The 70 MPs who signed the letter to Javid hope to kill two birds with one stone.
First, they are legitimizing the discourse of the Trump administration. This is no longer about an illegitimate U.S. extradition request on Assange we should all be loudly protesting. It is a competition between two legal claims, and a debate about which one should find legal remedy first.
It weighs a woman's sexual assault allegation against Assange and WikiLeaks' exposure of war crimes committed by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. It suggests that both are in the same category, that they are similar potential crimes.
Unequivocal Response
But there should only be one response to the U.S. extradition claim on Assange: It is entirely illegitimate. No debate. Anything less, any equivocation is to collude in the Trump administration's narrative.
The Swedish claim, if it is revived, is an entirely separate matter.
That The Guardian and the MPs are connecting the two should come as no surprise.
In another article on Assange last Friday, the The Guardian -- echoing a common media refrain reported as fact a demonstrably false claim: "Assange initially took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden."
Assange and WikiLeaks always said that he entered the embassy to claim political asylum so as to avoid extradition to the U.S.
There could be no possible reason for its reporters to make this elementary mistake other than that The Guardian is still waging its long-running campaign against Assange, the information revolution he represents and the challenge he poses to the corporate media of which The Guardian is a key part.
Seven Years of Derision
For seven years the political and media establishments have been deriding the suggestion that Assange faced any threat from the U.S., despite the mounting private and public evidence that he did. Assange again has been proved conclusively right by current events, and they decisively wrong.
The Guardian knows that Assange did not need political asylum to avoid a sex case. So reporting this not as a claim by his detractors but as an indisputable fact is simple, Trump-supporting propaganda meant to discredit Assange propaganda that happily treats any damage to the cause of journalism as collateral damage.
Second, the only major politicians prepared to highlight the threats to Assange's personal rights and wider press freedoms posed by the U.S. extradition request are opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his ally, Diane Abbott, the Labour shadow home secretary. They have rightly noted that the U.S. is using the extradition demand to silence Assange and intimidate any other journalists who might think about digging up evidence of the crimes committed by the U.S. national security state.
Abbott commented last Friday that Assange's current arrest was not about "the rape charges, serious as they are, it is about WikiLeaks and all of that embarrassing information about the activities of the American military and security services that was made public."
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