JULIAN A

For a long while, Nils Melzer, the UN spe­cial rap­por­teur on tor­ture, had doubts about the Aus­tralian Wik­ileaks founder Ju­lian As­sange, sus­pect­ing that he was lit­tle more than a ‘shady hacker’. The 2010 rape al­le­ga­tions made by two Swedish women didn’t do much for his image, ei­ther. So Melzer re­fused him UN pro­tec­tion when re­quested to do so by As­sange’s legal team in 2018. They pe­ti­tioned Melzer again in 2019 and this time round he de­cided to take a closer look; the look turned into a two year in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the (dev­as­tat­ing) re­sults of which have been pub­lished in Melzer’s re­cent book ‘The Trial of Ju­lian As­sange’. Melzer re­minds us that in 2006, Wik­ileaks started by ex­pos­ing cor­rup­tion in Kenya; the ban­ning of Red Cross del­e­gates in Guantánamo; and by de­tail­ing thou­sands of cases of war crimes com­mit­ted in Iraq and Afghanistan by west­ern troops, in­clud­ing a video taken from an Apache he­li­copter, which showed the crew hav­ing a good laugh as they killed two Reuters re­porters and a dozen un­armed Iraqi civil­ians. As for the rape al­le­ga­tions, Melzer found that the two Swedish women in­volved, with whom As­sange had had brief af­fairs, went to the po­lice to oblige him to get an HIV test, but the Swedish po­lice seem to have as­sumed (or de­cided) that this was an ac­cu­sa­tion of rape. Over the next ten years, the po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion never went be­yond the pre­lim­i­nary stage (i.e. As­sange was never charged) and sev­eral pros­e­cu­tors dropped the case, which was picked up by oth­ers who were also un­able to find enough ev­i­dence to pros­e­cute. As­sange left for Britain, only for the Swedish gov­ern­ment to de­mand his ex­tra­di­tion. Fear­ing, rea­son­ably, that once ex­tra­dited he would be whisked off to a US wait­ing for him with open jaws, As­sange sought refuge in the Ecuadorean Em­bassy in 2012. Wik­ileaks con­tin­ued to pub­lish damn­ing doc­u­ments, this time on Syria’s Assad regime and the west­ern com­pa­nies that were doing busi­ness with it; even more damn­ingly, in 2017 it pub­lished ‘Vault 7’: nearly 9,000 CIA files re­veal­ing that the Agency had been prac­tis­ing covert mass sur­veil­lance on US cit­i­zens and Eu­ro­pean lead­ers. The CIA’s di­rec­tor clas­si­fied As­sange as the leader of a ‘non-state hos­tile in­tel­li­gence ser­vice’ and planned to kid­nap or mur­der him (ac­cord­ing to 8 of the 30 of­fi­cials in on the plot, which was aban­doned when White House lawyers ques­tioned its ‘le­gal­ity’). When the New York Times and the Wash­ing­ton Post pub­lished the same CIA doc­u­ments, Trump de­cided to pros­e­cute As­sange alone. In 2019, the Ecuadore­ans handed As­sange over to the Lon­don po­lice, hav­ing con­fis­cated his razor and for­bid­den him from cut­ting his hair 3 months ear­lier. He looked ter­ri­ble (that was the idea).

What’s more, it has now been con­clu­sively proven that As­sange redacted ma­te­r­ial from his doc­u­ments that could have put peo­ple in dan­ger: con­trary to per­sis­tent ru­mours, no one has been in­jured or killed be­cause of Wik­ileaks. At his ex­tra­di­tion hear­ings in the UK in 2020, As­sange was (un­law­fully) placed in a glass cage which made it im­pos­si­ble to con­fer with his coun­sel. If ex­tra­dited, he will be jailed for life, ac­cused of being a ter­ror­ist and a spy. In Cat­alo­nia, the As­sange case is being fol­lowed closely: here too, hun­dreds of peo­ple - po­lit­i­cal lead­ers in­cluded - have been il­le­gally spied upon, and hun­dreds more are being ac­cused of ter­ror­ism for no demon­stra­ble rea­son. If the British ex­tra­dite As­sange, it will give a green light to lib­eral democ­ra­cies every­where to in­stantly get shot of any­one who they con­sider to be a pain in their back­sides. And free speech be damned.

opin­ion