Assange Smear 7: “Well he jumped bail! Of course the UK had to arrest him.”
Never in my life have I seen so many people so deeply, deeply concerned about the proper adherence to the subtle technicalities of bail protocol as when Sweden dropped its rape investigation, leaving only a bail violation warrant standing between Assange and freedom. All of a sudden I had establishment loyalists telling me how very, very important it is that Assange answer for his horrible, horrible crime of taking political asylum from persecution at the hands of the most violent government on the planet to the mild inconvenience of whoever had to fill out the paperwork.
This smear is soundly refuted in this lucid article by Simon Floth, which was endorsed by the Defend Assange Campaign. Floth explains that under British law bail is only breached if there’s a failure to meet bail “without reasonable cause”, which the human right to seek asylum certainly is. The UK was so deeply concerned about this bail technicality that it waited a full nine days before issuing an arrest warrant.
After the Swedish government decided to drop its sexual assault investigation without issuing any charges, Assange’s legal team attempted last year to get the warrant dropped. The judge in that case, Emma Arbuthnot, has many shady establishment ties and just happens to be married to former Tory junior Defence Minister and government whip James Arbuthnot, who served as director of Security Intelligence Consultancy SC Strategy Ltd with a former head of MI6. Lady Arbuthnot denied Assange’s request with extreme vitriol, despite his argument that British law does have provisions which allow for the time he’d already served under house arrest to count toward far more time than would be served for violating bail. The British government kept police stationed outside the embassy at taxpayers’ expense with orders to arrest Assange on sight.
This, like America’s tweaking the law in such a way that allows it to prosecute him for journalism and Ecuador’s tweaking its asylum laws in such a way that allowed it to justify revoking Assange’s asylum, was another way a government tweaked the law in such a way that allowed it to facilitate Assange’s capture and imprisonment. These three governments all tweaked the law in unison in such a way that when looked at individually don’t look totalitarian, but when taken together just so happen to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing inconvenient truths.
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This is an excerpt from the mega-article “Debunking All The Assange Smears”.
