‘Assanje’ – a farce in multiple acts.

Free at last! After three attempts Assanje is out of the slammer and is now comfortably ensconced in rural Suffolk. He is tagged and has to report to the turnip-tops every eight hours. Presumably the village booby will trundle down to the country mansion on his bike three times a day at 8 a.m, 4 p.m, and midnight. He has had to put up humungous bail, and when I read that Ken Loach and Bianca Jagger were amongst other lefty pond-life who had stumped up, I had a vision of him scarpering back to Oz, leaving them bereft of large quantities of drinking vouchers.

There was his brief outside the court, wearing a suit that transgressed the Obscene Publications Act and a tie that looked like the TV test card, complaining that his poor client had been held in conditions that were ‘Dickensian’. Funny; I thought that Newgate and the Bridewell had been closed years ago.

On BBC World News we had a phlegmatic Swede (good on phlegmatic, these Nordics) telling us without even a hint of a smile that the Swedes had nothing to do with the three extradition hearings. It was all down to the intellectually constipated Crown Prosecution Service. The Swedish prosecutor had no locus in the bail hearings. Yeah....right! The CPS went through no less than three bail hearings entirely off its own bat. So that’s all right then.

What he failed to explain was why the Swedes are going to so much trouble to extradite poor Julian on charges that they have not served on him. We don’t know for a fact what they are, except that they are sexual offences. Neither does he, which is an outrage and a denial of natural justice. It is said that the rape charge rests on the allegation that he had sexual intercourse without a condom whilst the woman was asleep. That must have been an exciting lay; he should ask for his money back! But then under the EAW the strength of the case is irrelevant. Welcome to Brave New World.

So the extradition hearings have nothing to do with Wikileaks, either; we must all be relieved to know that.

No wonder the figure of justice is blindfolded!

It seems that the US lawyers are now drafting charges under the Espionage Act 1917, so if A stays in Britain long enough they will get him under the extradition treaty. But since A was the procurer not the publisher we can then await warrants to be served on the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, and all the rest of the meeja which have published the leaks. Could be a long wait.

The main casualty of this affair will be transparency. Politicians and diplomats will be far more circumspect about what they commit to writing. The shredders will be working overtime. Files will be deleted big-time. Security will be tightened up, and there will be a tendency to revert back to the departmental secrecy which does not share information between agencies, the main failure of 9/11 in the first place. The plus-side of all this is the plain fact that, with the internet, blogging, social networking and the rest –facebook, twitter etc – our masters no longer have a stranglehold on information about what they get up to. We are the masters now – or will be.