On the 5 February it emerged in the British press that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and celebrity virtual prisoner living inside the Ecuadorian embassy which is surrounded by British police, had won a victory of sorts against both the British and Swedish governments.
The UN had set up a panel to examine the situation and it found, by a three to one majority, that Mr Assange was indeed being subjected to ” arbitrary detention” and they called for him to be allowed to walk free. The victory at present remains a moral one only as both Britain and Sweden have turned deaf ears to the UN call and Assange remains exactly where he has been for the past 44 months since Ecuador granted him asylum in their Embassy in Britain .
Much of the history of Assange’s situation can be read in Proletarian issue 39 (December 2010) – ‘WikiLeaks strikes blow for truth on Iraq’ and Proletarian issue 49 (August 2012) – ‘Julian Assange: cyber-revolutionary or liberal do-gooder?’ Also Lalkar carries a good article in the January/February 2011 edition – ‘WikiLeaks: the double standards and hypocrisy of US imperialism.’
According to John Pilger writing online for Counterpunch – ‘Julian Assange: the Untold Story of an Epic Struggle for Justice’, any charges in Sweden can only be related to misconduct rather than rape, because both young women involved in the allegations have categorically denied that they were raped. Indeed one of the women is on record as saying that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test but was steamrollered into making charges by the Swedish police. This makes it less understandable, in legal terms, for the Swedish authorities to have always refused to send an officer to interview Assange here in Britain as there is plenty of precedence for this course of action in other cases. It has been rumoured that this may now be done since both the press and public opinion in Sweden seem to have turned from being anti-Assange to a position of healthy distrust of their own government’s motives and most certainly of the hand of US imperialism ‘guiding’ the Swedish government.
A cursory glance at the sentences given to ‘whistle-blowers’ in the US, and the screams emanating from senior US politicians for whistle-blowers still at large to be hunted down and killed, explains instantly the reasoning behind the chief imperialist’s demand that Sweden use these charges to get its hands on Assange in the first place (so that he can then be extradited to the USA for ‘justice’!) and for Britain to hold Assange under siege until ill health or frustration cause him to come out and be packed off to Sweden.
The plans for the ‘legal’ vindictiveness that will be used against a captured Assange are not commonly known as they are considered a state secret and, if he is ever captured, the ‘trial’ will doubtless also be as secret as it will be free of any justice. What is certain is that a lot of money, much of it Swedish and English, has been spent so far (£12 million in Britain) on legal sleights of hand and diplomatic skulduggery in Sweden and what Pilger calls “The siege of Knightsbridge” over here.
Regardless of what crime, if any, Assange committed in Sweden or the known leaks that Assange has made of embattled nations’ secrets that have actually helped imperialism attack them, this case is only really about US imperialism wanting to punish someone who has upset them by showing them to be murdering, thieving liars who spy on the world, including their ‘friends’, as well as the desire of this putrid, rotting beast publicly to heap torment and never-ending punishment on one person as a warning to all others not to reveal the huge crimes against humanity and, indeed, all of nature, committed by imperialism. Under these circumstances we can only wish their intended victim, Julian Assange, the very best of luck and greater strength in resisting the hoary, cold claw of the vile poison-oozing entity we call US imperialism and repeat our call for all to join us in working to slay this and all the other imperialist leeches that cover so much of our planet with their toxic sickness.
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