As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is \u201cdelusional\u201d and \u201cblood-drenched\u201d while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of \u201cstability\u201d.<\/p>\n
But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that \u201cpeople must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other\u201d. Paine\u2019s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with \u201ca dangerous and treasonable conspiracy\u201d. Wisely, he sought refuge in France.<\/p>\n
The ordeal and courage of Tom Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia\u2019s human rights Gold Medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks\u2019 alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.<\/p>\n
Should Assange\u2019s current British appeal fail against his extradition to Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him has already been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public statements about Assange\u2019s \u201cguilt\u201d. Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who as Sweden\u2019s minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.<\/p>\n
These facts were documented in an Australian parliamentary briefing in Canberra on 2 March. Outlining an epic miscarriage of justice threatening Assange, the enquiry heard expert evidence that, under international standards of justice, the behavior of certain officials in Sweden would be considered \u201chighly improper and reprehensible [and] preclude a fair trial\u201d. A former senior Australian diplomat, Tony Kevin, described the close ties between the Swedish prime minister Frederic Reinheldt, and the Republican right in the US. \u201cReinfeldt and [George W] Bush are friends,\u201d he said. Reinhaldt has attacked Assange publicly and hired Karl Rove, the former Bush crony, to advise him. The implications for Assange\u2019s extraidition to the US from Sweden are dire.<\/p>\n
The Australian enquiry was ignored in the UK, where black farce is currently preferred. On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Stephen Spielberg\u2019s Dream Works was to make \u201can investigative thriller in the mould of All the President\u2019s Men\u201d out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange\u2019s War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much Spielberg had paid the Guardian for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. \u201cNo idea,\u201d was the puzzling reply of the Guardian\u2019s \u201cinvestigations editor\u201d. The Guardian paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks — not Leigh or Harding — are responsible for what the Guardian\u2019s editor, Alan Rusbridger, calls \u201cone of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Guardian has made clear it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian\u2019s self-regarding book, Assange\u2019s extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an \u201cunusual Australian\u201d with a \u201cfrizzy-haired\u201d mother, gratuitously abused as \u201ccallous\u201d and a \u201cdamaged personality\u201d that was \u201con the autistic spectrum\u201d. How will Speilberg deal with this childish character assassination?<\/p>\n
On the BBC\u2019s Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay about Assange not caring about the lives of those named in the leaks. As for the claim that Assange had complained of a \u201cJewish conspiracy\u201d, which follows a torrent of internet nonsense that he is an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as \u201ccompletely false, in spirit and word\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, the sense of isolation and state of siege of Julian Assange, who in one form or another is paying for tearing aside the fa\u00e7ade of rapacious power. The canker here is not the far right but the paper-thin liberalism of those who guard the limits of free speech. The New York Times has distinguished itself by spinning and censoring the WikiLeaks material. \u201cWe are taking all [the] cables to the administration,\u201d said Bill Keller, the editor, \u201cThey\u2019ve convinced us that redacting certain information would be wise.\u201d In an article by Keller, Assange is personally abused. At the Columbia School of Journalism on 3 February, Keller said, in effect, that the public could not be trusted with the release of further cables. This might cause a \u201ccacophony\u201d. The gatekeeper has spoken.<\/p>\n
The heroic Bradley Manning is kept naked under lights and cameras 24 hours a day. Greg Barns, director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, says the fears that Julian Assange will \u201cend up being tortured in a high security American prison\u201d are justified. Who will share responsibility for such a crime?<\/p>\n