Wikileaks has become like the hydra with mirror sites springing up everywhere. US attacks on Wikileaks has become a game of ‘whack-a-mole’, they hit one and another pops up. Rather than concede, however, in an effort to hit something more tangible the state department has conflated Julian Assange with his legal counsel.
Dear Ms. Robinson and Mr. Assange:
I am writing in response to your 26 November 2010 letter to U.S. Ambassador Louis B. Susman regarding your intention to again publish on your WikiLeaks site what you claim to be classified U.S. Government documents.
As you know, if any of the materials you intend to publish were provided by any government officials, or any intermediary without proper authorization, they were provided in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action. As long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing.
Speaking to The Guardian, Assange’s lawyers Jennifer Robinson and Mark Stephens believe they are being watched.
“I’ve noticed people consistently sitting outside my house in the same cars with newspapers,” said Robinson. “I probably noticed certain things a week ago, but mostly it’s been the last three or four days.”
Robinson said: “By eliding client and lawyer, that was a very inappropriate attempt to implicate me. That is really inappropriate to come from the state department of all places; they understand very well the rules on attorney-client protocol.”
She said that although they had requested a public retraction from the state department, no answer had been received.
“It’s quite a serious situation,” she said, adding that, according to the UN’s Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, governments should ensure that lawyers “are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference” and that “lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients’ causes as a result of discharging their functions”.
Now we have a Swedish prosecutrix behaving badly and resurrecting allegations previously dropped. Now our own state department has sunk to the level of bullying lawyers for defending their clients!
The Cablegate memos reveal this is not the first time the US as inserted itself into the legal system of foreign countries. It has been revealed the US successfully pressured Spain to drop its investigation in the killing of a Spanish journalist by US forces. The memos also expose how the Obama administration interfered with Spain again to not enforce international law in the investigation of torture by the Bush administration.
The cat is out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube and taking out Assange, literally or figuratively, isn’t going to change anything now. One argument so often used by US officials to maintain our presence in Iraq when it was determined Saddam Hussein and Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction or anything to do with 9/11 was ‘right or wrong we are there, we may as well stay’.
The leaked information is now out there, so we may as well learn to live with it and stop insisting that keeping the public in the dark is somehow in our best interest.
