Julian Assange saga just gets weirder

SHOULD you try to peer through the suspended animation currently encircling Julian Assange's medium-term future you might be tempted to punt that he won't be extradited to the US to face espionage charges.

You might go on to guess he could eventually find himself back in Sweden dealing with sexual molestation claims, allegations that could possibly - if Andrew Fowler's Four Corners of July 23 is a reliable guide - come to little.

Suggesting logical outcomes to the Assange affair is, of course, a hazardous business. The Assange saga has taken so many eccentric turnings since his WikiLeaks organisation released thousands of confidential US diplomatic cables two years ago it has become one of those stories that can, and frequently does, go just about anywhere.

There were very few predictions, for example, that Assange would one day find himself residing in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, even less that the British might storm said embassy in their zeal to pack him back off to Sweden.

Fowler, an experienced journalist and a friend and colleague on this journal in days of yore, imparted the strong impression the Sweden sex claims may be a bit dubious.

 Why the two Swedish women said to have been improperly dealt with by Assange would have continued to conduct what appeared to be normal relationships with him seems a bit of a mystery.

Assange notified authorities he planned to leave Sweden (on September 27, 2010) to return to his British base and was told that that was fine.

You could certainly have gained the impression the sex charges were hastily plucked from a convenient bottom drawer.

Thus it was that Four Corners left open the door for Assange's extradition to the USFowler pointed out Assange's New York lawyer, Michael Ratner, was convinced a grand jury was investigating Assange, then went on: "Four Corners has obtained a copy of a subpoena from a grand jury which is examining evidence for possible charges relating to 'conspiracy to communicate or transmit national defence information' and obtaining 'information protected from disclosure from national defence'. Critically, the subpoena contains the identifying codes, 10 and 3793."

Ratner: "There's a grand jury currently sitting in Alexandria, Virginia, and it's interesting the grand jury's number is 10, standing for the year it began. (There's) GJ, which is grand jury, and then 3793. Three is the conspiracy statute in the US and 793 is the espionage statute. So what they're investigating is 3793, conspiracy to commit espionage."

It isn't surprising that, in the Four Corners aftermath, a Labor MP, Melissa Parke, asked the US Attorney-General, Eric Holder, to say once and for all whether the US wanted to extradite WikiLeaks' founder. This, on the surface, shouldn't be too difficult for Holder to do. Because Jeffrey Bleich, the US ambassador to Australia, repeated to Fowler what he's previously told other interrogators: the US is quite definitely not interested in extraditing Assange.

It could be, of course, that Bleich is too far from the Washington action to be closely abreast of what's going on. But if he's well briefed and correct, there'd seem no good reason why Holder couldn't reinforce the ambassador's sentiments.

You have to ask: if the US is determined to extradite Assange, why must it be from Sweden?

As Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr has said, it might well have been easier, pre-Ecuador, to extradite him from Britain. Others maintain the extradition gate remains very much ajar. Another excellent Four Corners reporter, Quentin McDermott, went to the US in February last year to probe the situation of Bradley Manning, the young, jailed intelligence officer said to have borrowed or stolen the cables in the first place.

One of McDermott's interviewees was a Massachusetts computer researcher and Manning jail visitor, David House, who told McDermott: "The only conclusion I can reach is that this (incarceration) is torture ... You hear him (Manning) coming from a long way away, you hear the chains. He's unable to exercise, he's kept in his cell for 23 hours a day and the only exercise he gets is walking around an empty room in chains.

"I went and saw him again (in December 2010) and it was completely alarming, the transition. He was ashen-faced, had huge bags under his eyes and had trouble keeping up with topics of conversation, something that had never been a problem for him."  McDermott: "They (US authorities) want him (Manning) to do a deal? They want him to turn the tables on Julian Assange?"

House: " I think that's completely correct. The US government is . . . trying to take down the WikiLeaks organisation at all costs."

Well, we'll stay with instinct and suggest Assange being extradited to the US is unlikely.

Aside from Carr's point, mentioned above, Assange is an Australian and Australia is a staunch US ally. If Assange's legal future became a major talking point in this country, you could probably expect a bit of nationalism to intrude.

It's likely, though not certain, that Assange would be seen as wearing the white jersey and the US perceived as wearing a black one. In other words, it probably wouldn't transpire as a US public relations triumph.

The released cables can't be re-secretised. We know what they said, many had a wry chuckle over their contents, and that's where it stands.

What does seem fairly likely is that Washington has flirted heavily with the idea of extradition, then decided against it. It could well be satisfied that a strong, cautionary signal to other would-be leakers has now been well and truly delivered.

What may, or may not, occur in Sweden - assuming Assange does find himself back there - is another matter. It's a weird business