However Black Our Humour, The Government Goes Darker

The Case of Julian Assange

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange has spent his fifth Christmas awaiting trial in a London prison. Teased appeal dates for US extradition hearings have been and gone. Finally, now, we have a formal announcement: the British High Court will make a decision on February 21st 2024.

I originally drafted this article for a protest organised by the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign — the DEA. I like calling it the DEA because goddammit this case makes me wanna go rogue, hand in my badge, then bust the real criminals down at city hall.

I feel I should trust the US, though. You know it has a policy never to negotiate with terrorists? Yep, apparently it’ll never change the price when selling weapons to terrorists.

I jest — but no matter how black our satire, the government goes blacker. And nowhere is this more evident than in its persecution of Julian Assange.

The UN has described Assange’s treatment as torture but I feel the word has lost some clout. Yes, his overall judicial situation itself — over 2,400 days trapped in an embassy, 1,700 days in a high-security prison without trial, the CIA recording his attorney-client conversations and plotting to assassinate him — is torture… but details, relayed by insiders, twist the knife.

To build his case, the prison provided Assange with a computer, but the keys were stuck down. They diagnosed him HIV positive, then later said this was a false diagnosis.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say these were sadistic acts, the first a perverted parody of Assange as putative computer hacker; the second as a riff on the abandoned 2010 sexual allegations, which stemmed from one of the women entering a police station — not to report a crime — but to ask if she could compel Assange to take an STI test. “This way, madam,” gloated the boys in blue.

Other state decisions raise a queasy smile as they vacate the soul. When officers found a blade in Assange’s cell, prosecutors only reluctantly acknowledged he was suicidal because there was a record of the prison punishing him for hiding it. Such bureaucrats now assure the court through saccharin lips that he’ll be safe in his next residence — security in a supermax is too tight to kill yourself.

Assange would probably be held for 23 hours daily under Special Administrative Measures, in conditions reserved for the 50 most wretched people in the United States. The only joy is an occasional letter, read through a glass hatch as part of a Communications Management Unit. Sounds like a Blairite think tank — don’t you just wanna drown in it?

The last photograph of Assange is a grainy CCTV court shot, during which he is experiencing a small stroke, which the prosecution at first thought he was faking. The image should be iconic but hasn’t even spread beyond Caitlin Johnstone's blog, where it was published.

The lesson is clear. When the British government sees signs of stroke it acts FAST:

Face: Has it fallen on one side? Good.

Arms: Sell as many as possible.

Speech: If it’s free, shut it down.

Time: If you expose our crimes, you’ll do time.

If all else fails, Keir Starmer will get your circulation up and running again. He hates when anyone gets “cold feet,” as his office warned Sweden’s director of public prosecutions over Assange: “Don’t you dare.”

Apparently, there is one more recent picture — a kilted Assange at his wedding to Stella. The prison refused to release it on “national security” grounds, though I suspect it’s because his legs were emaciated. The couple was denied use of the prison chapel, but his radiant, indefatigable bride nonetheless expressed that they “felt enveloped by love,” as indeed they were.

There was no Hello! magazine wedding shoot for this remarkable couple — despite their fame, despite Stella’s dress being a Vivienne Westwood, despite Julian Assange’s iconographic status as political prisoner.

The public has witnessed little because court access is so difficult. A large public gallery was readily available, but cordoned off for just two people — the Australian High Commissioner and his wife, who never showed.

Incredibly, one of the FBI’s paid informants was convicted for fraud, embezzlement, and child abuse. He admitted he lied when alleging that Assange had instructed him to hack government accounts.

Such peculiarities would ordinarily cause the case to be dismissed. Piling on the perversity, the namesake of the judge who rejected Assange’s earlier attempt to halt extradition is Jonathan Swift, these islands’ greatest satirist.

Extradition to the US would intensify Assange’s “cruel and unusual punishment,” prohibited by the American constitution, 1791, and England’s Bill of Rights, 1689.

Legislation applied for centuries is being ditched so we can grind to death our greatest journalist, who not only implicated state and private systems worldwide in corruption, illegal surveillance and false flag attacks but also established a tool to receive files that protects whistle-blowers. The charges on Assange that remain are, in yet another twist, only for his best work, including footage of the US army killing 12 innocent people from the safety of a helicopter gunship.

Next year — as we hurtle into British, Israeli and US elections — will be pivotal for the safety of our world: the environment, international stability and media freedoms. Fights led by Assange. If he is extradited, any journalist who reports classified information — standard practice — will be subject to prosecution, along with their publishers and sources. In a short joint statement, the broadsheets agree — a decade too late to safeguard Assange’s wellbeing.

“If you don’t like it, why not go live in Russia?” I hear them jeer. There’s an obvious answer: “I’d never want to experience our foreign policy.”

Genuinely, we can make a difference: protests didn’t stop the US bombing Iraq in 2003, but maybe stopped it bombing Iran in 2008, and fresh complaints from the public definitely stopped David Cameron and Barack Obama bombing Syria in 2013.

The people must act again to restrain the powerful, for there is no-one left to do it. “If wars can be started by lies,” observes our century’s Mandela, “peace can be started by truth.” Elsewhere he channelled Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” but in his own joyful twist added: “And we will.”

After the protest, I MC’d a comedy gig. I love a nice dark joke, but mine are never as pristine or brutal as those our government is playing on Julian — and on us.

Remember, when the security state strikes, act FAST: the faster you act the more of the democracy we save.

For more details and discussion of the case, see my latest interview here with Pacifica Radio in New York: