Assange’s Game

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks who slipped into the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual abuse, is very clever. That, or the British police are going a little soft in the head, since Quito has been offering him political asylum publicly for some time now.

There is, of course, a third possibility: that the British authorities, to be rid of him, were careless with the vigilance of the Norfolk mansion where Assange was staying, easing his escape to the embassy. But this is improbable, because if Ecuador should offer political asylum to Assange it would be up to the House of Lords to decide if he should be given safe conduct out of the country, which is a complicated and lengthy process.

It is an astute move on Assange’s part. With all his local options exhausted, there was only one left: the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg. But his position there is weak. His central argument – that if he is extradited to Sweden he will wind up in the hands of the United States to face charges of espionage for releasing documents about the Afghan war on Wikileaks – has much less weight in Strasbourg than in Quito. It is a political argument, and although Strasbourg takes politics into account, the process against Assange is based on an accusation of common crimes to which he has not responded. This is something the Human Rights Court cannot fail to take very seriously. For Quito, on the other hand, Assange is the perfect occasion to turn up the volume and visibility of the confrontation between “21st Century Socialism” and Washington.

Assange’s only hope of getting out relatively gracefully is to politicize his case. The United States has made this much easier for him, it must be said, with its overreaction to the release of 92,000 secret documents related to the war in Afghanistan (an overreaction similar to the one provoked by Daniel Ellsberg with the famous Pentagon Papers in the 1970s: The New York Times and The Washington Post played the part of Assange in that case). Hence, in the asylum request to Correa, Assange says that Washington wants to detain and kill him. Knowing his only escape consists in converting common crimes into political ones, the founder of Wikileaks has continued to release material accusatory of the United States. The most recent bombshell was the video “Collateral Murder” that records the incursion of U.S. troops in a Baghdad suburb at the cost of civilian victims.

Assange knows that, like in Cold War times, inserting himself in the ideological struggle against Washington is a way of obtaining moral exemption. If Assange is “rescued” by Ecuador, a tenacious adversary of the United States, who could possibly concern themselves with the small matter of three charges of sexual abuse and one of rape? [These are] unbearably bourgeoisie considerations that pale in importance before a moral crusade against the enemy of humanity.

None of this implies that the release of a good portion of the 1.2 million documents spread by Wikileaks since 2006, when it was born, has not served a good purpose. All states abuse power, lie, and act as though they are above the law. Some more than others, because they are less subject to democracy and the state of law, but all do it. And so, although it has committed excesses and possibly crimes, Wikileaks has obliged governments, corporations and churches to explain themselves and be a tiny bit more transparent.

The problem is that in the matter of an extradition to Sweden it is not the free expression of Assange or the defense of the individual against power that is in play; rather it is the rights of those women who report being objects of sexual abuse and who request justice in the courts. It is obvious that several governments would be delighted to see Assange jailed as a rapist. It is evident they would put a bullet in the nape of his neck if they could. But at this stage the best protection against that is that Assange is more famous than the governments that hate him, and his case has been aired more widely than that of any other civil adversary of the U.S.

Assange has weakened his moral stature by snuggling up to a government that is just now in the spotlight in terms of freedom of expression. When he says he wants to continue his mission “in a place of peace dedicated to truth and justice,” he is giving the Ecuadorian government exactly what it wants to hear, but also saying something absurd. With the exception of Cuba and Venezuela, there is no country in Latin America where the press is subject to greater harassment than in Ecuador. Ecuador will, this week, discuss the possible prohibition of administration officials from giving interviews to two important television channels and the principal print media outlets.

But we shouldn’t be surprised: a drowning man will clutch at straws.