AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Arundhati, you’re one of six public intellectuals in India who criticized the arrest of WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange in London last month. In a statement, the signatories of the statement called for his immediate release, writing, quote, “The journalism WikiLeaks and its Editor-in-Chief stand for is a journalism of outrage—outrage against the injustices and atrocities that take place round the world—but always with an eye to factuality, substantiation, and precision. … [I]f the US had charged Assange and Wikileaks for publishing classified material, the legal case would have been no different from charging The New York Times with publishing the Pentagon Papers,” the statement said.

AMY GOODMAN: In Sweden, prosecutors are now reopening an investigation into sexual assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and are seeking his extradition to face the charges in Sweden. The U.S. is also seeking Assange’s extradition over the publication of leaked documents by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, which showed evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

So, this latest news that just broke today, many people feel that Sweden has been under enormous pressure to say they’ve reopened an investigation on sexual assault and rape charges against Assange so that he will also be called back to Sweden, and that, ultimately, what he is most concerned about is being extradited to the United States. He has said he doesn’t want to be sent to Guantánamo Bay. Why have you gotten involved with this case? And these latest allegations today, do they concern you?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I met Assange a few years ago at the Ecuadorean Embassy. I was and am an admirer of WikiLeaks. The trouble is, of course, that there’s a sort of—you know, these issues of sexual assault are separate, in my mind, from the idea of his extradition to the U.S. Now, I don’t know—I’m unable to read what this new demand by Sweden is. Is it really to try him for rape, or is it because the U.S. feels it can get him extradited from Sweden easier than it can from England, from London? I don’t know. You know, I don’t know.

But I think it’s absolutely right that if you are going to send Julian Assange to Guantánamo Bay, then you’re really attacking people who publish news that the world needs to know. Although the charge against him, they are trying to say, is that he was trying to help and encourage Chelsea Manning to hack into the Pentagon computers, which I think is a flimsy charge.

AMY GOODMAN: Many journalists are deeply concerned about this, because when they are working with a source, and the source says, “How do I get this information to you?” it is very difficult when the government says, “You solicited this,” when a source is trying to be protected and trying to figure out the safest way to get information they feel is critical to understanding—in this case, war, Iraq War, Afghanistan War, State Department memos.

ARUNDHATI ROY: It’s outrageous, basically, because what about all the documents that Snowden leaked? You know, people have published them. Are they going to be put into prison? What about the people who helped Snowden to escape? Are they going to be put into prison? Where does this end, then? So it’s a very serious step. It’s not about Assange. It’s not about whether he’s a nice man or a not-nice man, or whether he raped someone or didn’t. If he did, he should be punished for it. That’s a separate matter from this. And we oughtn’t to get into this mess about, oh, you know, would it be—is it OK because you like him or you don’t like him. It’s not about him as a person. I don’t know him personally. And if he has indeed raped somebody, he should be punished for that. But that is not the same thing as the WikiLeaks enterprise. And that enterprise concerns us all. All of us.