RS: Yes. I'm sure most people believe that in the United States; they've been told this over and over again. But then you write: "But all I found is that he consistently published true information of inherent public interest without any breach of trust, duty or allegiance." So that goes to this question: he didn't have an oath to the U.S. government; he was not given these secrets to preserve that oath and guard it. He was in the position of the New York Times or the Washington Post, getting the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. And you say: "Yes, he exposed war crimes, corruption and abuse, but let's not confuse national security with governmental impunity." And what is so shocking is that in the United States now, there are very few publishers and very few political people speaking out in defense of Julian Assange's right to publish material and make it available to the Washington Post, to the Guardian, to other mainstream journalists. Is that not true?
NM: That is -- that is a huge concern. And you know -- well, you've just recently had the story of the New York Times submitting its own articles to the U.S. government for clearance. I mean, you certainly have noted that as well. And so that's really, really worrying. We've had the raids on ABC News in Australia by the Australian federal police in relation to leaks of secret Australian government information that also showed evidence of abusive killing of civilians by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. So they raided the ABC News headquarters to find, you know, the sources and more information about that. So that is a really worrying development.
RS: So let's understand -- I'm talking to Nils Melzer, who is the human rights, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. And I dare say -- and you have a long history, decades, of looking into these kinds of issues for the Red Cross, for the UN, for NATO, for others. And your prejudice -- and I suspect that it's true of most well-intentioned people throughout what is called the West -- is that, OK, this happens in totalitarian countries. But we have restraints; we have checks and balances in what used to be called the free world. And what's happening here is you're describing, you know -- and it's interesting to see the UN taking a consistent position, so it's not just Saudi Arabia or China or so forth that you go after, but you have to raise questions throughout the world. And you know, here, this is an example where we're saying inconvenient truth -- to use Al Gore's old phrase -- inconvenient news, that's inconvenient to a government, if it happens to call itself a democracy like the United States or England -- then they can shoot the messenger. That's really what we're talking about. The crime of Julian Assange as you have written it, was not that he distorted the American election in some kind of way that compromises democracy, but rather, he might have informed the American electorate. He might have brought up inconvenient truth. Right? Because after all, in the WikiLeaks exposure there was what the Democratic National Committee had done to undermine Bernie Sanders' campaign; there was the account of Hillary Clinton's speeches to Goldman Sachs, which undermined her claim to be of a populist bent. And so it was inconvenient information that was released. And yet, clearly, that's what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects.
NM: You know, democratic elections in my country, in Switzerland, and certainly also in the U.S.and the nature of this is that you have an election campaign during which the candidates are exposed to increased scrutiny. So they have to expect that some journalist digs out, you know, true information that may be inconvenient to them, and will even time it very inconveniently. Journalists are not obliged to be impartial in elections. They just have -- well, in my view at least, they should be true; so the information they publish should be true. And the one thing that you cannot claim of WikiLeaks is that they ever published fake news; they don't. They don't interpret the news; they simply publish secret documents. And it's up to the public to interpret them. So I have no stakes in any elections. And you know, I've had my own row with the Trump administration over his, you know, encouragement of waterboarding and these types of things. So I'm no, you know, fan of the -- of this administration. But I'm just saying that the information that WikiLeaks and Assange published about Hillary Clinton was true information, and it did not take away the liberty of the U.S. voter to make up his mind and to decide which candidate he preferred. So if that information leads to her not being elected, that's just democracy. In my view. And so I'm not an expert on electoral processes, but it does not -- it does not point to interference with U.S. elections.
RS: Well, and also, you are an expert, because we claim in the U.S. it's part of an America-centric view, but we claim that our Constitution is the gold standard for the world. We claim limited government, checks and balances, an American refinement on what the Greeks and the Romans and everyone else left us, or Confucius and other strains of political philosophy. And these are supposed to be universal ideas. We're proclaiming them in Hong Kong right now, and elsewhere. And so what we're really talking about -- and it gets to the fourth point of your column, and I want to get people to read this column, "Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange" -- you can get it on Medium. I guess Medium is a self-publishing place; we're going to get to why you're there and not in the New York Times. But I want to get to this last point, which is the shoot-the-messenger point. And you're really quite compelling in this regard. You're not somebody who thought you would like Julian Assange. You bought the propaganda against him; you know, this egomaniac, holed up in this, unnecessarily in this embassy, and with his cat, and doing all sorts -- because there's all these rumor-mongering. And what you really have is a full-blown campaign to shoot the messenger. To, you know, distort the debate. And you end up talking about that in a very compelling way. You've actually met him, and you've examined the circumstance of his time at -- and you have defined this as psychological torture that he's been put through.
NM: Ah, yes. And you know, I knew when I was going to visit him, because I was so reluctant and careful initially, I had to have a very strong, objective evidence basis for whatever result that was going to publish afterward. So I took with me two very experienced medical experts, a psychiatrist and a forensic expert. Both of them have worked decades to examine torture victims in various, in various circumstances. So I took both of them with me, so I didn't just have one, but I wanted to have two independent medical opinions of very experienced experts. And we had four hours with Assange, and we spent three of those four hours on pure medical examinations, psychiatric examinations. And we applied recognized, universal standards and protocols, medical protocols for the examination of torture victims, to document and identify symptoms of torture, and to distinguish symptoms of torture from other medical, you know, symptoms that you would find with any prisoner. Any prisoner is stressed or depressed because he's in prison, right? So that's not torture. So these people know what they're doing. And both of them came to the conclusion that he shows all the signs of, that are typical for a person who has been exposed to psychological torture on a prolonged period of time. That was the conclusion, the medical, evidence-based, forensic results of this examination. As the Special Rapporteur on torture, I'm an international lawyer, so I'm now looking at -- well, he shows all these symptoms; that does not necessarily mean anyone wanted to torture him, yet; he just shows the medical symptoms. But then I had to look at, well, what could have caused these symptoms? Because you don't get these symptoms overnight; it takes years to develop these types of symptoms. For the last almost seven years, he has been locked up in the same room of the embassy. So we have a very controlled environment where we can count on the fingers of our hands the major factors that could have influenced his life and could have caused these symptoms. So -- so with a relatively high degree of certainty, we were able to identify the causes and effects. And so what I saw is that he has been exposed to a concerted and kind of sustained campaign of mobbing, first of all. Mobbing is something very serious; it's where you shame and insult someone, you intimidate people. But it's always the collective turning against an isolated individual. We know it from school; we know it from the workplace, from the Army, where the whole unit might turn against one member. It can cause people to commit suicide, even in this isolated environment. Now, in Assange's case, basically the whole world ganged up against him. So wherever he turned, except the Ecuadorian embassy, he was under threat. And he -- he knew he was not going to get a fair trial if extradited to the U.S. He knew he was not going to get a fair trial if extradited to Sweden, the way they prosecuted their trial. He knew he was not going to get a fair trial in the U.K. either. And what has been done to him since the arrest proves that point. And also, in the end, with the new president in Ecuador since 2017, the Ecuadorian government also turned against him and started harassing him inside the embassy. So he has been surveilled 24 hours a day, 24 hours seven, in his private rooms, ah, the video cameras, he had no privacy whatsoever for several years. He was -- he was threatened, so several officials in the U.S. called for his assassination; even prominent personalities in the U.K. did the same thing. He was ridiculed in countless media outlets, making fun of him; he was obviously vilified as a sleazy rapist. So this all sounds a bit not so serious, but if you're exposed to this as an individual, over several years -- and you don't have a family around you, you don't have a sane, protective environment around you -- it will cause very serious psychological consequences. And it actually destroys your personality. So it's -- it's actually quite easy to link the causes and effects in this case. And that obviously links up with the judicial persecution that we've just described before, and then also it's exacerbated by the fact that he is locked up in the embassy; he doesn't have access to a doctor when he had a tooth inflammation; he had to take very, very strong painkillers for several years. So all of these factors add up, add up, add up. And at some point, a person will break and develop serious psychological symptoms.
RS: Well -- I just want to push this a little further. Because you have devoted much of your adult life to examining this torture, violation of human rights, and so forth. And we indulge a convenient cop-out, which is we're always the lesser evil. Or we do it by mistake, or it's an aberration, or don't draw big conclusions from it. And so, you know, if another country in the world engages in this practice, then it's easy to condemn them. But the fact is that the U.S. has, in the matter of torture, set a pattern for the world. I mean, we have said when we feel we face this threat that we did after 9/11 -- which was not the biggest threat any country in the world ever faced. They've had enemies, every country has had enemies, and existential threats and so forth. But we said, after this 9/11 attack, you know, all restraints are off. All restraints are off. And we say it in pursuit of war, you know; the idea that the first casualty of wars is truth. You know, well, we have enemies; we get to lie about it. And that becomes a very dangerous narcotic, in a way. You know, England, for example; Sweden, United States. Yes, they make mistakes. But what you're really describing here is a systematic pattern of suppressing truth, maybe more effectively than even in an overtly totalitarian country. That seems to me what's happened. We are able to make a non-person -- we, I take collective responsibility -- the U.S. has been able to make a non-person out of Chelsea Manning and out of Julian Assange. They tried to do it with Ellsberg, and it was only a fluke in that trial because Richard Nixon, the president, had tried to bribe the judge with an appointment, that there was a mistrial; there was never really a resolution. But you know, we have here a test of whether you mean it by these checks and balances, or are they just a fig leaf?
NM: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I think it's very important that, you know, you don't need to like Julian Assange. You may even think that perhaps -- and you know, I don't know. Maybe he did commit some kind of a sexual assault at some point. Maybe he did, you know, do this, that and the other, break the rules here and there. I don't know, I'm not saying he is an angel. But I'm saying that what is being done with him stands in no proportion to whatever he could have committed. And that the motivation here is not to do justice; the motivation is to make an example of him so you can discourage others from following his example, from imitating what he has been doing. Because obviously, when you have platforms like WikiLeaks and systems where whistleblowers can submit secret information anonymously, it becomes extremely difficult for governments to control the information that goes out. And especially, obviously, information about wrongdoings, corruption, crimes, and so on. They can handle one WikiLeaks and one Assange, perhaps, but they won't be able to cope with 10,000 of them, you know, popping up throughout the world. So I think that's why not only the U.S.this is not just a U.S. worry. Why is the U.K. cooperating so closely with them? Why is Sweden cooperating so closely with them? Why is now Ecuador, you know, cooperating so closely with, and flunking all principles of due process of law, just to make sure that an example can be made out of Assange? Because governments the world over, they dislike these types of uncontrolled elements that will, you know, come up with secret information and publish it. And so my assessment really is that our democratic oversight seems not to function anymore. That's why we have organizations like WikiLeaks popping up and taking their place. If our media would function, if they would actually keep our governments under control, if the judiciary would keep our governments in control -- and actually prosecute torture -- if they did their job, we would need no WikiLeaks. But obviously, now we have these kind of rogue organizations coming up and filling that role, because the institutions we have created and appointed are not doing their jobs anymore.
RS: Well, I hate to say this to somebody who is as thoughtful and courageous as you, I think you are, I believe you are. And I know you're an expert on these questions. I think you're being too charitable to the past. And we all tend to do that. I -- you mentioned, you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Pentagon Papers. But they had printed lies about the Vietnam War; they had basically gone along with the official government account. Media, establishment media, generally in these Western societies, have gone along with the dominant narrative. And there was some room, some room to question, and sometimes they did. But you know, as they say, the My Lai massacre was revealed by Sy Hersh in an alternative publication, I think it was called Dispatch News, and then it got picked up. The Pentagon Papers required a whistleblower like Daniel Ellsberg to tell us what we really should have been told all along about why we were in Vietnam, and the fallacy of it. And maybe one positive thing to come out of this whole incident -- and maybe this is a good point to conclude -- maybe, yes, the internet has a lot of problems. The establishment looks at it and says, oh, it's out of control, fake news, blah blah blah. But Julian Assange, as you have pointed out, revealed not fake news -- he exposed fake news. He exposed the fake news that we don't torture. He exposed the fake news that we don't kill civilians. He exposed the fake news that -- I mean, all of those cables about what we said to the Saudis and what we said to other embassies -- that was real news. And it was real news that was very easy to conceal. Now, in the day of the internet, the real threat of -- and I'm going to say, it's not an accident or just, you know, why are they going after -- they're going after Julian Assange, and they will go after Edward Snowden if they can get their hands on him. And if the Chinese government had grabbed him they would have been very happy, and if the Russians had turned him over they would be very happy, so they wouldn't complain about totalitarian governments. And the real threat of an Edward Snowden, of a Chelsea Manning, of a Julian Assange is that in the day of the internet, as long as it remains relatively open, you can't keep these terrible secrets that if the public knew -- public anywhere knew -- they'd throw these guys out of power. Isn't that really what's at stake here?
NM: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, to also take this on a very generic point here, I think this is really not just about good people and bad people. We have to just realize it's about human nature. We know from neurological research that, you know, power intoxicates. Whoever you give unchecked power to, will abuse it at some point. It's -- you know, if you want to know what human nature is like, go on a highway, remove all the speed controls, tell people you're not going to be checked for speed limits -- who is going to respect a speed limit? You know, it's not because they're bad people; it's just because people, when they know they're not being controlled, well, they tend to use that, you know, to take advantage of that. And obviously, when you give to someone huge amounts of power and money, and you don't subject them to control by the judiciary or the media or the public, they will end up abusing it. So it's very important. It's not just a moral issue, it's very important as a global governance and national governance issue, that we ensure that there is scrutiny, the checks and balances work, and that there is transparency. The right to know the truth is absolutely crucial if we want to have a balanced and democratic society.
RS: Yes. And the other point that -- let me throw in as a little editorial -- ah, the internet is the worst and the best of all worlds. And if governments can control it and punish the dissenters on the internet, and hound them out of existence, ah, then the internet because an incredible, effective source of surveillance and intimidation. And if you have free spirits and a relatively open internet -- and certainly Julian Assange has been an incredible free spirit, and even in the annoying senses of those words -- and you can eliminate those voices, you have eliminated the prospect of this internet world being a new source of freedom, and instead it becomes a new source of intimidation, a very effective one. So I want to thank Nils Melzer. And you know, I haven't done you credit with the introduction and everything. But he's the Human Rights Chair of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. He's a Professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow. He has since November 2016, he has been the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. And he has really delved into this Julian Assange case. And I compared it to J'Accuse! from Emile Zola and the Dreyfus case. I think your work has really been the most significant on this case, and I am appalled that the media that benefited, made money off Julian Assange's leaks, and Edward Snowden's leaks, is so eager to turn its back on their news source, and a fellow publisher; that's what Julian Assange is. But that's all the time we have.
The article, "Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange," we'll have it here on our KCRW website and on other places; you can get it through Medium and read it yourself. Our engineers for KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. Joshua Scheer produced the show. A special thanks to our producer here at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Sebastian Grubaugh. And see you next week with another edition of "Scheer Intelligence."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
