The fragility of the US, the world’s most powerful nation and said to be a model democracy, couldn’t bemore stark when one follows its hounding of Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks, who had the temerity to expose the ugly and brutal side of the workings of US power, for instance, the killings of civilians in Iraq from aerial bombing for no real purpose.
It is simply that the US has the power to act arbitrarily and gratuitously and can get away with it. Assange is going through an extradition trial in the UK for espionage charges in the US relating to the 2010 leaking of documents, passed on to WikiLeaks by Chesea Manning, a US operative with access to such information that weighed on his-atthe time identified as male-consciencethat his government was acting arbitrarily, and that the people should have the right to know.
In other words, it was in public interest that such informationshould be made known, which the WikiLeaks agreed to publish on its platform, as well as sharing, most of it, with respected newspapers such asTheGuardian and The New York Times.
While Assange is being hounded for the material published on Wikileaks, the newspapers that published that materialare spared so far because, for some odd reason, they are regarded as practising responsible journalism because they redacted some of the material that might put lives of some Western agents in danger.There is nothing so far to suggest that WikiLeaks jeopardised the lives of any agent/s.
In other words, newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times were practising journalism, while Assange and his WikiLeaks were not in that business and hence not worthy of public interest journalism. Assange, therefore, was engaged in espionage when publishing the ‘secret’ information, and hence accountable for the said offence of espionage.
Of course, the trial in the US on espionage charges will happen as and when the judicial process of extradition in the UK is completed, and Assange is found to be liable for proceedings in the US. It is important to note that the extradition between the US and UK excludes political offences.
But the whole process seems to assume that Assange’s leaking of the US documents was a criminal offence for which he is liable to face consequences in the US. In other words, it is essentially a political process rolled out as a criminal case, in which Assange is already viewed as having committed alleged act/s of espionage against the US. To put it more bluntly, the UK judicial process seems tailored to hand over Assange to the US over a period, where he is said to be facing multiple life imprisonment of 175 years. It is simply vendetta dressed as justice, with the US proclaiming loudly that no matter what your citizenship status and/or the place of alleged crime, the US would hunt you down. Even though President Barack Obama pardoned Manning for supplying the documents to WikiLeaks, Assange must face the music for daring to reveal the US’s ugly and brutal side.
Assange, according to reports, has been strip-searched and repeatedly handcuffed like some violent criminal, prevented from any communication with his legal team, and was thrown into solitary confinement
Even before Assange faces ‘justice’ in the US after the extradition process in the UK, as and when it is completed, proceedings in the magistrate’s court pre-judge him as a criminal. Assange, according to reports, has been strip-searched and repeatedly handcuffed like some violent criminal, prevented from any communication with his legal team, and was thrown into solitary confinement and the like. His treatment has been so abysmal that more than 60 British doctors protested at his “torture”.
Assange is an Australian citizen but his own government being part of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence-sharing compact-whichincludes the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand-islargely letting Assange face his destiny with the US justice system when he is delivered from his British nightmare into a US dungeon.
It was reported that a Trump associate/confidant had let it be known that if Assange would declare that his leaking of a trove of Hillary Clinton related emails, towards the close of the presidential election, was not a part of Russian interference to favour Trump, he might be pardoned. The Trump camp has denied any such deal.
One, however, wonders why Assange is such a ‘criminal’ when at the height of the election campaign, Trump, as a presidential candidate, openly encouraged WikiLeaks to come out with Hillary leaks, saying that he loved WikiLeaks. However sordid the whole WikiLeaks saga is from the beginning the sad thing is the US’s model democracy is hounding an individual for exposing the truth behind an image that was illusory.
The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia