UN torture official says persecution of Assange threatens journalists worldwide

America’s request to extradite Julian Assange has been denied – the latest development in a show trial designed to silence the WikiLeaks founder and scare future whistleblowers, reports Andrew Buncombe

A van showing support for Chelsea Manning and Assange (Getty)

Nils Melzer says a lot of very striking things. The UN special rapporteur on torture says the way that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his most famous source, Chelsea Manning, have been treated by the US and UK authorities amounts to just that – torture. What is more, this mistreatment is not by chance, not a simple, unanticipated byproduct of the authorities’ efforts to stop the leak and publication of their secrets. Rather, this mistreatment is intentional, intended not only to silence them, but to intimidate and threaten others too.

This is why he says what has happened to the pair, as Washington seeks to punish and prosecute firstly Manning and now Assange, amounts to “persecution”.

“When I say persecution I feel that the instrument of prosecution is being used for ulterior motives, for political motives, and that is what turns a prosecution into a persecution,” Melzer tells The Independent. “It is not used genuinely to prosecute a crime, but it’s used to intimidate journalists worldwide and publishers worldwide.”

He adds: “Torture and ill treatment is not necessarily used to extract information. It can be, but very widely it is used to intimidate either the person being ill treated, or others.”

Melzer points to women being raped during war time in the “in the middle of the village square”, or people beaten in public. “I think this is what we’re looking at here. It’s not that Assange is being punished primarily for what he has done. But they’re making an example of him, for everyone to see, what happens when you publish on a grand scale the ‘dirty laundry’ or the dirty secrets of states,” he says.

“I think that’s what states generally are afraid of. That’s also why we see very little action from other governments in favour of Assange, because essentially most governments operate the same way, rely a lot on secrecy, and they have no interest in getting those secrets exposed.”

Melzer, 59, was speaking from Geneva ahead of the extradition hearing being held today at the Old Bailey, where the judge has rejected the US request to extradite him to face espionage charges, saying it would be “oppressive” to his mental health. They charges – which relate to WikiLeaks’s publication of details of the often deadly and underhand reality of the west’s “war on terror” – carry a potential sentence of 175 years imprisonment, perhaps in a maximum security facility in Colorado where inmates are confined to their cells for 23 hours a day.

Assange and his organisation say they are war crimes. Many high profile names have denounced his possible extradition, saying it represents a dangerous precedent for journalism and for free speech.

‘Punishment by process’

In May 2019, Melzer, who talks in a manner that is calm and yet has a sense of urgency, visited Assange in London’s Belmarsh Prison. A month earlier the WikiLeaks founder had been sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for violating the terms of his 2012 bail, when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Assange spent more than seven years there before  Ecuador, following pressure from the US, and after a change of government, said it would no longer offer him protection.

Assange was arrested by British police and shortly afterwards, the US announced it had built 17 espionage charges against him, to go with a single charge of computer hacking.

In a report issued then, Melzer said he feared for Assange’s safety and wellbeing. “In the course of the past nine years, Mr Assange has been exposed to persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy, and from deliberate collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination,” he wrote.

Melzer says he believes the governments acting against him are not doing so in good faith. As evidence of this, he says nobody whose actions or behaviour exposed by WikiLeaks was ever prosecuted or pursued. At the same time, a whistleblower such as Manning, convicted of a non-violent offence, was jailed for 35 years, after military prosecutors sought 60.

They’re making an example of him, for everyone to see what happens when you publish on a grand scale the ‘dirty laundry’ or the dirty secrets of states

She eventually served seven years, much of it in solitary confinement, before the sentence was commuted by Barack Obama. Last year, she was held for more than 11 months after refusing to help the Department of Justice in its case against Assange. She was only released after trying to take her own life.

“That’s what is the message – it’s punishment by process,” says Melzer. “I don’t think the US is in a hurry to get Assange over to America. They will eventually, probably. But I think their interest is that he is being silenced. And that has happened already, I mean he’s in virtual isolation, he doesn’t even have sufficient contact with the outside world to prepare his defence.”

He says even if he were sent to the US, the authorities might be happy to let him sit and fester as the case moved forwards slowly. “And keep him in isolation, all that time, first silence him and his organisation, but also to demonstrate to everybody else, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do to you’.”

What made Trump go after Assange?

There has been speculation Donald Trump could offer a pardon to Assange, as he spends the final days of his presidency railing against his defeat to Joe Biden, and potentially laying the groundwork for a second run in 2024. Yet it is also unclear why Trump decided to pursue Assange, given the Obama administration, which was quick to punish Manning and notoriously hard on whistleblowers, did not.

Some believe it is because Trump already offered a pardon and Assange turned it down. During the earlier extradition hearing, the Australian’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, said in a witness statement that in 2017 she was present when Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Trump associate Charles Johnson visited the WikiLeaks founder at the embassy and offered a pardon. The move was dependent on Assange issuing a statement denying Russia had provided the leaked Democratic Party emails, which the website published on the eve of the party’s 2016 convention.

Many believe the emails were hacked by Russian operatives, though others say they were an internal leak, rather than an outside hack. In an interview with NBC in 2016, Assange did not say Russia was not the source but said “there is no proof whatsoever” that it had provided the material that hurt Hillary Clinton and helped Trump.

“The proposal put forward by Congressman Rohrabacher was that Mr Assange identify the source for the 2016 election publications in return for some kind of pardon, assurance or agreement which would both benefit President Trump politically and prevent US indictment and extradition,” Robinson said.

Melzer says he believes Trump may have decided to move forward after being snubbed. “From then on, you can see a change of attitude,” he says. “You can see that pressure is being made on Ecuador by the US to hand over Assange. We can speculate whether that Trump was just angry, for not getting his deal done. And now he wanted to silence. I don’t know, but it very much looks like that.”

‘Intention was to smear him over rape allegation’

Of all the episodes that lost Assange support, probably more than WikiLeaks’s 2016 publishing of emails that may have been hacked by Russian operatives, were two accusations of sexual assault, one of rape and one of molestation, that were levelled at Assange by Swedish investigators.

Assange denied the claims. His lawyers said he was prepared to cooperate with the investigators, but did not want to travel to Sweden as he feared he could be sent on to the US.

It was after a British court ordered his extradition to Sweden that Assange skipped bail and sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy. In the summer of 2019, Melzer published an essay on Medium entitled “Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange”. In it, he did not dispute that Assange had been with the women, but said neither woman alleged they were raped. He pointed out no charges were ever brought.

He was accused of not only intensity but of victim-blaming. In a subsequent essay he defended his assertion that no evidence had been brought against Assange, and yet for nine years he had been “smeared” as a rapist.

“Though the tone of my critique may be harsh, it is not aimed at the women, but at the gross arbitrariness of the ‘rape’ narrative, which has been wrongly imposed by zealous officials not only on Assange, but also on the two concerned women themselves, and on the general public,” he wrote.

Melzer says that at the end of 2019, Sweden closed the investigation for lack of evidence. “By law, Assange is assumed innocent. But that’s obviously no the longer the case because for nine years this narrative has been maintained,” he says. “And he has just basically been presumed guilty. And even when Sweden closed that proceedings for lack of evidence in November 2019, they did say that this means he is presumed innocent.”

He says he believes that while the authorities had no role in the women’s reporting of Assange to the Swedish police and demanding he take a HIV test, there was a benefit to letting the issue continue. “I feel that the purpose of this whole narrative was to corner him, to cut his popularity. To isolate him.”

‘That’s what show trials are about’

Melzer has also raised the treatment of Manning, the former army intelligence analyst who started making contact with WikiLeaks in the beginning of 2010, having become increasingly concerned as she became aware of the reality of the military operation she was part of. She was convicted on 22 charges, and found guilty of sending hundreds of thousands of secret files to the whistleblower site.

Among the most most damning episodes she helped reveal was a 2007 attack in Baghdad involving two US AH-64 Apache helicopters, which targeted some buildings and then bore down on a group of people. More than a dozen were killed, including two Reuters journalists. It transpired none of them was armed.

“Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one US airman could be heard saying on the video footage

Many of the charges she faced were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act, passed at a time when the US was at war, and which does not permit an individual to use the defence of serving the public interest. It is the same law under which Assange has been charged. Melzer says that in 2019 he raised Manning’s plight after she was detained as prosecutors sought to force her to testify against Assange.

“I think you have to see just how disproportionate that treatment was. We can see there’s a zero tolerance policy of Obama in regard to whistleblowers. And the prosecution asked for 60 years in prison. She then got 35, but 35 years is enormous.”

He says murderers or war criminals receive such sentences, while Manning was convicted of a non-violent offence, for which she had a clear public interest defence had she been able to use it. He says the act appears to be in conflict with both the US Constitution and its First Amendment. He says the treatment of Manning was again intended to deliver a message.

“That’s what show trials are about. You want to pass a message. Obama was not even trying to hide that, he was very clear that he wanted to demonstrate his zero tolerance policy,” he says.

Melzer says Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s first CIA director, recently appeared in a documentary on German TV, in which he said the only way to stop leaks of information was to punish people and hope to send a message.

“He said that, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. So clearly the intention is to make an example of these people, in order to scare everybody else away,” says Melzer. “It deprives the public of an independent national security journalism. And it deprives them of the tools to control their government because they don’t know they no longer know what the government is doing.”

Melzer says people ought not to be able to leak secret materials for any reason, but that the public interest ought to be a defence.

Right now, he says, the only purpose of prosecuting the whistleblowers is to provide impunity for the government’s own officials. He says having dealt with whistleblowers such as Manning, the US would have been set to silence Assange and his organisation.

“And if that had succeeded, we’d probably put an end to national security journalism, and we’d empower governments to basically govern without democratic oversight.”