Daily Times

The US has reportedly prepared charges of an unspecified nature against Julian Assange. Aside from the haphazard way in which this has come to public attention — seemingly by way of an apparent “copy-and-paste” error that effectively disclosed a sealed indictment — what this potentially means for the WikiLeaks founder and international whistle-blower is far from good.

Mr Assange first came to global prominence when he began dumping classified material on the net back in 2010; the majority of which uncovered behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings of nation states on matters of foreign policy and national security. The US, particularly, came under the spotlight in terms of its conduct in the GWOT. This was done with the help of Chelsea Manning, at the time a serving soldier in the American army in Iraq, who passed on hundreds of thousands of documents to Wiki Leaks that became known as the Iraq War logs and that also constituted part of the Afghan War logs.

And had that been all, it would have been easy to defend Assange as a freedom fighter. But the primary reason that he has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 are allegations levelled by Sweden two years previously of separate counts of sexual assault; one of rape, the other of molestation.

As expected, the Wiki Leaks founder and his supporters pointed to the suspect timing of these accusations. Admittedly, there may have been some truth to this. Just as Assange’s fears that trial in Stockholm would lead to extradition to the US may have been legitimate. Though he did pledge to ‘surrender’ to the American authorities if then President Obama agreed to grant Manning clemency; something that the latter did back in January 2012. The only condition being that Washington uphold his rights.

Yet the fact remains that by resisting numerous British court orders for extradition to Sweden — Assange may have ultimately damaged his own reputation as well as the cause of freedom of information. After all, the charges of sexual misconduct were ultimately dropped due to the timeframe for questioning having expired and the impossibility of serving the defendant a notice, respectively. This is to say nothing of the effective silencing of the woman who accused him.

Yet all this being said, the timing of Washington’s move may be significant. Pundits are beginning to link it to the mid-terms and President Trump’s surprise sacking of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The latter had, after all, last April confirmed that bringing Assange to book was a priority. And while other administration officials have been equally vocal about this — highlighting linkages between Wiki Leaks and suspected Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections — Trump himself at the time credited the whistle-blowers for helping him defeat his rival; something that Assange has always denied was the objective. And then there is the President’s personalised approach to foreign relations which has seen him build a seemingly strong bond with Vladimir Putin.

Thus while Mr Assange prepares to fight back, it is hard to see where he can go from here. If only there were a way of dumping the sealed indictment online. For all to see. *

Published in Daily Times, November 17^th 2018.