US indictment of WikiLeaks founder said to be imminent

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US indictment of WikiLeaks founder said to be imminent
By Bill Van Auken
11 December 2010

A US indictment of Julian Assange on espionage charges is believed to be
imminent, a lawyer for the WikiLeaks founder said Friday.

“We are taking legal advice on the possibility of prosecution in light of
high-profile public officials calling for his prosecution and rumors circulating
in the US that a sealed indictment is being prepared, or may have already been
prepared,” Jennifer Robinson told the AFP news agency.

She added that any prosecution of Assange and the WikiLeaks web site for
espionage would be a violation of the US Constitution.

“Our position is that any prosecution under the Espionage Act would be
unconstitutional and call into question First Amendment protections for all
media organizations,” said Robinson.

Julian Assange remains behind bars at the Wandsworth prison in south London
where he is being held on the basis of an extradition request from Sweden on
trumped-up sexual misconduct charges. He was denied bail after voluntarily
presenting himself to the police and has since been placed in solitary
confinement with his access to his lawyers, the telephone and Internet strictly
limited, more restrictive conditions than those applied to other prisoners.

The lawyer representing Assange in the extradition case reported that he has
been denied access to his client until Monday, giving him less than 24 hours to
prepare for a hearing scheduled Tuesday, when the WikiLeaks founder will return
to court.

Both the Swedish case―which was first dropped because of its patently spurious
character and then reinstated―and the denial of bail in Britain are inconsistent
with normal legal practices. They strongly suggest that the actions taken
against Assange are aimed at using the sex charges as a pretext for meting out
political punishment and giving Washington time to concoct its own frame-up and
present its own extradition request.

The Center for Constitutional Rights in the US issued a statement declaring
itself “alarmed by multiple examples of legal overreach and irregularities in
the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, especially given concerns that
they are meant to clear the way for Mr. Assange to be extradited to the US via
Sweden."

The statement continued: “Standard procedure in these cases is to call in a
suspect for interrogation, and he has offered on numerous occasions to cooperate
with the authorities. Similarly, a suspect who has surrendered, having never
gone into hiding or attempted to flee, would normally be allowed to post bail.
Yet Mr. Assange has been arrested and denied bail.”

The Obama administration, the State Department and the Pentagon are intent on
exacting revenge on Assange and WikiLeaks for having exposed US war crimes and
criminal conspiracies against people in countries all over the world, including
the US itself. These exposures did not begin with the latest release of
diplomatic cables last month, but have been ongoing since April, when WikiLeaks
released a video of a massacre of civilians in Baghdad by a US attack
helicopter. Since then the site has also released tens of thousands of other
documents detailing US killings of civilians and complicity in torture in
Afghanistan and Iraq.

Speaking on Thursday in Washington after a meeting with ministers from the
European Union, US Attorney General Eric Holder said that they had discussed
WikiLeaks. “The hope here in the United States is that the investigation that we
are conducting will allow us to hold accountable the people responsible for that
unwarranted disclosure of information that has put at risk the safety of the
American people,” he said. Earlier in the week, Holder had announced “a very
serious, active ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature” in relation to
the Internet organization's disclosure of classified State Department cables.

An attempt to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917, a reactionary
piece of law used in an earlier period to imprison American socialist and
workers leader Eugene V. Debs and many other working class militants, would set
the stage for a frontal assault on freedom of speech and other basic democratic
rights in the US.

A report prepared this week by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the
nonpartisan research arm of the US Congress, spells out the unprecedented
character of seeking to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks for making classified
information public.

US criminal statutes covering such information, the report notes, “have been
used almost exclusively to prosecute individuals with access to classified
information (and a corresponding obligation to protect it) who make it available
to foreign agents, or to foreign agents who obtain classified information
unlawfully while present in the United States.”

It goes on to point out, “Leaks of classified information to the press have only
rarely been punished as crimes, and we are aware of no case in which a publisher
of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee
has been prosecuted for publishing it.”

The CRS report warns that an attempt stage a prosecution for the WikiLeaks
disclosures would raise questions over “government censorship” and US attempts
to exercise “extraterritorial jurisdiction.”

It cites the precedent of the publication in the New York Times and Washington
Post of the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of the US intervention in
Vietnam, in 1971 and the refusal of the US Supreme Court to grant the
government's request for an injunction barring the papers from printing the
material.

Given the sharp shift to the right by the high court along with the rest of the
political establishment, however, there is every reason to fear a very different
ruling today in relation to a government attempt to railroad Assange on
espionage charges. And, as the CRS points out, such charges are punishable by death.

Leading US politicians and commentators have called for Assange to be declared
an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks a terrorist organization and, openly and
shamelessly, for the WikiLeaks founder to be “assassinated” or “taken out.” This
chorus of public demands raises the obvious question of whether Assange would
even make it to court if he were extradited to the US. The logic of this public
campaign is that he would instead be “disappeared” into the CIA's gulag of
“black sites” or murdered.

The vendetta against Assange has promoted condemnation from several heads of
state and international officials, who, for their own political reasons, have
highlighted the reactionary and hypocritical character of Washington's attempts
to punish WikiLeaks for exposing the true character of American “diplomacy.”

Thus, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, speaking in Brasilia on
Thursday, declared that WikiLeaks has “my solidarity in disclosing these things
and my protest on behalf of free speech.”

Lula added, “I don't know if they put up signs like those from the Westerns
saying, 'wanted dead or alive' … Instead of blaming the person who disclosed it,
blame the person who wrote this nonsense. Otherwise we wouldn't have the scandal
we now have.”

And speaking in Moscow, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ridiculed US
pretensions as the guardian of democracy in light of the attempt to suppress
WikiLeaks. “If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in
prison? That's what, democracy?” said Putin.

“So you know, as they say in the countryside, some people's cows can moo, but
yours should keep quiet,” Putin said, using a Russian adage similar to “the pot
calling the kettle black.” Meanwhile the Russian press reported a statement from
an unnamed Kremlin official suggesting that Assange be nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize as a means of protecting him.

And at the United Nations, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights, condemned the pressure begin placed upon “private companies, banks and
credit card companies,” to cut off services to WikiLeaks.

“They could be interpreted as an attempt to censor the publication of
information, thus potentially violating Wikileaks' right to freedom of
expression,” Pillay said at a press conference in Geneva.

Meanwhile, an announcement this week by the State Department on the decision
that Washington will host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day next May has drawn
international ridicule.

In what seemed like unintended self-parody, the State Department declared: “New
media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances,
express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments
sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of
expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some
governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of
information.”

While undoubtedly intended as a barb against the Chinese government and its
attempts to control access to the Internet, the “concern” expressed by the State
Department reads like an indictment of Washington's own attempt to “censor and
silence” WikiLeaks and cut off the damning flow of information about US
imperialism's criminal activities around the globe.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/assa-d11.shtml

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