I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I
was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: 'You
mean including your mother?'"
Last week, on BBC World
News, on the day Sweden announced it was dropping the case, I was interviewed
by Geeta Guru-Murthy, who seemed to have little knowledge of the Assange case.
She persisted in referring to the "charges" against him. She accused
him of putting Trump in the White House; and she drew my attention to the
"fact" that "leaders around the world" had condemned him.
Among these "leaders" she included Trump's CIA director. I asked her,
"Are you a journalist?".
The injustice meted out to
Assange is one of the reasons Parliament reformed the Extradition Act in 2014.
"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." In other
words, he would have won his case in the British courts and would not have been
forced to take refuge.
Ecuador's decision to
protect Assange in 2012 was immensely brave. Even though the granting of asylum
is a humanitarian act, and the power to do so is enjoyed by all states under
international law, both Sweden and the United Kingdom refused to recognise the
legitimacy of Ecuador's decision.
Ecuador's embassy in London
was placed under police siege and its government abused. When William Hague's
Foreign Office threatened to violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic
Relations, warning that it would remove the diplomatic inviolability of the
embassy and send the police in to get Assange, outrage across the world forced
the government to back down.
During one night, police
appeared at the windows of the embassy in an obvious attempt to intimidate
Assange and his protectors.
Since then, Assange has
been confined to a small room without sunlight. He has been ill from time to
time and refused safe passage to the diagnostic facilities of hospital. Yet,
his resilience and dark humour remain quite remarkable in the circumstances.
When asked how he put up with the confinement, he replied, "Sure beats a
supermax."
It is not over, but it is
unravelling. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention - the
tribunal that adjudicates and decides whether governments comply with their
human rights obligations - last year ruled that Assange had been detained
unlawfully by Britain and Sweden. This is international law at its apex.
Both Britain and Sweden
participated in the 16-month long UN investigation and submitted evidence and
defended their position before the tribunal. In previous cases ruled upon by
the Working Group - Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Burma, imprisoned opposition leader
Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, detained Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian in
Iran - both Britain and Sweden gave full support to the tribunal. The difference
now is that Assange's persecution endures in the heart of London.
The Metropolitan Police say
they still intend to arrest Assange for bail infringement should he leave the
embassy. What then? A few months in prison while the US delivers its extradition
request to the British courts?
If the British Government
allows this to happen it will, in the eyes of the world, be shamed
comprehensively and historically as an accessory to the crime of a war waged by
rampant power against justice and freedom, and all of us.