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The Endgame: Assange running
low on support - and options
If Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa
grants Julian Assange his asylum plea, the
Wikileaks founder may escape prosecution in the
United States indefinitely. But by holing up in
Ecuador's embassy in the United Kingdom, Assange
has already sacrificed the one thing that's made
him a household name - his credibility. By
KEVIN BLOOM.
In late May, on
The World Tomorrow, his controversial show on the
Kremlin-approved news network Russia Today, Julian
Assange interviewed Ecuadorian president Rafael
Correa. To his
critics on the right,
this latest guest came as no surprise-Assange had,
after all, kicked off his television career by
throwing softball questions at Hassan Nasrallah,
leader of Hezbollah.
Had there been in any
doubt before - and they weren't, of course,
because Assange has always terrified people who
fail to appreciate the virtues of anarchy - with
Nasrallah the verdict was in: the man was now
using terrorist organisations to even the odds in
his personal vendetta against the United States.
But the rightists and the conservative
mainstream were one thing, what about Assange's
critics in the media? Here the Australian-born
rebel faced a more nuanced battle, and, like the
master tactician that he is, he pre-empted the
moves of his enemy. Before the Nasrallah interview
aired, he put out a press release entitled "Smear
and Enjoy," where he quite accurately predicted
what the haters would say about him.
"I
have decided to hold out an olive-branch to our
overworked detractors," Assange stated in the
release, "by writing higher quality smears for
them." Requesting that each journalist take one
smear per article, and that they each tweet their
chosen favourite alongside the hashtag
#smearandenjoy, he provided, amongst others, the
following:
Item 2.2: "Putin is a WikiLeaks
patsy, allowing his television channel to be
manipulated by Julian Assange to become a
propaganda network for WikiLeaks!"
Item
2.3: "Nasrallah was interviewed as part of a
Russian diplomatic game with Syria. Assange is a
pathetic patsy, and a dictator-supporting
hypocrite. We all know Russia supports Syria and
RT is its uncritical propaganda vehicle. Why else
would they interview Nasrallah?!"
Again,
that's exactly what the mainstream Western media
said about Assange and Wikileaks in the days
following the show's debut, although in slightly
less blatant terms. While Assange, as he did in
the press release, would no doubt have boiled the
comparatively restrained language down to a
journalistic "lack of imagination," he was still
dead-on: the big media organisations called him
out for being a hypocrite.
Nevertheless,
given what's happened in the last week, the
question must once more be asked-if Assange is
able to confidently and correctly predict a media
backlash that labels him one thing or another,
does this mean he isn't what the label says he is?
Let's go back to the interview that aired
on The World Tomorrow in late May, the one where
he spoke to Rafael Correa. In the show's opening
minutes, Assange introduced the Ecuadorian
president as a left-wing populist who's brought
change to his country, noting that unlike his
predecessors he holds a PhD in economics. US
embassy cables, said Assange-and he would
know-painted Correa as the most popular president
in Ecuador's democratic history, a man who in 2010
was taken hostage in an attempted coup.
Continued Assange: "He blames the coup
attempt on corrupt media and launched a
controversial counter-offensive. Correa says the
media defines what reforms are possible. I want to
know, is he justified? And what are his visions
for Latin America?"
If it was Assange's
intent to find out whether Correa was "justified"
in his clampdown on Ecuadorian media, the
questions he put fell slightly short of the mark.
There seemed to be no sustained effort to follow a
specific line, and when the president was asked
why he'd recently booted the United States
ambassador, the answer seemed tailor-made to fit
the Wikileaks founder's agenda.
"The last
straw was Wikileaks," said Correa, "where she
wrote that her own Ecuadorian contacts told her
that the chief of the national police was corrupt,
and that surely I had given him that post knowing
he was corrupt, so that I could control him.
"The lady ambassador was called, and asked
to give an explanation. With all her loftiness,
insolence, grandeur, imperial airs she puts on,
she said she had nothing to account for. And as we
here respect our country, we threw her out."
At the end of the interview, after Assange
clapped, smiled victoriously and thanked his
guest, Correa signed off with this: "It's been a
pleasure to meet you, Julian, at least in this
way. And cheer up! Welcome to the club of the
persecuted."
Not to come down too heavily
on the side of the name-callers in the Western
media, but this is the same president who in
February changed his country's electoral laws to
prohibit journalists from directly or indirectly
promoting candidates, proposals or "political
theses" during the campaign for the 2013
presidential elections.
Correa has
approval ratings in Ecuador close to 80%, thanks
in the main to social programmes that benefit the
poor and disabled, so it is on the face of it
unclear why he would want to ban his country's
media from making political statements. Until,
that is, you start to look at which journalists
he's been hunting down.
Juan Carlos
Calderon, for example, who in 2010 wrote a book
entitled El Gran Hermano (Big Brother), wherein
government contracts that benefited the
president's older brother Fabricio were detailed
(Calderon is facing a libel suit of $10 million).
Or a former editor and three directors of the
newspaper El Universo, who face $40 million in
collective fines and may soon be jailed, because
in 2010 the editor wrote in a column that Correa
was a "dictator".
To be fair, Correa,
since he came to power in 2007, has repeatedly
claimed that private media in Ecuador is there to
serve the interests of its owners-invariably,
groups linked to the country's economic elite. But
while he may well have a point, it doesn't change
the fact-as per the Washington Post- that his
strategy for dealing with the perceived injustice
is "the most comprehensive and ruthless assault on
free media under way in the Western Hemisphere."
Neither does it change what Assange said
about Wikileaks back in the days when he wasn't on
the run from sexual assault charges in Sweden: "We
are free press activists. It's about giving people
the information they need. That is the raw
ingredient that is needed to make a just and civil
society. Without that you are just sailing in the
dark."
There are still defenders of
Assange out there who claim that the only reason
the man is holing up with a repressive populist is
because the United States will, if Correa rejects
his asylum plea, enforce a "temporary surrender"
mechanism in the US/Sweden bilateral treaty, which
allows for Assange's onward rendition to the US to
face potential espionage charges. (In case you
haven't been following developments, Assange lost
his legal battle with the British courts regarding
extradition to Sweden, and last week took refuge
in Ecuador's UK embassy).
The argument
seems valid; no man would willingly face charges
under the US's Espionage Act of 1917, mainly
because capital punishment is an applicable
sentence. Further, as the experiences in US
federal prison of Bradley Manning-the soldier who
provided the diplomatic cables to Wikileaks-has
shown, in this matter there may be fates worse
than death.
Yet it's undeniable by now
that Assange is scraping the bottom of the
sympathy barrel. The world's most powerful
English-medium newspaper brands, former supporters
of his including the New York Times and the
Guardian, have turned on him for good reason-the
values that he once held dear, the principles of
openness and transparency that he once espoused,
have been rendered empty by his latest choice of
ally. DM
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article is run courtesy of Daily Maverick. To
visit their site, please click here.
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