By Oscar Grenfell
22 November 2019
In an opinion piece on
Wednesday, Nick Miller, European correspondent for the Sydney Morning
Herald and the Age, mounted a desperate rearguard defence of the
bogus Swedish investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which had been dropped the day before.
Miller’s argument was summed
up in the headline, which declared “Assange has not been vindicated, he has
merely outwaited justice.”
Miller sympathetically cited
the pathetic statements of the Swedish prosecutors, who claimed that witness
recollections had “weakened” due to the passage of time and that there was
therefore “insufficient evidence” to proceed with a “preliminary
investigation”—which they had dragged-out for nine years and had already
dropped twice.
The journalist repeated all of
the talking points that have been used in the media to misrepresent the Swedish
investigation.
Assange, Miller claimed, had
“managed to stay out of the hands of the law for long enough.” It was, he
wrote, “a grim kind of pragmatism for this truth warrior, to deny women the
right to seek justice, to have their claims tested in court, because of a legal
jurisdictional gambit which itself is an attempt to avoid a trial.”
Miller’s article did not
mention the statement of one of the women to a friend, indicating she had never
intended to pursue a criminal complaint against Assange in the first place, and
that it was “the police who made up the charges.” Nor did he cite the finding
of the initial prosecutor Eva Finne, in August 2010, who stated: “I do not
think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Finne dismissed
the police fabrications, stating that the “conduct alleged… disclosed no crime
at all.”
As is now widely recognised,
the allegations in Sweden were revived in 2010 due to a political decision that
was inseparable from the frenzied US-led pursuit of Assange over his exposures
of American war crimes and global diplomatic conspiracies.
The frame-up character of the
investigation is attested to by the litany of “irregularities” in the case.
These range from the police changing one of the women’s statements without
informing her, to the fact that the only physical evidence in the case, a torn
condom, contained no DNA, to the decision of the authorities to leak witness
statements to the press in defiance of Swedish law.
The almost innumerable
violations of Assange’s legal and democratic rights were set out in detail in
two letters sent by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer to
the Swedish government this year. The Swedish authorities were unable to
respond to any of his substantive inquiries. None of this rated a mention in
Miller’s article.
Most perniciously, Miller’s
article was aimed at promoting the fraudulent claim that Assange “evaded
justice” and sought to hamper the investigation.
In reality, Assange took
refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012, after the British judiciary took
the unprecedented decision to uphold a Swedish extradition request—issued by a
prosecutor, not a court—so that Assange could be asked “questions.”
The Swedish authorities did
not say why they needed to extradite Assange in order to interview him. Nor has
it ever been explained why they refused to guarantee that they would not
dispatch him to the United States if he came into their custody.
It was the prosecutors, not
Assange, who sought to prevent any resolution of the investigation. For years,
they refused to interview Assange in London, or via video-link. Contrary to
Miller’s insinuations, this is standard practice. Swedish prosecutors
interviewed more than 40 individuals outside of their jurisdiction during the
same period that they would not speak to Assange in London.
Prosecutors finally relented
and interviewed Assange in November 2016. They dropped the case in May 2017.
Miller’s suggestion that
Assange needed to be in Sweden for charges to be laid is similarly false.
Swedish prosecutors charged individuals in absentia of serious crimes,
including murder and assault, during the same time period they did not charge
Assange.
In a particularly cynical
paragraph, Miller decried Assange’s “more wide-eyed supporters,” who “flirt
with absurd, evidence-free conspiracy theories: that the women were US secret
service ‘honeytraps,’ that the Swedish investigation was a CIA-led operation to
lure Assange into a jurisdiction where he would be instantly, illegally whisked
away to Virginia—or renditioned to Guantanamo, or worse.”
As Miller would be aware, the
Swedish authorities did in fact collaborate with the US “extraordinary
rendition” program, allowing CIA operatives to kidnap individuals on their
territory.
Correspondence released under
Freedom of Information requests has revealed direct political interference in
the case by other states, which would be inexplicable if the investigation was
not a component of the British and US conspiracy against Assange.
Emails showed that the British
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) insisted in 2010 and 2011 that Swedish
authorities reject Assange’s offer to question him in Britain, or via video
link, rather than seeking his extradition arrest. A January 2011 email from the
CPS to Swedish prosecutors stated: “Please do not think that the case is being
dealt with as just another extradition request.”
The documents also revealed
that Sweden had been considering dropping the investigation in 2013. The
British CPS insisted that it continue, with one of its representatives writing:
“Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!” Other emails, including one from the FBI to
the chief Swedish prosecutor, were deleted. Conveniently, nobody involved could
remember their contents.
Not all Sydney Morning
Herald articles, moreover, have been so dismissive of questions about the
background of Anna Ardin, one of the Swedish complainants who is presented in
glowing terms by Miller.
A December 2010 article in
the Herald, headlined “Victims, jilted lovers or undercover agents,” noted
that “serious questions are being asked about one of Julian Assange’s
accusers.”
The SMH article pointed out
that the day after Ardin had supposedly been assaulted, she publicly tweeted
that she wanted to take Assange to a “crayfish party.” It reviewed revelations
that Ardin had previously worked with right-wing anti-Castro organisations in
Cuba. Her activities had led the Cuban government to request that she leave the
country. Ardin had also interned at the Swedish embassy in Washington.
The article stated:
Australian journalist and
expert on espionage Philip Knightley, who is backing Assange in his battle with
the British courts, does not believe Ardin is a CIA agent.
“There’s no direct evidence,”
he told the Sun-Herald. But he said that decades of dealing with spy
agencies had led him to suspect that she fitted the model of someone who could
be useful to intelligence agencies.
“She’s someone they would
consider an asset. I do not think she has been recruited for this mission but
once she realised she was in this position, she might have known the right
people to contact.”
The essence of Knightley’s
theory is that Ardin is someone whose high-level political activity inside
Sweden’s historically dominant party—and her ability to travel to contentious
destinations such as Cuba and make connections with hostile emigre communities
as part of her academic research—would make her a valuable source for Sweden’s
boutique spy agency.
In 2010, the Sydney
Morning Herald did not consider reporting such serious questions to be
engaging in “conspiracy theories.” The article concluded by noting that the
Swedish investigation was unfolding in a context where the “WikiLeaks founder
is certainly the target of an angry superpower.”
Nine years on, there is no
question that the investigation was a frame-up. It served Washington’s
essential aims of embroiling Assange in the legal system, besmirching him and
undermining his support.
All of those journalists, such
as Miller, who have promoted the bogus case have served as the propagandists of
this operation. While many of them have loudly condemned government attacks on
the media, including Australian Federal Police raids targeting journalists in
June, they helped foster the climate in which press freedom could be attacked
through their relentless slander of Assange.
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