A decision that will come as a shock to many given most thought it was ‘over’ for Assange, British Judge Vanessa Baraitser decided not to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the US, where he would face espionage charges, due to his mental health. Assange is charged with 18 counts of conspiring to hack a US government computer and the publication of confidential military records pertaining to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, including the infamous 2007 Apache helicopter incident in Baghdad that saw US soldiers kill a dozen people including two Reuters journalists.
According to the Judge’s decision, she feels freedom of speech rights don’t allow for Assange to have “unfettered discretion to decide what he’s going to publish,” but he appears to be in extremely poor mental health and for that reason alone he won’t be extradited. Judge Baraitser believes Assange would have been given all legal and constitutional protections in the US but felt that given the conditions of a likely supermax US prison, Assange’s mental health would suffer even more, putting his life at risk.
“I find that the mental condition of Mr Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” – Judge Vanessa Baraitser
Judge Baraitser has accepted the evidence of multiple medical experts to come to this conclusion,
“The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man who is genuinely depressed about his future,”
Assange has now been taken back to Belmarsh prison where he will apply for his release on bail. It’s expected his legal team will focus the bail case on the conditions at the high-security prison and the worsening Covid-19 pandemic.
What I find personally interesting about this case is that it appears there is still not much of an acceptance by government and law enforcement that what Assange did was a function of journalism and helpful for the public as a whole. That is to say, he exposed secrets, corruption, and wrong doings of the US government, something the people should actually know, yet the sentiment of ‘rulers’ remains that no, this was a threat to national security, not journalistic, and we should never have to answer to the illegal actions we took – only Assange does.
This case is important because whatever precedent is set with Assange will later be the rule for any other journalists who decides they want to expose government secrets. Future journalists and whistleblowers will think twice, three times, and even four times before doing what was once a celebrated act by most.
His case represents a threat to what’s left of free, honest and open journalism. And you can tell this is true amongst some as even some mainstream outlets can sense the severity of what this case means for them, all while other mainstream outlets bury Assange in lockstep.
The judge’s reasoning was hardly a ringing endorsement of either Wikileaks or the function of journalism. But the extradition outcome is the right one and I hope the US will now drop the pursuit of Assange (and @Snowden) and let them get on with their lives.
— alan rusbridger (@arusbridger) January 4, 2021
Assange’s prosecutors say he helped US defence analyst Chelsea Manning breach the US Espionage Act, and was complicit in hacking by others and published classified information that endangered informants. Assange did some controversial things, there’s no denying that, and it’s possible that you could argue that releasing some information from government computer hacks could be dangerous to national security, but were his leaks actually dangerous? Perhaps to the pride of those in charge.
“Snowden and Assange put America’s national security at risk” is merely a talking point used to deflect from the vast civil rights issues they both exposed the US government guilty of. The difficult part for the general public in making sense of these cases is that mainstream journalists bought right into the talking point, and informed citizens to think that way also. Now weeding through the many perspectives can be a difficult task.
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