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Julian Assange and State Crime

Julian Believes!

Working Paper by Professor Scott Poynting – School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology

(above photograph courtesy of the World Socialist Website, https://www.wsws.org/)

Abstract

From July 2012 to April 2019, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange was subjected unlawfully to arbitrary deprivation of liberty. Had he left the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he was a refugee with well-founded fear of persecution, he faced arrest by UK authorities for absconding on bail in 2012, because of a European arrest warrant which Sweden withdrew in May 2017. If arrested, Assange claimed he risked extradition to the US; he now has been arrested on 11 April 2019 and extradition proceedings have begun. He faces detention under abusive conditions, as did Chelsea Manning. The same danger from the Swedish state was why Assange declined in 2012 to travel to Sweden to be interrogated in the sexual assault and sexual misdemeanour case, since dropped. Assange has committed no crime under British law, and no Swedish cases were pending at the time of his arrest. A US secret grand jury indictment, finally unsealed on 11 April 2019, for ‘conspiracy to commit computer intrusion’, revealed the reasons of state for which first Sweden and then the UK had been determined to keep Assange’s arrest pending.

The WikiLeaks Afghan war logs were published on 25 July 2010, as front-page news, detailing war crimes including the knowing and deliberate or reckless killing of civilians, among them children. On 22 October, the Iraq War Logs were released by WikiLeaks, comprising some 300,000 documents from the Iraq war Within a month, Swedish prosecution authorities issued their arrest warrant. The Iraq War Logs published further evidence of war crimes, including torture, rape and murder of civilians. On 28 November, WikiLeaks leaked the first tranche of ‘Cablegate’ documents; on the 29th, US Attorney General Holder announced that Assange was under criminal investigation for the leaks; on the 30th Interpol issued a ‘red notice’ for the arrest of Assange anywhere in the world on behalf of Sweden.

This working paper argues that Swedish, UK and US state actions against Assange are because of his revelations of state crimes.

Key Words: Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, state crime, sexual assault, Sweden

Prologue

This article was completed at around the time of Julian Assange’s arrest in London on 11 April 2019. The charges laid that day, of defaulting on bail in 2012, have led to a conviction on 1 May 2019 and a gaol sentence of 50 weeks. This is bloodyminded, vindictive and disproportionate  ‘You had a choice,’ pronounced the judge, fatuously. As this article shows, the choice was to seek asylum - a legal right - or to face Swedish extradition to the United States and the same mistreatment (amounting to torture, according to the UN Special Rapporteur)  that Chelsea Manning did. Assange now faces precisely that fate, and Manning is again, indefinitely, subjected to it. If ‘disdain for the law of this country’ is what troubled the judge, there will now be a lot more of it. As this article awaits upload, Assange is still facing the proceedings for extradition to the US, which was always the point of his deprivation of liberty. The talk of extraditing Assange to Sweden to face a sexual assault investigation is a diversion now, as it always has been. The Empire is not concerned with such small things. As Naomi Wolf wrote, back in 2010, ‘Anyone who works in supporting women who have been raped knows from this grossly disproportionate response that Britain and Sweden, surely under pressure from the US, are cynically using the serious issue of rape as a fig leaf to cover the shameful issue of mafioso-like global collusion in silencing dissent. That is not the State embracing feminism. That is the State pimping feminism’ (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jaccuse-sweden-britain-an_b_795899). It still is, in 2019, and the Empire is pimping British justice.

Introduction

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange has been arrested on 11th April 2019, after being dragged by London Metropolitan Police from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, in the course of proceedings for extradition to the United States (Davies, Murphy and Gayle, 2019). For his almost seven years of asylum there, besieged by the British state, that arrest for extradition is exactly what Assange and his lawyers have said would happen should he leave the embassy. No wonder his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, exclaimed to the media, ‘I told you so!’ One might have hoped that, in the light of these events, the propaganda about Assange being confined in the embassy of his own volition, able to leave at any time should he so choose, but too craven to face ‘justice’ (Swedish investigations for alleged sexual assault in 2010) would now cease (Ball, 2018). John Pilger (2018) dubs this specious account ‘Vichy journalism’. It has not ceased.

Assange and his lawyers always maintained that the Swedish investigations for sexual assault and misdemeanour were a pretext, aimed at his deportation to the US to punish him and make an example of him for public-spirited revelations, via WikiLeaks, of state crime. We shall review below some evidence for this, along with examining the Swedish allegations against Assange. That the aim of deportation persisted long after the Swedish cases were dropped, and is now being enthusiastically pursued by the British state, certainly lends credence to the claim of a long drawn out and manifestly disintegrating pretext.

I shall argue here that WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange was confined in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for those 2,487 days precisely because he is WikiLeaks editor, and because of what WikiLeaks has revealed. WikiLeaks is an internet platform that since 2007 has revealed the hidden, nefarious and often unlawful activities of contemporary nation states, and their alliances, as well as secret corruption involving transnational corporations (Fowler, 2011). It thus holds states and corporations to account, by bringing state crime and state-corporate crime into public visibility and onto the record. WikiLeaks, under Assange’s editorship, exposed state crimes that the US state and its allies would have preferred to remain secret. Whether Assange is ‘really’ a journalist (he has won a number of awards for journalism, including one in honour of murdered Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia), and so entitled to press freedoms, is an exercise, ongoing as I write, in red herrings and special pleading (Greste, 2019). His social function, like that of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, is that of a whistle-blower. It is a valuable and indeed heroic social function. Not only will he be denied press freedom if the US state holds sway, but he will be punished severely and inhumanely for his whistle-blowing.

The UN Human Rights Council twice determined that Assange was, through being confined in the Ecuadorian embassy on pain of arrest and deportation, being arbitrarily deprived of his liberty, which is in contravention of international law. This wrong was cynically perpetrated by the British state, with the initial connivance of the Swedish state and under pressure from the US. Assange knew that if he were to leave his sanctuary in the embassy, he faced arrest by UK authorities for absconding on bail nearly seven years ago, because of a European arrest warrant which Sweden in fact withdrew in May 2017. The fact that Assange risked extradition to the US to a similar fate to Chelsea Manning - extended and abusive solitary confinement, amounting to torture, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez (Pilkington, 2012) - is why Assange was accepted by Ecuador as a refugee: he had a well-founded fear of political persecution. He still does, though Ecuador under a different president (Lenín Moreno, facing a corruption scandal and political-economic pressure from the US) has withdrawn his asylum. Chelsea Manning is herself once again a political prisoner - indefinitely - for her principled refusal to be examined in secret by a Virginia grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks (Lartey, 2019).

That same danger from the Swedish state, of being turned over to the US on a then secret and sealed indictment, was why Assange declined nearly seven years ago to travel to Sweden to be interrogated. Sweden has form in unlawfully handing over ‘suspects’ to the CIA for rendition and torture, as we shall see. So Assange’s fear of arrest and extradition to the US by the Swedish state, on matters completely unrelated to the warrant for questioning, was indeed well founded. Assange had committed no crime under British law, and as of mid-April 2019 was not wanted even for questioning under Swedish law. The original Swedish assault and sexual misdemeanour cases against Assange were not only conveniently timed, but were clumsily contrived, as I shall indicate below. No longer needed to effect the extradition which was always the point, the case has since been dropped (though rumours and urging of its resurrection continue, serving as an ideological smokescreen for the pending US extradition).

PsyOps against WikiLeaks

Most Australians, if they thought of compatriot Julian Assange much at all these last seven years, were led to think of him as a cowardly fugitive from Swedish justice over accusations of the serious crime of sexual assault. People would think that, given what they read and hear in the news. How it gets there is a matter of managed misinformation, designed to discredit and damage WikiLeaks. As well as how, we  need to ask who would want to do that, and why.

Most people, when they think of Chelsea Manning, however, think of a brave whistle-blower who revealed atrocious killing of civilians in the Iraq War, that most of us would recognise as war crimes. Who could forget the so-called ‘Collateral Murder’ video, taken through the gunsights of an Apache helicopter, targeting a wounded journalist and co-worker, his civilian would-be rescuers, and a van carrying children by-standers? All plainly observable, deliberate, wanton, reckless, avoidable and criminal. Manning pointed out in her public speech in Sydney in 2018 – by video since she was denied a visa by the Australian state – that there were dozens more such instances in the Iraq War Logs published by WikiLeaks. (She also suggested that this one received such media prominence because it involved journalists as victims.) We have WikiLeaks’ instigator and editor to thank for the knowledge of these atrocities coming to light, along with the courageous Manning, and indeed we also owe Edward Snowden for revealing the extent of egregious and unlawful secret state surveillance that dwarfs the miles of files held by the Stasi that so outraged civil libertarians in the 1990s.

All of this is why for years there was a secret sealed grand jury indictment of Assange pending in the US, finally unsealed in London on 11th April, for ‘conspiracy to commit computer intrusion’. Further charges are likely to follow once Assange is in the US. All this is the case irrespective of what we might think of Assange’s much publicised character flaws, personal hygiene, cat-manners, and inappropriateness as a date. The character assassination has been deliberate and systematic, designed to discredit Wikileaks and to undermine support for Assange. Shamefully, it has been effective.

The sexual assault allegations against Assange

So what of the Swedish allegations against Assange? On 20th August 2010, two women attended the Klara police station in Stockholm, ostensibly to inquire about legally requiring a sexually transmitted infection test of Assange who was then visiting Sweden. The desk was staffed at the time by a political associate of the complainant who initiated the visit. Based on their accounts of foregoing events, the stand-in prosecutor issued charges against Assange for rape of one of the women and sexual misconduct in relation to the other. The timing, people involved and subsequent developments raise obvious questions about motivations and bona fides, and indicate that these were not the straightforward sexual offences that they were represented to be. The accusations of sexual offences were immediately and unlawfully leaked to the media. It is fair to consider why. The reporter did have prior connections (via political reporting) with one of the complainants. The profit-based motivations of the commercial media may operate in tandem with other, more geo-political, motivations within the Swedish state and in its connections with the US.

The two eventual complainants’ accounts were temporally and mutually inconsistent, and they were not to be substantiated. On 21st August, Stockholm’s chief prosecutor, Eva Finné, who had learned of the charges via an afternoon tabloid while on vacation, called for the file. On reviewing it, she revoked the rape charge, judging that the acts alleged did not amount to rape, but she retained the misdemeanour (ofredande) charges. The rape charge involved Assange’s sexual penetration of one of the women (SW) while she allegedly slept; they had earlier slept together and had consensual sex on that same night of 16th August, and Assange had allegedly not sought consent for the later sexual act. Assange’s non-use of a condom on this later occasion was an important issue for this woman. The misdemeanour charge involved Assange’s alleged removal or contrived breach of a condom during otherwise consensual sex some days earlier, on 13th or 14th August, with the other woman (AA) (Rundle, 2010). Assange has always denied these allegations. It is a matter of documentary record that improprieties occurred, during police interviews and their recording. Be that as it may, AA returned later to the police bearing, as further evidence for the pursuit of her hitherto underwhelming case, a torn condom which she claimed to have been left by Assange and only just retrieved from under her bed. It bore no trace of DNA: not of Assange nor anyone else (Sims 2012).

After Finné’s cancellation of the rape charges former Social Democrat minister, lawyer Claes Borgström, took the case to Marianne Ny, head of a unit developing sex crime law in Gothenburg, some 200 km away (Rundle, 2010). (Such ‘prosecutor-shopping’ is not allowed in the United Kingdom or Australia.) The next day, the prosecutor’s office interviewed Assange on the ofredande charges only. On 1st September, Ny re-opened the investigation of alleged rape. Ny did not interview Assange while he was in Sweden, and in early November he travelled to the United Kingdom, with Swedish court permission. Then on 20th November Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Assange, to face questions (without charge) in the investigation of the alleged rapes – plural since by now the sex acts with both AA and SW were ruled by the prosecutor as liable for investigation as such. On 30th November, an Interpol detention notice was issued, and on 6th December, a European arrest warrant. The next day, Assange presented himself to British police.

What was Assange doing in Sweden?

Assange had travelled to Sweden seeking a safe base for WikiLeaks (Sims 2012). The Afghan war logs – over 75,000 secret US military reports – had been published on 25 July, and were front-page news in Der Spiegel and The Guardian, detailing, as we have noted, war crimes including the knowing and deliberate or reckless killing of civilians, including children (Leigh and Harding, 2012: 121). It was about these that Assange spoke at his Stockholm seminar on 14 August, hosted by AA and attended uninvited by SW, where he pledged to publish the remaining 15,000 Afghan war documents on WikiLeaks within the month, disregarding threats from the US state  (Sims 2012).

On 22 October 2010, the Iraq War Logs were released by WikiLeaks, comprising some 300,000 documents. The Iraq War Logs published further evidence of war crimes, including torture, rape and murder of civilians. Within a month, the Swedish prosecution authorities issued their arrest warrant. On 28 November, WikiLeaks published the first tranche of ‘Cablegate’ documents, which altogether comprised about a quarter of a million documents totalling some 300 million words from diplomatic cables, with material highly embarrassing to the US state and its allies. On the 29th, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Assange was under criminal investigation for the leaks (Yost 2010); on the 30th Interpol issued a ‘red notice’ for the arrest of Assange anywhere in the world on behalf of Sweden over the alleged sexual assault matters (Rundle 2010). Note this timeline.

The leaker to WikiLeaks of Afghanistan and Iraq documents, Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, had been in US military custody since July 2010, under abusive conditions amounting to torture; Assange knew what to expect should he be extradited to the US. Extradition was likely: Sweden had in 2001 unlawfully handed over, to ‘rendition’ and eventual torture, innocent ‘suspects’ Ahmed Agiza (2005) and Muhammad Alzery (2006) to the CIA.  A fair trial for Assange in the US was improbable; already by December 2010, there were rightwing demands in the US media that Assange be assassinated (eg Kuhner 2010).

Having exhausted all avenues of appeal in British courts against extradition to Sweden, in June 2012 Assange defaulted on his bail and sought, and in August was granted, asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He was trapped there until April 2019; as explained above, if he left the embassy he would be arrested for absconding while on bail, and immediately liable to be  handed over, directly or indirectly, to the US, as is now occurring. In February 2016, a United Nations panel found that Assange was being kept in arbitrary detention, contrary to international law. In November 2016, Assange was interviewed by a Swedish prosecutor in the London Ecuadorean embassy, which he had all along indicated willingness to undertake. Note that he was never unwilling to face police interviews over the sexual assault allegations; the Swedish state or its own reasons had refused to conduct these in the UK and had demanded his extradition. In May 2017, Swedish prosecutors finally dropped the rape investigation against Assange, and applied for withdrawal of the European arrest warrant. In November 2017, the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention reaffirmed its decision that Assange was detained arbitrarily (and hence unlawfully). The systematic attention by media, public commentators and political actors to allegations of sexual crime or misdemeanour by Assange, not to mention his manifest and seemingly newsworthy sleaziness, have distracted from the unlawful treatment of Assange by various states in concert, and most importantly and quite deliberately have discredited WikiLeaks as an uncoverer of otherwise secret state crime and unlawful practice.

A caveat

It should go without saying that the sexual assault complainants are entitled to respect, and to have their complaints taken seriously. The following account is emphatically not a matter of disbelieving or denigrating victims, or calling complainants’ sexual histories and behaviour into account. It rather goes to the nature of the state, or states acting in concert, and especially their intelligence agencies and how they operate. Accounts of facts given by the two complainants and Assange are in close enough concordance to affirm that we are almost certainly not discussing actions that would amount to rape in the UK, Australia, the United States and arguably Sweden, though these matters have never been taken to a Swedish court. This is not an attempt of any sort to discredit survivors of rape. It is reasonable to ask about the operations of security services of the US, the UK and Sweden, given what we know about their operations.

The complainants

I will refer to the complainants as AA and SW, though their identities are all over the internet. The then 31-year-old AA was a political officer with the left Christian ‘Brotherhood’ faction of the Social Democratic Party, which had invited the WikiLeaks founder to speak at a meeting in Stockholm on 14 August 2010, which he did, the day after moving into AA’s apartment, which she had offered him for his stay as she would be out of town. It was understood that Assange would have the apartment to himself, but AA had returned unexpectedly, purportedly to prepare for a meeting, and they ended up sharing the single bed in the one-bedroom apartment, and engaging in what AA has recorded to be consensual sex. It was AA who initiated the joint representations with SW at Klara police station, after each learned that the other had had unprotected sex with Assange, who had reportedly been resistant to using a condom. A friend of AA’s, from the same political faction, was the duty officer at the Klara station at the time. According to the police record, SW became most distressed when she learned Assange had been charged, which was not her intention, and police had been unable to proceed with the interview (Sims, 2012). Guy Rundle (2011) infers an attempt by police to ‘reverse engineer’ rape changes out of the women’s approach. There is documentary evidence that police departed from regulations in their taking of statements and in fact altered records (Sims 2012).

Before working as a political officer for the ‘Brotherhood Movement’ of Christian Social Democrats, AA was an intern in the Swedish embassy in Washington, and then worked in their embassy in Buenos Aires as a public relations manager. Over the same period of 2003-6, she travelled four times to Cuba, ostensibly researching for her eventual 39-page Master’s thesis on opposition groups in that country, which she was asked to leave in 2006 because of her close relationships with anti-Castro politics. She continued her research in Miami, again through at best uncritical contact with sources with CIA connections. Her CV records that over 2004-7 she was ‘Project Manager and Deputy Project Manager of Democracy Project with the Cuban opposition financed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency … under the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ (Sims 2012: 60).

The esteemed Australian journalist and expert in espionage matters, Phillip Knightley, judged that AA may not have been a CIA operative, but rather a person of use to western intelligence agencies: ‘She’s someone they would consider an asset. I do not think she has been recruited for this mission but once she realised she was in this position, she might have known the right people to contact’. The Swedes’ ‘small but very active intelligence agency … are always on the lookout for people with what you might call “interesting friends”’, Knightley observed (cited in West and Whyte, 2010). He noted their close contact with the CIA from Cold War times, and we know that the Swedish state indeed collaborated with the CIA in recent times in the secret rendition of Agiza and Alzery. AA certainly would have known who to call for contacts; her first cousin, a military colonel, was in 2006 the leader of the Swedish Forces in Afghanistan (Sims 2012).

AA as Political Secretary for the Brotherhood was their media liaison person during the ill-fated Gaza Flotilla in May 2010 in which Israeli Defence Force troops boarded the Mavi Marmara in international waters and killed nine Turkish civilians. The Brotherhood international secretary was aboard one of the flotilla ships; a well-known Swedish author and theatre manager Henning Mankell was on the Mavi Marmara itself. Mankell and others reported that the Israeli commandos knew exactly where the Swedes were on the ship; only the Turks were targeted. Guy Sims’ (2012) book, Julian Assange in Sweden: What Really Happened, reports strong suggestions that a Swedish reporter was tipped off to the Israeli repatriation of Maskell in time to be on the same flight to interview him – before even the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs knew what flight he was on. It was the same reporter that broke the story about the rape allegations against Assange. AA’s tweets about the Gaza flotilla were removed from the Net at about the time of the Assange matter. Moreover, her social media messages exculpatory of Assange were expunged, which raises serious doubts and could be an unlawful attempt to pervert the course of justice. AA’s media, political, foreign affairs and indeed police connections would prove invaluable in trashing Assange’s reputation and thus discrediting WikiLeaks.

SW was 26 years old in 2010 and was employed on an hourly basis at the Natural History Museum. She had studied photography in Paris and then done a fine arts degree in Wales. She turned up uninvited to Assange’s otherwise in-house lecture, and sat in the front row taking photographs with a professional camera. She made no secret of her romantic interest in Assange, and this was commented upon by AA in social media communications. Within two days, and while AA was out of Stockholm, SW had taken Assange to her apartment in outlying Enköping, where they spent the night and had consensual sex. Some two days after this SW and AA texted each other and arranged to meet, a day or so after which they attended Klara police station together. Until this time, SW had maintained a very active web and social media presence. She had posted many of her photographs, across a number of international trips, including a summer spent on tour with a very famous rock star. One might expect this to benefit the career of a budding photographer, who complained of being burdened by student debt. Yet after the Assange affair, SW’s presence and tracks were totally purged from the web – so thoroughly that IT experts deemed it to be an extremely professional job, of intelligence-level capability. She has also disappeared entirely from the Swedish public record. Those associated with her have had their internet tracks thoroughly obliterated as well. (Media reports in April 2019 suggest that SW has resurfaced, asking via her lawyer for the abandoned charges against Assange in her case to be reopened.)

Set up?

None of this history of either AA or SW proves that Assange was set up. Yet it must raise suspicions about security services’ involvement with their complaints – if not before the events then certainly afterwards. If Assange was not set up by intelligence services and dirty tricks, he was certainly taken down by them.

Assange, like Manning, is a political prisoner. The allegations of sexual assault have nothing to do with Assange’s current, now seven-year deprivation of liberty, and will have nothing to do with any coming extradition to the US. Katrin Axelsson (2010), of the European organisation, Women against Rape, suggested in The Guardian nearly nine years ago that the allegations of rape were being misappropriated to serve political agendas: ‘There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women’s safety. … Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused…’. As Naomi Klein tweeted (8 December 2010), ‘Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that women’s freedom was used to invade Afghanistan’.

Since Assange’s arrest, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has demanded that, ‘The extradition of Julian Assange to the US for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan should be opposed by the British government’ (Weaver and Bowcott, 2019). Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott has taken a similar position. Yet there is a division in the Labour Party over the issue. Some opponents of Corbyn and Abbott are insisting that Assange be first extradited to Sweden,  to face the accusations of rape of SW, should the case be reopened. The statute of limitations on this case expires in 2020, and has already expired in the lesser case of sexual misdemeanour allegedly committed against AA. It is for the home secretary to decide which extradition application takes precedence. These political divisions highlight clearly that the  the sexual assault allegations are, and always have been, politicised.

On 11 April, Anna Ardin tweeted publicly, as @therealardin, ‘I would be very surprised & sad if Julian is handed over to the US.’ This could be either naive or disingenuous. Most legal and political commentators agree that this eventual handing over is most likely.  ‘Too bad my case could never be investigated properly, but it’s already been closed’, she regretted.  Yet we know that the case was not investigated fully because of the Swedish prosecutors’ refusal, for years, to interview Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, so determined were they to have him brought to Sweden (where he would, as we have seen, be liable for extradition to the US). Ardin elaborated, ‘For me this was never about anything else than his misconduct against me/women and his refusal to take responsibility for this’. We must accept her account of what the investigation was about, for her.

What the allegations and the extradition proceedings were about for the Swedish, the British, and behind them the US, states, has been shown to be an entirely different matter.

 

References

Agiza v. Sweden (2005) Agiza v. Sweden, Communication No. 233/2003, U.N. Doc. CAT/C/34/D/233/2003 (2005).

Alzery v. Sweden (2006)  Mohammed Alzery v. Sweden, Communication No. 1416/2005, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/88/D/1416/2005 (2006).

Axelsson, K. (2010) ‘Rape claims, Wikileaks and internet freedom’, letter to The Guardian, 8 December. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-rape-allegations-freedom-of-speech Accessed 19 April 2019.

Ball, J. (2018) ‘The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride’, The Guardian, 10 January. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/10/julian-assange-ecuador-embassy-wikileaks-us-sweden Accessed 18 April 2019.

Davies, C. ,Murphy, S, and Gayle, D. (2019) ‘Julian Assange faces US extradition after arrest at Ecuadorian embassy’ The Guardian 12 April. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/11/julian-assange-arrested-at-ecuadorian-embassy-wikileaks Accessed 18 April 2019.

Fowler, A. (2011) The Most Dangerous Man in the World Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Greste, P. (2019) ‘Julian Assange is no journalist: don’t confuse his arrest with press freedom’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 April. Available online: https://www.smh.com.au/national/assange-is-no-journalist-don-t-confuse-his-arrest-with-press-freedom-20190412-p51di1.html Accessed 18 April 2019.

Kuhner, Jeffrey T. (2010) ‘Kuhner: assassinate Assange?’ The Washington Times, 2 December. Available online: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/2/assassinate-assange/ Accessed 27 May 2018.

Lartey, J. (2019), ‘Chelsea Manning: supporters demand release from solitary confinement’, The Guardian, 24 March. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/23/chelsea-manning-jail-solitary-confinement-wikileaks Accessed 18 April 2019.

Leigh, D. and Harding, L. (2011) Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy London: Guardian Books.

Pilger, J. (2018) ‘The Urgency of Bringing Julian Assange Home’, 18 June. Available online: http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-urgency-of-bringing-julian-assange-home Accessed 18 April 2019.

Pilkington, E. (2012) ‘Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules’, The Guardian, 12 March. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un Accessed 18 April 2019.

Rundle, G. (2010) Rundle, ‘Timeline of Assange’s visit to Sweden and events that followed’, Crikey, 13 December. Available at: https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/13/rundle-timeline-of-assanges-visit-to-sweden-and-events-that-followed/ Accessed 23 May 2018.

Rundle, G. (2011) ‘Crayfish summer’, The Monthly, April. Available online: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/march/1346725054/guy-rundle/crayfish-summer Accessed 19 April 2019.

Sims, Guy J. (2012)   Julian Assange in Sweden – what really happened Book Baby.

Weaver, M. and Bowcott, O. (2019) ‘Labour row breaks out over Assange sexual assault allegations’, The Guardian, 12 April. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/12/diane-abbott-urges-pm-to-block-julian-assange-extradition Accessed 19 April 2019.

West, A. and Whyte. S. (2010) ‘Victims, jilted lovers or undercover agents’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December. Available at: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/victims-jilted-lovers-or-undercover-agents-20101218-191ae.html Accessed 18 April 2019.

Yost, P. (2010) ‘Holder says Wikileaks under criminal investigation’,  The Seattle Times, 30 November. Available at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/holder-says-wikileaks-under-criminal-investigation/ Accessed 18 April 2014.

Scott Poynting (Author) at Assange Rally, Sydney Town Hall, Australia (2018)

PilgerSpeakingAt SydneyTownHallAssangeDemo

John Pilger at Assange Rally, Sydney Town Hall, Australia (2018)

SydneyRally2018