What an Assange extradition would reveal

Ian Fantom – May 19, 2022

1. Overview

The broad drift of the Julian Assange story is well-known in the anglosphere. He was the founder of Wikileaks, which subsequently published secret or confidential and incriminating documents from the USA and other countries. Wikileaks employed a system using encryption techniques, by which whistle-blowers could send documents confidentially and untraceably. It was not itself engaged in espionage or hacking. The treatment that Julian Assange is having to endure presents a threat to journalism itself, but there are also fundamental constitutional questions involved.

Wikileaks published evidence of US war crimes, and the US has been calling for his extradition from the UK. Allegations in Sweden of rape were never followed up by prosecution, but finally withdrawn. Their demand for his travel to Sweden was suspicious because he was only wanted so that he could be interviewed over the allegation, yet they refused to interview him in London when he was available. Julian Assange believed that they really wanted him over there in order to hand him over the the US.  He skipped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy, where he remained for over six years. He was given an Ecuadoran passport, yet with a change in regime in Ecuador he was handed over to the London police. He has since been held for three years under the harsh conditions of Belmarsh Prison, whilst his health has been seriously deteriorating, with, apparently, no medical care. The legal proceedings, including appeals, were spun out over this period, to a remarkable extent.

Julian Assange was working with The Guardian newspaper. So where are his former colleagues now? The words of Jesus come to mind: “Oh Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”. I remember a quotation from Julian Assange made in 2011. The video was recently reposted. Here is a transcript:

One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.

The media could have stopped it if they’d searched deep enough. If they hadn’t reprinted government propaganda they could have stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means basically: populations don’t like war. And populations have to be fooled into war. Populations don’t willingly and with open eyes go into a war. So, if we have a good media environment, then you also have a peaceful environment. Our number one enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the number one enemy that everyone is not understanding what is actually going on in the world. It’s only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now, question is: who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organisations that try to keep things secret, and those organisations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In this latter category it is bad media. It really is my opinion that the media in general are so bad, we have to question whether the world wouldn’t be better off without them altogether. There’s some very, very fine journalists, and we work with many of them, and some fine media organisations, but the vast majority are awful, and so distortive to how the world actually is, that the result is we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

The mainstream media have indeed forsaken Julian Assange. Where is the National Union of Journalists on this? They pay lip-service to supporting Julian Assange, but it has been overwhelmingly their members who have forsaken him. Why are they not rising up against such a massive attack on journalism in the UK?

It’s not as if they don’t know the sort of things that are going on. I once attended a seminar at the Headquarters of the National Union of Journalists in London. The central them was the truthfulness of the mainstream media. This was just after the 2009 publication of Nick Davies’s book ‘Flat Earth News’, which was on sale at the book stall at the back of the hall, together with ‘A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power’ by David Miller and William Dinan.

One journalist said words to the effect, “Do you realise that we were responsible for the Iraq War?” There were some murmurs of agreement, and no-one disagreed. There seemed to be an atmosphere of acceptance.

Another journalist said that in the BBC they had been given instructions not to check the facts behind incoming reports, if they came from official sources. That meant that all BBC journalists were becoming mere propagandists for the government rather than genuine journalists.

2. On campaigning techniques

In 1972 I organised a Press and Public Relations Committee for The British Esperanto Association. We founded an all-party Parliamentary Group, which in 1974 became the largest grouping of MPs in Westminster. We achieved that by applying a little-known technique, which I had taken for granted in those days. It’s called ‘listening’.  Any PR campaign has to be sensitive to everyone’s opinions and criticisms. Nowadays the attitude often seems to be: “Cooperate and don’t criticise”. But cooperation needs constant two-way communication, including critisising. Criticisms have to be dealt with.

Some thirty years later I found myself cancelled by some of the very people I had been working with in the 1970s, after I had discovered evidence of concealment of funds, and the membership started to plummet. Suddenly, all the enigmas from past decades started to make sense. Then I became involved in the 9/11 Truth movement, and constantly had a sense of déjà vu. It seems that signs of infiltration were widespread. Then I could see how skilled the operators were in the art of creating a furore out of absolutely nothing. It had happened to me, it had happened to others in my studies, and it is now happening massively to Julian Assange.

A good general in a war, they say, should be able to read the mind of his opposite number. That is a key piece of advice from the standard military text book ‘The Art of War’, by Tzu Sun, writing in the Chinese Ming dynasty. This is important in understanding the cancel culture lobby, which is closing down meetings and cancelling individuals. Once we get into their mindset at the top level, we can begin to understand what their interests are, and what their sensitive spots are. Then we can have some idea on how to deal with them.

3. Undermining of the rule of law and of the British Constitution

I see the Julian Assange affair as representing the top end of the cancel culture campaign. It ranges from the dregs of society, as shown by the aggressive facial gesture of one of their street mob through the glass of the London conference centre Diorama, when they closed down our Keep Talking meetings there, to the very top of the judicial system in the UK. In the Diorama case there were apparently brainless thugs shouting out ‘Fascists’ from Antifa, Hope Not Hate, and, believe it or not, the RMT Union, with the police standing aside, but not letting anyone into or out of the building, thus closing our meeting down. In that we could see that the ‘cancel culture’ culture must have gone up to management level in the police force. The cancel culture mob that cancelled my long-standing involvement in the Esperanto movement in 2006 was a lot more sophisticated, led by professors and academics, behaving very unprofessorially, even childishly. I can now see a continuity right to the top of the judicial system.

If you are British will remember the Supreme Court’s ruling against Boris Johnson in the Prorogation of Parliament case. Parliament was stymied as a result of sabotage by the anti-Brexit crowd, and so Boris prorogued Parliament early. The judgment by the Supreme Court was announced in a document with a very long preamble, undoubtedly aimed at the general public rather than the legal profession.

I wish to quote two consecutive sentences from Paragraph 39 of that report. The first is:

Although the United Kingdom does not have a single document entitled ‘The Constitution’, it nevertheless possesses a Constitution, established over the course of our history by common law, statutes, conventions and practice.

OK. What are those documents? How many people who have not dedicated themselves to a study of the British Constitution will be aware of which documents they are. Was the Treaty of Lisbon before Brexit part of that Constitution? In any case, I am unclear on which definition they are taking for ‘common law’. Is it the current legal definition, meaning that it is based on legal precedents, or is it the previous meaning, still understood by many outside the legal profession, of “ancient unwritten universal custom”. The fact that this is taken from a document by the Supreme Court would suggest the former; the inclusion of the word ‘practice’ would imply that they are putting the two together. Even here we seem to have confusion. What are these ‘practices’?

I asked some colleagues in different countries who, in their countries, had the power to decide on military action abroad. A colleague in Moscow replied:

The President, with the obligatory immediate confirmation of the Federal Council (=Senate), with a simple majority of votes out of all senators. Articles 87 and 102 of the constitution.

Other replies from several countries were broadly similar.

I think when I tell them the situation in the UK they will be amazed. Our Parliament has no formal say in initiating military action abroad. Only the Prime Minister can do that, by invoking the Royal Prerogative. Once people start querying our Constitution, such things will inevitably be talked about, here and abroad. Yet the UK has been boasting of pride in the rule of law, and imposing such values of democracy on ‘dictatorships’ abroad. What will that do to Britain’s image abroad? We have here in the UK an ‘elective dictatorship’.

I first heard the suggestion that we were in danger of becoming an ‘elective dictatorship’ from Lord Hailsham’s Dimbleby lecture on BBC4 Radio in 1976 but the full implications of this were not clear to me until I started digging deeper on hearing that Theresa May had described herself as ‘the Queen in Parliament’.

In 2013 Parliament rejected a motion to approve military action in Syria, and when the vote was announced, the leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, asked: “On a point of order, Mr Speaker. There having been no motion passed by this House tonight, will the Prime Minister confirm to the House that, given the will of the House that has been expressed tonight, he will not use the royal prerogative to order the UK to be part of military action before there has been another vote in the House of Commons?”. The Prime Minister gave that assurance.

Later, after the government had admitted to having bombed targets in Syria, I wrote to the Queen, asking whether she had given agreement to the bombing by the British military in Syria. I received a reply from the Queen’s Deputy Correspondence Coordinator, saying: “While careful note has been taken of your enquiries, I should explain that as a constitutional Sovereign, Her Majesty acts on the advice of her Ministers and therefore would not comment on matters of this nature”. In other words, the Queen does whatever her ministers tells her to do, which presumably means that she has given permission under the royal prerogative, but as an ordinary citizen it’s none of my business.

Overwhelmingly the British public understand by ‘Parliament’ the two chambers, one elected by the people, and the other appointed. Yet all we had to do to see through that was to look up ‘Parliament’ in Wikipedia, to see that there are actually three elements in Parliament. It’s a trinity, like Christianity. Wikipedia states: “Parliament is bicameral but has three parts, consisting of the Sovereign (Queen-in-Parliament), the House of Lords, and the House of Commons (the primary chamber).”

A page on the UK Parliament’s website dated 7 June 2007, but later deleted, was headed ‘Parliament and Crown’, and it explained: “Along with the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the Crown is an integral part of the institution of Parliament. The Queen plays an essential role in opening and dissolving Parliament and approving Bills before they become law.”

There is occasional talk in our mainstream media of the separation of powers. But the concept of Queen-in-Parliament makes a nonsense of the idea of separation of powers. The Wikipedia entry for ‘Queen-in-Parliament’ clearly stated: “The concept of the Crown as a part of parliament is related to the idea of the fusion of powers, meaning that the executive branch and legislative branch of government are fused together. This is a key concept of the Westminster system of government, developed in England and used across the Commonwealth and beyond. It is in contradistinction to the idea of the separation of powers.”

But the Supreme Court ruling document went on to state:

Since it has not been codified, it has developed pragmatically, and remains sufficiently flexible to be capable of further development.

What are they saying here? The advantage of not having a Constitution document is that it is ‘flexible’! That can only mean that it is flexible for those like themselves, who are in a position to flex it. That’s not a Constitution for or of or by the People. It becomes a tool of repression.

The Julian Assange case is an extreme example of the flexing of the British Constitution, which takes it beyond the limit of credibility.

It seems to me that the true decision-making process in issues of war and peace is being deliberately concealed from the public, and that the public ignorance that Julian Assange referred to has been generated deliberately by the Powers That Be.

This is not just a fusion of powers; it’s a deliberate confusion of powers.

4. On being a good general

I said earlier that a good general will read the mind of his opposite number. So what will be the mindset of the decision makers in government who now have to decide whether or not the Home Secretary should sign that extradition warrant?

The Cabinet is not a Charity; it is a business. People don’t go into the Cabinet for the good of the people; they get onto the Cabinet out of ambition. What matters to them is not morality, but what is ‘seen to be’. Cabinet ministers like to look as if they are in charge, when they are mere PR people, getting the public to accept whatever they are told by the Grey Cardinal, as he/she would be called in some languages. That’s the one who really runs things from behind the scenes, perhaps in a grey suite, whilst the Cardinal, dressed in red robes, appears to be in charge. In English we use the term ‘éminence grise’ (though I don’t know what the plural is in English, so I’ll stick to the more comprehensible ‘grey Cardinal’). We even used to have an expression ‘the men in grey suits’, until that became non-PC.

So who is the Grey Cardinal in the British Cabinet now? From various accounts – and no pun is intended – it is Civil Servant Sue Gray. She is the Second Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet, supposedly a non-political office. According to Wikipedia:

Gray has been portrayed as relatively unknown but highly influential, and has been described as “an enigma”. In 2015, a profile by Chris Cook, then policy editor for the BBC’s Newsnight, claimed that she was “notorious… for her determination not to leave a document trail”, had advised special advisers how to destroy emails through “double-deletion” and made at least six interventions “to tell departments to fight disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act”. She was described by former prime minister Gordon Brown, in his memoir, as someone who could be counted on for “wise advice when – as all too regularly happened – mini-crises and crises befell”. Rajeev Syal in The Guardian described her as “an uncompromising operator”. Political journalist Andrew Gimson wrote: “All power to the Civil Service is her modus operandi. She owes her allegiance to the permanent government and the deep state.” Former cabinet minister Oliver Letwin wrote of her: “Unless she agrees, things just don’t happen. Cabinet reshuffles, departmental reorganizations, the whole lot — it’s all down to Sue Gray”.

So does that apply to Partygate? That’s the current affair concerning parties in Downing Street and elsewhere at a time when the pubic was being held in Lockdown, with laws limiting public or private meetings, and under which many people were suffering. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were fined for breaking the very law that they had introduced, together with 81 others.

Sue Gray was appointed to head the inquiry into Partygate when the First Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet, Simon Case, reclused himself from the inquiry amid reports that his own office had also held a party, and responsibility for the inquiry was handed to Sue Gray.

So what did Sue Gray know, and when? Was she present at any of the parties? They won’t find a paper trail or emails proving that, but they will not want public attention to be focussed on such questions. This looks to me very much like a setup, designed to flex the system of government for themselves and back up their friends.

The extradition of Julian Assange would attract public attention to such very flexing of the British Constitution. Already Britain’s credibility abroad is under severe strain. What happens when Muscovites learn of Britain’s elective dictatorship, when their government is constantly describing Putin as a dictator? What would this do to confidence in the UK in the British judicial system. To me it would say that it is probably generally honest at the bottom, and thoroughly corrupt at the top – just like other British institutions seem to be.

But most importantly, what would that do for Sue Gray’s reputation? She could have to recluse herself from the Partygate investigation. She may even have to step down from her role in the Cabinet Office.

That is why I wrote not to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, pleading with her not to sign the Julian Assange extradition warrant, but directly to Sue Gray herself via the Cabinet Office, pointing out such things. She should not advise Priti Patel to sign that extradition warrant, because that would undermine everything she and the proud British political elite have ever stood for – or so they have been claiming.

Perhaps I should have written directly to Priti Patel, too, pointing out her known associations and vested interests in the anti-Assange cancel culture lobby, but I ran out of time. I did write to my MP, a Labour leadership loyal, who mildly acknowledged bias in the media, but thought it would be wrong to comment whilst the affair is still in the hands of the judiciary. I take the opposite view, that it is for the moment in the hands of the politicians, and that it is their duty to express themselves on this issue. But the point of my letter to her was that it would neither be in her interests, nor those of her party, to be seen to be on the wrong side of history.

By carrying out this study, I concluded that the judicial system at the top level is even more corrupt than I had previously imagined, and that there should now be a concentrated effort to cancel the cancel culture mob at all all levels, from the grimacing street thugs right up to the heart of the British judicial system. In the Vatican Archbishop Viganò is calling for an ‘Anti-Globalist Alliance’ to Stop the Enslavement of Humanity. Can likeminded people, despite their very different political and religious philosophies, rise to that challenge? The Julian Assange extradition case would seem to be the issue to concentrate on at this moment.

5. Appendix: Letter to Sue Gray

Sent by email via the Cabinet Office on 27 April, 2022:

Dear Sue Gray,

I write to you as a Civil Servant with influence in Cabinet Circles, and I urge you to consider carefully the constitutional implications if the Home Secretary were to sign the extradition warrant relating to Julian Assange.

The Julian Assange case by any standards is truly shocking. There can be no good reason for keeping a remand prisoner in prison under such circumstances for so long, only to face extradition under an unequal extradition treaty with a country which also has held remand prisoners for years in a torture centre.

But this isn’t just a case of morality. There are wider issues even more fundamental than the implied intimidation of journalists and the loss of diversity of information sources and interpretations throughout the Establishment media, which is now widely recognised. There are constitutional implications.

There was a time when in this country we were proud of our judicial system, believing it to be the best in the world. But times are changing.

Imagine if Julian Assange were to be extradited to Brussels, or The Hague, under the Human Rights Act, facing almost certain death in prison. There would be an outcry throughout our country, and the abolition of the Human Rights Act would follow as night follows day.

Yet UK citizens have effectively become subject to US Federal Law, with no consultation, and no general support, by an unfair and unequal extradition treaty. To extradite Julian Assange to a country which runs an extrajudicial torture centre in Guantanamo Bay cannot be seen to be fair justice either. If Julian Assange does die in prison, either in the UK or the US, then the penny will drop amongst the so-far silent majority. There will be widespread allegations of judicial murder, and quite rightly so.

The Supreme Court, in the preamble to their ruling on the prorogation of parliament when the Prime Minister was facing a deadlocked Commons, stated that since our Constitution has not been codified, it remains “sufficiently flexible” to be capable of further development. That very flexibility is now allowing the Constitution to be flexed to the limit in the case of Julian Assange.

There are also serious doubts relating to the impartiality of the High Court’s judge, and former Chief Magistrate in Westminster, Lady Arbuthnot, the chief judge who conducted the trial for the extradition of Julian Assange. She is married to Lord James Arbuthnot, a well-known Conservative ‘hawk’ and former Minister for Defence Procurements, with links to British and US intelligence. Did Judge Emma Arbuthnot have a conflict of interest here? In 2020, she refused recusal. Did Assange’s lawyers issue a request for her recusal?

I understand that Lord Arbuthnot is, among other things, Chairman of the British Advisory board of Thales, a French multinational which specialises in aerospace military systems, and a member of Montrose Associates, which specialises in Strategic Intelligence. Lord Arbuthnot is also part of the Henry Jackson Society, an influential transatlantic think-tank linked to the US Government and Intelligence Agency, which has called Assange “bonkers and paranoid”. Last July, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at a round table of the Henry Jackson Society in London. He was in 2017 the Director of the CIA, and he accused WikiLeaks, founded by Assange, of being “an enemy spy service”. The Henry Jackson Society led the same campaign accusing Assange of “sowing doubts on the moral position of Western democratic governments, with the support of autocratic regimes”. Home Secretary Priti Patel, who is now responsible for the extradition order of Assange was until recently on the political board of the Henry Jackson Society, alongside Lord Arbuthnot. These facts are now coming to light.

It is looking as if Lady Arbuthnot is essentially connected to a pressure group which is conducting a pounding campaign for the extradition of Assange, directed by Lord Arbuthnot and other influential characters.

As far as is known, Lady Arbuthnot has never declared any conflicts of interest in the case and has never formally recused herself, yet the Guide to Judicial Conduct, at least in the revision of March 2018, states in the introductory text: “Judicial independence, impartiality and integrity provide judges with a guide, not only as to the way they discharge their judicial functions, but also as to how they conduct their private lives to the extent that this affects their judicial role. They remain at the heart of this Guide and at the centre of every judicial officeholder’s conduct”. The body of the report, under ‘Impartiality’, states: “It follows that judges should, so far as is reasonable, avoid extra-judicial activities that are likely to cause them to have to refrain from sitting because of a reasonable apprehension of bias or because of a conflict of interest that would arise from the activity”. And under a heading ‘Dealing with Conflicts of Interest’ the Guidelines state: “Whilst the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office ( JCIO) would not consider a complaint about recusal as it relates to a judicial decision, the JCIO would investigate an allegation that a judicial officeholder had not disclosed a potential conflict of interest”. Under a heading ‘Universities, schools etc’, which considers an area where contentious issues are likely to arise, the report states: “Any conflict of interest in a litigious situation must be declared”.

It has been reported that Lady Arbuthnot stepped aside from directly hearing the case because of a “perception of bias”, but it was not elucidated what this related to. This refusal means Assange’s defence team cannot revisit her previous rulings. A Freedom of Information request sent by Declassified to the UK Ministry of Justice (MOJ) in August asking what this “perception of bias” pertained to — and whether Lady Arbuthnot had played a role in appointing the junior judge now ruling in the case — was rejected.

The very ‘flexibility’ of the British Constitution, and the issues of possible vested interests in those implementing the judicial system, which is supposed to work according to that Constitution, is likely to be very damaging to Britain’s reputation abroad, and to undermine confidence amongst the British public in the rule of law. The Partygate issue has already done much damage. It should be clear not only that leading politicians, and possibly Civil Servants, were not only behaving hypocritically, but that they could not have believed in the mortal dangers involved that they had been conveying to the public.

Further erosion to public confidence in our judicial system will not be in the interests of the British government, nor of Her Majesty’s Opposition. I urge you to do nothing to encourage the Home Secretary to sign that extradition warrant, which so easily could be seen as effectively a death warrant.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Fantom