The case of Julian Assange: An assault against democracy

The persecution of Julian Assange
represents an all-out assault on democratic rights. For what “crime” is
this man being persecuted? The Swedish authorities are trying to get him
extradited on a trumped up “rape” case that has long been exposed as
fraudulent. No serious person will believe for a single moment that this
is the real reason for the witch-hunting of the founder of Wikileaks.

Julian AssangeIn
2010, two female ex-Wikileaks volunteers in Sweden accused Mr Assange,
an Australian citizen, of committing sexual offences against them while
he was in Stockholm to give a lecture. Mr Assange insists the sex was
consensual and the allegations are politically motivated. Originally,
the charge of rape was dropped in August 2010 after the head prosecutor
considered there not be enough evidence. However, a couple of weeks
later the case was reopened by a different prosecutor.

We will never find out exactly what happened between Assange and the
women who accuse him but that is not really the question at stake. The
zeal with which the Swedish state and the international press have
pursued Assange is unlike any other rape case. Everybody knows that
Assange’s real “sin” is to have exposed the criminal machinations of US
imperialism, its shady deals and cynical intrigues. He has laid bare the
real motives that lie behind all the cynical and lying propaganda about
“democracy” and “humanitarianism”. He has shown to the whole world the
real attitude of the US military and political establishment towards its
“friends and allies”.

The US is waging a vendetta against Wikileaks, which has published a
mass of leaked diplomatic cables, embarrassing several governments,
including the Swedish, and international businesses. Assange has helped
to expose the CIA as a vast international conspiracy dedicated to the
ruthless pursuit of the aims of US imperialism by means of terrorism,
murder, torture and the destruction of unfriendly governments through
coups, wars and invasions. He has helped to expose the crimes of the US
occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The British government had behaved in a disgustingly servile manner
in this whole affair. In the days when Britain really ruled the waves,
when it was a powerful and wealthy state governing an Empire upon which
the sun never set, the British ruling class felt confident enough to
offer the right of asylum to the likes of Marx and Lenin. How things
have changed! Now that it has lost all its power, the British
bourgeoisie is reduced to the role of a second-rate lackey of
Washington, and must obey its every whim without question.

That is the real nature of the “special relation” between Britain and
the USA. The Assange case only provides new evidence of this sorry
state of affairs. Obama shouts “jump!” and Cameron replies: “how high?”
Fortunately for the London government, there is an even more servile and
disgusting set of bourgeois, to whom Cameron can pass the blame as one
man throws a hot potato to another.

A truly despicable role in all this has been played by the Swedish
government. Everybody can see the openly reactionary nature of US
imperialism. No intelligent person now pays any attention to its
protestations about “democracy” and “humanitarian missions. Washington
therefore requires the services of more credible allies in a country
renowned for its democratic and humanitarian values – at least in
theory. The task of the persecution and entrapment of Julian Assange has
been enthusiastically embraced by the government of Sweden.

The loathsome hypocrisy of the Scandinavian bourgeoisie and middle
class has been very well exposed by writers like Ibsen in works such as An Enemy of the People. True, he was writing about the bourgeois of his native Norway, but exactly the same traits can be seen in neighbouring Sweden.

The nice, democratic, civilized Swedish bourgeoisie demonstrated its
strong commitment to pacifism when it traded with Britain and Germany in
both World Wars, cheerfully exporting the raw materials necessary for
the efficient functioning of the machines of war and even more
cheerfully pocketing the profits of death. Such “pacifism” makes a lot
of money!

Now the same nice, democratic, civilized Swedish bourgeoisie
demonstrates its strong commitment to “feminism” by persecuting an Enemy
of the People, and, by the way, ingratiating itself to the Boss in
Washington. Such strong principles! And such a profitable relationship
with the Boss! What more can any bourgeois government desire? What a
pity there is no Nobel prize for cynical hypocrisy! The ladies and
gentlemen in Stockholm would have no difficulty in winning every time.

If the Swedish authorities had the slightest interest in getting the
facts of the “rape” case, there is a very simple option open to them.
Assange has said repeatedly that he is quite happy to be questioned by
Swedish prosecutors – but in the UK, not in Sweden. If the Swedes think
he is bluffing, they should call his bluff.

They could easily send over a team to London to interrogate him. In
this day and age, it is surely not beyond the technical resources of
Sweden to arrange a video conference to allow the participation of
witnesses. But no! All the efforts of the Swedish state are aimed at one
thing, and one thing only: to get Assange extradited.

Only a complete simpleton could swallow the silly stories emanating
from Stockholm. Only a fool or a rogue could fail to understand that
behind this whole scandalous affair lies the long hand of Washington.
There can be no doubt that the revelations of Wikileaks dealt a severe
blow to US imperialism and its murderous international network of
espionage and conspiracy. The imperialists were determined to take
revenge and they are doing so.

US imperialism has in effect identified the Australian journalist as a
target. And it has enlisted the aid of its foreign stooges to help it
eliminate this target. This and this only, is the reason why the Swedish
and British governments have conspired against Julian Assange. They are
acting as the hired agents of Washington, which was, and remains,
determined to take revenge on the man who has helped to expose its
criminal machinations on a world scale.

Assange has repeatedly stated that the campaign to get him extradited
to Sweden is only the first step to eventually getting him extradited
to the USA, where he would face a kangaroo trial and then a long term of
imprisonment in the most inhuman conditions, or even a death sentence.
There have been frequent attempts to deny this, from British Foreign
Secretary Willam Hague among others.

These are lies and completely transparent. The US government has made
little secret of their displeasure with Assange. US Vice-President Joe
Biden has already branded him a “terrorist”. The head of the US Senate
Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, as late as July called for the
Obama administration to prosecute Assange and the US Justice Department
has confirmed that Assange is under investigation. This is the real
reason why the Swedish government refuses to give Assange a guarantee
against extradition to the US.

Stating that the British government has invited the Ecuadorian
government to resume discussions on the issue as early as possible,
Hague dismissed suggestions that Assange’s human rights could be
violated if he was extradited to Sweden. He stressed that those claims
were "completely unfounded" and noted that they had been
"comprehensively rejected" by UK courts.

"As we have discussed with the government of Ecuador, the United
Kingdom and Sweden robustly implement and adhere to the highest
standards of human rights protection. The suggestion that Mr. Assange’s
human rights would be put at risk by the possibility of onward
extradition from Sweden to a third country is also without foundation,"
Hague said. But the facts incline us to think otherwise.

In 2001, the Swedish government handed over two Egyptian nationals to
the CIA, who “renditioned” them to Egypt, where they were tortured on
charges of terrorism. The Stockholm government ignored the existing
human rights legislation in Sweden and took an executive decision to
send the men to the torture chambers. One of the reasons they gave was
that the charge was terrorism. But it is quite likely that the Americans
will want to charge Assange with the same thing. The same year, they
froze all assets of four Swedish citizens when the US put them on their
list of terrorists.

The Swedish state has time and time again showed its subservience to
US imperialism. This time is no different and Assange is correct to
worry about extradition.

The torture of Bradley Manning

Let us now examine the case of Bradley Manning, now aged 24, an
intelligence analyst in the American army who served in Iraq, who is
alleged to have leaked US government cables to the whistle-blowing
website. He is set to face a court martial. Following his arrest, the
alleged Wikileaks source inside the U.S. military was held in the most
barbarous conditions. The (then) 22-old Manning was “detained” at
Quantico Marine Corps brig on “Prevention of Injury” watch.

That means: 23 hours of solitary confinement a day, with a ban on
push-ups and sit-ups in the cell, with lying down and leaning against
the walls also prohibited. Manning was deprived of all personal items in
his cell, but equipped with a “tear-proof security blanket” that gave
the prisoner rashes and carpet burns. Eventually, Manning’s reading
glasses were confiscated; so was all of his clothing.

The United States has ratified the international Convention Against
Torture, whose acting body, the Committee Against Torture, has
recommended that long-term solitary confinement be wholly abolished. But
that is just a scrap of paper, to be conveniently produced when
Washington needs to denounce some “rogue state” or other, but to be
ignored when its own actions come under scrutiny.

It is well known that solitary confinement can have serious
psychological, psychiatric and sometimes physiological effects. I have
talked to a man who spent years in solitary confinement after severe
torture. He told me that he would have preferred to be taken out to be
tortured as long as he had someone to talk to. A long list of documented
symptoms includes insomnia, confusion, hallucinations and outright
insanity.

The suicide rate for isolated inmates is substantially higher than
among those living communally in the general prison population. But
solitary confinement is only one of the methods used to break the
prisoner mentally and physically. If Manning slept at night—he was not
permitted to sleep during the day—in such a position that his guards
could not see him, he was awakened and repositioned. In other words, he
was systematically deprived of sleep.

Such treatment of a defenceless prisoner has a name known to all. It
is called torture. The technique of sleep deprivation was well known to
the Gestapo and the KGB, and is clearly equally well-known to those
honourable defenders of American democracy and civilization who are so
concerned with the health and wellbeing of Bradley Manning that they
oblige him to respond every five waking minutes to the guards’ query,
“Are you okay?”

This unrelenting repetitive stress, designed to stop the victim from
sleeping or resting at any time, has a most damaging effect on mental
health if kept up over a long period of time. It can drive a healthy man
crazy, and that is just what it is intended to do. If this is not
torture, then it is an excellent imitation. And despite the fact that
the Quantico Brig’s psychiatrists urgently insisted that there was no
medical or psychiatric justification for this treatment, the torture
continued.

Let us remind ourselves that President Obama, before he was elected,
promised to close down the notorious concentration camp and torture
centre in Guantanamo Bay. Four years later, Guantanamo Bay is still open
for business and torture is freely carried on in American prisons.

The smooth-talking hypocrite in the White House told a reporter that
he had personally looked into the matter and that Manning’s ongoing
isolation and enforced nudity was for the young man’s own good. In fact,
the prison’s own psychiatric staff repeatedly found that there was no
medical reason for Manning to be in isolation, and argued month after
month that he be taken off “Prevention of Injury” status.

Just imagine the outcry from Washington, if the same methods were
used on an American soldier, held prisoner, say, in North Korea or Iran.
Yet for nine interminable months this treatment was inflicted on
Bradley Manning. There was no objection raised by President Obama or
Hillary Clinton. There were no editorials in the press, no campaigns on
CNN. Their motto was: “Manning’s in his prison; all’s right with the
world”.

There is an old legal phrase to the effect that silence signifies
assent. The silence of Obama speaks louder than words! For the leaders
of America, torture is fine, as long as it is “our boys” who are
carrying it out. Precisely this kind of thing was what Wikileaks had
exposed. For this “crime” a young American soldier has been imprisoned,
brutalised, slandered and tortured.

Finally, in April of 2011, as a result of political pressure, mainly
from overseas, Bradley Manning was transferred to the medium-security
prison population at Fort Leavenworth. But these facts completely
contradict the reassuring words of William Hague and his friends in
Stockholm concerning the possible fate of Julian Assange once he is
extradited.

The right of asylum

In order to escape an imminent danger, Assange took refuge in the
embassy of Ecuador in Knightsbridge, London in June. He entered the
embassy after the UK’s Supreme Court dismissed his bid to reopen his
appeal against extradition and gave him a two-week grace period before
extradition proceedings could start.

Ecuador announced it had granted Mr Assange asylum but the UK has
said it will not allow him safe passage out of the country. Moreover,
they have hinted that they might lift the embassy’s diplomatic status to
allow police to enter the building to arrest Mr Assange for breaching
his bail terms.

In a statement issued after the Ecuadorean decision to grant Mr
Assange political asylum, Foreign Secretary William Hague said the UK
was under a "binding obligation" to extradite him to Sweden. We do not
know what “binding obligation” the London government has with Stockholm,
but we are well aware of the “binding obligation” that ties both these
governments to Washington: it is the “binding obligation” between the
servants and the Master.

The hypocritical double standards of the British government are truly
glaring. The bloody Chilean dictator Pinochet was welcomed with open
arms when he came to London, allegedly for health treatment in 1998.
When an attempt was made to get him extradited to stand trial in Spain
for torture, the British government obstinately refused to allow it,
using all kinds of tricks and subterfuges to defend this monster. Now
they are doing everything possible to secure the extradition of a man
whose only crime was to serve the cause of democracy and free speech.

“Quite apart from international obligations, the UK had ‘complete
confidence in the independence and fairness of the Swedish judicial
system”, Hague said in a speech to the House of Commons. Assange does
not believe these hollow assurances, and he is quite right not to do so.
A spokesman for the Ecuadorian government in London said Hague’s
statement only partly addressed the issues. “The most significant
omission was his failure to address the issue of extradition to a third
party and specifically the USA,” he said.

“The Ecuadorian government would welcome cast iron guarantees from
the UK government that will make sure that the fate that has befallen
Bradley Manning will not be meted out to Mr Assange. If the UK provided
these basic human rights guarantees, then we believe that there would
be a quick, fair and honourable solution to the present impasse.”

But the UK government is in no position to give any such guarantee.
There is absolutely no guarantee that Assange will not be seized the
moment he leaves the relative safety he has found in Britain and put on
the first flight to New York or Guantanamo Bay.

The right of asylum is a democratic right respected by every
civilised nation, but now under threat in Britain. The British
government has employed extreme measures in this case – measures that
would never have been used in any similar case. They have surrounded the
Ecuadorean Embassy in London with police, who have strict instructions
that Assange must not be allowed to leave the embassy – even in a
diplomatic car, but must be immediately arrested.

Ecuador is a small, poor country in Latin America. Britain is a rich
and relatively powerful state, which is shamelessly bullying Ecuador by
these strong-arm tactics. The British government has even gone so far as
to claim the legal right to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy in London “in
some circumstances”. This was an implied threat to violate the
territorial integrity of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, an act that
would be in violation of international law.

It is a well-established international convention that local police
and security forces are not permitted to enter an embassy, unless they
have the express permission of the ambassador. The Vienna Convention
makes it clear that local police and security forces may not enter a
diplomatic mission without the permission of the leader of that mission.

In a recent televised address President Correa correctly described
this as “intolerable" and "an explicit threat" which had to be rejected
out of hand. To his credit, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has
defended Assange’s right of asylum. Mr Correa said he wanted a guarantee
from Britain and Sweden that there would be no subsequent extradition
of Mr Assange to a third country.

"Ecuador, in a sovereign fashion, decided to grant diplomatic asylum
to Mr Julian Assange," he said. "What sort of mentality is it that still
doesn’t realise Latin America is now sovereign and free?" The
president pointed out that if a South American nation had acted in the
same way as Britain or Sweden, it would be dubbed a dictatorship.

At emergency talks held by the OAS in Washington, US envoy Carmen
Lomellin said a meeting of foreign ministers "would be unhelpful and
harmful to the OAS’ reputation as an institution". She said the USA did not "recognise the concept of diplomatic asylum as a matter of international law". But the only two countries that backed her were the USA’s satellite Canada, and the diminutive island of Trinidad and Tobago.

Subsequently, the London government has shown signs of wanting to get
out of the diplomatic row that has isolated both it and the USA in
Latin America. Britain’s permanent observer to the OAS, Philip Barton,
said the UK would continue to work with Ecuador "to bring this matter to
an amicable and successful conclusion”. However, the UK Foreign Office
insists that it will arrest Mr Assange if he leaves the embassy.

The people of Ecuador are fully behind their President in this
matter. The BBC quoted one man as saying: "We’re free to do as we
please." The same report admitted that “It is that freedom to grant
diplomatic immunity and asylum to whomever they please that has
galvanised President Rafael Correa’s supporters”.

“One man on a busy Quito thoroughfare says Mr Assange is being
persecuted by the US for simply ‘telling the truth’ and it was right for
Ecuador to support him”. Deputy Foreign Minister Rafael Quintero told
the BBC that Mr Assange wanted to come to Ecuador as he felt "his human
rights, civilian rights, civic rights and political rights would be
protected". He said: "We only hope that the government of the United
Kingdom will respect the sovereign decision of the Ecuadorean peoples."

Within yesterday’s long and detailed explanation by Foreign Minister
Ricardo Patino of why Julian Assange had been given asylum, there is one
sentence which jumps out: "Ecuador is a free and democratic state, not
subject to foreign tutelage, independent of interests other than those
of its people and sovereign in its decisions." What popular interest
could be in question with the political protection which the government
decided to give to Julian Assange?

Ecuador has a preferential trade agreement with the US on some 1,300
goods and that deal is up for renewal in January. Yet its government has
decided to stand up to the USA and defend democracy. The courageous
stand taken by Ecuador is a blow in defence of the freedom of expression
and free access to information. It deserves the full and unconditional
support of the international labour movement.

Down with secret diplomacy!

The working class of the entire world has an interest in unmasking
the intrigues of imperialism and exposing the crude calculations and
cynical power-politics that are normally hidden behind an impenetrable
screen of lies. What Julian Assange and Wikileaks did in publishing a
mass of secret documents of US imperialism was a tremendous service to
the working class and the peoples of the whole world.

From the standpoint of US imperialism, the actions of Julian Assange
are seen as those of a dangerous criminal and a traitor. But from the
point of view of the workers of the world, and even from the standpoint
of the most elementary democracy, what Assange did was both progressive
and extremely courageous.

We say that Julian Assange deserves a medal for his services to
democracy. Instead of that, he has been shamelessly slandered,
persecuted, hunted like a common criminal, until he had no alternative
but to seek refuge in the embassy of Ecuador in London, where he lives
like a caged animal.

From his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange has maintained his
defiant stand, demanding that the USA ends its witch-hunt against
Wikileaks. In his first public statement since entering the embassy, he
also called for the release of Bradley Manning, who is awaiting trial.
The 41-year-old said the United States must also stop its "war on
whistleblowers".

Assange said the United States was facing a choice between
re-affirming the "revolutionary values it was founded on" or "dragging
us all into a dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall
silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the
dark".

He said the United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute
Wikileaks staff or supporters: "The United States must pledge before
the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the
secret crimes of the powerful”.

Addressing a crowd of his supporters from an embassy balcony, Assange
said: "Inside this embassy after dark, I could hear teams of police
swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I
knew there would be witnesses and that is because of you.

"If the UK did not throw away the Vienna Conventions the other night
it is because the world was watching and the world was watching because
you were watching."

That is correct! The only way to save Julian Assange is to step up
the widest campaign of protest against the assault on democratic rights,
which is being launched from Washington with the sly connivance of
London and Stockholm. Above all, it is necessary to mobilise the full
force of the international labour movement to demand the immediate and
unconditional freeing of Julian Assange.