The man who was Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London today by some plain-clothes police officers from the Met. He looked nothing like his picture.
Edward Snowden claimed they were "secret police" and declared it a "a dark moment for press freedom" from his perch under the asylum granted by ex-secret policeman, Vladimir Putin, who actually kills journalists who displease him. The tumbling whirl of irony swallows all laughter.
He was taken to Court to appear, charged with the crime of failing to surrender to the court, dating from 2012. He somehow pleaded 'not guilty', despite having just spent almost seven years hidden in an embassy to avoid justice, while waving and giving thumbs-up to the gallery. The judge called this "the behaviour of a narcissist" and it is difficult to argue with that. It is also difficult to argue with his being found 'Guilty', as he soon was.
Wikileaks has accused Ecuador of "betraying" Assange, which is rich, as Wikileaks had recently produced leaked documents damaging to Ecuador's government. The truth is, he has been goading them for years, and finally they have had enough and sent him packing.
I wonder if he was acting out of a sub-conscious desire to be thrown-out? Or perhaps a conscious desire, so he would be able to claim it was somehow illegal or unjust for his asylum to be rescinded. Playing the victim has long been his modus operandi, and he would not be able to if he had simply walked out into the London air.
He is either too much of a deluded narcissist, or too little of a man, to leave the embassy on his own accord to face justice. However, I am sure that today, in the long-run, will count as a great day for Julian Assange, because today he is out of purgatory.
His long confinement is over. Julian Assange is finally free from the Embassy - and the Ecuadorian Embassy is free of him. He is now in the hands of the criminal justice system of the United Kingdom, which has a decent reputation for protecting free speech.
But the case of Julian Assange is not about free speech - it could have been, had he surrendered to the courts in 2012, but that time has long-since passed.
There has been an extradition request from the US, relating to 'helping' Chelsea Manning break password protection to access classified files. If that request is accepted, if he is then tried and convicted, if he has no successful appeal, if he is given and serves the full sentence of 5 years, and if that is on top of the 12 months given by the UK for absconding, then he will still spend less time in jail than he spent in the embassy.
As I have always said: he would have been better off leaving the embassy years ago, ending his own confinement, and submitting himself to the justice system, rather than behaving as if he were above the law.
The investigation of rape accusations in Sweden have never fully gone away, either - though they were reported to be 'dropped', they were really put on hold. “If he, at a later date, makes himself available, I will be able to decide to resume the investigation immediately.” Said the Swedish prosecutor.
Assange is now available, so the case can be resumed. It is down to the Swedes what happens next in that case. I would not like to guess what will happen, but they might be granted extradition, so that he can finally face his accusers - one of whom is today pushing for exactly that.
In my mind, that has always been the crux of this story - an accused rapist, using the privilege of being a celebrity white westerner, has been hiding under asylum laws from two women. These women accuse him of raping them - one saying he lied about using a condom, the other saying he started having sex with her while she was asleep, and ignored her when she said "No."
The behaviour of Wikileaks towards certain public figures - of taking their personal correspondence and exposing them without their consent - is too reminiscent of rape to ignore. He may have embarrassed people like Hillary Clinton, but he never revealed her as a criminal, despite using the most invasive tools. He did it to exercise power over her, and that is the act of a rapist.
The charges in the US are, in contrast, far more noble crimes. The US under George W. Bush went down a road of torture and war, and there are many people walking the earth today who are guilty of crimes that Assange exposed. Manning is a hero in my eyes for having been a whistle-blower. Assange could have been, too. But helping Chelsea Manning to break password protection is yet another betrayal of trust - if proven true, he did not look after his source, instead he used her to advance his own agenda, in the process helping to condemn them both.
After this, his career veered towards corruption, towards greedily and unquestioningly publishing stuff that was more and more being dictated from the Kremlin - I don't know if he was unwittingly helping them, or if it was his intention, but he did turn down the chance to expose Russian corruption, he did redact information that exposed Russian corruption, and eventually he committed the worst crime imaginable by assisting the election of Donald Trump, and condemning the world with a hateful madman in the White House.
I see nothing in any of the charges against him that have anything at all to do with free speech.
All I see are the actions of a narcissist, who never thought he would be judged like everyone else, who never thought that the law applied to him, who never thought he would be exposed to his own crimes.
Like Dorian Gray, now the painting is out of the attic. Now we get to see who he really is.
Now we see him crying 'betrayal!' at the people who took him in, who he repaid with threats and with leaks; now we see him being called to Sweden to face the women who say he betrayed them; now we see him being called to America to face justice with the soldier he betrayed - because he betrayed her, too; now we see him in the sunlight and he seems small, and quite see-through.
Now we see him and now he sees him, too. That is why today is a great day for Julian Assange - today is the day he starts to become who he is; to reconcile everything he has done with what it means to have done it; today he is no longer hidden in the shadows, he is being thrust out into the light.
My hope is that justice is done in the open, so all those dark mutterings about corruption, by all those Wikileaks followers and conspiracy drones, can also be exposed to the power of the truth, to the brilliance of justice and to the foolishness of hiding from either.
