Abuses Show Assange Case Was Never About Law

Jonathan Cook says 17 glaring legal anomalies provide overwhelming evidence that the WikiLeaks publisher has been the victim of political persecution.

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.”

That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade — or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly liberal outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC.

A recent Guardian editorial — the paper’s official voice and probably the segment most scrutinized by senior staff — made just such a false claim:

Then there is the rape charge that Mr. Assange faced in Sweden and which led him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place.

Assange: Victim of legal persecution. (YouTube)

The fact that the Guardian, supposedly the British media’s chief defender of liberal values, can make this error-strewn statement after nearly a decade of Assange-related coverage is simply astounding. And that it can make such a statement days after the U.S. finally admitted that it wants to lock up Assange for 175 years on bogus “espionage” charges — a hand anyone who wasn’t being willfully blind always knew the U.S. was preparing to play — is still more shocking.

Assange faces no charges in Sweden yet, let alone “rape charges.” As former U.K. ambassador Craig Murray recently explained, the Guardian has been misleading readers by falsely claiming that an attempt by a Swedish prosecutor to extradite Assange — even though the move has not received the Swedish judiciary’s approval — is the same as his arrest on rape charges. It isn’t.

Also, Assange did not seek sanctuary in the embassy to evade the Swedish investigation. No state in the world gives a non-citizen political asylum to avoid a rape trial. The asylum was granted on political grounds. Ecuador rightly accepted Assange’s concerns that the U.S. would seek his extradition and lock him out of sight for the rest of his life.

Assange, of course, has been proven – yet again – decisively right by recent developments.

Herd Think

The fact that so many ordinary people keep making these basic errors has a very obvious explanation. It is because the corporate media keep making these errors.

These are is not the kind of mistakes that can be explained away as an example of what one journalist has termed the problem of “churnalism:” the fact that journalists, chasing breaking news in offices depleted of staff by budget cuts, are too overworked to cover stories properly.

Nick Davies’ “churnilism” coinage does not apply. (FT/McKinsey BBYA 2014, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

British journalists have had many years to get the facts straight.

In an era of social media, journalists at the Guardian and the BBC have been bombarded by readers and activists with messages telling them how they are getting basic facts wrong in the Assange case. But the journalists keep doing it anyway. They are trapped in a herd-think entirely divorced from reality.

Rather than listen to experts, or common sense, these “journalists” keep regurgitating the talking points of the British security state, which are as good as identical to the talking points of the US security state.

What is so striking in the Assange coverage is the sheer number of legal anomalies in his case — and these have been accumulating relentlessly from the very start. Almost nothing in his case has gone according to the normal rules of legal procedure. And yet that very revealing fact is never noticed or commented on by the corporate media. You need to have a blind spot the size of Langley, Virginia, not to notice it.

If Assange wasn’t the head of WikiLeaks, if he hadn’t embarrassed the most important western states and their leaders by divulging their secrets and crimes, if he hadn’t created a platform that allows whistleblowers to reveal the outrages committed by the western power establishment, if he hadn’t undermined that establishment’s control over information dissemination, none of the last 10 years would have followed the course it did.

If Assange had not provided us with an information revolution that undermines the narrative matrix created to serve the U.S. security state, two Swedish women — unhappy with Assange’s sexual etiquette — would have gotten exactly what they said in their witness statements they wanted: pressure from the Swedish authorities to make him take an HIV test to give them peace of mind.

He would have been allowed back to the U.K. (as he in fact was allowed to do by the Swedish prosecutor) and would have gotten on with developing and refining the WikiLeaks project. That would have helped all of us to become more critically aware of how we are being manipulated — not only by our security services but also by the corporate media that so often act as their mouthpiece.

Which is precisely why that did not happen and why Assange has been under some form of detention since 2010. Since then, his ability to perform his role as exposer of serial high-level state crimes has been ever more impeded — to the point now that he may never be able to oversee and direct WikiLeaks ever again.

His current situation — locked up in Belmarsh high-security prison, in solitary confinement and deprived of access to a computer and all meaningful contact with the outside world — is so far based solely on the fact that he committed a minor infraction, breaching his police bail. Such a violation, committed by anyone else, almost never incurs prosecution, let alone a lengthy jail sentence.

So here is a far-from-complete list — aided by the research of John Pilger, Craig Murray and Caitlin Johnstone, and the original investigative work of Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi — of some of the most glaring anomalies in Assange’s legal troubles. There are 17 of them below. Each might conceivably have been possible in isolation. But taken together they are overwhelming evidence that this was never about enforcing the law. From the start, Assange faced political persecution.

No Judicial Authority

-In late summer 2010, neither of the two Swedish women alleged Assange had raped them when they made police statements. They went together to the police station after finding out that Assange had slept with them both only a matter of days apart and wanted him to be forced to take an HIV test. One of the women, SW, refused to sign the police statement when she understood the police were seeking an indictment for rape. The investigation relating to the second woman, AA, was for a sexual assault specific to Sweden. A condom produced by AA that she says Assange tore during sex was found to have neither her nor Assange’s DNA on it, undermining her credibility.

-Sweden’s strict laws protecting suspects during preliminary investigations were violated by the Swedish media to smear Assange as a rapist. In response, the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took charge and quickly cancelled the investigation: “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” She later concluded: “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”

-The case was revived by another prosecutor, Marianne Ny, although she never questioned Assange. He spent more than a month in Sweden waiting for developments in the case, but was then told by prosecutors he was free to leave for the U.K., suggesting that suspicions against him were not considered serious enough to detain him in Sweden. Nonetheless, shortly afterwards, Interpol issued a Red Notice for Assange, usually reserved for terrorists and dangerous criminals.

Lyon, France, headquarters of Interpol, which issued a Red Notice for Assange.
(Massimiliano Mariani via Wikimedia Commons)

-The U.K. supreme court approved an extradition to Sweden based on a European Arrest Warrant in 2010, despite the fact that it was not signed by a “judicial authority,” only by the Swedish prosecutor. The terms of the EAW agreement were amended by the U.K. government shortly after the Assange ruling to make sure such an abuse of legal procedure never occurred again.

-The U.K. supreme court also approved Assange’s extradition even though Swedish authorities refused to offer an assurance that he would not be extradited onwards to the U.S., where a grand jury was already formulating draconian charges in secret against him under the Espionage Act. The U.S. similarly refused to give an assurance they would not seek his extradition.

-In these circumstances, Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in London in summer 2012, seeking political asylum. That was after the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, blocked Assange’s chance to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

-Australia not only refused Assange, a citizen, any help during his long ordeal, but Prime Minister Julia Gillard even threatened to strip Assange of his citizenship, until it was pointed out that it would be illegal for Australia to do so.

Gillard, right, with Gen.David Petraeus, commander of the Intl. Security Assistance Force, Afghanistan, Oct. 2, 2010. (U.S. Army/Lorie Jewell)

-Britain, meanwhile, not only surrounded the embassy with a large police force at great public expense, but William Hague, the foreign secretary, threatened to tear up the Vienna Convention, violating Ecuador’s diplomatic territory by sending U.K. police into the embassy to arrest Assange.

Six Years of Heel-Dragging

-Although Assange was still formally under investigation, Ny refused to come to London to interview him, despite similar interviews having been conducted by Swedish prosecutors 44 times in the U.K. in the period Assange was denied that right.

-In 2016, international legal experts in the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which adjudicates on whether governments have complied with human rights obligations, ruled that Assange was being detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden. Although both countries participated in the UN investigation, and had given the tribunal vocal support when other countries were found guilty of human rights violations, they steadfastly ignored its ruling in favor of Assange. U.K. Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond flat-out lied in claiming the UN panel was “made up of lay people and not lawyers.” The tribunal comprises leading experts in international law, as is clear from their resumes. Nonetheless, the lie became Britain’s official response to the UN ruling. The British media performed no better. A Guardian editorial dismissed the verdict as nothing more than a “publicity stunt.”

U.K.’s Hammond at right, with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. (State Department)

-Ny finally relented on Assange being interviewed in November 2016, with a Swedish prosecutor sent to London after six years of heel-dragging. However, Assange’s Swedish lawyer was barred from being present. Ny was due to be questioned about the interview by a Stockholm judge in May 2017 but closed the investigation against Assange the very same day.

-In fact, correspondence that was later revealed under a freedom of information request – pursued by Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi – shows that the British prosecution service — the Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS — pressured the Swedish prosecutor not to come to the London to interview Assange through 2010 and 2011, thereby creating the embassy standoff.

-Also, the CPS destroyed most of the incriminating correspondence to circumvent the freedom of information requests. The emails that surfaced did so only because some copies were accidentally overlooked in the destruction spree. Those emails were bad enough. They show that in 2013 Sweden had wanted to drop the case against Assange but had come under strong British pressure to continue the pretense of seeking his extradition. There are emails from the CPS stating, “Don’t you dare” drop the case, and most revealing of all: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.”

-It also emerged that Marianne Ny had deleted an email she received from the FBI.

-Despite his interview with a Swedish prosecutor taking place in late 2016, Assange was not subseqently charged in absentia — an option Sweden could have pursued if it had thought the evidence was strong enough.

-After Sweden dropped the investigation against Assange, his lawyers sought last year to get the British arrest warrant for his bail breach dropped. They had good grounds, both because the allegations over which he’d been bailed had been dropped by Sweden and because he had justifiable cause to seek asylum given the apparent U.S. interest in extraditing him and locking him up for life for political crimes. His lawyers could also argue convincingly that the time he had spent in confinement, first under house arrest and then in the embassy, was more than equivalent to time, if any, that needed to be served for the bail infringement. However, the judge, Emma Arbuthnot, rejected the Assange team’s strong legal arguments. She was hardly a dispassionate observer. In fact, in a properly ordered world she should have recused herself, given that she is the wife of a government whip, who was also a business partner of a former head of MI6, Britain’s version of the CIA.

-Assange’s legal rights were again flagrantly violated last monthwith the collusion of Ecuador and the U.K., when U.S. prosecutors were allowed to seize Assange’s personal items from the embassy while his lawyers and UN officials were denied the right to be present.

Information Dark Ages

Even now, as the U.S. prepares its case to lock Assange away for the rest of his life, most are still refusing to join the dots. Chelsea Manning has been repeatedly jailed, and is now facing ruinous fines for every day she refuses to testify against Assange as the U.S. desperately seeks to prop up its bogus espionage claims. In Medieval times, the authorities were more honest: they simply put people on the rack.

Back in 2017, when the rest of the media were still pretending this was all about Assange fleeing Swedish “justice,” John Pilger noted:

“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.’ …

According to Australian diplomatic cables, Washington’s bid to get Assange is ‘unprecedented in scale and nature’. …

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. …

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.

All of this information was available to any journalist or newspaper that cared to search it out and wished to publicize it. And yet not one corporate media outlet — apart from Stefania Maurizi — has done so over the past nine years. Instead they have shored up a series of preposterous U.S. and U.K. state narratives designed to keep Assange behind bars and propel the rest of us back into the information dark ages.

Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth. This article first appeared on his blog at  Jonathan Cook.net. 

17 comments for “Abuses Show Assange Case Was Never About Law

  1. James Fletcher
    June 6, 2019 at 12:14

    Honestly? I hope he rots in jail. The main thing people are overlooking is that this creep put serving Defence members lives at risk and could have also inadvertently caused some deaths due to leaking of the clasified information. That is something that all the “Do gooders” conviently overlook.

    All governments make mistakes. All Defence forces have things occur that should not have and all Defence members run the risk of doing something illegal in times of conflict. I do not excuse that nor do I defend it. It should all be brought to light using the correct channels. But to blatantly print classified information without considering the consequences is unforgivable.

    He did what he did knowing full well what couldmpossibly happen to him but he did it anyway. And now he should pay the price for it.

    • Skip Scott
      June 7, 2019 at 06:40

      You are misinformed. And the Empire is not “making mistakes”, they are purposely ignoring international law and slaughtering innocents in a quest for global hegemony, as Wikileaks releases reveal for the whole world to see. I hope your mind doesn’t continue to rot in a cell of its own making. I hope enough citizens eyes are opened that they refuse to serve (or let their children serve) an evil empire. We owe Assange, Manning, Snowden, and other whistleblowers a big “thank you.”

  2. TERESA LOUISE TWEEDIE
    June 6, 2019 at 02:58

    FREE ASSANGE — YOU KILL HIM AND YOU KILL THE FIRST AMENDMENT………

  3. June 5, 2019 at 08:45

    Thank you for the truth

  4. hetro
    June 4, 2019 at 20:26

    Highlighting from the article once again:

    “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.’ …

    The key emphasis here on “destroying the ‘trust’ that was Wikileaks’ ‘centre of gravity’ is crucial to understanding WHY the persecution.

    Key concept: a source widely trusted and influential.

  5. Zhu
    June 4, 2019 at 06:36

    Assange’s “crimes” are against”American Exceptionalism “and the vanity of the US elite.

  6. geeyp
    June 4, 2019 at 01:17

    2016 UK foreign secretary Phillip Hammond: Have you ever watched him sit there with Theresa May in Parliament? John Lennon might have called him a “toffee nosed git”. I’ll go with that.

    • Hassan Shaida
      June 5, 2019 at 16:30

      You are being overly kind to the toffee-nosed git. He is much worse. I would describe him as te possible Missing Link.

  7. Mesa
    June 4, 2019 at 00:25

    There is also the remote targeting torture tech beamed into his embassy room that causes physical illness, sleep deprivation, and psychosis . When the new puppet dictator was installed in Ecuador by the US, His existence became the evil version of the Truman Show where even his lawyer confidentially privileges were violated 24/7 surveillance even in the bathroom. Prisoners have more rights.

  8. CitizenOne
    June 4, 2019 at 00:21

    Well well. The media that broadcasts information ad nausea into our brains is not liberally biased after all. It has its roots in the king’s crier and the parchments nailed to the pillar in the town square admonishing rebels and offering rewards for the menaces that were a threat to the King.

    Not much has changed since medieval times. The media serves the same age old purpose of demonizing dissenters, seditionists and rouges especially those with information damaging to the royal establishment.

    The media is not an information clearing house run by truth tellers that speak power to truth and boldly risk everything. It is just a scribe paid by the rich to create the narrative for control. It has been incredibly reliable over the course of centuries as as a tool for the rich to control the masses through continuous allegations that any person or persons or foreign nations that have a quarrel with governance are enemies of the kingdom.

    Things have progressed and today Julian Assange will not likely be drawn and quartered or be boiled alive or be impaled on a pike pole and hoisted up for all to see but the mechanisms for control by the media are the same. The tactics of the media in conjunction with government are more nuanced and less murderous but not always.

    It is clear by the media coverage of the Assange case is the modern media version of people who were once upon a time condemned to be burned at the stake by the King’s Court. Although not not literally a public burning, the media coverage is designed to send a message learned from the far distant past that dissent will be dealt with by brutal force.

    Our Country has a core value which is at stake here. There will be no cruel or unusual punishment meted out for political enemies of the ruling class. Why is this core value enshrined in our nation’s laws? It is because our original citizens suffered greatly by attempting to speak freely only to find that their words were sufficient to condemn them to torture and death often by cruel and inhuman means.

    The Kings Crier of modern times is not an advocate for the common man but is the paid mercenary for the despotic rule over our states just like the despotic rule over our colonies colonies by a foreign king that severely punished public dissenters.

    Freedom of speech is also based on our history which is also the history of the World where those who spoke out were branded enemies of the state.

    Prosecution of Assange is reminiscent of the barbaric practices of the past which we successfully waged a revolution against and formed a Constitution to guard against.

    • hetro
      June 4, 2019 at 17:34

      Yes, very well said. Salem in the 1690’s also comes to mind, and of course McCarthy’s smearing tactics –the essentially barbaric nature of today’s lynching of Assange is the same. The preposterous elevation of “consensual sex” to “rape” is a prime example of this witch-frenzy.

  9. Ann M Garrison
    June 3, 2019 at 21:34

    The UK Foreign Secretary’s remarks about why he won’t stand in the way of Assange’s extradition are nauseating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRC_cmpp6ZY

  10. Trixie The Biking Viking
    June 3, 2019 at 20:40

    Obviously…….!!!????????

  11. Jeff Harrison
    June 3, 2019 at 20:03

    It is clear that the so-called “liberal rules based order” originally led by the not-so-liberal colonial powers and led now by the new champion of imperialism, the US, is beginning to fall apart. Do not feel sorry for its demise. It was never liberal nor was it based on any rules other than the golden rule – he who has the gold makes the rules. The very first rule of he who has the gold is I win, you lose. Don’t feel sorry but do feel afraid, very afraid. He who makes the rules is self-centered, viscous, and ruthless. Many will die before the world is freed from his evil.

  12. John Neal Spangler
    June 3, 2019 at 19:00

    The MSM media wants everyone to be in the information Dark Age. They are well paid to lie on behalf of their owners. If people could get real news off independent sources on the net, no one would watch ABS, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or Fox.

  13. DW Bartoo
    June 3, 2019 at 16:46

    As well, Julian Assange’s loss of both asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship were not the result of actual due process, of a court proceeding, but were, instead, the arbitrary unilateral decision of Lenin Moreno, the President of Ecuador.

    Presumably, in the age of “Strong Man” governance this has been little noticed.

    Yet, the implications are staggering, and one wonders if lawyers and attorneys everywhere are noting the brutal rise of Unitary excecutives all around the world or whether most have little noticed that the rule of law and habeas corpus are swiftly being revoked?

    I very much appreciate seeing these Jonathan Cook articles appearing at Consortium News.

  14. Abe
    June 3, 2019 at 16:09

    “Shame and the fear of accountability for what has been done by our ‘security’ authorities, not the law-breaking of leakers, is what this is all about.”

    The Final Punishment of Julian Assange
    By Robert Fisk
    https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/03/the-final-punishment-of-julian-assange/

Comments are closed.