Enough is enough

Here’s a name that isn’t published or broadcast much these days — Julian Assange.

Fourteen years ago he was one of the most famous people in the world. That was after the online publisher he founded, WikiLeaks, let the world know what illegal and immoral acts the United States had been up to in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Living and working in Britain in 2010, Assange — an Australian citizen — obtained the leaks, which were mainly classified and secret documents, as well as a chilling video of US soldiers fatally shooting unarmed civilians from a helicopter in Iraq in 2007.

On the accompanying audio, the soldiers are heard laughing while committing the atrocity.

The US government, furious at the publication of such material, have been trying pretty much ever since to have Assange transported to the US to stand trial on charges under the 107-year-old Espionage Act. 

Remember Assange is not an American and the deeds he is accused of committing did not occur on American soil.

Yet the Washington government wants to have Assange extradited to the US so that he faces trial there.

In 2012 Assange claimed asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, protecting himself from extradition to Sweden to face some possibly spurious sex charges. He reckoned the US would lean on Sweden into putting him on a plane to Washington from Stockholm.

The charges in Sweden were dropped in 2019.

London’s Metropolitan Police spent over 12 million pounds patrolling the streets around the Ecuadorian Embassy to ensure Assange didn’t escape under darkness. They finally retreated in 2015.

But in April 2019 Ecuador withdrew his asylum, inviting London Police in to arrest Assange. As he had missed a court appearance on the Swedish extradition case seven years prior, Assange was taken from the Embassy to the high security HM Prison Belmarsh in London, where he has remained ever since.

Now he’s in isolation for up to 23 hours a day.

Assange has not been charged with a crime in the United Kingdom but the US has continued the fight to have him extradited.

Despite credible evidence emerging that President Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo had planned to have Assange murdered in prison, the then British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s extradition to the US in June of 2022.

Assange’s legal team continue the battle to fight extradition. The most recent hearing was in February this year. The High Court decision handed down on March 26th sought assurances from the US Government that if he was extradited he would, despite being Australian, be able to claim rights under the US Constitution’s First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech, and that he would not be sentenced to death.

Those guarantees have not yet been forthcoming, and 52-year-old Assange — now in failing health — remains in Belmarsh.

His continued incarceration is an affront to justice, to freedom of expression and freedom of the media.

Assange is guilty of little more than embarrassing the American government. The source of much of his 2010 material, US Army soldier Chelsea (born Bradley) Manning was convicted of espionage in 2013, sentenced to 35 years in prison but was pardoned by President Barack Obama just before he left office in January 2017.

The election of Trump and his appointment of Pompeo stepped up the efforts to get Assange to the US. The Biden administration has not relented either.

The British Government has been bullied by its ally to keep Assange in conditions which can only be described as torturous. He was too ill to attend the court case in February.

A new movie about Assange’s plight Trust Fall has been showing in New Zealand cinemas this year. It hasn’t received wide publicity but is an important, if overly long, documentary about the case, and the continuing injustice of it.

That Assange remains behind bars is a disgrace to the values that every Western liberal democracy should embrace.

In his home country of Australia, the Albanese government is taking a hands-off approach. On February 14th this year, the House of Representatives passed a motion calling for Assange’s immediate release and return to Australia. But the Prime Minister, who voted for the motion, believes that “quiet diplomacy” is the best way to pursue Assange’s release.

That will get nowhere with American officials.

The US Ambassador in Australia Caroline Kennedy, daughter of a former President and cousin of a candidate in this year’s presidential race, has previously flagged a “plea deal” for Assange.

The implications of that would be a severe reduction in freedom of the media to report without fear on the activities of governments and their military.

New Zealand officials and diplomats can only watch from the sidelines as this saga plays out. But the implications of Assange’s incarceration on fearless reporting here and in every country that claims to be democratic are huge.

The British and Australian governments have succumbed to the American empire over a man who through his computer skills and contacts inside the military has exposed unethical US behaviour in wars that were pointless in the first place.

Much of the US Government’s case against Assange is that the release of the hundreds of thousands of documents through WikiLeaks put many lives at risk.

But that same US Government set up an Information Review Task Force (IRTF) to investigate the impact of the WikiLeaks publications. However, the head of the IRTF testified at Chelsea Manning’s sentencing that the task force, in which 125 people worked for ten months, found no evidence that anyone had lost their life due to the leaks.

Mark Summers KC, acting for Assange in February told the court the WikiLeaks publication “disclosed extrajudicial assassinations, renditions, torture, dark prisons and rogue killings” by the US military.

“The revelations brought about by the disclosure of those cables brought about a cessation of some of the practices.”

Summers also argued the political nature of the attempt to extradite Assange which meant his extradition was barred under section 81A of the UK’s Extradition Act 2003.

Julian Assange should be a free man.

He has had his liberty impinged upon for a decade and a half. In any decent society, enough is enough.

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