Can US Assurances on Assange be Trusted?
Channel: Cathy Vogan Films
Date: 2021-11-04

Just over 10 years ago, Julian Assange’s lawyer Gareth Peirce, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, that eerily described what eventually came to pass in Britain. It was hand-delivered by Malcolm Turnbull, a subsequent PM. The letter warned of Assange’s ‘alternate’ future, were he to be extradited to Sweden. 

He was not facing charges there, but he WAS facing immediate imprisonment, solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day and indefinite detention - on NO charges, as yet. He was to be sent for questioning only, and conveniently, there was no time limit to pre-trial detention in Sweden. This was “due process” for foreigners and suspects in sexual misconduct allegations, BEFORE they had been charged with any crime. They couldn’t apply for bail and even family visits were forbidden. Only a lawyer and priest could speak with them.

Swedish remand prisons had been described by Birgitta Winberg, the president of International Prison Chaplains’ Association Worldwide, as ’the worst in Europe’, “In no other country”, she said, “are people in isolation before they are charged”. And if a US indictment were to come through in the meantime for Assange, within days or years this process could be interrupted by Sweden to “loan” Assange to the US under the two countries' Temporary Surrender Treaty - no questions asked. It was a neater arrangement, a fast-track version you might say, of what eventually transpired in the UK. 

Assange secured Ecuador’s protection for another five good years of publishing, but the same net eventually tightened around him. The same indefinite detention and torture of isolation that Sweden had planned, with a hand-over to the US looming - like it is now in the UK - despite its prohibitive Extradition Treaty with the US for political offences; and despite the exposure, over time, of countless violations of due process across Sweden, the UK and the US - including CIA spying on the defence and most recently its utterly lawless kidnap or kill plan under the Trump Administration. 

The court knows now from expert witness Maureen Baird, that if extradited, Assange's future would be determined by the CIA - effectively those who were planning to kill him. It didn't happen in 2012 and it can’t happen now. It’s time to admit "Game Over" and drop the charges.