A day in the death of British justice
John Pilger examines the latest arguments by the US in its bid to extradite Julian Assange, and the continuing persecution of the Wikileaks whistleblower and his partner Stella Moris
Isat in court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London on 11 August with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought apartheid. On August 12, her name was uttered by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege.
The barrister, Clair Dobbin, is in the pay of Washington, first Donald Trump’s then Joe Biden’s. She is the US’S hired gun, or “silk,” as she would prefer. Her target is Assange, who has committed no crime and has performed a service by exposing the criminal actions and secrets on which governments base their authority.
Wikileaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the bids by Washington to overthrow elected governments such as Venezuela’s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (George Bush and Barack Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the CIA’S Vault 7 campaign that turned your cellphone, even your TV set, into a spy in your midst.
Wikileaks released almost a million documents from Russia, which allowed Russian citizens to stand up for their rights. It revealed the Australian government had colluded with the United States against its own citizen, Assange. It named Australian politicians who have “informed” for the US. It made the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the rise of jihadism in Us-armed states in the Gulf.
There is more: Wikileaks disclosed the US campaign to suppress wages in sweatshop countries such as Haiti, India’s campaign of torture in Kashmir, the British government’s secret agreement to shield “US interests” in its official Iraq inquiry and the British foreign office’s plan to create a fake marine protection zone in the Indian Ocean to cheat the Chagos islanders out of their right of return.
In other words, Wikileaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the repetitive spin that fills newspapers and TV screens. This is real journalism. For the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in some form of incarceration, including Belmarsh prison.
Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent and accountable.
On August 11, the US sought the approval of Britain’s high court to extend the terms of its appeal against a decision by a district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January to bar Assange’s extradition. Baraitser accepted the deeply disturbing evidence
of a number of experts that Assange would be at great risk if he were incarcerated in the US’S infamous prison system.
Professor Michael Kopelman, a world authority on neuropsychiatry, had said Assange would find a way to take his own life — the direct result of what Professor Nils Melzer, the United Nations rapporteur on torture, described as the craven “mobbing” of Assange by governments.
Those who were in the Old Bailey last September to hear Kopelman’s evidence were shocked. The court was also told about the discovery of a razor blade in Julian’s Belmarsh cell and that he had made desperate calls to the Samaritans and written notes.
Watching the lead barrister acting for Washington, James Lewis, reduce these facts to “malingering” and smearing witnesses, especially Kopelman, we were heartened by Kopelman’s response that Lewis’s abuse was “a bit rich” as Lewis himself had sought to hire Kopelman’s expertise in another case.
Lewis’s sidekick is Dobbin, and August 11 was her day. She said Kopelman had “misled” Baraitser in September because he had not disclosed that Assange and Moris were partners, and their children, Gabriel and Max, were conceived when Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The implication was that this somehow lessened Kopelman’s medical diagnosis: that Julian, locked up in solitary in Belmarsh prison and facing extradition to the US on bogus “espionage” charges, had suffered severe psychotic depression and had planned, if he had not already attempted, to take his own life.
Baraitser saw no contradiction. The full nature of the relationship between Stella and Julian had been explained to her in March 2020, and Kopelman had made full reference to it in his report in August 2020. So the judge and the court knew all about it
before the main extradition hearing last September. In her judgment in January, Baraitser said this:
“[Professor Kopelman] assessed Mr Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr Assange’s background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician ... I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.”
She said she had “not been misled” by the exclusion in Kopelman’s first report of the Stella-julian relationship and that she understood that Kopelman was protecting the privacy of Stella and her two children.
As I know well, the family’s safety was under constant threat to the point when an embassy security guard confessed he had been told to steal one of the baby’s nappies so that a Cia-contracted company could analyse its DNA.
For the US and its legal hirelings in London, damaging the credibility of a renowned expert by suggesting he withheld this information was a way, they no doubt reckoned, to rescue their crumbling case against Assange. In June, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin reported that a key prosecution witness against Assange has admitted fabricating his evidence. The one “hacking” charge the Americans hoped to bring against Assange depended on this source
and witness, Sigurdur Thordarson, an FBI informant.
Thordarson had worked as a volunteer for Wikileaks in Iceland between 2010 and 2011. In 2011, as several criminal charges were brought against him, he contacted the FBI and offered to become an informant in return for immunity from prosecution. It emerged that he was a convicted fraudster who embezzled $55000 from Wikileaks, and served two years in prison. In 2015, he was sentenced to three years for sex offences against teenage boys. The Washington Post described Thordarson’s credibility as the “core” of the case against Assange.
On August 11, Lord Chief Justice Holroyde made no mention of this witness. His concern was that it was “arguable” that Baraitser had attached too much weight to the evidence of Kopelman. He said it was “very unusual” for an appeal court to have to reconsider evidence from an expert accepted by a lower court, but he agreed with Dobbin it was “misleading” even though he accepted Kopelman’s “understandable human response” to protect the privacy of Stella and the children.
If you can unravel the arcane logic of this, you have a better grasp than I, who have sat through this case from the beginning. Kopelman misled nobody. Baraitser said she was not misled; it was not an issue; it did not matter. So why had Holroyde spun the language with its weasel legalese and sent Julian back to his cell and its nightmares? There, he now waits for the high court’s final decision in October — for Assange, a life or death decision. Why did Holroyde send Stella from the court trembling with anguish? Why is this case “unusual”? Why did he throw the gang of prosecutor-thugs at the department of justice in Washington a life raft as their rotting, corrupt case against a principled journalist sunk as surely as the Titanic?
This does not necessarily mean that in October the high court will order Julian to be extradited. In the upper reaches of the masonry that is the British judiciary there are still those who believe in real law and real justice.
I sat with Stella while she drafted words to say to the media and wellwishers outside. Along came Dobbin, she who said Assange was “not so ill” that he would consider suicide. How does she know?
Has Dobbin worked her way through the maze at Belmarsh to sit with Julian in his yellow arm band, as Kopelman and Melzer have done, and Stella has done, and I have done? Never mind. The Americans have now “promised” not to put him in a hellhole, just as they “promised” not to torture Chelsea Manning.
And has she read the Wikileaks’ leak of a Pentagon document dated March 15, 2009? This foretold the current war on journalism. US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy Wikileaks’ and Assange’s “centre of gravity” with threats and “criminal prosecution”. Read all 32 pages and it is clear that silencing and criminalising independent journalism was the aim, smear the method.
Outside, Stella struggled to contain her emotion. This is one brave woman, as indeed her man is an exemplar of courage.
“What has not been discussed today,” said Stella, “is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and for Julian’s life. The constant threats and intimidation we endured for years, which has been terrorising us and has been terrorising Julian for 10 years. We have a right to live, we have a right to exist and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end.”
This is real journalism. For the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in some form of incarceration