The attack on Julian Assange has reached a sinister new phase, with a judge in a British court greenlighting American efforts to extradite the WikiLeaks founder. Assange has been detained since May, ostensibly for breaching his bail conditions. He's been held in the maximum security Belmarsh Prison under circumstances that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer recently described as constituting torture, an assessment reinforced by Assange's reported frailty in the courtroom.
Suffice to say, the persecution of Assange bears no relationship to the minor infraction used to justify his initial detention. Neither does it relate to Wikileaks' alleged publication of material pertaining to the US election — or, indeed, to Assange's conduct in recent years.
The American extradition effort pertains to a charge of conspiring to hack computers, levelled against Assange for allegedly working with Chelsea Manning to access and copy files from a defense department network in 2010. It also rests on subsequent charges of violating the Espionage Act by publishing material relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the Wikileaks site, including video of a US army helicopter attack that killed (among others) two journalists, evidence of widespread torture, and documentation of previously unknown civilian deaths.
Assange's latest court appearance coincided with the launch of the Right to Know campaign, backed by the major press organisations in Australia as well as the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. It was spurred by two recent AFP raids, the first targeting Telegraph journalist Annika Smethurst and the second directed at the ABC. But it goes much further than that.
As the Sydney Morning Herald explained, 'the campaign ... is pushing for stronger protections for media freedom after years of perceived deterioration ... to combat a growing culture of secrecy that restricts journalists' ability to hold the powerful to account'. These are necessary — even crucial — goals for a campaign that deserves wide support. Yet, the Assange case highlights major problems in the Australian media's attitude to secrecy and disclosure. Assange belongs to the MEAA.
To its immense credit, the union has consistently defended him, with, for instance, its leaders declaring the charges against him 'a real threat to press freedom for journalists and media outlets across the world' and urging the Foreign Minister to oppose them. But many prominent Australian journalists have not.
Most notoriously, immediately after Assange's arrest, the journalist and media academic Peter Greste — writing in his capacity as