{"id":6134,"date":"2021-01-07T08:55:52","date_gmt":"2021-01-07T08:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=147096"},"modified":"2021-01-07T08:55:52","modified_gmt":"2021-01-07T08:55:52","slug":"its-not-as-bad-as-iwo-jima-i-suppose-the-julian-assange-extradition-verdict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/07\/its-not-as-bad-as-iwo-jima-i-suppose-the-julian-assange-extradition-verdict\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s Not as Bad as Iwo Jima, I Suppose\u201d: The Julian Assange Extradition Verdict"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The barrister-brewed humour<\/a> of Edward Fitzgerald QC, one of the solid and stout figures defending a certain Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at the Old Bailey in London, was understandable. Time had worn and wearied the parties, none more so than his client. Fitzgerald had asked for water, but then mused that its absence could hardly have been as bad as the horrors of war in the Battle of Iwo Jima. What mattered was the decision on extradition.<\/p>\n

Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof<\/em> also gave us a sense<\/a> of the scene. \u201cI see a bench of a glass container, where Assange will be isolated during the announcement of his extradition decision. This has been standard practice during this case, even after he complained about how it infringed upon his ability to participate in his defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it transpired, District Justice Vanessa Baraitser went against her near perfect streak of granting extraditions by blocking the request by the US government for 17 charges based on the Espionage Act of 1917 and one of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. Crudely put, she accepted the grounds of poor mental health, evidence that Assange was a suicide risk, and that his conditions of detention in a US supermax prison facility might well accentuate it. She also noted a \u201creal risk that \u2026 Assange will be subject to restrictive special administrative measures [SAMs].\u201d<\/p>\n

Should the publisher be \u201csubjected to the extreme conditions of SAMs, [his] mental health will deteriorate to the point where he will commit suicide with the \u2018single minded determination\u2019 described by Dr [Quinton] Deeley.\u201d She was further \u201csatisfied that Mr Assange\u2019s suicidal impulses will come from his psychiatric diagnoses rather than his own voluntary act.\u201d Accordingly, \u201cit would be oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for those unwilling to digest the headline act and specious highlights, the decision of Justice Baraitser was also an expansive effort to salvage the credibility of state-sanctioned persecution while dishing it out to the defendant. Central to her judgment was reasoning crafted to deny the exceptional, political nature of the Assange case and its threat to journalism.<\/p>\n

She did not accept, for instance, that Assange would be treated differently \u2013 in other words, \u201cbe subject to harsh detention conditions on the basis of his political opinions or nationality.\u201d She further failed to accept that the case against Assange might be \u201cmanipulated for political purposes at the behest of the executive or the CIA.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mountain of evidence submitted by defence witnesses demonstrating the markedly politicised nature of the Department of Justice\u2019s actions, left little impression. As Reprieve\u2019s board president Eric Lewis stated<\/a> during the trial, individual prosecutors might well be acting in good faith but \u201cthe [DOJ] is highly politicised and many Americans would agree with that sentiment.\u201d Baraitser\u2019s response: \u201cthere is no credible evidence\u201d to reach a conclusion \u201cthat federal prosecutors have improper motives for bringing these charges or to find they have acted contrary to their obligations and responsibilities of impartiality and fairness.\u201d Things remain perennially micro with some judicial minds.<\/p>\n

Baraitser pays homage to state power and dirties the role played by WikiLeaks and whistleblowers. The defence had argued Assange engaged in activities as an investigative journalist, and that such conduct would be protected by Article 10 of the European Charter of Human Rights providing the right to freedom of expression and information.<\/p>\n

But the judge evidently had different ideas uncritically focusing on the alleged conspiracy to commit computer intrusion between Chelsea Manning and Assange. In doing so, there was little engagement with the defence\u2019s demonstration<\/a> that the hacking allegation is deeply flawed and speculative, both in terms of attributable identity and on the matter of execution. The testimony<\/a> from Patrick Eller, formerly of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters at Quantico, was particularly damning. Manning, Eller revealed on September 25, 2020, \u201calready had legitimate access to all the databases from which she downloaded the data.\u201d To have logged \u201cinto another user account would not have provided her with more access than she already possessed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baraitser merely accepted the prosecution submission that Assange had \u201cagreed to use the rainbow tools, which he had for the purpose of cracking Microsoft password hashes, to decipher an alphanumeric code [Manning] had given him.\u201d The code was tailored for \u201can encrypted password hash stored on a Department of Defence computer connected to the SIPRNet [Secret Internet Protocol Router Network].\u201d But Eller\u2019s testimony, referring to Manning\u2019s court martial records, makes the point that she never supplied the two files essential in generating the decryption key for the password hash. \u201cAt the time, it would not have been possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.\u201d In any case, Manning already had access, making any conspiracy needless.<\/p>\n

None of this mattered a jot. \u201cThis is the conduct which most obviously demonstrates Mr Assange\u2019s complicity in Ms Manning\u2019s theft of the information, and separates his activity from that of the ordinary investigative journalist.\u201d Assange had also allegedly engaged in conduct that would amount to offences in English law, not only with Manning, but with \u201ccomputer hackers Teenager, Laurelai, Kayla, Jeremy Hammond, Sabu and Topiary to gain unauthorised access to a computer\u201d.<\/p>\n

The judge also took a withering view to the publisher\u2019s \u201cwider scheme, to work with computer hackers and whistle blowers to obtain information for WikiLeaks.\u201d She latched onto the US prosecution\u2019s keenness to target Assange\u2019s philosophy, citing the \u201cHacking at Random\u201d conference held in August 2009 and the \u201cHack in the Box Security Conference\u201d in October that year. \u201cNotwithstanding the vital role played by the press in a democratic society, journalists have the same duty as everyone else to obey the ordinary criminal law.\u201d The right to freedom of expression was mediated by imposed responsibilities and the \u201ctechnical means\u201d used in gathering information.<\/p>\n

Clearly keeping in mind the deterrent function of such stifling instruments as The Official Secrets Act of 1989, Baraitser remained staunchly establishment in relegating journalism to the lowest pegs of significance. Motivation is irrelevant, the public interest merely a construction best left to the paternally learned. Those with secrets had to be prevented from disclosing them; the role of whether information should be made available for public consumption had to be left to \u201ctrusted people in a position to make an objective assessment of the public interest\u201d.<\/p>\n

The credulous acceptance of most of the evidence by Assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Gordon Kromberg, boggles. Kromberg made a good go of convincing Baraitser that the case against Assange was far from \u201cunprecedented\u201d and would not attract the free speech protections of the US First Amendment. Criminalising the intentional disclosure of names of intelligence agents and sources, by way of example, was still consistent with First Amendment rights. Weakly, the judge claimed that, \u201cCases which raise novel issues of law are not so uncommon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Untroubled by any potential desecration of press freedoms, Baraitser resorted to vague hypotheticals. Whether the prosecution would raise the issue of excluding Assange from the protections of the First Amendment for publishing national defence information or otherwise did not raise \u201ca real risk that a court would find that Mr Assange will not be protected by the US Constitution in general or by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment in particular.\u201d Convoluted understatement chokes the dangerous implication.<\/p>\n

The \u201charm\u201d thesis \u2013 that Assange\u2019s publishing activities supposedly put people at risk \u2013 was seen as credible. Little stock is put in his redaction efforts<\/a>, many of which were extensively documented at the trial. Instead, an opportunistic, careless figure emerges, one who endangered \u201cwell over one hundred people\u201d and caused \u201cquantifiable\u201d harm \u2013 loss of employment, the freezing of assets. Even if Assange had been \u201cacting within the parameters of responsible journalism\u201d he had no vested \u201cright to make the decision to sacrifice the safety of these few individuals, knowing of their circumstances or the dangers they faced, in the name of free speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reasoning of the judge on the US-UK Treaty would have also caused shudders across the fourth estate. Extradition treaties, she affirmed, confirmed no enforceable rights. And Parliament, in its wisdom, had taken \u201cthe decision to remove the political offences bar which had previously been available to those facing extradition.\u201d She accepted, in whole, the US submission that the regime upon which extradition would be dealt with obligated the court to follow a set of \u201cimperative steps\u201d which did not \u201cinclude a consideration of the political character of the offence\u201d.<\/p>\n

For human rights organisations and those defending press freedom, the judgment remains rewarding in terms of outcome, unsatisfactory in terms of reasoning. It leaves the appalling treatment of Assange, at the hands of UK authorities guided by US instruction, unaccounted for. As Amnesty International described<\/a> it, the verdict \u201cdoes not absolve the UK from having engaged in this politically-motivated process at the behest of the USA and putting media freedom and freedom of expression on trial.\u201d WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson was characteristically blunt in his assessment<\/a>. \u201cIt is a win for Julian Assange \u2013 but it is not a win for journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US Department of Justice, keen to prolong Assange\u2019s suffering, promises to appeal, though the grounds on mental health will prove hard to impeach. A bail application is due to be submitted by the defence in a few days.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair The barrister-brewed humour of Edward Fitzgerald QC, one of the solid and stout figures defending a certain Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at the\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134"}],"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=6134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6135,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6134\/revisions\/6135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}