Juan Branco: “We Are Lucky that Assange Is Still Alive”
By: Despina Papageorgiou
Tags: Juan Branco, Yellow Vest, Julian Assange, Journalism, Wikileaks

Julian Assange may not be an “ideal” client for a lawyer, in the sense, he is not into being “diplomatic” to appease powerful people in key-positions and ingratiate himself. For example, while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy, Wikileaks released Vault 7 documents, detailing CIA hacking techniques. This was after Trump had applauded Wikileaks for its role in disseminating the contents of internal communications stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign; but it was also after Trump was elected president. When Assange was arrested, President Trump in a U-turn was stating: “I know nothing about Wikileaks”.

Has Assange’s legal team, and Branco in particular, ever tried to “speak more sense” to their client?

“I never try to influence him in any way”, Branco says. “When he asked for advice, I gave him, but I was considering that he knew what he was doing with his destiny”, he continues — and one might think he is perhaps taking some distance from Assange’s choices. “He is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. So, he needs information, but he is the only one who takes his decisions — and when you meet someone like that, you respect his free will. If it got him where he was, it must be for a reason. We try to learn from him and of course, we try to inform his choices the best way you can”.

“Assange is treated like all dissidents”

In the “Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, author Milan Kundera is describing how the communist leadership in his country of origin, Czechoslovakia, had been erasing people from history and from pictures, trying to throw into oblivion what seemed “uncomfortable”. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, Kundera, whose Czech citizenship was restored only in December 2019 after 40 years, famously wrote.

This novel echoes in my mind while following Julian Assange’s case and observing how it has been gradually “buried” by the media. The comparison is eerie. Could it be some orchestrated effort to “erase” this persistent Australian from history?

The meager journalistic representation in the press conference room in Athens (where mainly alternative media were represented, only five newspapers, no radio, and no TV channel) was only indicative of the mainstream media stance towards the imprisoned Wikileaks publisher.

When I asked Branco at the Press Conference how he would explain this stance, he replied he wrote his latest (seventh) book “Assange: L’Anti Souverain” in an attempt to answer this question. Apart from “structural reasons that push mainstream media to a state of dependence from the mechanisms of power”, he said, there are “different approaches to journalism” and “definitely a competition” between Wikileaks and these media. Assange has laid the theoretical foundation for “scientific journalism”, which is “very different from journalism as we know it” and can be considered “violent by part of the institutions exposed by this journalism”, Branco claimed.

However, he appeared optimistic that mainstream media will change their stance, handle the issue in a fair manner and expose its political underpinnings — and added how important support from journalists, institutions and citizens is in this case.

Yellow Vests protest in solidarity for Julian Assange, outside Belmarsh prison, on 25th January 2020 (photo: The Canary website)

Given Branco’s knowledge in law history, the question is if he has ever come across any other case where a defendant has been vilified as much as Julian Assange.

“I think it’s a classical proceeding regarding dissidents”, Branco states. “In dictatorships, I guess”, I comment. “Under any kind of regime”, he replies. “We do not perceive it necessarily and we do not perceive how close we are from autocratic regimes in Western Europe. We have divinized for decades our regimes and we are starting to realize in the last years that [they] are actually much less efficient than we thought and actually very problematic in some dimensions, as soon as you would touch important interests”.

He pauses for seconds.

“So, in a sense, we are lucky that Julian has survived all these, but it’s a price he should have never paid”. “He reveals the nature of our regimes, Julian Assange’s case — and I think that’s why it is so important”, Branco goes on, essentially describing Assange as a contemporary Machiavelli in the sense he provided insight to the mechanisms of power for the people. “It is not only his individual fate but what he says about the nature of the societies in which we are. I hope it helps people realize that we are far more distant from liberty than what they thought”.

“My first impression of Assange was surprisingly different than what I had read about him”

During our conversation, my impression that Branco is under immense pressure has not disappeared for a second. How does it feel to work for Julian Assange?

“It depends on the period”, Branco replies. “It can be extremely isolated and violent; it can be also very exciting; because you receive a lot of pressure from powerful people, but also important gratitude from those citizens that understand that you are working to improve… Yeah, I think violence is the term that should be used for these proceedings; Violence for Julian and violence for the people surrounding him, who have paid a high price for what they do”.

Violence for Assange is currently “translated” to psychological torture. “There is a force sufficient to destroy him”, Branco says. “He is under psychological torture as Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has stated. The conditions of his detention are sufficient to destroy a man. He doesn’t need to be drugged or anything else.

”And yet he is not destroyed. And yet he is still an active man and yet he will be able to defend himself, starting the 24th of February. So, that says a lot about who he is”.

The situation under which Branco first met Assange would lavishly provide for a capturing movie scene. For the Franco-Spanish lawyer met this restless Australian while the latter was organizing the defense of Edward Snowden, the former intelligence officer who revealed the NSA and its international intelligence partners’ secret mass surveillance programs and capabilities. Branco was initially to defend Snowden, but:

“I think [Assange] felt I would be more useful with him — and he was right”, he says. “And, yeah, I was at Yale at the time, I was teaching at Yale, and it was quite some story to… Yale is the temple of the CIA, so it was kind of strange to be helping him from there”.

To verify Branco’s words, Yale has been depicted in The “New York Times” as “A Great Nursery for Spooks”, while “Yale Daily News” has quoted the then Undergraduate Career Services Director Philip Jones said: “It’s always been on the radar for Yale students that there is a career in the CIA”.

Meeting Assange for the first time. Well, this is the first impression I definitely want to hear about.