LONDON/WASHINGTON: The man who shook the world’s national security establishments with the most copious classified information leak in history and followed it up by changing the course of US presidential history through disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s email flubs was taken into custody from the Ecuadorian embassy in on Thursday, arrested by the British police, acting on a US indictment.
Julian Assange, the Australia-born founder of , was arrested, forcibly bundled into a police van and brought before a London court on Thursday where he was found guilty of a bail offence and remanded in custody. Assange was also arrested a second time in the police station on a US extradition request.
Assange had been offered asylum by the Ecuador embassy in June 2012 after losing his bid to fight extradition to Sweden on sexual offence charges. But on Thursday the ambassador revoked his asylum and invited Scotland Yard inside.
An unsealed grand jury indictment from the Eastern District of Virginia court outside Washington DC, where most national security issues come up, charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion with American whistleblower , their effort resulting in the publishing of classified information that not only revealed US war crimes but rattled world capitals with an unvarnished look at leaders and policies.
The indictment said Assange participated in the hacking in ‘real-time’ and encouraged the act, a charge that will enable prosecutors to get around any potential First Amendment defense that Assange might claim by arguing he was only a recipient of classified information. According to the indictment, on March 8, 2010, Assange agreed to assist (then Bradley) Chelsea Manning crack the password stored on United States Defense Department computers.
“During the conspiracy, Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange. The discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more information,” the indictment said, revealing that during an exchange, Manning told Assange that ‘after this upload, that’s all I really have got left,’ to which Assange replied, ‘curious eyes never run dry in my experience.'”
The indictment further claims that Bradley Manning, who later underwent a gender change to become Chelsea Manning, gave Assange a portion of a password to ‘crack’ in order to obtain access to files for users with “administrative-level privileges.” Manning had already provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents— including activities reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the government. The material allegedly included four nearly complete databases, comprising 90,000 reports from the Afghanistan war, 400,000 reports from the Iraq War and 250,000 State Department cables.
Assange has long resisted extradition to the US, where his lawyers have claimed he could face the death penalty for the mass leaking of highly-classified documents through WikiLeaks. But the US has chosen not to go with an espionage charge, obviating capital punishment and making the extradition more or less certain.
The Manning-Assange generated Wikileaks explosion in 2010 had rattled security establishments across the world, starting from Washington, by revealing raw intelligence cables, including assessment of many world leaders. From a voyeuristic look at Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi’s personal life to a description of Russian President Vladimir Putin as an “alpha dog,” the cables revealed American assessment of world leaders. Evaluation of Pakistan and its nuclear weapons program (“unstable”) and India’s Cold Start doctrine (“mixture of myth and reality” and mostly unworkable) were also revealed in the cables.
While much of the world and its leaders recovered from the discomfiture from the cables, one of the most egregious outcomes from the leaks came during the 2016 presidential campaign when thousands of emails stolen from the computer systems of the in Washington lead to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, contributing to her eventual defeat at the hands of . Although US investigators have said the systems were hacked by Russian agents, Assange has denied ties with Moscow led to the leaks while expressing distaste for both Clinton and Trump, saying choosing between them “is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhea.” Trump though had gone on to say that he loved Wikileaks.
On Thursday, Assange was brought to court from the Ecuadorian embassy to face two charges: failing to surrender to custody without reasonable excuse on June 29, 2012, and a separate US extradition request made in 2017 in relation to WikiLeaks publishing 750,000 classified and unclassified sensitive US documents in 2010 which included the Iraq War Logs and Afghan War.
District Judge Michael Snow on Thursday said: “In or around January 2010 and May 2010 you conspired with Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst in the US army, to disclose classified documents downloaded by Chelsea Manning.”
For the charge of failing to surrender to custody on June 29, 2012, he entered a not-guilty plea. His barrister, Liam Walker, who arrived in court 20 minutes late, said Assange had a reasonable excuse for failing to surrender.
“His reasons for seeking refuge in Ecuador Embassy were well-founded… he would never have received a fair hearing…”
Walker said an application had been made twice before Westminster Magistrates’ Court claiming there was no public interest in pursuing Assange for skipping bail, but chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot had upheld his arrest warrant.
He then went on to make an astonishing claim against Arbuthnot, who is also overseeing Nirav Modi’s extradition, saying: “The district judge Emma Arbuthnot should have recused herself on the basis of bias as WikiLeaks impacted Lord Arbuthnot her husband. We would like her to recuse herself from all further hearings….”
This criticism of the chief magistrate infuriated district judge Michael Snow, overseeing this case, who scolded Walker for “traducing Arbuthnot’s reputation in front of a packed press gallery to try and ruin the reputation of a senior and able judge in front of the press.”
He immediately found Assange guilty of the bail offence and said he would be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court. Assange was remanded in custody for both that conviction and for the US extradition request.
“He had a full hearing February 24, 2011, and a full hearing at the high court in July 2011 and a full hearing at the supreme court on February 12, 2012, so he has had judges who have looked at his case with great care and his assertion he has not had a fair hearing is laughable and the behaviour of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own self-interest. His behaviour through counsel is shameful,” Snow said. “Assange has chosen not to give evidence and rather to make assertions about behaviour of senior judge yet not having courage to be cross examined before court….”
The judge requested the full extradition request from the US to be sent by June 12. Assange will next appear in court on May 2 via video link.
Assange looked visibly much older with a full head of long white hair in a small ponytail and a white beard, dressed in black, clutching lots of papers. He waved at the public gallery and did a thumbs-up from the dock. As the court waited 20 minutes for his barrister, he sat and read Gore Vidal’s ‘History of the National Security State’. The book describes itself as being about the historical events that led to the establishment of the “massive military-industrial-security complex and political culture that gave the US its Imperial Presidency.”
About 50 angry supporters of the 47-year-old Australian journalist and editor of WikiLeaks gathered outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court holding placards of ‘Free Assange’ ‘Free speech’ and ‘Free press.’ They chanted ‘true journalists support Julian Assange’ to a huge media scrum as a police helicopter circled above and police officers watched on.
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