WikiLeaks Julian Assange held w/o bail until 14 December hearing

A UK judge has denied bail to Wikileaks’ Jullian Assange, and has set a date of 14 December to review the case.

Assange lawyers say they will again request Assange’s release on bail at that time

Meanwhile, Assange has been taken to Wandsworth prison, where he has reportedly not been allowed to see his lawyers, as the prison claims to have no facilities for visitors… It is apparently not a very nice place, even as prisons go.

Assange is being held on the basis of Sweden’s request for extradition on charges of having sexual intercourse without a condom, and earlier with a condom that broke — and without then consenting to be tested for sexually-transmitted diseases.

Meanwhile, prosecutors in other places — in particular, the United States — are continuing criminal investigations into Wikileaks activities, and possibly preparing other charges that might be filed against Assange who is now in custody, no longer in hiding or on the run.

A former U.S. Attorney General told The Guardian newspaper that “When one is accused of a very serious crime … it’s common to hold him in respect of a lesser crime … while you assemble evidence of a second crime.”

UPDATE: The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that “U.S. officials have been investigating whether Assange, as head of WikiLeaks, can be charged for disseminating sensitive documents, including detailed accounts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and embarrassing personal opinions of world leaders held by U.S. diplomats … The U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., and the FBI are conducting what Justice Department officials have described as an aggressive criminal probe that sources familiar with the inquiry say could lead to charges under the Espionage Act. Assange has yet to be formally charged; rather, he is still only being sought for questioning by Swedish authorities”. The same article reported that “if British authorities grant the Swedish request, Assange would be flown to a country that shares a significantly stricter extradition treaty with the United States. Swedish authorities said Tuesday that they would seriously weigh any request but noted that their treaty with the United States does not cover crimes that are political and military in nature.” So, this article noted, “Given the broader extradition treaty Washington enjoys with London, analysts say that going after Assange while he is still on British soil would prove the surer path”. This SF Chronicle article can be read in full here.

In its article, published today, The Guardian reported,  here, that yesterday’s UK Court bail hearing had been dramatic: “Despite Jemima Khan, former wife of Pakistan cricket captain Imran Khan, the campaigning journalist John Pilger, the film director Ken Loach and others offering to stand surety totalling £180,000 [British pounds], the judge said the Australian Assange’s ‘weak community ties’ in the UK, and his ‘means and ability’ to abscond, represented ‘substantial grounds’ for refusing bail … Others offering surety were Professor Patricia David, and the lawyer Geoffrey Sheen, president of Union Solidarity International, who both said although they did not know Assange they were concerned about human rights. An unnamed relative of Assange offered £80,000”.

It was explained in court yesterday, the Guardian noted, that “Assange is wanted in connection with four allegations including of rape and molestation. Gemma Lindfield, for the Swedish prosecutors, said the first involved complainant A, who said she was the victim of ‘unlawful coercion’ on the night of 14 August in Stockholm. The court heard Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner. The second charge alleged Assange ‘sexually molested’ Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her ‘express wish’ one should be used. The third charge claimed Assange ‘deliberately molested’ Miss A on 18 August ‘in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity’. The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on 17 August without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home”.

Put this way, it doesn’t sound quite like “consensual” sex, which is how many have described these encounters — though Swedish prosecutors are talking about acts allegedly committed on 14, 17 + 18 August, with two different women.

But, on the U.S. concerns — the leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, and earlier leaked field reports of U.S. military activity in Afghanisan and in Iraq — only a few hundred of the U.S. diplomatic cables that have caused the most recent reaction have been published so far by Wikileaks. Meanwhile, the publication is on-going.

Prior to its own publication of the documents, Wikileaks sent them to a selected group of major media organizations which have published their own news reports and analysis, commentary, and some copies of the classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

Assange is an Australian citizen, and when pressed he gave an Australian address to the UK court at yesterday’s hearing.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has spoken out to several news organizations, reportedly telling Reuters that ” ‘Mr Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorised release of 250,000 documents from the US diplomatic communications network … The Americans are responsible for that. I think there are real questions to be asked about the adequacy of their security systems and the level of access that people have had to that material over a long period of time. The core responsibility, and therefore legal liability, goes to those individuals responsible for that initial unauthorised release … There is a separate and secondary legal question … which is the legal liabilities of those responsible for the dissemination of that information, whether it’s WikiLeaks, whether it’s Reuters, or whether it is anybody else”. This was reported in another article in The Guardian, here.

Lawyer and commentor Glen Greenwald said yesterday in an interview on the U.S. radio program Democracy Now! that: “whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they’ve never been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. And yet, look at what has happened to them. They’ve been essentially removed from the internet, not just through a denial of service attacks that are very sophisticated, but through political pressure applied to numerous countries. Their funds have been frozen, including funds donated by people around the world for his – for Julian Assange’s defense fund and for WikiLeaks’s defense fund. They’ve had their access to all kinds of accounts cut off. Leading politicians and media figures have called for their assassination, their murder, to be labeled a terrorist organization … If they want to prosecute them, they should go to court and do it through legal means. But this extralegal persecution ought to be very alarming to every citizen in every one of these countries, because it essentially is pure authoritarianism and is designed to prevent the internet from being used as its ultimate promise, which is providing a check on unconstrained political power”.

But, putting a check on unrestrained political power is one thing. Dealing with the law can be quite another matter.

NBC’s First Read webpage analyzes some of the possible legal options apparently being examined by the U.S. here. According to this report, the options include the following:
(1) “government officials say the Justice Department is considering whether a federal law dealing with theft of government property would apply. Part of that statute makes it a crime to receive or keep property that’s known to have been stolen. The law applies to anyone who receives it with intent to ‘convert to his own use or gain’.”
(2) “Another [US] federal law makes it a crime to retain classified information that was obtained by improperly accessing it on government computers. The law applies only to the person who actually gets it from a computer, and does not directly criminalize retaining classified information that was obtained by someone else. But some legal experts think it could be used to charge someone who’s an accessory after the fact”.
(3) “on November 27th the State Department sent him [Julian Assange] a letter advising him that publishing further documents would ‘place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals — from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security’. Publication would also, the letter said, place military operations at risk and jeopardize US relations with other countries. The letter was clearly intended to defeat any subsequent argument by Assange that he had no idea the material could be used to injure the US. It’s worth noting that the letter, signed by Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, also said that the cables WikiLeaks was about to release were obtained illegally and that ‘as long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing’, a clear indication that some government lawyers have concluded that WikiLeaks is violating the espionage laws merely by retaining the cables”.

And, the New York Times blog, The Lede, has written here that “In that letter, however, Mr. Koh did not argue that publication of the documents by WikiLeaks, or any media organization, would be illegal. Instead, Mr. Koh wrote that the documents ‘were provided in violation of U.S. law’ to WikiLeaks, which means that the State Department considered the original leak of the documents to Mr. Assange’s organization to have been a criminal act. The letter added, ‘As long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing’.”

The U.S. State Department letter, which was apparently first published by Reuters, is also posted on The Lede here.