April 15, 2019 • 74
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The WikiLeaks publisher
is in a maximum-security prison that has been called the UK’s Guantanamo Bay,
Elizabeth Vos reports.
Special to Consortium News
While Julian Assange waits for
what comes next — sentencing on skipping bail in England and a U.S.
extradition request — he is being held in a maximum-security prison in London
that has been called the “UK’s
Guantanamo Bay” and has been used to detain
alleged terrorists, sometimes indefinitely.
The reputation of HM Prison Belmarsh raises
natural concerns about the wellbeing of the WikiLeakspublisher there.
“While many prisoners at
Belmarsh say it’s difficult to see a doctor or a nurse, these services are
available at the facility,” reports Bloomberg News, regarding the
possibility of Assange receiving overdue medical attention.
Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh
had been used to detain high-profile national security prisoners indefinitely
without charge under the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001,
passed six weeks after 9/11, until the House of Lords ruled it violated the
British Human Rights Act.
Assange was found guilty on
Thursday of skipping bail. On May 2 he is scheduled to participate in a
court hearing via video link on the U.S. extradition request.
Assange’s name now tops the
alphabetical roster of
notables who have done time at Belmarsh or who are still there. The list
includes notorious gangsters, serial killers and drug traffickers. Ronnie
Biggs of the 1963 Great Train Robbery was imprisoned there. Others are
subjects of high-profile scandal, such as Richard Tomlinson, imprisoned for six
months in 1997 after he gave a synopsis of a proposed book detailing his career
with MI6 to an Australian publisher. Andy Coulson, a former press secretary to
Prime Minister David Cameron, was imprisoned for a few months for the phone
hacking scandal that engulfed News of the World while he was editor
there.
One mainstay of the inmate
population are convicted terrorists. Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian cleric,
was at Belmarsh until his extradition to the United States where he is
serving life in prison on 11 counts of terrorism. Rams Mohammed, Muktar
Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar were were all incarcerated there
for their roles in the 2005 attempted bombings of the London
underground. Anjou Choudhry completed his sentence at Belmarsh for
promoting the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant. Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale are identified as Islamic
terrorists convicted of the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in London.
There is legitimate concern
about how Assange will fare inside Belmarsh. A 2018 survey by HM
Chief Inspector of Prisons found that “91 percent of men said they had problems
when they arrived at Belmarsh, which was higher than at other local prisons and
more than at our last inspection,” Business
Insider reported.
In 2009, the same prison
authority had found “extremely
high” amount of force used to control inmates at the prison.
Detainees were “unable to see
the intelligence evidence against them and are confined to their cells for up
to 22 hours a day. Their solicitors say they have been ‘entombed in concrete,’ BBC reported
in 2004.
The 2018 chief inspector’s
report said the prison contains a “High Security Unit (HSU) within the
already-high-security premises, which the report described as a ‘prison within
a prison.’” The report went on to state that:
“The role of the high security
unit (HSU) remained unclear. We were told it was for high risk category A
prisoners, but such men are held in main locations in other high security
prisons and we did not understand why the approach was different at Belmarsh.
We noted that two of the men held were only standard risk category A prisoners
and that in December 2017 two men from the main prison had been held in the HSU
segregation unit. The conditions and the regime in the HSU provided prisoners
with an intense custodial experience in which they could exercise little
self-determination, and we were concerned that prisoners could be located there
without any oversight process or redress.”
Describing the use of solitary
confinement, the chief inspector’s report found: “Conditions in the unit were
reasonable, but some prisoners could not have a shower or exercise every day.
Those who could only be unlocked in the presence of several officers were most
affected.” The report repeatedly described concerns that arose due to staff
shortages, and added in a separate section: “We remained concerned about this
use of designated cells, where men were held in prolonged solitary confinement
on an impoverished regime.”
Individual accounts from
former Belmarsh inmates published by CAGE, an advocacy group against human
rights abuses that occurred as a result of the “war on Terror,” described their experiences. An
anonymous prisoner who was later acquitted said: “The prison system is run in
such a way as to humiliate and degrade the inmate as much as possible. The
process of dehumanisation starts immediately.” In the wake of Assange’s
imprisonment, CAGE published
a statement, saying in part: “The UK is doing the U.S.’s dirty work by
persecuting a man who exposed war crimes.”
Vigils and protests in support
of Assange were held outside the prison on April 14 and April 15.
The last time Assange was held
in a British prison, in 2010, he says that he was given food containing metal
objects that severely damaged a tooth. This was at London’s HM Prison Wandsworth. The
incident caused serious
injury and he did not receive proper medical treatment during the six
and a half years of his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy. A medical
report published by WikiLeaks in 2015 describes Assange’s
version of the event:
‘This is Unlawful, I’m Not
Leaving’
Uniformed British police
officers, aided by what appeared to be plain-clothes secret police, had entered the
embassy on Thursday morning when the Ecuadorian ambassador “indicated
he was preparing to serve upon Mr Assange documentation revoking his asylum,”
attorney James Hines, Queens Counsel, who represented the U.S. government, told
the court during Assange’s bail-skipping hearing. The Guardian quoted
Hines as later telling the court that day:
“Officers tried to
introduce themselves to him in order to execute the arrest warrant before he
barged past them, attempting to return to his private room.
“He was
eventually arrested at 10.15 am. He resisted that arrest, claiming
‘this is unlawful’ and he had to be restrained.
“Officers were struggling to
handcuff him. They received assistance from other officers outside and he was
handcuffed saying, ‘this is unlawful, I’m not leaving’.
“He was in fact lifted into
the police van outside the embassy and taken to West End Central police
station.”
Assange was likely referring
to the 1951 Convention on Refugees that forbids a
nation that has granted someone asylum from returning that person to a country
where the asylee is likely to be persecuted.
Police were then filmed forcibly
dragging the handcuffed, physically ill Assange from the steps of the embassy.
During the arrest, Assange was seen holding a copy of Gore Vidal’s “The History of the
National Security State,” as he shouted: “The
UK must resist this….the UK must resist.”
Fears of U.S.
Mistreatment
In view of then CIA Director
Mike Pompeo’s comparison of WikiLeaks (46:00 minutes into the above video) with Al
Qaeda, while calling it a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” concerns
are mounting in Assange’s camp about the harsh treatment he may face by
British, and if he’s extradited, U.S. authorities.
In the hours following the
arrest, Reuters reported:
“Lawyers for Assange said he may risk torture and his life would be in danger
if he were to be extradited to the United States.”
On the same day, human-rights
organizations and press-freedom advocates argued against the prosecution of
the WikiLeaks founder. These groups included the ACLU,
The Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Center
for Investigative Journalism, Amnesty Ireland, Committee To Protect
Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Human
Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Union of Journalists, the The Knight First Amendment Institute and Digital Rights Watch.
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald was quick to note the
widespread mischaracterization of the charge against Assange as one of
“hacking,” writing that the charging document and related materials indicate
Assange may have attempted to help Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army whistleblower
then known as Bradley Manning, use a different username to access classified
material she was legally allowed to access at the time. In other words,
Greenwald says Assange is charged with helping a source preserve anonymity, a
common practice by investigative reporters.
Greenwald also points out that this action has been on
public record since 2011, but that U.S. authorities under the Obama
administration refused to use it as a basis of prosecution due to the chill it
could put on press freedom.
UN Visitor
The UN independent expert on
the right to privacy, Joe
Cannataci, issued a statement following Assange’s arrest. “This will
not stop my efforts to assess Mr. Assange’s claims that his privacy has been
violated,” he was quoted by the United Nations’ news service. “All it means is
that, instead of visiting Mr. Assange and speaking to him at the Embassy. I
intend to visit him and speak to him wherever he may be detained.”
Shortly
before Assange’s expulsion, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils
Melzer expressed alarm at reports that an arrest was imminent. If
extradited, Melzer said Assange could be exposed to “a real risk of serious
violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right
to a fair trial, and the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
or punishment.”
Assange’s supporters likewise
fear for his treatment in Belmarsh.
Matthew Hoh, a senior fellow with
the Center for International Policy and a former Marine, visited Assange at the
embassy. He worries about the mistreatment Assange might face in custody.
He believes, “When they get their hands on him, they will do things that will
be criminal, it will be immoral, it will be torture,” he said during an
online Unity4J vigil
held days before Assange’s expulsion.
The online Assange
vigils are co-hosted by Consortium News and have been held
for over a year, to maintain public awareness about Assange after Ecuador
withdrew his internet access.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning
journalist Chris Hedges, during a Unity4J panel, offered
his fear of what he believes will happen to Assange if he is extradited to the
United States :
“He will have a hood over his
head, he will be shackled and chained, he’ll be put on a black flight, he will
be taken to the U.S., put into solitary confinement — which is a form of
torture, it is how people break, and often break very quickly. He will be
relentlessly interrogated, there will be all sorts of psychological techniques
— it will be very hot in his cell and then very cold. They will constantly wake
him every few hours so he will be sleep deprived. They will maybe even put him
into a dry cell, where there is no water, so he will have to ask for water to
go to the bathroom or wash his hands.”
Hedges continued:
“Everyone has a breaking
point, and they will attempt to psychologically destroy him, and we have seen
with Guantanamo that several of these detainees, most of whom were just sold to
the U.S. by warlords in Afghanistan or Pakistan, are emotionally crippled for
life. It will be scientific torture. I used to cover the Stasi state in East
Germany, and the joke in the Stasi state was that the Gestapo broke bones and
the Stasi break minds, and that’s what they’ll do. That’s what will happen.
I’ve seen it with Muslims who have been entrapped in the U.S. in so-called
terrorism plots, and by the time they shuffle into court, they are a zombie.”
Hedges added: “There will be a veneer
of legality: it will be the figment of law. But he will be treated like
all of the people who have been disappeared into that system from around the
world.”
Micol Savia, representative of
the International Association of Democratic Lawyers at the United Nations, drew
on Chelsea Manning’s experience of torture
in U.S. custody when raising concern that Assange may be likewise
abused, writing via Twitter:
“#Assange’s eventual
extradition to the US would expose him to a substantive risk of human rights
violations. The likely treatment he would receive can easily be inferred from
the unjust trial and detention of [Chelsea Manning] @xychelsea, who faced life
in prison and was subjected to torture.”
Elizabeth Vos is a freelance
reporter and regular contributor to Consortium News. She co-hosts the
#Unity4J online vigil.
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