Assange: The Untold Story Of
An Epic Struggle For Justice
By John Pilger
This is an
updated version of John Pilger’s 2014
investigation which tells the unreported story
of an unrelenting campaign, in Sweden and the
US, to deny Julian Assange justice and silence
WikiLeaks: a campaign now reaching a dangerous
stage
July 31, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
-
The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice
and a gruelling farce. For three years, a police cordon around
the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other
than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost
£12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged
with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given
him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have
initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism
and war.
The persecution of Julian Assange is about to flare again as it
enters a dangerous stage. From August 20, three quarters of the
Swedish prosecutor's case against Assange regarding sexual
misconduct in 2010 will disappear as the statute of limitations
expires. At the same time Washington’s obsession with Assange
and WikiLeaks has intensified. Indeed, it is vindictive American
power that offers the greatest threat – as Chelsea Manning and
those still held in Guantanamo can attest.
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.
WikiLeaks continues to expose criminal activity by the US,
having just published top secret US intercepts – US spies'
reports detailing private phone calls of the presidents of
France and Germany, and other senior officials, relating to
internal European political and economic affairs.
None of this is illegal under the US Constiution.
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor
of constitutional law, lauded whistleblowers as "part of a
healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal".
In 2012, the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama boasted
on its website that he had prosecuted more whistleblowers in his
first term than all other US presidents combined. Before Chelsea
Manning had even received a trial, Obama had pronounced the
whisletblower guilty. He was subsequently sentenced to 35 years
in prison, having been tortured during his long pre-trial
detention.
Few doubt that should the US get their hands on
Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of the capture and
assassination of Assange became the currency of the political
extremes in the US following Vice-President Joe Biden's
preposterous slur that the WikiLeaks founder was a
"cyber-terrorist". Those doubting the degree of ruthlessness
Assange can expect should remember the forcing down of the
Bolivian president's plane in 2013 - 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 five 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.
Faced with this constitutional 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 Espionage Act has life in
prison and death penalty provisions.
Assange's ability to defend himself in this
Kafkaesque world has been handicapped by the US declaring his
case a state secret. In March, 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. Rosthstein, said it was necessary
to show “appropriate deference to the executive in matters of
national security”. Such is the “justice” of a kangaroo court.
The supporting act in this grim farce is Sweden,
played by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny. Until recently, Ny
refused to comply with a routine European procedure routine that
required her to travel to London to question Assange and so
advance the case. For four and a half years, Ny has never
properly explained why she has refused to 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.
Contrary to its 1960s 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 in WikiLeaks
cables. In the summer of 2010, Assange had flown to Sweden to
talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the war in Afghanistan - in
which Sweden had forces under US command.
"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."
Why hasn’t the Swedish prosecutor resolved the
Assange case? Many in the legal community in Sweden believe her
behaviour inexplicable. Once implacably hostile to Assange, the
Swedish press has published headlines such as: "Go to London,
for God's sake."
Why hasn'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? And if she
did question him, the conditions she would demand of him and his
lawyers – that they could not challenge her – would make
injustice a near certainty.
On a point of law, the Swedish Supreme Court has
decided Ny can continue to obstruct on the vital issue of the
SMS messages. This will now go to the European Court of Human
Rights. What Ny fears is that the SMS messages will destroy her
case against Assange. One of the 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 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
which blights the reputation of Sweden itself.
For Assange, his only trial has been trial by
media. On August 20, 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, personally and
politically.
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 – which has the
acronym MUST -- publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article
entitled "WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers." 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
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
commonly 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 and now discredited
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 2013. The Assange decision had been wrong, but it was
too late to go back. With extradition imminent, the Swedish
prosecutor told Assange's lawyers that Assange, once in Sweden,
would be immediately placed in one of Sweden's infamous remand
prisons..
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 reformed the Extradition Act to prevent the
misuse of the 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." In other words, the change in the UK
law in 2014 mean that Assange would have won his case and he
would not have been forced to take refuge.
Ecuador's decision to protect Assange in 2012
bloomed into a major international affair. 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 recognize the legitimacy of
Ecuador's decision. Ignoring international law, the Cameron
government refused to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador.
Instead, Ecuador’s embassy was placed under siege and its
government abused with a series of ultimatums. 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, Julian Assange has been confined to a
small room under Ecuador's protection, without sunlight or space
to exercise, surrounded by police under orders to arrest him on
sight. For three years, Ecuador has made clear to the Swedish
prosecutor that Assange is available to be questioned in the
London embassy, and for three years she has remained
intransigent. In the same period Sweden has questioned
forty-four people in the UK in connection with police
investigations. Her role, and that of the Swedish state, is
demonstrably political; and for Ny, facing retirement in two
years, she must “win”.
In despair, Assange has challenged the arrest
warrant in the Swedish courts. His lawyers have cited rulings by
the European Court of Human Rights that he has been under
arbitrary, indefinite detention and that he had been a virtual
prisoner for longer than any actual prison sentence he might
face. The Court of Appeal judge agreed with Assange's lawyers:
the prosecutor had indeed breached her duty by keeping the case
suspended for years. Another judge issued a rebuke to the
prosecutor. And yet she defied the court.
Last December, Assange took his case to the
Swedish Supreme Court, which ordered Marianne Ny's boss – the
Prosecutor General of Sweden Anders Perklev – to explain. The
next day, Ny announced, without explanation, that she had
changed her mind and would now question Assange in London.
In his submission to the Supreme Court, the
Prosecutor General made some important concessions: he argued
that the coercion of Assange had been “intrusive” and that that
the period in the embassy has been a “great strain” on him. He
even conceded that if the matter had ever come to prosecution,
trial, conviction and serving a sentence in Sweden, Julian
Assange would have left Sweden long ago.
In a split decision, one Supreme Court judge
argued that the arrest warrant should have been revoked. The
majority of the judges ruled that, since the prosecutor had now
said she would go to London, Assange's arguments had become
“moot”. But the Court ruled that it would have found against the
prosecutor if she had not suddenly changed her mind. Justice by
caprice. 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 that she be replaced.
Having said she would go to London in June, Ny
did not go, but sent a deputy, knowing that the questioning
would not be legal under these circumstances, especially as
Sweden had not bothered to get Ecuador’s approval for the
meeting. At the same time, her office tipped off the Swedish
tabloid newspaper Expressen, which sent its London
correspondent to wait outside Ecuador's embassy for “news”. The
news was that Ny was cancelling the appointment and blaming
Ecuador for the confusion and by implication an “unco-operative”
Assange – when the opposite was true.
As the statute of limitations date approaches –
August 20 – another chapter in this hideous story will doubtless
unfold, with Marianne Ny pulling yet another rabbit out of her
hat and the commissars and prosecutors in Washington the
beneficiaries. Perhaps none of this is surprising. In 2008, a
war on WikiLeaks and on 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 such a rare source of
truth-telling was the aim, smear the method. While this scandal
continues the very notion of justice is diminished, along with
the reputation of Sweden, and the shadow of America’s menace
touches us all.
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
https://justice4assange.com/Timeline.html
http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/wikileaks_doj_05192014.pdf
https://wikileaks.org/59-International-Organizations.html
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1202703/doj-letter-re-wikileaks-6-19-14.pdf
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/23/julian-assange-ecuador-and-sweden-in-tense-standoff-over-interview?CMP=twt_gu
http://assangeinsweden.com/2015/03/17/the-prosecutor-in-the-assange-case-should-be-replaced
https://justice4assange.com/Prosecutor-cancels-Assange-meeting.html
http://johnpilger.com
