In November, someone leaked to The New York Times a batch of official documents about the repression of China’s Uyghurs. Imagine the leaker were an Australian living in London and that China sought to extradite him to face trial in Beijing. Imagine an Australian, living in London who posts material from the Indian cabinet about the repression of Muslims in Kashmir? What? No representations from our foreign minister while the leaker is winkled out of London into the arms of security forces in Delhi? Loading Israel and India have extensive nuclear weapons programs - each protected by ferocious domestic official secrets acts. “Think of the outcry if the Netanyahu or Modi governments attempted to extradite a British or US journalist to face life in jail for writing true things about nuclear arsenals”, wrote Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian. If the American bid succeeds, this extra-territorial reach will be brought home sometime in 2020 when we see Assange in shackles, escorted across a British airfield into a CIA aircraft to be flown to Virginia. There he will face a trial, part of it secret with a high likelihood of a 175-year sentence in extreme isolation, as close to the death penalty as one can imagine. Effectively, the death sentence. Whatever Assange did in 2010-2011 it was not espionage, and he’s not a US citizen. His actions took place outside the US. Under this precedent anyone, anywhere, who publishes anything the US state brands secret could be prosecuted under the US Espionage Act and offered to the maw of its notoriously cruel justice system.

American diplomats talk darkly about lives lost because Assange leaked unredacted material. But during the Chelsea Manning trial in 2013 a US brigadier general in counter intelligence was asked to nominate casualties caused by the leaks. First he said he knew of one, an Afghan national. Later he had to retract and say there was none. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell had said in 2010 “there was no evidence that anyone had been killed because of the leaks”. In 2010 an Australian Defence Department task force concluded WikiLeaks did not reveal any significant details about operational incidents involving Australians beyond those already public. More important than punishing Assange should be protection of media freedom, summed up in an heroic American achievement: the First Amendment to its constitution entrenching free speech. The WikiLeaks material is no different in principle from the Pentagon Papers leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg. Would anyone argue today we did not deserve to know how two American presidents kept the Vietnam War going after they had been advised it could not be won? The US Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment right to publish the material (a freedom-to-print drama captured in the stirring movie The Post with Meryl Streep playing publisher Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks as editor Ben Bradlee). Some American grievances against Assange are fed by the way WikiLeaks appeared to serve the interest of the Russian state when it intervened in the 2016 election. Brazen interference, and a mark against Assange. Still, wouldn’t American anger be better directed at fixing their electoral system with its creaky electoral college, designed in 1789, twisting a popular vote majority into its reverse? Or at the voter suppression laws and the brazen gerrymander of House boundaries? Cunning Russian Facebook posts and email leaks would not have worked their magic against healthy voter turn-out and a process run, not by partisan state officials, but something like our own Australian Electoral Commission.

Hard to think of a more effective way of creating a martyr than by pursuing Assange who has already paid a price for his poor judgment huddled in a single room for seven years. The last Lowy Poll showed that because of Trump, support for the US alliance had fallen from 78 per cent to 66 per cent and that only 25 per cent of Australians had confidence in the US President. Among Australians under 29 years it was almost non-existent. How better to seed sourness about the alliance than running a year’s trial in British courts against this Aussie maverick, followed by a battle in American courts, with liberal media defining it as an issue of freedom, transmuting him into a second Daniel Elsberg. Loading Foreign Minister Marise Payne is entitled to courteously remind Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Australia serves up a whopping trade surplus to the US ally, important to this President. We are a good ally to the point of giddy excess - dispatching a warship to the Gulf, risking a firefight with Iran. We sent trainers and planes into Iraq and Syria. We host two communications bases that probably make Australian territory a nuclear target. All said, we are entitled to one modest request: that in the spirit with which Barack Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning, and given President Trump’s own objection to “endless wars” in desert sands, it would be better if the extradition of Assange were quietly dropped. The US has almost 2.3 million prisoners in its jails. One less and the sky won’t fall in on the empire. And he is an Australian.