No escape for Assange, but we let a torturer go.

Pinochet

I can’t help comparing the hoo-ha over Julian Assange with that stain on the reputation of the Blair government, their failure to extradite General Augusto Pinochet in 2000 to Spain to face charges of torture.

I am as dubious as anyone about the case against Assange.  The charges against him rest largely on him not using a condom during consensual sex with two women, one  of whom threw a party for him after the event.  Both women are linked to the US security services, apparently.  But of course, charges of rape – even if that country’s definition of rape seems to be totally at odds with anything we would understand the term to mean – are hugely serious, and must be investigated.  Assange must answer the charges, and has offered to do so if Swedish officers will come to the UK or if they will guarantee him safety from extradition to the US.  They have refused.

But it’s nonsense to say it’s just about that: it is absolutely clear that the US has some stake in this, and will apply for Assange’s extradition when he is in Sweden.  We’ve already seen that, while refusing to acknowledge international law in a whole raft of ways, such as the criminal court in the Hague, the US believes its law can be exported to other judicial systems; hence their demand for the extradition of hackers from the UK.  In effect, international law for the US consists of US law being applied to preserve US interests wherever it wishes.

William Hague’s horrible “there will be no escape” pronouncements, then, are all part of keeping the US happy.  It has nothing to do with international law or extradition treaties; it’s all about what the US wants.  It was exactly the same in 2000, when, despite the highest court in the land ruling that Pinochet should be extradited to Spain to face torture charges and despite a swathe of international courts and governments supporting that, Jack Straw delayed and delayed and delayed the extradition until doctors could concoct a case for him being too ill to go to Spain.  Funny – he was too ill to go to Spain, but well enough to travel to Chile, which is a bit like me saying the journey to Edinburgh is a bit wearing, so I’ll go to Berlin instead.

But of course, Pinochet was a pal of George W. Bush, seen as a still  influential US ally amongst the red threat in South America.  There was a message to be sent out, since no dictator would ever cooperate with the US again if they were going to be held responsible for crimes condoned and actively supported by the US in the future.  Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher saw him as the man who was willing to turn his country into one of the first testbeds of the Friedman economics that has dominated the world since the 1970s.  There was no way the politicians were going to accede to the demands of the law in that case; Pinochet had to be protected.

So: if it is permissible to let a torturer slip through the legal net, why is the government so vexed about the story of an albeit rather arrogant guy who might have slipped up with a burst prophylactic?  Of course, it’s to do with the establishment.  Pinochet was part of it, part of the global power elite who are prepared to repress and torture and kill to maintain the status quo;  Assange threatens it by providing a mechanism by which their grubby secrets – great and small – can be washed in public.

And by playing up the charges against Assange, it obviously draws attention away from and discredits Wikileaks.

The messenger is being shot.  Just what Pinochet would have wanted.