From The Guardian we see confirmation of what everyone already believed would happen if Julian Assange was arrested. The US with the assistance of the Swedish and British authorities will hold him while they find a way to charge him with some offense, espionage, where he can be extradited to the US.
Michael Mukasey, a former US attorney general, said last night that American lawyers should try to extradite Assange to the US for betraying government secrets. “If I was still in charge there would have been an investigation,” he told the BBC’s Newsnight. “This is a crime of a very high order. Julian Assange has been leaking this information. He came into possession of it knowing that it was harmful.”
Mukasey, who stepped down from the post of attorney general last year, implied that the Swedish sexual accusations may only be a holding charge. “When one is accused of a very serious crime,” he said, “it’s common to hold him in respect of a lesser crime … while you assemble evidence of a second crime.”
[emphasis added]
Robert Scheer compares Assange’s actions and whether they qualify as ‘espionage’, to those of Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
Actually Ellsberg’s position, as morally strong as it was, was weaker than that of Assange, in that the former Marine and top Pentagon adviser was working at the government-funded Rand Corp., where he had agreed to rules about the handling of classified information, including the Pentagon Papers. Assange operates under no such restraints and is an even clearer example of the journalist who ferrets out news and attempts to report it. He had no special clearance that provided him access, and what he did was no different from what the editors of The New York Times did in publishing news that was fit to print.
As Scheer goes on to say, every journalist on the planet should be rallying to his aid.
