UK Blurring Two Very Different Extradition Claims
April 19, 2019
The Swedish and U.S. claims are vastly different, writes Jonathan Cook. But
the public conversation in the U.K. is simply about which has first dibs on
Assange.
By JonathanCook
Jonathan-Cook.net
In a previous blog post, I warned that the media and political class would
continue with their long-running deceptions about Julian Assange now that he
has been dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy. They have wasted no time in
proving me right.
The first thrust in their campaign of deceit was set out on The Guardian's
front page on Friday, April 12, the day after Assange was imprisoned.
There should have been wall-to-wall outrage from public figures in the U.K.
at the United States creating a new crime of "doing journalism" and a new
means of arrest for those committing this "crime" overseas, what I have
termed "media rendition."
Remember that all of the information contained in the U.S. charge sheet
against Assange - the supposed grounds for his extradition - were known to
the previous Obama administration as far back as 2010. But President Barack
Obama never dared approve the current charges against Assange because
legally there was no way to stop them being turned against "respectable"
journalists, like those at The New York Times, The Washington Post and The
Guardian.
This was the same Obama administration that had the worst record on
prosecuting whistleblowers. Obama was no friend to investigative journalism
but he understood that it would be unwise to so overtly subvert the notion
of a free western press.
That the Trump administration has cast all this aside to get Assange behind
bars should have every journalist in the world quaking in their boots, and
loudly decrying what the U.S. is seeking to do.
Assange being forced out of embassy, April 11, 2019. (YouTube)
Assange getting dragged out of embassy, April 11, 2019. (Ruptly/YouTube)
And yet the reaction has been either quiet acceptance of the U.S.
extradition request as a simple law enforcement measure or gentle mockery of
Assange - that the scruffy outlaw dragged from the embassy was looking even
scruffier after seven years of extreme house arrest and "arbitrary
detention." What a laugh!
Narrative Collusion
Now we can see how the media is going to collude in a narrative crafted by
the political class to legitimize what the Trump administration is doing.
Rather than focus on the gross violation of Assange's fundamental human
rights, the wider assault on press freedoms and the attack on Americans'
First Amendment Rights, U.K. politicians are "debating" whether the U.S.
extradition claim on Assange should take priority over earlier Swedish
extradition proceedings for a sexual-assault investigation that was publicly
dropped back in 2017.
In other words, the public conversation in the U.K., sympathetically
reported by The Guardian, supposedly Britain's only major liberal news
outlet, is going to be about who has first dibs on Assange.
Here's the first paragraph of The Guardian's front-page article:
"Political pressure is mounting on [Home Secretary] Sajid Javid to
prioritise action that would allow Julian Assange to be extradited to
Sweden, amid concerns that US charges relating to Wikileaks' activities
risked overshadowing longstanding allegations of rape."
So, the concern is not that Assange is facing rendition to the U.S. It is
that the U.S. claim might "overshadow" an outstanding legal case in Sweden.
The 70 MPs who signed the letter to Javid hope to kill two birds with one
stone.
First, they are legitimizing the discourse of the Trump administration. This
is no longer about an illegitimate U.S. extradition request on Assange we
should all be loudly protesting. It is a competition between two legal
claims, and a debate about which one should find legal remedy first.
It weighs a woman's sexual assault allegation against Assange and WikiLeaks'
exposure of war crimes committed by the U.S. military in Iraq and
Afghanistan. It suggests that both are in the same category, that they are
similar potential crimes.
Unequivocal Response
But there should only be one response to the U.S. extradition claim on
Assange: It is entirely illegitimate. No debate. Anything less, any
equivocation is to collude in the Trump administration's narrative.
The Swedish claim, if it is revived, is an entirely separate matter.
That The Guardian and the MPs are connecting the two should come as no
surprise.
In another article on Assange last Friday, the The Guardian- echoing a
common media refrain - reported as fact a demonstrably false claim: "Assange
initially took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to
Sweden."
Assange and WikiLeaks always said that he entered the embassy to claim
political asylum so as to avoid extradition to the U.S.
There could be no possible reason for its reporters to make this elementary
mistake other than that The Guardian is still waging its long-running
campaign against Assange, the information revolution he represents and the
challenge he poses to the corporate media of which The Guardian is a key
part.
Seven Years of Derision
For seven years the political and media establishments have been deriding
the suggestion that Assange faced any threat from the U.S., despite the
mounting private and public evidence that he did. Assange again has been
proved conclusively right by current events, and they decisively wrong.
The Guardian knows that Assange did not need political asylum to avoid a sex
case. So reporting this not as a claim by his detractors but as an
indisputable fact is simple, Trump-supporting propaganda meant to discredit
Assange - propaganda that happily treats any damage to the cause of
journalism as collateral damage.
Second, the only major politicians prepared to highlight the threats to
Assange's personal rights and wider press freedoms posed by the U.S.
extradition request are opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his ally,
Diane Abbott, the Labour shadow home secretary. They have rightly noted that
the U.S. is using the extradition demand to silence Assange and intimidate
any other journalists who might think about digging up evidence of the
crimes committed by the U.S. national security state.
Abbott commented last Friday that Assange's current arrest was not about
"the rape charges, serious as they are, it is about WikiLeaks and all of
that embarrassing information about the activities of the American military
and security services that was made public."
Abbott has faced a storm of criticism for her statement, accused of not
giving enough weight to the Swedish case. In fact, her only mistake was to
give it more weight than it currently deserves. She spoke of "rape charges,"
but there are in fact no such charges. (Additionally, although the case is
classed broadly as a rape allegation in Sweden, in the U.K. it would be
classed at most as sexual assault. Forgotten too is that the evidence was
considered too weak by the original prosecutor to bring any charges, Assange
was allowed to leave Sweden and the investigation was dropped.)
Assange Did Not Flee Questioning
Rather, Assange was previously wanted for questioning, and has never been
charged with anything. If the Swedish extradition request is revived, it
will be so that he can be questioned about those allegations. I should also
point out, as almost no one else is, that Assange did not "flee"
questioning. He offered Swedish prosecutors to question him at the embassy.
Even though questioning overseas in extradition cases is common - Sweden has
done it dozens of times - Sweden repeatedly refused in Assange's case,
leading the Swedish appeal court to criticize the prosecutors. When he was
finally questioned after four years of delays, Swedish prosecutors violated
his rights by refusing access to his Swedish lawyer.
Further, the MPs and media getting exercised that Assange "took refuge in
the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden" are forgetting that
he did not object to extradition as long as he received a promise that he
would not then be extradited on to the U.S. Sweden refused to offer such
assurances. We can now see only too clearly that Assange had every reason to
insist on such assurances.
Diane Abbott: It's about Wikileaks. (Policy Exchange via Wikimedia Commons)
Diane Abbott: It's about Wikileaks. (Wikimedia Commons)
I don't have space here to analyze the Swedish case on this occasion (that's
maybe for another time), though it is worth briefly noting that most of the
problematic details of the case have been disappeared down the memory hole.
Given that the political and media class are still speaking in terms of
"charges," rather than questions about allegations, we should recall that
there were glaring problems with the evidence in the Swedish case. Not
least, the key piece of evidence against Assange - a torn condom produced by
the woman - was found to contain not a trace of DNA from either Assange or
from her.
Those at the forefront of the attacks on Abbott and Corbyn, echoed by The
Guardian, are the same Blairite Labour MPs who have been trying to oust
Corbyn as Labour party leader, despite his twice being elected
overwhelmingly by the membership.
These MPs, who dominate the Labour parliamentary party, have spent the past
four years focusing on smears that Labour is "institutionally anti-Semitic"
in an obvious effort to terminally wound Corbyn. Now they have found another
possible route to achieve the same end.
They are suggesting that Corbyn and Abbott are disregarding the Swedish
woman's right to justice. The clear subtext of their arguments is that the
pair are rape apologists.
As I have pointed out, Abbott has actually overstated the current status of
the Swedish case, not sidelined it at all.
But what Corbyn and Abbott have done is to make a clear political, legal and
moral demarcation between the Swedish case, which must be resolved according
to accepted legal principles, and the U.S. extradition, which has no legal
or moral merit whatsoever.
What these U.K. MPs and The Guardian have done in this front-page story is
muddy the waters yet further, with enthusiastic disregard for the damage it
might do to Assange's rights, to Corbyn's leadership and to the future of
truth-telling journalism.
Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth. He blogs at
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/.
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