On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security.\u00a0 Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such as what has just been concluded at the High Court.<\/p>\n
How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion and expression?<\/p>\n
Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp got the bien pensant<\/em> treatment of the national security state, dressed in robes, and tediously inclined.\u00a0 Prosaic arguments were recycled like stale, oppressive air.\u00a0 According to Clair Dobbin KC, there was \u201cno immunity for journalists to break the law\u201d and that the US constitutional First Amendment protecting the press would never confer it.\u00a0 This had an undergraduate obviousness to it; no one in this case has ever<\/em> asserted such cavalierly brutal freedom in releasing classified material, a point that Mark Summers KC, representing Assange, was happy to point out.<\/p>\n Yet again, the Svengali argument, gingered with seduction, was run before a British court.\u00a0 Assange, assuming all the powers of manipulation, cultivated and corrupted the disclosers, \u201csoliciting\u201d them to pilfer classified government materials.\u00a0 With limping repetition, Dobbin insisted that WikiLeaks had been responsible for revealing \u201cthe unredacted names of the sources who provided information to the United States,\u201d many of whom \u201clived in war zones or in repressive regimes\u201d.\u00a0 In exposing the names of Afghans, Iraqis, journalists, religious figures, human rights dissidents and political dissidents, the publisher had \u201ccreated a grave and immediate risk that innocent people would suffer serious physical harm or arbitrary detention\u201d.<\/p>\n The battering did not stop there.\u00a0 \u201cThere were really profound consequences, beyond the real human cost and to the broader ability to the US to gather evidence from human sources as well.\u201d\u00a0 Dobbin\u2019s proof of these contentions is thin, vague and causally absent: the arrest of one Ethiopian journalist following the leak; unspecified \u201cothers\u201d disappeared.\u00a0 She even admitted<\/a> the fact that \u201cit cannot be proven that their disappearance was a result of being outed.\u201d\u00a0 This was certainly a point pounced upon by Summers.<\/p>\n The previous publication by Cryptome of all the documents, or the careless publication of the key to the encrypted file with the unredacted cables by journalists from The Guardian<\/em> in a book on WikiLeaks, did not convince<\/a> Dobbin.\u00a0 Assange was \u201cresponsible for the publications of the unredacted documents whether published by others or WikiLeaks.\u201d\u00a0 There was no mention, either, that Assange had been alarmed by The Guardian<\/em> faux pas and had contacted the US State Department of this fact.\u00a0 Summers, in his contribution, duly reminded the court of the publisher\u2019s frantic efforts while also reasoning<\/a> that the harm caused had been \u201cunintended, unforeseen and unwanted\u201d by him.<\/p>\n With this selective, prejudicial angle made clear, Dobbin\u2019s words became those of a disgruntled empire caught with its pants down when harming and despoiling others.\u00a0 \u201cWhat the appellant is accused of is really at the upper end of the spectrum of gravity,\u201d she submitted<\/a>, attracting \u201cno public interest whatsoever\u201d.\u00a0 Conveniently, calculatingly, any reference to the enormous, weighty revelations of WikiLeaks of torture, renditions, war crimes, surveillance, to name but a few, was avoided.\u00a0 Emphasis was placed, instead, upon the \u201cusefulness\u201d of the material WikiLeaks had published: to the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden.<\/p>\n This is a dubious point given the Pentagon\u2019s own assertions to the contrary in a 2011 report<\/a> dealing with the significance of the disclosure of military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks.\u00a0 On the Iraq War logs and State Department cables, the report concluded \u201cwith high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq.\u201d\u00a0 On the Afghanistan war log releases, the authors also found that they would not result in \u201csignificant impact\u201d to US operations, though did claim that this was potentially damaging to \u201cintelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population,\u201d and intelligence collection efforts by the US and NATO.<\/p>\n Summers appropriately rebutted the contention<\/a> about harm by suggesting that Assange had opposed, in the highest traditions of journalism, \u201cwar crimes\u201d, a consideration that had to be measured against unverified assertions of harm.<\/p>\n On this point, the prosecution found itself in knots, given that a balancing act of harm and freedom of expression is warranted under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.\u00a0 When asked<\/a> by Justice Johnson whether prosecuting a journalist in the UK, when in possession of \u201cinformation of very serious wrongdoing by an intelligence agency [had] incited an employee of that agency to provide information\u2026 [which] was then published in a very careful way\u201d was compatible with the right to freedom of expression, Dobbin conceded to there being no \u201cstraightforward answer\u201d.<\/p>\n When pressed<\/a> by Justice Johnson as to whether she accepted the idea that the \u201cstatutory offence\u201d, not any \u201cscope for a balancing exercise\u201d was what counted, Dobbin had to concede that a \u201cproportionality assessment\u201d would normally arise when publishers were prosecuted under section 5 of the UK Official Secrets Act.\u00a0 Prosecutions would only take place if one \u201cknowingly published\u201d information known \u201cto be damaging\u201d.<\/p>\n Any half-informed student of the US Espionage Act knows that strict liability under the statute negates any need to undertake a balancing assessment.\u00a0 All that matters is that the individual had \u201creason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the US,\u201d often proved by the mere fact that the information published was classified to begin with.<\/p>\n Dobbin then switched gears.\u00a0 Having initially advertised the view that journalists could never be entirely immune from criminal prosecution, she added more egg to the pudding on the reasons why Assange was not<\/em> a journalist.\u00a0 Her view of the journalist being a bland, obedient transmitter of received, establishment wisdom was all too clear.\u00a0 Assange had gone \u201cbeyond the acts of a journalist who is merely gathering information\u201d.\u00a0 He had, for instance, agreed with Chelsea Manning on March 8, 2010 to attempt cracking a password hash that would have given her access to the secure and classified Department of Defense account.\u00a0 Doing so meant using a false identity to facilitate further pilfering of classified documents.<\/p>\n This was yet another fiction.\u00a0 Manning\u2019s court martial had revealed the redundancy of having to crack a password hash as she already had administrator access to the system.\u00a0 Why then bother with the conspiratorial circus?<\/p>\n The corollary of this is that the prosecution\u2019s reliance on fabricated testimony, notably from former WikiLeaks volunteer, convicted paedophile and FBI tittle-tattler Sigurdur \u2018Siggi\u2019 Thordarson.\u00a0 In June 2021, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin<\/em>, now publishing under the name Heimildin<\/em>, revealed<\/a> that Assange had \u201cnever asked him to hack or to access phone recordings of [Iceland\u2019s] MPs.\u201d\u00a0 He also had not \u201creceived some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained.\u201d\u00a0 Thordarson never went through the relevant files, nor verified whether they had audio recordings as claimed by the third-party source. The allegation that Assange instructed him to access computers in order to unearth such recordings was roundly rejected.<\/p>\n The legal team representing the US attempted to convince the court that suggestions of \u201cbad faith\u201d by the defence on the part of such figures as lead prosecutor Gordon Kromberg had to be discounted.\u00a0 \u201cThe starting position must be, as it always is in these cases, the fundamental assumption of good faith on the part of those states with which the United Kingdom has long-standing extradition relationships,\u201d asserted<\/a> Dobbin.\u00a0 \u201cThe US is one of the most long-standing partners of the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n This had a jarring quality to it, given that nothing in Washington\u2019s approach to Assange \u2013 the surveillance sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency via Spanish security firm UC Global, the contemplation of abduction and assassination by intelligence officials, the after-the-fact concoction of assurances to assure easier extradition to the US \u2013 has been anything but one of bad faith.<\/p>\n Summers countered by refuting any suggestions<\/a> that \u201cMr Kronberg is a lying individual or that he is personally not carrying out his prosecutorial duties in good faith. The prosecution and extradition here is a decision taken way above his head.\u201d\u00a0 This was a matter of \u201cstate retaliation ordered from the very top\u201d; one could not \u201cfocus on the sheep and ignore the shepherd.\u201d<\/p>\n Things did not get better for the prosecuting side on what would happen once Assange was extradited.\u00a0 Would he, for instance, be protected by the free press amendment under US law?\u00a0 Former CIA director Mike Pompeo had suggested that Assange\u2019s Australian citizenship barred him from protections afforded by the First Amendment.\u00a0 Dobbin was not sure, but insisted that there was insufficient evidence to suggest that nationality would prejudice Assange in any trial.\u00a0 Justice Johnson was sharp<\/a>: \u201cthe test isn\u2019t that he would be prejudiced.\u00a0 It is that he might<\/em> be prejudiced on the grounds of his nationality.\u201d\u00a0 This was hard to square with the UK Extradition Act prohibiting extradition where a person \u201cmight be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained, or restricted in his personal liberty\u201d on account of nationality.<\/p>\n Given existing US legal practice, Assange also faced the risk of the death penalty, something that extradition arrangements would bar.\u00a0 Ben Watson KC, representing the UK Home Secretary, had to concede<\/a> to the court that there was nothing preventing any amendment by US prosecutors to the current list of charges that could result in a death sentence.<\/p>\n If he does not succeed in this appeal, Assange may well request an intervention of the European Court of Human Rights for a stay of proceedings under Rule 39<\/a>.\u00a0 Like many European institutions so loathed by the governments of post-Brexit Britain, it offers the prospect of relief provided that there are \u201cexceptional circumstances\u201d and an instance \u201cwhere there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.\u201d<\/p>\n The sickening irony of that whole proviso is that irreparable harm is being inflicted on Assange in prison, where the UK prison system fulfils the role of the punishing US gaoler.\u00a0 Speed will be of the essence; and the government of Rishi Sunak may well quickly bundle the publisher onto a transatlantic flight.\u00a0 If so, the founder of WikiLeaks will go the way of other prestigious and wronged political prisoners who sought to expand minds rather than narrow them.<\/p>The post Imperial Venality Defends Itself: Day Two of Julian Assange\u2019s High Court Appeal<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On February 21, the Royal Courts of Justice hosted a second day of carnivalesque mockery regarding the appeal by lawyers representing an ill Julian Assange, whose publishing efforts are being impugned by the United States as having compromised the identities of informants while damaging national security.\u00a0 Extradition awaits, only being postponed by rearguard actions such [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Imperial Venality Defends Itself: Day Two of Julian Assange\u2019s High Court Appeal<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557,130,1235,2828,1312,117,200,36,205],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1515065"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1518926,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515065\/revisions\/1518926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1515065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1515065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1515065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}