Assange: what it means to be a suspect

If you google "rape" with "Assange", you get several million hits, which suggests the Wikileaks founder has reason to complain that the criminal charges have damaged his reputation. But there is no evidence to support his further claim that the US, angry at the disclosures, has pressured Swedish authorities to revive a case they had earlier dismissed. Whatever the facts, many people will be concerned lest this drama distract attention from the ongoing revelations, including recent claims that India has tortured thousands of Kashmiri detainees.

Speculation has increased since the disclosure of the nature of the charges, the identity of the two complainants, and the factual allegations on which the rape and assault charges were based. The first summary, reportedly leaked from Swedish prosecution files, appeared in The Times of India over three weeks ago. This was followed by a Reuters summary publicized by MSNBC, which was in turn followed by the recent and highly detailed disclosures by the UK Guardian and the New York Times.

Aware that many readers might feel this information was gratuitous, and likely to prejudice the defence case, the Guardian published an editorial to justify its decision. It did not convince Assange's lawyers, who were understandably upset at the publicity given to sordid details of allegations they must now respond to, from persons whose testimony they have had no chance to cross-examine.

While the internet will continue to rake over these matters, there is no evidence to support the claims of a conspiracy theory involving US secret agents, despite the US having both the means and motive. The known facts suggest that these are mature and intelligent women, generally supportive of the Wikileaks project, but deeply offended by Assange's behaviour. What he did and whether it was a criminal offence under the law of Sweden are, of course, the issues to be resolved.

There is, however, an imbalance in the media treatment which is not altogether the fault of journalists. No one can deny that, in the eyes of the law, Assange is a "rape suspect"; but it is also true that, in the media vernacular and since 9:11, this description has a more sinister connotation. For in recent years the analogous phrase "terrorist suspect" has come to describe a person who is almost certainly a terrorist, waiting only to be legally processed in order to receive his just desserts.

This is, at least, the case where charges are made by senior public officials and repeated without question and endlessly by the press. How else to explain a widespread media acquiescence over the treatment of Guantanamo detainees, described as "the worst of the worst" by the head of the US Chiefs of Staff, the most authoritative spokesman for the Pentagon, and regularly paraded in a way meant to reinforce this claim, with blacked out goggles, gloves and earmuffs to cut off all sensory experience, and wheeled about strapped to a mediaeval trundle, like Hannibal Lecter.

We now know (mainly from the remarkable Seton Hall studies by law professor Mark Denbeaux, based entirely on US Government sources, most secured under FOI legislation) that almost all were Afghan and Pakistani peasants, many of them Taliban conscripts, and that only 5% were captured on the battlefield by US forces.

The rest were sold for rewards of between one and five thousand dollars by Northern Alliance warlords and their Pakistani allies. Given the then recent and savage civil war between warlords and the Taliban, this process was always suspect and it is not surprising that of the original 770 detainees, most held and interrogated for years, only two have been convicted of an offence and one (Hicks) confessed.

An example of this disinformation program is the fate of the Uighurs, twenty-two Turkic-speaking Muslims from Xianjiang in the arid regions of Western China. Refugees from a repressive Chinese policy to stamp out ethnic political aspirations, they were also taken prisoner in Afghanistan.

Although their only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time the Bush Administration, with the help of the media, has so far poisoned public opinion that it is now politically impossible to resettle them in America, forcing the Obama Administration to plead with various nations to afford them asylum. It took the Pentagon seven years to admit they were never "enemy combatants" or terrorists.

The implications of being an official suspect are profound when foreign policy is used to justify the use of lethal force, and perhaps the best known example is the use of the phrase "suspected militant" to justify the deaths of increasing numbers of civilians in aerial drone attacks in North West Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan (before President Obama instructed General McChrystal to tighten the rules of engagement, the kill ratio was as high as 1:10).

The media, especially the "embedded" media, does not question the decision to bomb, not just because it lacks any military qualification to judge the risk, but because it does not know what the rules of engagement permit. This is apart from the problem of access to interviews and information from those responsible for drafting and applying these rules. In practice this allows the attribution of suspected militant status to justify ongoing collateral damage in the killing and maiming of women, children and old men in increasingly desperate efforts to target more local Taliban leaders.

This has led to a familiar scenario in which official claims of success are regularly met by cries of outrage, not just from the surviving villagers and relatives, but from President Karzai himself. The Pentagon then announces an official investigation, likely to take months. The protracted nature of this process, the fact that it is conducted by the Pentagon, and the 24:7 news cycle ensure that the final report, if and when it emerges, will have no impact on the conduct of the war.

The fact that some victims are official suspects, because it blurs the issue of innocence, blurs the justification of collateral damage. It lulls the media into accepting without question the secret status of operational "rules of engagement", and explains why no one asks if these rules might be different had the innocent victims been allied troops, aid workers or American contractors. This is an acid test of the morality of "collateral damage" because it forces us to confront, among other things, racial and ethnic prejudice in deciding whose lives we will sacrifice to pursue political goals.

None of this has any bearing on the merits of the charge against Julian Assange. It does, however, have everything to do with the need for care to keep this allegation of sexual abuse separate from the credibility and importance of Wikileaks' revelations of the abuse of rights, as well as its reports of corruption and deception of the public in the area of foreign policy. Whatever the fate of Assange, it highlights the need for an internet-based organization to provide anonymity for whistleblowers, and to help counter the ability of government to shape public opinion to its own ends.

It is easy to forget how vulnerable the corporate media may be to this pressure. In 2009 David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for an article in The New York Times which reported that the Defence Department had recruited over 75 retired military officers, some with secret ties to major defense contractors, to appear on major news outlets as military analysts to comment on the Iraq war and to press the case in its favour.

In Barstow's words the Bush administration had used its control over access and information “to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside major TV and radio networks.” After initially denying it had done anything unethical the Pentagon later conceded the program had been a mistake.

The somewhat Orwellian nature of this symbiosis between government and corporate media is highlighted by the failure of the networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox) to either mention Barstow's name in their news reports, or talk about his investigation. Despite this, Barstow himself came to believe that the revelations had led to improvements in the networks' practices.

This concern is critical now that US Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell claims Assange is a "high-tech terrorist", prominent Republican leader Newt Gingrich thinks he should be treated "as an enemy combatant" - presumably to be locked up indefinitely - and Sarah Palin brands him "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands." Assange now has the double soubriquet of suspect rapist and suspect terrorist; when one recalls that the US President is not prepared to outlaw the CIA practice of "rendition", it is not hard to understand a certain degree of paranoia on his part.

Although public opinion forced Prime Minister Gillard to modify her initial, irresponsible, claim that Assange had acted illegally, her approach is governed by the same foreign policy considerations the Howard Government relied on when dealing with David Hicks, another citizen whose personal fate had to take second place to the national interest imperatives of the "US alliance".

For readers interested in Julian Assange's vision of and justification for the Wikileaks enterprise, it is hard to go past his Lateline interview with Tony Jones of 29 July (vodcast from ABC Lateline Archives) The questions are thoughtful and probing, forcing Assange to answer his most severe critics. Of particular interest is his response to US claims that the leaks put allied lives at risk.