Julian Assange: the fate of enemies of the state

Julian Assange in the dock. [BBC News]

Julian Assange is accused of violating the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917 by revealing U.S. war crimes,  I didn’t understand how the U.S. government treats people convicted of political crimes until I started following the Assange extradition hearing. 

It is like the old Soviet Union.  Crimes against the state were treated much more savagely than ordinary crimes.  Here is what Chris Hedges had to say about where Assange is likely to wind up.

The U.S. created in the so-called “war on terror” parallel legal and penal codes to railroad dissidents and rebels into prison. These rebels are held in prolonged solitary confinement, creating deep psychological distress. They are prosecuted under special administrative measures, known as SAMs, to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail.

They are denied access to the news and other reading material. They are barred from participating in educational and religious activities in the prison. They are subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. They must shower and go to the bathroom on camera.

They are permitted to write one letter a week to a single member of their family, but cannot use more than three pieces of paper. They often have no access to fresh air and must take the one hour of recreation in a cage that looks like a giant hamster wheel.

The U.S. has set up a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims.

A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists. Their sentences are arbitrarily lengthened by “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. 

Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.”  All calls and mail – although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials – are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English.

The highest-level “terrorists” are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation. It is Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.

Source: Chris Hedges: The Cost of Resistance

Here is how John Pilger describes Assange’s current treatment (slightly abbreviated).

In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers.  His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. 

The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband.  He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle.  His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago.

In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Morris, described as an upended coffin.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as ‘heath care’. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night.

At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality.  He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop.  Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers.

He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he could not say.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Professor Nils Melzer calls ‘psychological torture’.

Source: John Pilger: Consortium News

If Julian Assange is convicted, it means the U.S. government can commit crimes and  prosecute any reporter, publisher or private citizen who reveals them.  Neither Democratic nor Republican leaders challenge this.  No major newspaper or broadcaster covered the extradition hearing,

Fascism is already here.  It just isn’t evenly distributed yet. 

LINKS

Eyewiness to the Agony of Julian Assange by John Pilger.  There’s much more in this article than I’ve quoted.

The Cost of Resistance by Chris Hedges.  This one, too.

Julian Assange’s Prosecution for Publishing Leaked Documents Is an Extremely Dangerous Precedent, an interview of Kevin Gosztola for Jacobin

Assange on Trial: Abuse of Power, Breaching Attorney-Client Privilege and Adjournment by Binoy Kampmark for Counterpunch.

Five things to know about the “escape-proof” supermax prison on Corrections1, a news site for correctional officers.  [Added 10/8/2020]

Tags: Julian Assange, Julian Assange Extradition, Wikileaks