Cartoon by Ramses Morales Izquierdo

Whatever you think of Julian Assange, his extradition to the US must be opposed 
Extraditing the founder of WikiLeaks is an attempt by the US to intimidate anyone who exposes its crimes 

By Owen Jones

The Guardian: States that commit crimes in foreign lands depend on at least passive acquiescence. This is achieved in a number of ways. One is the “othering” of the victims: the stripping away of their humanity, because if you imagined them to be people like your own children or your neighbours, their suffering and deaths would be intolerable. Another approach is to portray opponents of foreign aggression as traitors, or in league with hostile powers. And another strategy is to cover up the consequences of foreign wars, to ensure that the populace is kept intentionally unaware of the acts committed in their name.

This is what the attempted extradition of Julian Assange to the US is about. Back in 2010, the then US soldier Chelsea Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US state department cables, and inmates imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Assange’s alleged role consists of helping Manning crack an encrypted password to gain access to the US defense department computer network.

It is Manning who is the true hero of this story: last month, she was arrested for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks, placed in solitary confinement for four weeks, and now remains imprisoned. We must demand her freedom.

These leaks revealed some of the horrors of the post-9/11 wars. One showed a US aircrew laughing after slaughtering a dozen innocent people, including two Iraqi employees of Reuters, after dishonestly alleging to have encountered a firefight. Other files revealed how US-led forces killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, their deaths otherwise airbrushed out of existence. Another cable, which exposed corruption and scandals in the court of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the western-backed then-dictator of Tunisia, helped fuel protests, which toppled him.

Assange does have a case to answer: but it is not this. It is widely circulating around the internet that the case of a Swedish woman who alleged rape has been kicked out by authorities. This is profoundly misleading: in 2017, prosecutors concluded that “at this point, all possibilities to conduct the investigation are exhausted”, that because Assange was holed up in Ecuador’s embassy, and Ecuador would not cooperate, the investigation had to be discontinued, but could be resumed if Assange “makes himself available”.

Separate allegations of sexual assault, made by a second Swedish woman, were dropped by Swedish authorities in 2015 after expiring under the statute of limitations. You cannot be a progressive if your response to someone making an accusation of rape is to dismiss her simply because you admire the man who is accused – worse, to portray a woman as a lying, Machiavellian schemer trying to bring down a great man is misogyny. If the case is resumed, Assange must answer the accusation in Sweden without the threat of extradition to the US.