Australian government joins persecution of WikiLeaks ’ Julian Assange

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Australian government joins persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange
By James Cogan
1 December 2010

The Australian Labor government has joined with the Obama administration in its
attempt to manufacture criminal charges against Julian Assange, an Australian
citizen and the editor of WikiLeaks.

On Monday, Attorney General Robert McClelland told a doorstop press conference
that Australia “will support any law enforcement action that may be taken. The
United States will be the lead government in that respect, but certainly
Australian agencies will assist”. The Australian Federal Police, he stated,
would “look at the issue as to whether any Australian laws have been breached as
a specific issue as well”.

A taskforce, made of up personnel from various intelligence and police agencies,
has been formed to scour through the leaked material to determine if Assange can
be charged with releasing “national security-classified documents”.

McClelland indicated that the Australian government had not received a specific
request from Washington to cancel Assange’s passport. This is likely because
both the US and Australian governments hope he will emerge from hiding and
attempt to travel, whereupon he can be detained on either the trumped-up rape
charges brought by the Swedish government or whatever equally
politically-motivated charges are ultimately laid in the US.

McClelland left no doubt that if Assange returned to Australia—where he is a
citizen and supposedly protected from political persecution by other states—the
Labor government would provide “every assistance” to his deportation and
prosecution in the US.

In a separate statement, McClelland also made clear that the Australian
government would demand that any country providing Assange refuge, before
charges are laid in the US, hands him over to Swedish authorities. The
prosecution in Sweden, he declared on Tuesday, “places an obligation on those
countries that are part of the Interpol arrangements to actually detain him when
he arrives”.

Australia’s foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, told journalists in the United Arab
Emirates, where he is attending forums on the Afghanistan war, that “our
attitude, like most governments, is one of absolute condemnation” of WikiLeaks.
“The Australian government” he said, “like other governments, is looking at full
recourse to its legal jurisdiction, in terms of whether any of these actions
have breached the Australian criminal law as well”.

The treatment being meted out to Assange demonstrates the contempt for
democratic rights and international law within the Australian ruling elite and
its political parties. Not one figure in the Labor government, the conservative
opposition or the Greens has even expressed concern, let alone condemnation, of
the implied death threats against Assange that were made by former Republican
vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin—who wrote that he should be hunted down
like “Al Qaeda”—or the hysterical calls in the US for WikiLeaks to be declared a
“terrorist organisation”.

WikiLeaks is a media organisation. It has both a legal and moral right to make
available to the public the mass of documents made available to it regarding the
US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and US diplomatic activity around the world. By
doing so, it has brought into the light of day such atrocities as the killing of
tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians and the US use of death squads
and torture in Iraq to repress resistance.

The initial leaks since Sunday of some 250,000 cables from US embassies and
consulates around the world have already revealed that US imperialism is
actively plotting a war against Iran and carrying out secret bombing missions in
Yemen. US diplomats have been ordered by the Obama administration to
systematically collect personal information and even DNA samples on officials of
foreign governments and the United Nations. It does not take a great deal of
imagination to envisage the filthy purposes for which such information could be
used, from frame-ups to blackmail.

All the outrage in the Australian political establishment, however, has been
reserved for Assange and WikiLeaks. It is prepared for one of its citizens to be
hounded, persecuted, imprisoned and even killed because he has contributed to
exposing, before the world’s population, the criminality of the foreign policy
of Australia’s primary ally.

For the Australian ruling class, the US alliance is the so-called “bedrock” of
its foreign policy. It depends upon Washington’s backing to assert economic and
strategic influence in the South Pacific and South East Asia—Canberra’s own
“sphere of influence”. The democratic rights, liberty and lives of Australian
citizens count for little in comparison.

There are parallels in the treatment of Assange with the willingness of the
Howard Liberal-National government to allow two Australian citizens—Mamdouh
Habib and David Hicks—to be held for years without charges in the Guantánamo Bay
prison camp. Instead, Canberra supported the criminal treatment of the two men,
doing nothing to assist them in defending themselves and securing their release.

Above all, the Australian government’s hostility to WikiLeaks is conditioned by
the role it plays as junior partner in US military aggression and imperialist
intrigue around the world. Australian troops have participated in both the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars; Australian ministers and diplomats vocally defend US
foreign policy in every international forum, and Australian intelligence
agencies cooperate closely with their US counterparts in spying on perceived
rivals, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Moreover, the Australian
government hosts Pine Gap, one of the most important satellite bases and
missile-targeting facilities in the US network.

Evidence revealed by WikiLeaks may well provide the basis for war crimes charges
against several politicians and military personnel in Australia. There may also
be concerns within the Labor government about the contents of the 1,003 cables
from the US embassy in Canberra and US consulate in Melbourne reportedly in the
hands of WikiLeaks.

In particular, there could be highly revealing information on any US involvement
in the June 23-24 political coup that removed Kevin Rudd as prime minister,
especially given the well-known acrimony between the Obama administration and
Rudd over Afghanistan and other foreign policy issues.

Since Rudd’s removal, his replacement, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has made an
indefinite and unconditional commitment to the war in Afghanistan and aligned
her government with US efforts to stem rising Chinese influence in Asia, despite
the fact that China is now Australia’s largest trading partner. The documents
from the US embassy in Australia may contain highly embarrassing and
diplomatically damaging revelations about joint US-Australian activity directed
against Chinese interests. As the Wikileaks cables from Australia are released,
the WSWS will comment further.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/assa-d01.shtml

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