Julian Assange has been subjected to a regime of torture for years. Since April 11, he has been subjected to a travesty of justice. His Don Quixote lawyers activate wind mills for the sake of proven torturers, the United States. In which dungeon lies Assange?
12 Dec. 2019
When will the Royal sealed letters, the ones that our kings and queens stamped with their emblem rings to silence the troublemakers, be addressed again? Actually, it’s already done. It is called a European arrest warrant, and it was not a queen but the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny who came restoring the tradition, assisted by the European authorities’ passive complicity. This arrest warrant is the primary cause of Julian Assange’s seven years of confinement in the diplomatic mission of Ecuador, it never had any legal value, and this is obvious. Because otherwise, just invent any lie to condemn anyone, add few police or judicial fellows you had beers with, then a preliminary investigation opens, and the trick is done: any disturbing kind of man, preferably honest, receives an arrest warrant right in the chest and finds himself nailed to Europe’s pillory.
Full Scale Deviations
Along the falling slope, the United Kingdom is no more than a good student: its regression is only achieved with the tacit or active agreement of European countries and structures, of NGOs such as Amnesty International or RSF, thanks to a fantastic self-persuasion movement, an inter-allied resonance that slowly capsizes our societies into the deepest dictatorial quagmires. A few irreducible people still believe they are free, but here we are. The exercise of free will is no longer a matter of interest in decision-maker circles.
This drift is accompanied by the dominant media, stoned by a pathological fright towards any systematic search for truth or precision. They write “accusation” or “accused” without specifying whether they place themselves from the institutional point of view (Justice) or from the individual point of view. Julian Assange would therefore be “accused of rape“. The reader believes that Justice accuses. Untrue, it never had the elements to accuse. If the accuser is an individual, the term is not justified either. A victim describes as rape a sexual abuse that has caused her or him a definite trauma. None of the complainants, who in the state of evidence may as well be liars, ever claimed to have been raped by Julian Assange. Neither “rape“ charge, neither related trauma, remains propaganda.
On 18 November 2019, Sweden achieved the feat of the century: it ended a preliminary investigation for the third time. Except preventing a mock arrest warrant, that doesn’t change anything. Julian Assange was no less innocent on November 17 than he is now, and in ordinary people’s minds, he remains as guilty as they heard it before. Brainwashing has taken place, a pack of journalists is ready to run for the Pulitzer Prize. A mass of real rapists wander freely, including well-dressed people against whom underage victims provide evidence, and meanwhile the presumed innocents are being assaulted by a horde of shameless demagogues, and Julian Assange is languishing in a hardly identified dungeon.
When an employee declares sick leave, the administration requires a certificate signed by a doctor. It demands proof. And when the British administration keeps a man in detention, in conditions of “psychological torture” according to Nils Melzer of the UN, it could claim the right not to provide evidence on his conditions of detention? The first question is by whom and where these conditions are decided and applied. No one, no official of the British authorities has ever named his responsibility on this issue. As soon as this man’s life is “in danger“, the answer to this question is essential and vitally urgent.
The Belmarsh fortress
The reputation of the Belmarsh prison dates back to post-9/11, when three suspected terrorists were incarcerated there for three years before being freed without any charge, innocent as they were at start. This “British Guantanamo” remains, however, a prison with rules. One of them is to manage the visits of the persons on the list duly completed by the detainee himself. Many lambda citizens (the lambda has a particularity: he defends a cause without hidden interests) have tirelessly written letters suggesting him to write their name down. Seeing different people couldn’t have hurt him; useless efforts, the Internet authorization procedure has never been successful. Some stubborn lambda repeated their request without success. However, several recent refusals do not mention a list issue, but an agenda issue. None of the dates, among those proposed over several weeks by the prison itself, were appropriate. Bad luck. Julian Assange is not available.
Many relatives and lawyers, sometimes even quasi-lambdas accompanied by relatives have nevertheless visited Julian Assange. Jennifer Robinson, John Pilger, artist Ai WeiWei, Pamela Anderson, John Shipton, Kristin Hrafnsson all expressed their concern about his health. These visits are reassuring in a certain sense, but in no way provide a guarantee equivalent to a HMP Belmarsh stamped document. On May 7, Kristin Hrafnsson deplored the “unacceptable” isolation of his boss, who “spends most of the time 23 hours in his cell“. Has he filed a complain to the administration? No idea. The WikiJustice Julian Assange association did so and received a letter from the Business Manager to Executive Director of the prison. He states that the conditions are in accordance with PSI Regulation 75-2011, which requires all prisoners to spend at least 2 hours a day outside their cells and 30 minutes in the open air. This is twice the release time announced by Kristin Hrafnsson, a crucial time for Assange’s health. The prison officer provides useful information on prison proceedings, but apologizes for being “unable to comment specifically on Mr. Assange“.
We are in an embarrassment: in the absence of Julian Assange related administrative documents, for example a medical report and a schedule of visits signed by doctors or civil servants, we have in front of us two almost contradictory testimonies. If Julian Assange is in Belmarsh, isolated 23 hours a day, then D. Hardin adds his signature to a ruling he is violating. He would take a huge risk. At the same time, he cannot comment on the state or presence of Mr Assange “specifically“. Harding and Hrafnsson’s statements are in accordance only if Julian Assange is not detained, or is not permanently detained, in Belmarsh prison. A doubt settles in, as large as a dark place.
Widespread doubts
From both a systemic and an individual point of view, doubt has been around for years. The first is the threat awaited by all protagonists. The young employee of the American Democratic Party Seth Rich was murdered in 2016, and many believe he was murdered for his alleged involvement in the DNC Leaks. This is enough to put the whistle-blowers connected or not to WikiLeaks, under huge pressure. Still in 2016 (*), WikiLeaks lawyers John Jones and Michael Ratner and the director Gavin MacFadyen die in April, May and October; no evidence of murder, but doubts and pressure on the protagonists are rising.
Some Assange’s prominent defenders have twitter and facebook as their second language. Since virtual world does not replace real life, the characters behind a twitter account are moderately reliable. As early (some would say lately) as August we expressed our doubts about the one of @AssangeMrs, supposedly held by Julian Assange’s mother. Finally, his mother did not go to London. And no later than December 1st, @AssangeMrs announces she quits twitter, because she “can no longer cope with the “activist” community”. Her 60,000 followers might look for her a long time: she does not say where she will go defend Julian Assange. He is innocent, imprisoned and tortured, she does not attend his hearings, and she leaves the only public bond that kept her connected to the defence? All her tweets have now disappeared, the past of the “activist“ mother is erased. Two questions still raise:
- Could she have drained so many people for so long without the tacit agreement of defence bodies such as Unity4J or defendwikileaks.org whom she retweeted so often?
- Where is Julian Assange’s loving mother?
Sometimes people active on twitter are well identified, but they abandon Assange’s defence overnight. It is the sincerity of their commitment, and therefore their relevance, which ends up questionable. For example Stanley Kubrik’s daughter, known for her pro-Trump activism, lost her interest in Assange’s fate at a time when he needed help most. Cases of this kind are numerous.
The vast majority of the lawyers mandated to defend Assange, as well as their firms, have their interests so tightly linked to the United States ones that their ineffective action becomes highly suspect. We have demonstrated this several times (here, there and there). The Swedish case turned into a fiasco, following the last episode of the third abandonment of the preliminary investigation. Did prosecutor Marianne Ny, who was responsible for Julian Assange’s persecution, and prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson, act in a balanced objective way, or according to interests and pressures linked to US power?
Add up to these the parody of a British justice system, which follows its course as if nothing had happened in Julian Assange’s absence. His “presence” on video at the last hearing on November 18 at the Westminster Court sums up the situation. His visible state of health is dramatic. We don’t even know if he has an audio-visual feedback of what’s going on in the courtroom, his lawyers and the judge don’t even care. It’s monstrous.
Add up to those the historical and pragmatic interweaving between the policies of the United States and those of Great Britain or Sweden, in articulation with dominant media that put their readers, eager to know what is happening around Julian Assange, in the position of a blind man from whom white cane has been hidden in a closet, and we end up in the current context: the citizens most involved and informed of the case have no other alternative than to doubt of everything, to check each other out, to imagine reality from the few indisputable elements found here and there. Moreover, this situation is in perfect adequacy with the ever-expanding atmosphere of mistrust between the world’s populations and local, invisible or external decision-makers.
