It's time to free Julian Assange

Guest Commentary:

The Associated Press reports that “British police have removed the officers standing watch over Julian Assange outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, but say they will still do their best to arrest the WikiLeaks founder who has been holed up there since June 2012.”

Arrest? Really? Assange has already spent the last three years and four months under de facto house arrest, trapped in the embassy and  prevented from traveling to Ecuador proper, where he’s been granted political asylum.

And let’s make no bones about this: Assange is a political prisoner.

In November of 2010, Sweden’s Stockholm District Court issued a falsified European Arrest Warrant for Assange. Such warrants may only be issued pursuant to actual prosecutions, not preliminary investigations.

To date, Assange has been charged with a grand total of zero crimes in Sweden. Director of Public Prosecution Marian Ny wanted to interview Assange, not arrest him, about spurious (and almost certainly politically motivated) rape and molestation allegations.

On the basis of the bogus warrant, the United Kingdom held Assange (on “conditional bail,” which also amounted to house arrest at the home of a supporter) for extradition proceedings. After exhausting his appeals, he sought political asylum in Ecuador and took up lodgings at the embassy.

Assange has offered, more than once, to submit to the “interview” Ny has requested – in the U.K. or at the embassy. He has even offered to return to Sweden voluntarily, given a guarantee that he wouldn’t be handed over to the United States for political prosecution over his work with WikiLeaks. The negative response from Swedish authorities to all these reasonable offers demonstrates exactly the ulterior motive Assange has suspected from the start.

The United States Department of “Justice” wants to get its hands on Assange and take vengeance on him for exposing American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for publishing United States Department of State cables that revealed various instances of U.S. diplomatic malfeasance (up to and including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s attempts to have the offices of United Nations diplomats illegally bugged by State Department operatives).

Former U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning is already serving a 35-year sentence – imposed after an entirely illegal military show trial – for making the material in question available to Wikileaks. Assange knows that he can expect no less if the U.S. gets its hands on him.

The United Kingdom’s government should appreciate the shame it has brought upon itself by conspiring with the Swedish and American regimes to illegally detain Assange for lo on five years now. It’s time to free him, publicly apologize to him, and indemnify him for imposing such an entirely unjustifiable loss of freedom on him for so long.

Thomas Knapp is director of the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism