Above photo: Stella Moris, the partner of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks to the media after attending the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, at the High Court in London, Wednesday, August 11, 2021.
United Kingdom – Julian Assange’s partner Stella Moris’s contention that we are seeing her husband “punished by process” is undeniable following the decision to allow the US to challenge January’s ruling against his extradition.
Despite having won his case seven months ago, Assange remains in Belmarsh while Washington tries every trick in the book to exact vengeance for the mass exposure of its own war crimes by Wikileaks.
It is clearer than ever that popular pressure like that exerted by protesters outside the High Court today is the best hope of defeating an extradition bid that, if successful, will have severe consequences for independent journalism and freedom of speech across the world. We cannot rely on the procedures of British “justice” to produce an acceptable outcome.
Lawyers’ wrangling over whether Assange is sufficiently ill for his suicide to be likely if he is extradited to the United States stems from problems with the original January verdict.
District Judge Vanessa Baraitser dismissed all the substantive arguments against Assange’s extradition save one, that grounded in the risk of suicide. She rejected the argument that his extradition to face espionage charges for publishing classified US cables was political and therefore not allowed under our laws.
Yet the world knows that this is a political case. Assange is not and never has been a US government employee. He did not leak classified material. He published material disclosed to him. The term for what he did is journalism.
Given the nature of what the cables disclosed — appalling war crimes by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan — it was public service journalism of the highest order.
The files published by Wikileaks include the infamous “collateral damage” video, in which US soldiers laugh and joke while gunning down civilians in Iraq. They revealed the scale of civilian killings by US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan. They documented the extraordinary rendition and torture of innocent people in Guantanamo Bay.
The US is pulling its troops from Afghanistan now, two decades after invading in the first of multiple acts of aggression dubbed the “war on terror,” a war which has not only killed hundreds of thousands of people directly but has caused exponential growth of extremist terrorist organisations across the Middle East and beyond.
The determination of Joe Biden’s administration to punish Assange for helping to reveal this gives the lie to any idea that it represents a progressive shift in US politics. As with its pursuit of the new cold war against China, it stands for the continuation of imperialist aggression worldwide.
Washington is determined to ensure that citizens of any country, operating anywhere, can be hauled before its courts and made an example of. The entire purpose is to silence critical journalism.
Britain’s complicity is shameful. And the Assange case is not the only reason we should be worried.
From the eight-month jail sentence handed to former diplomat Craig Murray, a sharp critic of British and US foreign policy whose blog relentlessly picked holes in official narratives over alleged Russian manipulation of British politics or the Salisbury poisonings, to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s calls for a ban on the media outlet RT, we are seeing signals from the political class that narratives it finds problematic will be silenced.
This is a reaction to the fact that Wikileaks’s journalism, combined with grassroots struggle by organisations like Stop the War, worked. Public opinion in the West did turn strongly against war. Trust in the US and British governments to tell the truth about the motives for their endless aggression has been significantly eroded. And neither Washington nor Westminster can tolerate that.
A full appeal hearing has been granted for October — meaning more months behind bars for Assange.
It is the responsibility of the left and labour movement not to leave this matter with the judges. Assange’s persecution is political. Extraditing him must be made politically impossible for our government.