US determined to make Assange pay
On September 7, Julian Assange will leave his cell in Belmarsh Prison in London and attend a hearing that will determine his fate. After a long period of isolation, he was finally able to meet his partner, Stella Moris, and see their two sons, Gabriel, 3, and Max, 1, on August 25. After the visit, Moris said he looked to be in "a lot of pain."
The hearing that Assange will face has nothing to do with the reasons for his arrest from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on April 11, 2019. He was arrested that day for his failure to surrender in 2012 to the British authorities, who would have extradited him to Sweden; in Sweden, at that time, there were accusations against Assange of sexual offenses.
That case was dropped in November 2019. Indeed, after the Swedish authorities decided not to pursue Assange, he should have been released by the UK government. But he was not.
The true reason for the arrest was never the charge in Sweden; it was the desire of the US government to have him brought to the United States on a range of charges. On April 11, 2019, the UK Home Office said, "We can confirm that Julian Assange was arrested in relation to a provisional extradition request from the United States of America. He is accused in the United States of America of computer-related offenses." Chelsea Manning
The day after Assange's arrest, the campaign group Article 19 published a statement that while the UK authorities had "originally" said they wanted to arrest Assange for fleeing bail in 2012 toward the Swedish extradition request, it had now become clear that the arrest was due to a US Justice Department claim on him. The US wanted Assange on a "federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified US government computer."
Assange was accused of helping whistleblower Chelsea Manning in 2010 when Manning passed to WikiLeaks, led by Assange, an explosive trove of classified information from the US government that contained clear evidence of war crimes. Manning spent seven years in prison before her sentence was commuted by then-US president Barack Obama.
While Assange was in the Ecuadoran Embassy and now as he languishes in Belmarsh Prison, the US government has attempted to create an airtight case against him.
The US Justice Department indicted Assange on at least 18 charges, including the publication of classified documents and a charge that he helped Manning crack a password and hack into a computer at the Pentagon. One of the indictments, from 2018, makes the case against Assange clearly.
The charge that Assange published the documents is not the central one, since the documents were also published by a range of media outlets such as The New York Times and The Guardian.
The key charge is that Assange "actively encouraged Manning to provide more information and agreed to crack a password hash stored on US Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a United States government network used for classified documents and communications. Assange is also charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to crack that password hash." The problem here is that it appears the US government has no evidence that Assange colluded with Manning to break into the US system.
Manning does not deny that she broke into the system, downloaded the materials, and sent them to WikiLeaks. Once she had done this, WikiLeaks, like the other media outlets, published the materials.
Manning had a very trying seven years in prison for her role in the transmission of the materials. Because of the lack of evidence against Assange, Manning was asked to testify against him before a grand jury. She refused and now is once more in prison; the US authorities are using her imprisonment as a way to compel her to testify against Assange.
What Manning sent to Assange On January 8, 2010, WikiLeaks announced that it had "encrypted videos of US bomb strikes on civilians." The video, later released as "Collateral Murder," showed in cold-blooded detail how on July 12, 2007, US AH-64 Apache helicopters fired 30-millimeter guns at a group of Iraqis in New Baghdad; among those killed were Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh.
Reuters immediately asked for information about the killings; it was fed the official story and told that there was no video, but Reuters futilely persisted.