Assange’s Freedom Is Also Ours: To Tell the Truth
After 12 years – including five years of solitary confinement at Belmarsh Prison in London – Julian Assange is free. God bless America! He wasn’t extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, where he faced a sentence of 170 years in prison for violating the so-called Espionage Act.
Instead, he took a plea deal with the U.S. government, pleading guilty to one count of violating that act – you know, threatening America’s freedom – for which he had paid by his time already served. He was officially pronounced free at a U.S. federal court in Saipan, capital of the Northern Mariana Islands (a U.S. territory), after which he flew home to his wife and two children in Australia.
My emotional relief at his escape from the clutches of this government far outweighs my feelings about the broader implications of the guilty plea, which has justifiably stirred concern and controversy. The government got its little triumph: a “legal” acknowledgment of its right to keep monstrous secrets about what it does and punish any unauthorized spilling of the beans as “espionage.”
“He’s basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” according to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, quoted by the New York Times.
And Matt Taibbi said the decision “will remain a sword over the heads of anyone reporting on national security issues. Governments have no right to keep war crimes secret, but Assange’s 62-month stay in prison is starting to look like a template for Western prosecutions of such leaks.”
While such concerns are no doubt worrisome, I don’t think the legal system is a mechanism for seriously addressing them. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was hardly an equal in this hellish controversy. He was in the legal crosshairs of the most powerful country on the planet, which he had had the nerve to defy, by publishing an enormous amount of “classified” – that is to say hidden – data, given to him by government-employed whistleblowers.
This is called journalism, no matter that part of the U.S. case against Assange was that he doesn’t count as a real journalist. Mainstream, corporate journalists know how to behave themselves, I guess. They’re far more likely to “respect” the do-not-cross lines the government establishes.
As I wrote in 2010, at the beginning of the WikiLeaks controversy:
“In a time of endless war, when democracy is an orchestrated charade and citizen engagement is less welcome in the corridors of power than it has ever been, when the traditional checks and balances of government are in unchallenged collusion with one another, when the media act not as watchdogs of democracy but guard dogs of the interests and clichés of the status quo, we have WikiLeaks, disrupting the game of national security, ringing its bell, changing the rules.”
As long as “national security” includes the waging of war, honest – a.k.a., real – journalism will be a nuisance to those in charge, because it includes actual reportage, not simply press-releases and public-relations blather. In the real world, war equals murder. War is not an abstract game of strategy and tactics. War itself is a “war crime” – especially when it’s waged not to gain freedom from an oppressor but to maintain control over the oppressed.
WikiLeaks releases were outrageous acts of espionage – from a war-waging government’s point of view – because the data was raw, real and unsanitized. They included 90,000 classified documents on the US war in Afghanistan and nearly 400,000 secret files on the Iraq war, which… uh, bled beyond the official propaganda and, among other things, showed that civilian deaths in the two wars were, according to Al-Jazeera, “much higher than the numbers being reported.”
In addition, WikiLeaks released data that, as Al-Jazeera noted, “unearthed how the Geneva Conventions were being violated routinely in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The documents, dating from 2002 to 2008 showed the abuse of 800 prisoners, some of them as young as 14.”
And then, of course, there was the infamous “collateral murder” video, which showed a U.S. helicopter firing at people on a street in Baghdad, killing seven of them, including a Reuters journalist, and wounding a number of others, including two children, who were sitting in a van that had pulled up to aid the wounded people in the street. And all this happened as helicopter crew members snickered about the deaths. This was the United States in full view, waging its “war on terror” by unleashing terror at the level only a superpower could commit.
Showing snippets of truth about the war on terror is Julian Assange’s crime: his act of espionage. And I get the government’s point of view. Assange put war itself into the forefront of collective human awareness – as a hideous reality, not a political abstraction. What he did bears striking similarity to what Emmett Till’s mother did. She exposed the raw horror of Southern racism by insisting that her son, a 14-year-old boy who was beaten and drowned by Mississippi racists for allegedly speaking to a white woman, have a public funeral with an open casket, so the whole world could see what had been done to him. This was in 1955. Not long afterward, the Civil Rights Movement was fully underway.
Human evolution isn’t a legal issue, decided by the courts. It involves humanity facing and transcending its own dark side, which can be a messy and chaotic process. This is the nature of truth.
Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.
Nimo Omer
Tue, 25 June 2024
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at a United States District Court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, US.Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
After 12 years of confinement, seven in the Ecuadorian embassy and five in a high-security prison in south London, Julian Assange has been freed. The WikiLeaks founder, who faced 18 charges for helping and encouraging Chelsea Manning to leak military files, has pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence, as part of a plea deal struck with the US justice department. Assange was sentenced by Judge Ramona V Manglona to time served on the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands and is now on a flight back to Australia. The US ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, said his return “brings this longstanding and difficult case to a close”. Assange’s wife said she is “elated” at the news of her husbands’ release.
It is the latest twist in the story of Assange, who spent years leaking documents that exposed government and military secrets, as well as less obvious targets like the actor Wesley Snipes, the Church of Scientology and the Church of the Latter-day Saints.
For today’s newsletter I spoke with writer and journalist Duncan Campbell about the final chapter of his legal drama.
In depth: ‘It’s good news for Assange … but not particularly good news for journalism’
Julian Assange, who was an expert hacker by the age of 16, has always had a bit of a rebel streak. In the late 80s he was accused of stealing half a million Australian dollars from Citibank.
But it was the website WikiLeaks that brought him to international attention. Major news outlets including the Guardian published leaks about Guantanamo Bay and classified Pentagon documents in collaboration with Assange. And in 2010 (when the picture above was taken) WikiLeaks published a video titled “Collateral Murder”, showing two US helicopter gunships in Iraq shooting Iraqi Reuters journalists. That devastating footage was followed by the publication of hundreds of thousands of documents, many in collaboration with numerous mainstream media outlets from the wars in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and Democratic party operatives in the run up to the 2016 election.
What followed were claims of dealings with Russian intelligence services, allegations of sexual assault in Sweden – which were ultimately dropped – and relentless calls for his imprisonment and even execution by US politicians. For years, prosecutors in America grappled with how to get a hold of Assange and prosecute him – the impulse to squash Assange became so strong that in 2017 senior CIA officials reportedly discussed plans to kidnap or assassinate him.
Journalists, human rights groups and press freedom organisations have been criticising the US for years, arguing that the pursuit of Assange represents a huge assault on freedom of expression. Amnesty International said prosecution could have a chilling effect on journalists who might self-censor for fear of punishment.
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Years of pursuit
In 2010, the Swedish authorities put out an arrest warrant for Assange over separate allegations of rape and molestation – Assange has always denied the allegations. To avoid extradition, Assange requested political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012, stating his fear that he would be sent to the US through Sweden, where he could face a lifetime in prison or death. His claim was granted and specific diplomatic laws protected him from arrest in the UK, as long as he stayed inside the building, which is where he remained for seven years. During this time he was visited by a host of celebrities – Lady Gaga, John Cusack and Pamela Anderson among them. He was also visited by Nigel Farage, in secret, on a number of occasions.
In 2017, Sweden dropped its allegations stating that “at this point, all possibilities to conduct the investigation are exhausted”. Eventually Ecuador rescinded its asylum offer, paving the way for Assange to be arrested and sent to Belmarsh prison where he has been held ever since.
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Why has he been released?
After so long avoiding extradition, his supporters and loved ones will no doubt be relieved at the end to this saga. It makes sense that he accepted the deal, Campbell says, “given the appalling conditions that he’s been held in, the fact that he has been deprived of seeing his two small children and wife for five years, often left in a cell for 23 hours a day. I think it’s shocking that the United States have insisted on that when he has not breached the Espionage Act.” His family have also said that his physical and mental health were deteriorating for a number of years.
For the US, and Joe Biden’s administration, it makes sense to wrap things up. In April Biden said that he was “considering” dropping the charges and extradition attempt against Assange, avoiding the complications and potential loss of a court case in the UK that could drag on through the most crucial part of the election race. Pursuing the charges against Assange was becoming damaging for Biden when a big part of his platform this campaign has been about providing a guard-rail against Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy and freedom of speech.
The quiet but forceful diplomatic pressure from Australia has also played a significant role in securing the release of Assange. Australian politicians have long expressed their opposition to the extradition charge and lobbied for a plea deal.
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Press freedom
As noted by Trevor Timm, a plea deal is less troubling than a conviction and appeals court ruling, which could have created an official precedent that potentially binds other courts to rule against journalists in future cases. But he adds that it is certainly not the best case scenario for press freedom.
Campbell echoes this sentiment. “It’s good news for Assange and his family, but it’s not particularly good news for journalism as a whole,” he says. “It still means that the US believes that if a journalist, who is not American or in the United States, publishes damaging information about them they can issue an extradition order and seek to have people from different countries stand trial in America.”
The criminalisation of Assange’s conduct through a guilty plea of the Espionage Act before a potential Trump presidency is particularly troubling given that Trump has repeatedly suggested that he would use the courts to retaliate against the media. In his opinion piece, Campbell notes that all over the world, journalists are facing unprecedented threats to their safety.
“From Haiti to Hong Kong, from Russia to Saudi Arabia, journalists are faced with pressures similar to those placed on Assange. That specious argument that Assange was ‘not really a journalist’, and thus not worthy of media support can surely now be finally buried.” Assange may be free, and Campbell understands why he has accepted the deal after so long behind bars, but “the situation for journalists is not great right now and the decision to release Assange doesn’t make it much better”.
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