April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is
threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in
England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to
disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay
nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged
whistleblower, of a capital crime.
Should Assange’s current British appeal fail against his extradition to
Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held
incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him has already
been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only
when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public
statements about Assange’s “guilt”. Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents
the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who as
Sweden’s minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of
two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm
airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.
These facts were documented in an Australian parliamentary briefing in
Canberra on 2 March. Outlining an epic miscarriage of justice threatening
Assange, the enquiry heard expert evidence that, under international
standards of justice, the behavior of certain officials in Sweden would be
considered “highly improper and reprehensible [and] preclude a fair trial”.
A former senior Australian diplomat, Tony Kevin, described the close ties
between the Swedish prime minister Frederic Reinheldt, and the
Republican right in the US. “Reinfeldt and [George W] Bush are friends,”
he said. Reinhaldt has attacked Assange publicly and hired Karl Rove, the
former Bush crony, to advise him. The implications for Assange’s
extradition to the US from Sweden are dire.
The Australian enquiry was ignored in the UK, where black farce is
currently preferred. On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Stephen
Spielberg’s Dream Works was to make “an investigative thriller in the
mould of All the President’s Men” out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian
Assange’s War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with
Luke Harding, how much Spielberg had paid the Guardian for the screen
rights and what he expected to make personally. “No idea,” was the
puzzling reply of the Guardian’s “investigations editor”. The Guardian paid
WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks --
not Leigh or Harding -- are responsible for what the Guardian’s editor,
Alan Rusbridger, calls “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last
30 years”.
The Guardian has made clear it has no further use for Assange. He is a
loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough,
unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian’s self-regarding book,
Assange’s extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty
bemusement, an “unusual Australian” with a “frizzy-haired” mother,
gratuitously abused as “callous” and a “damaged personality” that was “on
the autistic spectrum”. How will Speilberg deal with this childish character
assassination? e
On the BBC’s Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay about Assange not caring
about the lives of those named in the leaks. As for the claim that Assange
had complained of a “Jewish conspiracy”, which follows a torrent of
internet nonsense that he is an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this
as “completely false, in spirit and word”.
It is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, the sense of isolation and
state of siege of Julian Assange, who in one form or another is paying for