The Julian Assange saga

Julian Assange is not your regular newspaper or television journalist. He is more of an activist who wanted to expose governments which kept things covered up, and doled out lies in the public. He has been rightly described as an anarchist. The secret documents, mostly from the United States defence department revealed the many blunders that the world’s sole superpower had committed in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and in retrospect they turn out to be unlawful and fruitless wars. But the Americans would not tolerate anyone who exposed their own evil deeds. Assange was not an American citizen, and he was not in the defence services of the country. Yet, they used their superpower status to hunt him down, to get him arrested and to try him in an American court.

They turned Assange into a fugitive. But strangely enough, Ecuador held out against the United States and gave him political asylum in its embassy in London where he was forced to live out for five years. He was then held in a British prison while all the time he fought a case in British courts against the jurisdiction of the American state to try him. This is indeed the confusing part of international law. If a country feels that an individual has posed a threat to its security, it feels that it has a right to chase that person as enemy and seek his custody. This is exactly what the US had done with the hundreds of people it had arrested in Afghanistan and whisked them away to secret CIA prisons in Europe and in Africa, apart from lodging a large number of them in the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Unfortunately, the international legal system had not been able to prevent this American unilateralism and exceptionalism. The US had its way to a great extent with Assange even as the Australian government weighed in that Assange, an Australian citizen, should be left alone. So, it found Assange guilty on one count which he had to accept, and a plea bargain was made which is a common feature in American criminal cases. So, Assange was awarded a 62-month prison sentence which has been counted as part of the time he spent in British prison, and he was allowed to go back to Australia.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the statement, “There is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia.”

The Assange case leaves many loose ends. The US had convicted a man over whom it had no legal right. And it used its political clout to keep him confined because if he was free he would have been kidnapped by the CIA and taken to the US and convicted. Possibly, the American courts would have overturned the defence department’s arguments. But it is true as pointed out by Stella, his lawyer and his wife, that this issue of finding him guilty on one count is a matter of serious concern for journalists. It can be recalled that the Pentagon Papers, which was the official history of the Vietnam war locked away in the defence department strong rooms, was leaked to The New York Times and The Washington Post, by Daniel Ellsberg, the government raised the same cry that it compromised the security of the country.

In the case of Assange, the defence department said that he endangered the lives of secret agents on the field. But the US defence department did not follow the procedures prescribed in international law in such matters. It tried to arm-twist Assange, which was not a difficult thing to do given the mighty arm of the American state. The world is not convinced that Assange is guilty and the world is convinced that that America used extra-judicial powers.