A US indictment of Julian Assange on espionage charges is believed to be imminent, a lawyer for the WikiLeaks founder said Friday.
"We are taking legal advice on the possibility of prosecution in light of high-profile public officials calling for his prosecution and rumors circulating in the US that a sealed indictment is being prepared, or may have already been prepared," Jennifer Robinson told the AFP news agency.
She added that any prosecution of Assange and the WikiLeaks web site for espionage would be a violation of the US Constitution.
"Our position is that any prosecution under the Espionage Act would be unconstitutional and call into question First Amendment protections for all media organizations," said Robinson.
Julian Assange remains behind bars at the Wandsworth prison in south London where he is being held on the basis of an extradition request from Sweden on trumped-up sexual misconduct charges. He was denied bail after voluntarily presenting himself to the police and has since been placed in solitary confinement with his access to his lawyers, the telephone and Internet strictly limited, more restrictive conditions than those applied to other prisoners.
The lawyer representing Assange in the extradition case reported that he has been denied access to his client until Monday, giving him less than 24 hours to prepare for a hearing scheduled Tuesday, when the WikiLeaks founder will return to court.
Both the Swedish caseà ‚¬" which was first dropped because of its patently spurious character and then reinstatedà ‚¬" and the denial of bail in Britain are inconsistent with normal legal practices. They strongly suggest that the actions taken against Assange are aimed at using the sex charges as a pretext for meting out political punishment and giving Washington time to concoct its own frame-up and present its own extradition request.
The Center for Constitutional Rights in the US issued a statement declaring itself "alarmed by multiple examples of legal overreach and irregularities in the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, especially given concerns that they are meant to clear the way for Mr. Assange to be extradited to the US via Sweden."
The statement continued: "Standard procedure in these cases is to call in a suspect for interrogation, and he has offered on numerous occasions to cooperate with the authorities. Similarly, a suspect who has surrendered, having never gone into hiding or attempted to flee, would normally be allowed to post bail. Yet Mr. Assange has been arrested and denied bail."
The Obama administration, the State Department and the Pentagon are intent on exacting revenge on Assange and WikiLeaks for having exposed US war crimes and criminal conspiracies against people in countries all over the world, including the US itself. These exposures did not begin with the latest release of diplomatic cables last month, but have been ongoing since April, when WikiLeaks released a video of a massacre of civilians in Baghdad by a US attack helicopter. Since then the site has also released tens of thousands of other documents detailing US killings of civilians and complicity in torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Speaking on Thursday in Washington after a meeting with ministers from the European Union, US Attorney General Eric Holder said that they had discussed WikiLeaks. "The hope here in the United States is that the investigation that we are conducting will allow us to hold accountable the people responsible for that unwarranted disclosure of information that has put at risk the safety of the American people," he said. Earlier in the week, Holder had announced "a very serious, active ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature" in relation to the Internet organization's disclosure of classified State Department cables.
An attempt to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917, a reactionary piece of law used in an earlier period to imprison American socialist and workers leader Eugene V. Debs and many other working class militants, would set the stage for a frontal assault on freedom of speech and other basic democratic rights in the US.
A report prepared this week by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the nonpartisan research arm of the US Congress, spells out the unprecedented character of seeking to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks for making classified information public.
US criminal statutes covering such information, the report notes, "have been used almost exclusively to prosecute individuals with access to classified information (and a corresponding obligation to protect it) who make it available to foreign agents, or to foreign agents who obtain classified information unlawfully while present in the United States."
It goes on to point out, "Leaks of classified information to the press have only rarely been punished as crimes, and we are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it."
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