Assange’s Belmarsh torture is an attack on journalism, free speech and inquiry

Julian Assange did not appear at the first day of the hearing in London appealing against his extradition to the United States, and who can blame him? The WikiLeaks founder has been in Belmarsh prison in South London for almost five years now, practically all of it under separation from other prisoners and much of it under 23-hour-a-day lockdown. 

Belmarsh, and such attendant regimes, are designed for shorter-term prisoners, and for those accused of terrorism, the actual blowing up of things and people. The regime Assange is under has become, with its lack of social contact and social life, and its spartan conditions, a form of torture. Given that part IV of the “Cablegate” archive was files on the Guantanamo regime and the permanently sequestered detainees there, Assange’s current regime is less grim irony than it is payback by the Atlantic powers for that sort of revelation. 

Three years of a harsh regime is about the limit that will break anyone. Primo Levi noted in If This Is a Man, that, in the German camps, even the most resolute Communist or the most affectless professional criminal came apart psychologically after three years of the system. 

I suspect if anyone can stand such a regime, it’s someone like Assange, who is purported to have read The Gulag Archipelago while living wild in the Dandenongs for a few months in the early 1990s. But much of his sequestration — in an English country house, in the Ecuadorian embassy — has allowed him to continue the WikiLeaks project. Belmarsh has imposed a desocialisation, an unbecoming, that’s object is deliberate, or at least systemic: to deprive you of the very internal means to resist what is being done to you.

So, as this evening Australian time, we go into the second day of this two-day hearing to appeal Assange’s imminent extradition, it is not surprising that he is suicidal, depressed and in poor physical health, much of the latter presumably an effect of the former. Belmarsh is really an importation of the US prison-torture system into the British process, and if he is extradited he will be plunged deeper into that, further from family, lawyers, and supporters, facing years of waiting before a trial occurs. 

The farcical process uses remand to avoid any accusations of detention without trial, and questions of habeas corpus (which Assange, as a non-US citizen/resident, has no recourse to in any case). It’s a measure of the degree to which the US prison system is a calibrated form of torture that the US had to promise not to apply its standard procedures, in order to get around an earlier stay of extradition, which had been based on the notion that the system would be causative of Assange’s suicide, should he be placed in it. 

The current hearing is his next-to-final chance to avoid extradition, which would be very swift should it occur. It’s before two High Court justices, and it seeks merely leave to appeal. It is not the appeal itself. If the appeal leave is granted, then there will be many more months involved in a full appeal. If it is not, then UK processes are exhausted, and only an emergency injunction by the European Court of Human Rights, or, one presumes, a unilateral decision by the UK government to deny extradition, will stand in the way. 

For that reason, Assange’s defence, on day one of the hearing, has swung around to the broadest terms, arguing that Assange’s activities — publishing a vast cache of leaked documents, wherein he may have assisted the leaker to bypass some encryption passwords — amount to legitimate political activity, not espionage. The US-UK extradition treaty excludes extradition for political activity. 

The second part of that is the argument that bypassing a password on documents that a leaker is handling amounts to no more than standard journalistic practice in acquiring material. Printing out from a disc? Restoring damaged files? Putting a leaker up in a hotel for a few days? This is all simply what is done by major news organisations. It is all potentially criminalised by the Assange case. 

For this reason, it is believed, the Obama administration stayed an investigation into prosecution, given the advance involvement of The Guardian, The New York Times and others in the Cablegate releases. The Trump administration revived it. The Biden administration did not re-stay it. 

This may suggest a divergence between Obama and Biden. Biden is to the left of Obama on domestic policy, but to the right on foreign policy. Obama, a half-African, Indonesia-raised Hawaiian, had a more distanced view of America’s claims to virtue than mainstream Democrats. Biden described Assange as a “high-tech terrorist” at the time of the Cablegate release. Biden is enough of a “new frontier” guy to believe that you just don’t goddamn do that to the US. If the Department of Justice is driving the case autonomously, then at the very least, Biden’s refusal to stay it is indicative of political disposition. 

Meanwhile, Assange and his team have suffered from half-hearted support from those who should have been in his corner. Both The Guardian and The NY Times betrayed, both through the malice and incompetence of some editors and journalists at those publications. They should have had full front page/home screen “clear the decks” coordinated headlines: “Free Julian Assange”. 

The Australian government’s belated willingness to sign on to a motion calling for prosecution to be discontinued is also too little, too late — and the fact that a right-dominated national-security Labor government agreed to it is only because they don’t believe it will make any difference. Any Australian government that wanted to really make some difference would have linked Assange’s fate to intelligence sharing and Pine Gap. There is obviously no chance of that happening. 

WikiLeaks’ first generation — some early associates of Assange’s across the world — bailed out when the “collateral murder” video and Cablegate releases were first mooted, judging that the US would crunch them like a bug. So it has proved. WikiLeaks did exactly what it set out to do: change the whole idea of what legitimate government secrecy was, and — with successors like Edward Snowden — make visible the intelligence agencies’ political dominance of the West. 

To call the US’ determination to get him a backhanded compliment is a sicker joke than I really have the mood to make at the moment. What an even earlier iteration of resistance — the cypherpunks list, of which Assange was a member — saw as coming into being is now here. Total surveillance, but also increasingly capricious repression of free activity within it, such as the Albanese government’s proposed ban on investigations, under the guise of banning doxxing. One could quote half a dozen other similar laws, here or in the works.

Tomorrow, the US Justice Department presents its case, and there is presumably some brief rebuttal allowed. Then, in true British fashion, it could be hours or months before a decision is made. All we can do now is keep the issue visible and push for those in power to take greater opposition to this iniquitous attack on journalism, free speech, inquiry and investigations, for as long as we have any left, while those, and Assange, are still with us.

How do you feel about our government’s treatment of Assange? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.