And why the British police were ready to spend ????16 million of public money besieging the embassy for seven years to enforce an extradition Swedish prosecutors seemed entirely uninterested in advancing (p188).
Ecuador, the only country ready to offer Assange sanctuary, rapidly changed course once its popular left-wing president Rafael Correa stepped down in 2017. His successor, Lenin Moreno, came under enormous diplomatic pressure from Washington and was offered significant financial incentives to give up Assange (p212).
At first, this appears to have chiefly involved depriving Assange of almost all contact with the outside world, including access to the internet, and telephone and launching a media demonisation campaign that portrayed him as abusing his cat and smearing faeces on the wall (p207-9).
At the same time, the CIA worked with the embassy's security firm to launch a sophisticated, covert spying operation of Assange and all his visitors, including his doctors and lawyers (p200). We now know that the CIA was also considering plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange (p218).
Finally in April 2019, having stripped Assange of his citizenship and asylum - in flagrant violation of international and Ecuadorean law - Quito let the British police seize him (p213).
He was dragged into the daylight, his first public appearance in many months, looking unshaven and unkempt - a "demented looking gnome", as a long-time Guardian columnist called him.
In fact, Assange's image had been carefully managed to alienate the watching world. Embassy staff had confiscated his shaving and grooming kit months earlier.
Meanwhile, Assange's personal belongings, his computer, and documents were seized and transferred not to his family or lawyers, or even the British authorities, but to the US - the real author of this drama (p214).
That move, and the fact that the CIA had spied on Assange's conversations with his lawyers inside the embassy, should have sufficiently polluted any legal proceedings against Assange to require that he walk free.
But the rule of law, as Melzer keeps noting, has never seemed to matter in Assange's case.
Quite the reverse, in fact. Assange was immediately taken to a London police station where a new arrest warrant was issued for his extradition to the US.
The same afternoon Assange appeared before a court for half an hour, with no time to prepare a defence, to be tried for a seven-year-old bail violation over his being granted asylum in the embassy (p48).
He was sentenced to 50 weeks - almost the maximum possible - in Belmarsh high-security prison, where he has been ever since.
Apparently, it occurred neither to the British courts nor to the media that the reason Assange had violated his bail conditions was precisely to avoid the political extradition to the US he was faced with as soon as he was forced out of the embassy.
'Living in a tyrannyMuch of the rest of Melzer's book documents in disturbing detail what he calls the current "Anglo-American show trial": the endless procedural abuses Assange has faced over the past three years as British judges have failed to prevent what Melzer argues should be seen as not just one but a raft of glaring miscarriages of justice.
Not least, extradition on political grounds is expressly forbidden under Britain's extradition treaty with the US (p178-80, 294-5). But yet again the law counts for nothing when it applies to Assange.
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