The importance of Julian Assange
The importance of Julian Assange
The loss of this generation's most consequential journalist will be the de facto death of freedom of speech and the press
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was headline news again last week because after more than a dozen years as a political prisoner, the last five in solitary confinement under barbaric conditions at maximum security Belmarsh prison, often dubbed “Britain’s Guantanamo,” hearings were held February 20 and 21, 2024, on a final appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to decide his fate.
A decision is expected within the next few weeks on whether to honor a U.S. Justice Dept. request for extradition originally filed in June 2019. Assange is in such poor health, possibly near death, he has not been able to attend the hearings, even via video link.
Why has the US has been seeking Assange’s extradition for over a decade, long before the filing of a formal request in 2019? The Guardian perfectly summarized the core issue at stake in the Royal Court’s final Assange hearings.
Which is the more serious criminal activity: extrajudicial killings, routine torture of prisoners and illegal renditions carried out by a state, or exposing those actions by publishing illegally leaked details of how, where, when and by whom they were committed?
Many people no longer remember, or never knew, the story of how and why Assange founded Wikileaks, let alone its mission nor how it became so controversial. The NY Post offers a succinct primer for those who want to refresh their memories.
U.S. government pursuit of Assange at the executive branch level really began in 2010, when Wikileaks released over 400,000 secret files about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in what is considered to be “the largest document leak in US history.” Over 92,000 of these files were released to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, who subsequently published large swaths of the leaked information.
Although Wikileaks and Assange were already in the crosshairs of US security agencies, the size and scale of the 2010 leak set off alarms throughout the US security state, especially the Pentagon, which immediately designated Wikileaks as a “threat to national security.”
The vast trove of information exposed US war crimes, secret prisons and torture centers, a secret airline to shuttle Iraqi prisoners from one torture center to another, often outside the country as part of the CIA (and Pentagon) program of “Extraordinary Rendition,” and secret death counts of as many as 100,000 civilian casualties.
Here is a 2010, CBS News report on the documents leak.
THE APACHE HELICOPTER GUNSHIP VIDEO
The video linked below from the 2010 document release (Access restricted to adults, sign into YouTube required.), shows 2007 footage of a US Apache Hellfire helicopter gunship firing on and killing Iraqi civilians on the ground. It was one of the most sensational pieces of information in the entire document release, shocking war weary US citizens.
Although there is still confusion about total casualties, at least 13 adults were killed, including two Reuters journalists. Several other adults were injured, and two children were shot, one of whom later died.
WARNING: Graphic content
THE ESPIONAGE ACT
Initial attempts to prosecute Assange during the Obama administration centered on bogus sexual assault charges in Sweden and a secret US deal with the Swedish government to extradite Assange to the US if he returned to Sweden to defend himself.
When Swedish prosecutors dropped the charges, the Obama administration began investigating ways to prosecute Assange under the controversial and legally dubious Espionage Act, enacted in 1917 to criminalize dissent against World War I.
The Espionage Act is so extreme and constitutionally tenuous, it laid dormant for years, even under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney during the War on Terror. It was revived and used aggressively by the Obama administration, which prosecuted more whistleblowers under the statute than all other previous administrations combined.
Yet even Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder ultimately concluded that it was impossible to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act without also prosecuting their mainstream media allies who had published leaked material, such as the NY Times and the Guardian.
It was the Trump administration, under CIA Director Mike Pompeo, that ultimately charged Assange in May 2019 on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for “conspiring to obtain classified material” going all the way back to the 2010 document release.
Pompeo was triggered when Wikileaks published leaked documents in 2017 exposing the CIA’s cyber warfare programs “to monitor and remotely control newer cars, smart TVs, personal computers, web browsers, and most smartphones.” The publicity was so bad that Pompeo hatched a deranged covert scheme to have Assange assassinated.
Ironically, Pompeo pursued Assange with the full support of Democrats, who were angry that he had leaked thousands of incriminating emails exposing illicit activities by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Connor O’Keeffe of the Mises Institute summarizes the hypocrisy and constitutional danger of the Assange prosecution.
The reason Assange has been in various forms of custody for almost twelve years is not because he committed any real crimes but because he has embarrassed the political establishment.
Today, that same political establishment is feigning outrage over the alleged murder of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, as well as the ongoing imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in Moscow, all while it maneuvers to throw a Western journalist into solitary confinement for the rest of his life for daring to break truly incriminating stories.
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald offers a succinct analysis on the dangerous illegitimacy of the century old Espionage Act being used to prosecute Assange for his journalism.
TORTURING DEMOCRACY
Although I was aware early on of the work being done by Assange and Wikileaks, the importance of their journalism was thrown into sharp relief for me when I published a series of articles in 2014 and 2015 at Truthout detailing the elaborate suppression of photographic evidence documenting endemic torture in US prisons and torture centers in Iraq.
The Wikileaks document release of 2010 proved widespread torture and alluded to photographic evidence. There are in fact over 2,000 photos of this torture that have not been released to this day. President Obama stated that these images were so shocking, their release would risk igniting violent anti-American sentiment across the Middle East.
My articles are linked here for those who are interested. Absent the mass Wikileaks document release of 2010, the extent of the torture and the existence of photographic evidence would never have been known.
Dec. 10, 2014 – The Missing Photos from the Senate Report on CIA Torture
Oct. 1, 2014 – Confronting Barbarism: ISIS, the United States and the Consequences of Torture
May 19, 2015 – Torturing Democracy: The Freedom of Information Act and First Amendment Under Assault
PROPAGANDISTS vs. JOURNALISTS
A fourth quarter 2023 poll by YouGov in the UK measuring the fame of various global figures claims that 72% of the world’s population have heard of Julian Assange and know him as the founder of Wikileaks. The poll also illustrates the power of more than a decade of relentlessly negative Western media coverage and anti-Assange government propaganda, with his “popularity” rating at only 15%.
Yet reflecting public ambivalence, a September 2022 Morning Consult poll found that only 24% in the US (17% across the West) believe that Assange was wrong “to make the public aware about U.S. government policies and actions such as surveillance of American citizens.”
It is a striking contradiction. An oppressive, years long government sanctioned smear campaign against Assange has tarnished his personal reputation, yet large majorities still believe he did the right thing.
There are “whistleblowers” and “leaks” of classified information by reporters all the time, yet they seldom provoke the kind of homicidal backlash that has been directed at Assange.
Why?
Glenn Greenwald describes this as the difference between being a propagandist and a journalist. The US security state uses journalists all the time to disseminate information they want in the public sphere. Reporting of officially approved “leaks” by state sanctioned journalists and media outlets acts as a kind of information laundering service, making government propaganda look like news.
By contrast, Assange has practiced investigative journalism at the highest, most consequential level, holding powerful government actors in the security state (The Pentagon, State Department, US intelligence agencies, et. al.) accountable by simply sharing information publicly that they do not want their own citizens to see, even if that information reveals decision making that in a functioning democracy should be debated on constitutional grounds.
SAVING THE FUTURE
The kind of fearless journalism that Assange embodies is going to be needed more than ever during the reckoning that is surely coming over the crimes against humanity that have been committed by Western governments over the last four years.
Whether the issue is pandemic authoritarianism and propaganda, dangerous proxy wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, or transnationalist schemes to consolidate money and power upward, forcing democratic accountability requires courageous reporting.
You can show your support for ending the US extradition of Julian Assange by contacting your Congressional Representatives and asking them to sign onto House Resolution 934, and by visiting the Assange Defense website to subscribe to updates and action alerts.
Assange Defense is working with Julian Assange’s wife, attorney and human rights defender Stella Assange, to maintain political pressure and visibility on Julian Assange’s behalf.
Vital context on the state of the Assange legal battle and the history of state persecution against him is also provided in a recent interview of Stella by journalist Tucker Carlson after his visit with Assange at Belmarsh prison.
