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Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said little in her ministry’s statement, which was a good thing as it could have been dangerously helpful. A UK court ruling on whether Julian Assange would be extradited to the United States was made “because of his mental health and the resulting risk of suicide”. She doesn’t bother to mention the real details of the case, the fact that District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling, while blocking the extradition, was viciously directed against journalism.
Payne insists on the objective distance of the procedure. “Australia is not a party to the case and will continue to respect the ongoing legal process, including the UK judicial system’s review of requests for release or any appeals.” Superficial respect for due process is thus preserved and recognized.
What flows from the statement is a cover excusing the weak efforts of Australian governments over the years from all sides to aid Assange in his monumental battle against US imperialism and the proxy torment inflicted by Britain and Sweden. “We have made 19 offers of consular assistance to Mr. Assange since 2019 that have gone unanswered. We will continue to provide consular support. ”
Such a statement follows the constant line that Australian officials have always been there, always ready and eager to help a citizen besieged, persecuted and haunted by the agencies and instruments of an ally. But the position is damn lying: don’t upset the alliance with the United States or the United Kingdom; don’t disturb Washington’s good offices and don’t raise hackers in Downing Street.
In the past, Australia, with a few questionable exceptions, has shown little respect in protecting citizens in a monumental pickle, especially those accused of serious crimes of a political nature. The Howard government’s dismal response to David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, both accused of terrorist offenses by the United States in the Global War on Terrorism, has been documented. Hicks found himself faced with the most dubious of legal experiments with Australian cheerful approval: the US military commissions established by the administration of George W. Bush.
When the United States Supreme Court struck down the legality of the commissions Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld (2006) for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949, then Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer remained unmoved. “Previously, the military commission process had been upheld by other courts, including the United States Court of Appeals, so it had been, until it went to the Supreme Court, a process that has been confirmed by US civil courts.
Barely the most sophisticated legal analysis ever offered, and one that leaves Australian authorities barefoot in their treatment of an Australian citizen. “Our advice was, as the US government had advised, that it was legal,” explained a less than contrite Prime Minister John Howard. “Now the court said no, well, we accept that – you get advice and you act on it.”
The case of Assange is no less serious. When Vice President of President Barack Obama and soon to be President of the United States, Joe Biden, was asked about WikiLeaks’ exit from the US State Department cables in 2010, the answer was unequivocal: Assange was a species of “high-tech terrorist”. Republican Peter King of New York insisted he be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act (traffic jams must have cropped up when the Department of Justice indictment was released doing just that ) and WikiLeaks has designated a terrorist organization. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cheerfully pitched the idea of using a drone against Assange that same year, while claiming she didn’t remember it in 2016. “It would have been a joke, if that had been said, but I do not remember. this.”
Rather than defending an Australian national against the positively homicidal and kidnapping provision of US politicians and agencies, Canberra has been generally reluctant, hiding behind the fiction of due process. In some cases, Australian officials have gone so far as to bring their own charges against the Australian national, hinting that Assange may deserve to be tried and jailed. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard fell into a trap of her own making in claiming in 2012 that it was an “illegal act” to disclose documents to WikiLeaks. “That wouldn’t happen, the information wouldn’t be on WikiLeaks, if it hadn’t been for an illegal act.”
Unfortunately for Gillard, she hadn’t counted on the remedial assessment of opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis. Gillard, he said reproachfully, had been “awkward” in his language. “As far as I know, he (Mr. Assange) has not broken any Australian law.” Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop also pointed out that Gillard was unable to identify “any Australian law that Mr. Assange allegedly broke.” She also made no apologies for prejudging him in this way and making that damaging statement.
In 2012, while Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr also criticized the accusations, throwing a spear at Assange for divulging “secrets … with the aim of being released without inherent justification”. In doing so, he threw his lot with those who considered the WikiLeaks publication to be nothing like the Pentagon Papers, this showpiece of exposure published by US Department of Defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The WikiLeaks exhibits were “not like Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers which revealed a huge American deception, a huge deception by the US government of the American public.”
This was horribly irrelevant, especially given Ellsberg’s own assessment since 2010 and during Assange’s extradition trial. In December 2010, Ellsberg released a co-signed statement noting that “Every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was directed against me and the publication of the Pentagon Papers at the time.” Testifying as a witness for Assange’s defense in September 2020, he further argued that “his own actions in relation to the Pentagon Papers and the consequences of their publication have been recognized as having resulted in a dramatic shift in understanding . I consider the WikiLeaks publications of 2010 and 2011 to be of comparable importance. ”
Carr was also angered by these harmful accusations that Assange had not received sufficient consular assistance. In his diary of June 2, 2012, he noted that he was fed up with complaints from [Assange’s] family suggesting he was not backed by Australia and opposition spokesman saying the same ”. Dishonest at fault, Carr made the adventurous suggestion at a press conference that the editor of WikiLeaks “had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian.” Strictly speaking, I don’t know if this is the case.
Carr has since undergone the kind of transformation that Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel found inherent in politics. The very nature of the practice – it can hardly be called a discipline – produces a divorce between truth and the human being. When appropriate, these can meet, with human strength and solidarity gathered behind the truth. Carr, for a while, found it embarrassing to consider the truth about Assange’s situation. Now he has become Assange’s late defender and standard-bearer. His extradition to the United States, valorize the converted Carr, “would set a villainous precedent.”
Following the court ruling, Carr suggested on Twitter that Australia was “entitled to tell Trump in his last days that Assange is one of us and that his extradition is a mistake.” He spoke out against American war crimes just like ours in Afghanistan that we are pursuing. he also had words for Payne: raise the question of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with strength and pride to defend an Australian case. “Or your opinion on the [US-Australian] alliance mean you never do that? Havel would have rolled his eyes.
Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He teaches at RMIT University in Melbourne. E-mail: [email protected]
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