{"id":20012,"date":"2024-05-22T07:20:01","date_gmt":"2024-05-22T11:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=20012"},"modified":"2024-05-22T07:20:01","modified_gmt":"2024-05-22T11:20:01","slug":"assange-wins-delay-but-punishment-by-process-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/22\/assange-wins-delay-but-punishment-by-process-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"Assange Wins Delay, but \u2018Punishment by Process\u2019 Continues"},"content":{"rendered":"
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art by Natalie Fawn Danelishen<\/p><\/div>\n

American Conservative, May 22, 2024<\/p>\n

Assange Wins Delay, but \u2018Punishment by Process\u2019 Continues<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

The good news is that Julian Assange\u2019s lawyers blocked his extradition to the United States, where he would face a kangaroo court hearing and life in prison.<\/p>\n

The bad news is that Assange remains locked up in Britain\u2019s Belmarsh maximum security prison. \u201cPunishment by process\u201d is the term that his wife, Stella Assange, uses to describe his plight.\u00a0Almost five years ago, Nils Melzer<\/a>, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, concluded after examining Assange that he showed all the signs of prolonged psychological torture.<\/p>\n

Two judges on Britain\u2019s High Court ruled on Monday that Assange can file a full appeal against the U.S. government\u2019s attempts to extradite him. He is accused of violating the Espionage Act via his 2010 Wikileaks disclosures of American military war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

The ruling largely hinged on whether Assange would be permitted to invoke the First Amendment in his defense. The Justice Department lawyer James Lewis told the British court that the First Amendment doesn\u2019t apply to anyone \u201cin relation to publication of illegally obtained national defense information giving the names of innocent sources to their grave and imminent risk of harm.\u201d\u00a0As I noted in a March 28<\/a> piece in The American Conservative<\/em>, the U.S. government has never proven that Assange\u2019s leaks led to anyone\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

\u201cNational defense information\u201d is a blight that increasingly destroys any home for democracy in foreign policy.\u00a0Each year, the federal government creates the equivalent of 20 million filing cabinets full of new secret documents.\u00a0Any document that is classified is treated like a holy relic, unable to be exposed without damning the nation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Biden officials and members of Congress clamoring for Assange\u2019s legal impalement have offered no fix for a political-bureaucratic foreign policy that is practically designed for maximum deceit of the American people.\u00a0<\/strong>Three years ago, Washingtonians were shocked when Afghanistan\u2019s government collapsed like a house of cards under the Taliban\u2019s assault, despite endless U.S. aid and bureaucratic boasts of progress. Eighteen months before that collapse, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, slammed the institutionalized cover-up: \u201cIt turns out that everything that is bad news has been classified for the last few years.\u201d Sopko testified to Congress that there was \u201can odor of mendacity<\/a> throughout the Afghanistan issue\u2026. The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sopko\u2019s courageous condemnation rolled off the Washington establishment like water off a duck\u2019s back.\u00a0The Biden administration\u2019s claims of success in Ukraine are probably at least as deceptive, if not depraved, as the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations\u2019 claims about Afghanistan.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The best antidote to systemic lies is freedom of the press.\u00a0As Assange famously said, \u201cIf wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.\u201d But, at the moment, there is scant support inside the Beltway for either peace or truth.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Assange supporters are divided on whether the ruling is a victory or merely a reprieve.<\/p>\n

Thomas Fazi noted in Unherd<\/a>, \u201cAssange has now been subjected to relentless legal persecution by some of the world\u2019s most powerful governments, primarily the U.S. and UK, for 14 years.\u201d Those states \u201chave had no qualms about disregarding fundamental principles of due process in their effort to crush Assange.\u201d\u00a0The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs <\/a>scoffed, \u201cIt is difficult to qualify the ongoing persecution of Julian Assange as a decision in his favour.\u201d\u00a0A spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs<\/a> declared on Tuesday that the Assange case reveals \u201cAmerican-style freedom of the press\u201d: \u201cExposing other countries should be rewarded, while exposing the U.S. leads to punishment…. To the U.S., freedom of the press, like democratic human rights, is just a tool the U.S. uses to suppress dissidents and maintain its own hegemony.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assange\u2019s lawyers are prudent to fight vociferously to prevent their client from facing trial in the U.S.\u00a0John Kiriakou<\/a> was the only CIA official sent to prison for the Bush-era torture scandal. His crime? Disclosing the waterboarding. Kiriakou warns, \u201cJulian Assange will not receive a fair trial if extradited to the U.S. The so-called \u2018espionage court\u2019 is rigged.\u201d\u00a0As the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> noted, Assange\u2019s lawyers believe he would be denied a fair trial in part because jurors on his case \u201cwould be chosen from a pool filled with government employees, including people who work at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.\u201d Biden administration prosecutors have relied on similar jury pools to score convictions of practically any Trump supporter accused of being within a mile of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n