WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Britain, May 19, 2017.

It has been six years since Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to seek asylum from possible extradition to the United States to face indictment under the US Espionage Act.

At the time, Assange, an Australian national, was wanted by Sweden for questioning over sexual offense allegations. Assange had also broken the terms of his UK bail. Since then, he has become even more controversial, having published US Secretary of State Hillary Clintons emails and internal emails from Democratic Party officials.

While some admire and others despise Assange, no one should be prosecuted under the antiquated Espionage Act for publishing leaked government documents. That 1917 statute was designed to punish people who leaked secrets to a foreign government, not to the media, and allows no defense or mitigation of punishment on the basis that public interest served by some leaks may outweigh any harm to national security.

The US grand jury investigation of Assange under the Espionage Act was apparently based on his publishing the leaks for which Chelsea Manning, a former US army soldier, was convicted. Her sentence was commuted.

The publication of leaksparticularly leaks that show potential government wrongdoing or human rights abuseis a critical function of a free press in a democratic society. The vague and sweeping provisions of the Espionage Act remain ready to be used against other publishers and journalists, whether they be Wikileaks or the New York Times.

Assange has agreed to surrender himself to the British police but only if he were granted assurances against extradition to the US, where he could face life in prison. He also offered to appear in Sweden if Sweden would offer similar assurances.

In 2016, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Assanges stay in the Ecuadorean embassy, enforced by the alternative of his potential extradition to the US, to be an arbitrary deprivation of liberty. Ecuador, offended by Assanges political comments, this year has denied him internet access and visitors, other than occasional contact with his lawyers. Ecuador denied Human Rights Watch permission to visit him this May. Concern is growing over his access to medical care. His asylum is growing more difficult to distinguish from detention.

The UK has the power to resolve concerns over his isolation, health, and confinement by removing the threat of extradition for publishing newsworthy leaks. It should do so before another year passes.

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UK Should Reject Extraditing Julian Assange to US | Human ...

Assange's immediate health concerns remain a mystery.

A vigil will take place Tuesday evening outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the health of its longstanding resident Julian Assange.

The vigil will be held between 6 and 8 p.m. local time and will be attended by Susan Manning, mother of Chelsea Manning, along with Peter Tatchell, Vivienne Westwood and Lauri Love.

Tuesday marks six years since WikiLeaks founder Assange first entered the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault charges. The charges have since been dropped, but Assange is still wanted in the UK for skipping bail in 2012. He is concerned that if he leaves the embassy the US may also seek to extradite him on espionage charges.

An international group of lawyers appealed to the UN's Human Rights Council this week regarding concerns that Assange's protracted confinement is having a severe impact on his physical and mental health.

"The UK shows a deliberate disregard for his medical needs by forcing him to choose between his human right to asylum and his human right to medical treatment," said human rights barrister Jennifer Robinson in a statement. "No-one should ever have to make this choice."

Robinson and another representative for Assange didn't immediately respond to a request for further details of his precise health concerns and their urgency.

The UK maintains that Assange's exile is self imposed and in February a judge upheld a warrant for his arrest. Ecuador also isn't thrilled at the prospect of him remaining in the embassy long term. Julian Assange's situation is "not sustainable", said the country's foreign minister in January.

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During World War II Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty was a huge critic of fascism and wound up in prison. In Oct. 1945 he became head of the Church in Hungary and spoke out just as strongly against Communist oppression. He wound up back in prison for eight more years, including long periods of solitary confinement and endured other forms of torture. In 1949 he was sentenced to life in a show trial that generated worldwide condemnation.

Two weeks after the trial began in early 1949, Pope Pius XII (having failed to speak out forcefully against the Third Reich) did summon the courage to condemn what was happening to Mindszenty. Pius excommunicated everyone involved in the Mindszenty trial. Then, addressing a huge crowd on St. Peters Square, he asked, Do you want a Church that remains silent when she should speak a Church that does not condemn the suppression of conscience and does not stand up for the just liberty of the people a Church that locks herself up within the four walls of her temple in unseemly sycophancy ?

When the Hungarian revolution broke out in 1956, Mindszenty was freed, but only for four days. When Soviet tanks rolled back into Budapest, he fled to the U.S. embassy and was given immediate asylum by President Eisenhower.

There the Cardinal stayed cooped up for the next 15 years. Mindszentys mother was permitted to visit him four times a year, and the communist authorities stationed secret police outside the embassy ready to arrest him should he try to leave. Sound familiar?

Where is the voice of conscience to condemn what is happening to Julian Assange, whose only crime is publishing documents exposing the criminal activities and corruption of governments and other Establishment elites? Decades ago, the US and civilized world had nothing but high praise for the courageous Mindszenty. He became a candidate for sainthood.

And Assange? He has been confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six years from June 19, 2012 the victim of a scurrilous slander campaign and British threats to arrest him, should he ever step outside. The US government has been putting extraordinary pressure on Ecuador to end his asylum and top US officials have made it clear that, as soon as they get their hands on him, they will manufacture a reason to put him on trial and put him in prison. All for spreading unwelcome truth around.

A Suppression of Conscience

One might ask, is unseemly sycophancy at work among the media? The silence of what used to be the noble profession of journalism is deafening. John Pilger one of the few journalists to speak out on Julian Assanges behalf, labels journalists who fail to stand in solidarity with Assange in exposing the behavior of the Establishment, Vichy journalists after the Vichy government that served ad enabled the German occupation of France.

Pilger adds:

No investigative journalism in my lifetime can equal the importance of what WikiLeaks has done in calling rapacious power to account. It is as if a one-way moral screen has been pushed back to expose the imperialism of liberal democracies: the commitment to endless warfare When Harold Pinter accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he referred to a vast tapestry of lies up on which we feed. He asked why the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of the Soviet Union were well known in the West while Americas imperial crimes never happened even while [they] were happening, they never happened.

WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if?

In an op-ed published several years ago by The Los Angeles Times, two members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Coleen Rowley and Bogdan Dzakovic, pointed out that If WikiLeaks had been up and running before 9/11 frustrated FBI investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks.

There were a lot of us in the run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages. But we worked for ossified bureaucracies incapable of acting quickly and decisively. Lately, the two of us have been wondering how things might have been different if there had been a quick, confidential way to get information out.

Fourth Estate on Life Support

In 2010, while he was still a free man, the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity gave its annual award to Assange. The citation read:

It seems altogether fitting and proper that this years award be presented in London, where Edmund Burke coined the expression Fourth Estate. Comparing the function of the press to that of the three Houses then in Parliament, Burke said: but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far then they all.

The year was 1787 the year the US Constitution was adopted. The First Amendment, approved four years later, aimed at ensuring that the press would be free of government interference. That was then.

With the Fourth Estate now on life support, there is a high premium on the fledgling Fifth Estate, which uses the ether and is not susceptible of government or corporation control. Small wonder that governments with lots to hide feel very threatened.

It has been said: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. WikiLeaks is helping make that possible by publishing documents that do not lie.

Last spring, when we chose WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for this award, Julian said he would accept only on behalf or our sources, without which WikiLeaks contributions are of no significance.

We do not know if Pvt. Bradley Manning gave WikiLeaks the gun-barrel video of July 12, 2007 called Collateral Murder. Whoever did provide that graphic footage, showing the brutality of the celebrated surge in Iraq, was certainly far more a patriot than the mainstream journalist embedded in that same Army unit. He suppressed what happened in Baghdad that day, dismissed it as simply one bad day in a surge that was filled with such days, and then had the temerity to lavish praise on the unit in a book he called The Good Soldiers.

Julian is right to emphasize that the world is deeply indebted to patriotic truth-tellers like the sources who provided the gun-barrel footage and the many documents on Afghanistan and Iraq to WikiLeaks. We hope to have a chance to honor them in person in the future.

Today we honor WikiLeaks, and one of its leaders, Julian Assange, for their ingenuity in creating a new highway by which important documentary evidence can make its way, quickly and confidentially, through the ether and into our in-boxes. Long live the Fifth Estate!

Eventually a compromise was found in 1971 when Pope Paul VI lifted the excommunications and Mindszenty was able to leave the US embassy. Can such a diplomatic solution be found to free Assange? It is looking more and more unlikely with each passing year.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the Presidents Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Reprinted with permission from Consortium News.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).View all posts by Ray McGovern

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