What an ugly brute Uncle Sam appears to be these days. He looks like
any of dozens of Despots who have slobbered over their spoils down
through our history. All of our dreams of being the world's Savior,
bringing Peace and Love to one and all, turns out to be nothing other
than a Madison Avenue Fairy Tale.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/23/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over
to the U.K. What Comes Next?
Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept
July 21 2018, 12:17 p.m.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addresses the media holding a printed
report of the judgement of the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on
his case from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in central London on
February 5, 2016.During a press conference on February 5 Julian Assange,
speaking via video-link, called for Britain and Sweden to "implement" a UN
panel finding saying that he should be able to walk free from Ecuador's
embassy, where he has lived in self-imposed confinement since 2012. / AFP /
NIKLAS HALLE'N (Photo credit should read NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty Images)
Photo: Niklas Halle'n/AFP/Getty Images
Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno traveled to London on Friday for the
ostensible purpose of speaking at the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit
(Moreno has been using a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery
attempt). The concealed, actual purpose of the president’s trip is to meet
with British officials to finalize an agreement under which Ecuador will
withdraw its asylum protection of Julian Assange, in place since 2012, eject
him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and then hand over the WikiLeaks
founder to British authorities.
Moreno’s itinerary also notably includes a trip to Madrid, where he will
meet with Spanish officials still seething over Assange’s denunciation of
human rights abuses perpetrated by Spain’s central government against
protesters marching for Catalonian independence. Almost three months ago,
Ecuador blocked Assange from accessing the internet, and Assange has not
been able to communicate with the outside world ever since. The primary
factor in Ecuador’s decision to silence him was Spanish anger over Assange’s
tweets about Catalonia.
Presidential decree signed on July 17 by Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno,
outlining his trip to London and Madrid.
A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the president’s
office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to The Intercept that
Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement
to hand over Assange to the U.K. within the next several weeks. The
withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as
this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into
such an agreement.
The consequences of such an agreement depend in part on the concessions
Ecuador extracts in exchange for withdrawing Assange’s asylum. But as former
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa told The Intercept in an interview in
May, Moreno’s government has returned Ecuador to a highly “subservient” and
“submissive” posture toward western governments.
It is thus highly unlikely that Moreno — who has shown himself willing to
submit to threats and coercion from the U.K., Spain and the U.S. — will
obtain a guarantee that the U.K. not extradite Assange to the U.S., where
top Trump officials have vowed to prosecute Assange and destroy WikiLeaks.
The central oddity of Assange’s case — that he has been effectively
imprisoned for eight years despite never having been charged with, let alone
convicted of, any crime — is virtually certain to be prolonged once Ecuador
hands him over to the U.K. Even under the best-case scenario, it appears
highly likely that Assange will continue to be imprisoned by British
authorities.
The only known criminal proceeding Assange currently faces is a pending 2012
arrest warrant for “failure to surrender” — basically a minor bail violation
that arose when he obtained asylum from Ecuador rather than complying with
bail conditions by returning to court for a hearing on his attempt to resist
extradition to Sweden.
That offense carries a prison term of three months and a fine, though it is
possible that the time Assange has already spent in prison in the U.K. could
be counted against that sentence. In 2010, Assange was imprisoned in
Wandsworth Prison, kept in isolation, for 10 days until he was released on
bail; he was then under house arrest for 550 days at the home of a
supporter.
Assange’s lawyer, Jen Robinson, told The Intercept that he would argue that
all of that prison time already served should count toward (and thus
completely fulfill) any prison term imposed on the “failure to surrender”
charge, though British prosecutors would almost certainly contest that
claim. Assange would also argue that he had a reasonable, valid basis for
seeking asylum rather than submitting to U.K. authorities: namely,
well-grounded fear that he would be extradited to the U.S. for prosecution
for the act of publishing documents.
Beyond that minor charge, British prosecutors could argue that Assange’s
evading of legal process in the U.K. was so protracted, intentional and
malicious that it rose beyond mere “failure to surrender” to “contempt of
court,” which carries a prison term of up to two years. Just on those
charges alone, then, Assange faces a high risk of detention for another year
or even longer in a British prison.
Currently, that is the only known criminal proceeding Assange faces. In May
2017, Swedish prosecutors announced they were closing their investigation
into the sexual assault allegations due to the futility of proceeding in
light of Assange’s asylum and the time that has elapsed.
The far more important question that will determine Assange’s future is what
the U.S. government intends to do. The Obama administration was eager to
prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing hundreds of thousands of
classified documents, but ultimately concluded that there was no way to do
so without either also prosecuting newspapers such as the New York Times and
The Guardian, which published the same documents, or creating precedents
that would enable the criminal prosecution of media outlets in the future.
Indeed, it is technically a crime under U.S. law for anyone — including a
media outlet — to publish certain types of classified information. Under
U.S. law, for instance, it was a felony for the Washington Post’s David
Ignatius to report on the contents of telephone calls, intercepted by the
NSA, between then National Security Adviser nominee Michael Flynn and
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, even though such reporting was clearly in
the public interest since it proved Flynn lied when he denied such
contacts.
That the Washington Post and Ignatius — and not merely their sources —
violated U.S. criminal law by revealing the contents of intercepted
communications with a Russian official is made clear by the text of 18 § 798
of the U.S. Code, which provides (emphasis added):
“Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available
to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information …
obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the
communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title
or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
But the U.S. Justice Department has never wanted to indict and prosecute
anyone for the crime of publishing such material, contenting themselves
instead to prosecuting the government sources who leak it. Their reluctance
has been due to two reasons: First, media outlets would argue that any
attempts to criminalize the mere publication of classified or stolen
documents is barred by the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment, a
proposition the DOJ has never wanted to test; second, no DOJ has wanted as
part of its legacy the creation of a precedent that allows the U.S.
government to criminally prosecute journalists and media outlets for
reporting classified documents.
But the Trump administration has made clear that they have no such concerns.
Quite the contrary: Last April, Trump’s then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now
his secretary of state, delivered a deranged, rambling, highly threatening
broadside against WikiLeaks. Without citing any evidence, Pompeo decreed
that WikiLeaks is “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by
state actors like Russia,” and thus declared: “We have to recognize that we
can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free
speech values against us.”
The longtime right-wing congressman, now one of Trump’s most loyal and
favored cabinet officials, also explicitly rejected any First Amendment
concerns about prosecuting Assange, arguing that while WikiLeaks “pretended
that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice … they may
have believed that, but they are wrong.”
Pompeo then issued this bold threat: “To give them the space to crush us
with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution
stands for. It ends now.”
Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions has similarly vowed not only to
continue and expand the Obama DOJ’s crackdown on sources, but also to
consider the prosecution of media outlets that publish classified
information. It would be incredibly shrewd for Sessions to lay the
foundation for doing so by prosecuting Assange first, safe in the knowledge
that journalists themselves — consumed with hatred for Assange due to
personal reasons, professional jealousies, and anger over the role they
believed he played in 2016 in helping Hillary Clinton lose — would unite
behind the Trump DOJ and in support of its efforts to imprison Assange.
During the Obama years, it was a mainstream view among media outlets that
prosecuting Assange would be a serious danger to press freedoms. Even the
Washington Post editorial page, which vehemently condemned WikiLeaks, warned
in 2010 that any such prosecution would “criminalize the exchange of
information and put at risk” all media outlets. When Pompeo and Sessions
last year issued their threats to prosecute Assange, former Obama DOJ
spokesperson Matthew Miller insisted that no such prosecution could ever
succeed:
For years, the Obama DOJ searched for evidence that Assange actively
assisted Chelsea Manning or other sources in the hacking or stealing of
documents — in order to prosecute them for more than merely publishing
documents — and found no such evidence. But even that theory — that a
publisher of classified documents can be prosecuted for assisting a source —
would be a severe threat to press freedom, since journalists frequently work
in some form of collaboration with sources who remove or disclose classified
information. And nobody has ever presented evidence that WikiLeaks conspired
with whoever hacked the DNC and Podesta email inboxes to effectuate that
hacking.
But there seems little question that, as Sessions surely knows, large
numbers of U.S. journalists — along with many, perhaps most, Democrats —
would actually support the Trump DOJ in prosecuting Assange for publishing
documents. After all, the DNC sued WikiLeaks in April for publishing
documents — a serious, obvious threat to press freedom — and few objected.
And it was Democratic senators such as Dianne Feinstein who, during the
Obama years, were urging the prosecution of WikiLeaks, with the support of
numerous GOP senators. There is no doubt that, after 2016, support among
both journalists and Democrats for imprisoning Assange for publishing
documents would be higher than ever.
If the U.S. did indict Assange for alleged crimes relating to the
publication of documents, or if they have already obtained a sealed
indictment, and then uses that indictment to request that the U.K. extradite
him to the U.S. to stand trial, that alone would ensure that Assange remains
in prison in the U.K. for years to come.
Assange would, of course, resist any such extradition on the ground that
publishing documents is not a cognizable crime and that the U.S is seeking
his extradition for political charges that, by treaty, cannot serve as the
basis for extradition. But it would take at least a year, and probably
closer to three years, for U.K. courts to decide these extradition
questions. And while all of that lingers, Assange would almost certainly be
in prison, given that it is inconceivable that a British judge would release
Assange on bail given what happened the last time he was released.
All of this means that it is highly likely that Assange — under his
best-case scenario — faces at least another year in prison, and will end up
having spent a decade in prison despite never having been charged with, let
alone convicted of, any crime. He has essentially been punished — imprisoned
— by process.
And while it is often argued that Assange has only himself to blame, it is
beyond doubt, given the grand jury convened by the Obama DOJ and now the
threats of Pompeo and Sessions, that the fear that led Assange to seek
asylum in the first place — being extradited to the U.S. and politically
persecuted for political crimes — was well-grounded.
Assange, his lawyers and his supporters always said that he would
immediately board a plane to Stockholm if he were guaranteed that doing so
would not be used to extradite him to the U.S., and for years offered to be
questioned by Swedish investigators inside the embassy in London, something
Swedish prosecutors only did years later. Citing those facts, a United
Nations panel ruled in 2016 that the actions of the U.K. government
constituted “arbitrary detention” and a violation of Assange’s fundamental
human rights.
But if, as seems quite likely, the Trump administration finally announces
that it intends to prosecute Assange for publishing classified U.S.
government documents, we will be faced with the bizarre spectacle of U.S.
journalists — who have spent the last two years melodramatically expressing
grave concern over press freedom due to insulting tweets from Donald Trump
about Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd or his mean treatment of Jim Acosta —
possibly cheering for a precedent that would be the gravest press freedom
threat in decades.
That precedent would be one that could easily be used to put them in a
prison cell alongside Assange for the new “crime” of publishing any
documents that the U.S. government has decreed should not be published. When
it comes to press freedom threats, such an indictment would not be in the
same universe as name-calling tweets by Trump directed at various TV
personalities.
When it came to denouncing due process denials and the use of torture at
Guantanamo, it was not difficult for journalists to set aside their personal
dislike for Al Qaeda sympathizers to denounce the dangers of those human
rights and legal abuses. When it comes to free speech assaults, journalists
are able to set aside their personal contempt for a person’s opinions to
oppose the precedent that the government can punish people for expressing
noxious ideas.
It should not be this difficult for journalists to set aside their personal
emotions about Assange to recognize the profound dangers — not just to press
freedoms but to themselves — if the U.S. government succeeds in keeping
Assange imprisoned for years to come, all due to its attempts to prosecute
him for publishing classified or stolen documents. That seems the highly
likely scenario once Ecuador hands over Assange to the U.K.
