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.
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.
Listen to Eric Draitser’s interview with John Pilger on Episode 12 of the CounterPunch Radio podcast.
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
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
