The release of Julian Assange is cause for celebration. For more than five years he has languished in a maximum-security cell in Belmarsh prison as the US sought to extradite him to face a possible 175 years in jail – effectively a death sentence – for exposing its war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
This came after he spent nearly seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning over long-since-dropped allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange jumped bail, fearful he would be sent on to the US for trial and sought safety in the Ecuador embassy in June 2012 – he was granted political asylum.
Assange was always prepared to be questioned in London on the matter, the UK Crown Prosecution Service – then managed by Sir Keir Starmer – was one of many blocks preventing this routine procedure from happening. Sir Keir certainly played his part in supporting the long intelligence arm of the US empire, trying to ensure Assange would face the music.
It is something strange indeed that while Sir Keir oversaw that part of Assange’s legal ordeal, he visited the US to meet with US Attorney-General Eric Holder four times. The Crown Prosecution Service has destroyed all records of his four trips to Washington. Conspiracy or cock-up? Who knows?
At the time many sage voices in the mainstream media said Sweden wouldn’t allow him to be extradited to the US. The fact that after his forced removal from the Ecuador embassy in 2019 he was immediately slapped with the extradition request puts a lie to that argument.
Revelations show that while Assange was in the embassy, Trump’s man Mike Pompeo (first as CIA boss then as US Secretary of State) asked for ‘options’ for the abduction or assassination of Assange. This shows how the US intelligence community considers those who cross their path. Assange’s life has been in danger for more than a decade for revealing the war crimes of the global superpower and its war allies.
Assange flew out of Britain on Monday and has presented himself to a judge in a far-flung US federal court in the North Marianas Islands, sensibly not prepared to land in the US mainland. There he has pleaded guilty to a single charge (out of 18 charges in total) of revealing defence secrets and received a 62-month sentence, already considered served. From there he has flown home to Australia, a free man.
No doubt, Julian Assange is a hero for our times. A modern-day man in the iron mask. His release is a victory for all who fought against the US empire, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a snub to the quislings in the mainstream media who ummed and ahhed about whether they thought Assange was a journalist or not.
PRESS FREEDOM
Assange and Wikileaks revolutionised information gathering for journalism and the Fourth Estate. The innovation of safe and secure electronic drops for classified or leaked information are now commonplace in newsrooms the world over.
In 2011, Wikileaks received the Walkley Award for Outstanding Contribution to Journalism, Australia’s top media award.
While we celebrate his release, advocates of a free press must still feel a chill that Assange has had to plead guilty to one count of breaching the Espionage Act. What sort of precedent that sets for reporting on US military secrets in the future is unclear. Reporting on national security issues is – or should be – bread and butter for mainstream journalism.
Assange has been a proud member of Australia’s journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, and its global umbrella, the International Federation of Journalists since 2007. MEAA has put out a statement that notes:
“The work of Wikileaks at the centre of this case – which exposed war crimes and other wrongdoing by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan – was strong, public-interest journalism.
“MEAA fears the deal will embolden the US and other governments around the world to continue to pursue and prosecute journalists who disclose to the public information they would rather keep suppressed.”
While Assange may now be free, it is clear that journalism is not.
Of course, no one in their right mind will blame Assange for taking the deal. He was dying in prison. Campaigners for Assange and a free press will continue to push the US for a full pardon for Assange, who has committed no crime other than telling the truth to the world.
CAMPAIGN LEGACY
Those at the core of Wikileaks and their supporters worldwide have shown extraordinary courage and determination in the fight for Assange’s freedom. His union, MEAA, and other media unions, including the European Federation of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, have shown consistent support. The US media union, NewsGuild CWA, dragged its feet on the issue but eventually called for his release.
His former collaborators at The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere have been less consistent (and that’s being generous). While many individual journalists have stood up throughout Assange’s ordeal, some betrayed him and the big news houses in London, New York and Sydney have squirmed throughout. Some outright condemned him. Assange doesn’t play by their rules of quid pro quo with the powers that be, and for that many resent him.
In Australia, the then Labor Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, acted as judge and jury as far back as 2010, saying he was “guilty of illegality”, saying she had sought “advice about potential criminal conduct of the individual involved” from the Australian Federal Police.
The current Labor government has pursued backroom talks with the US, which have framed part of the final release of Assange. But much of its public commentary was to say “it’s gone on too long”, afraid of embarrassing its AUKUS partner.
Most in the ALP leadership were reluctant converts to the cause, forced by public campaigning to shift position. After years of civil society campaigning, a cross-party block including Liberal and National Party conservatives, independents, Greens and the ALP formed in the Australian parliament calling for Assange’s release.
Despite publicly playing the quiet diplomacy game, Prime Minister Albanese was forthright in his support for Assange’s release on the inside. This helped shift the ALP.
In his flight to freedom, Assange was accompanied by Australian High Commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith, and met by now US Ambassador Kevin Rudd, showing the Albanese government left nothing to chance at the last hurdle.
Nonetheless, for years Australian governments of all stripes have claimed it was nothing to do with them: a legal case involving the US and the UK. It will be interesting to see how much credit Albanese now claims for his backroom negotiations.
ANTI-IMPERIALISM OF FOOLS
Assange’s broader supporters have been a mixed bag. Many have been excellent. But the campaign has also attracted its share of crazy conspiracists – not surprising given the terrain and the revelations of some actual conspiracies against him.
However, many Assangistas maintain more than a residual of conspiracy ‘anti-imperialist’ politics. An anti-imperialism of fools.
The touchstone for many of these people is support for a “multi-polar world”, where the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Calling out the crimes of the US is one thing, but identifying any of its strategic enemies as a needed counterbalance is quite another. For some, this is mundane support for the BRICs bloc and a shift from a global reliance on the US dollar. For others, it means effective support for regimes in Damascus, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing: all criminals themselves.
Missing from this dead-end and dangerous politics is the democratic agency of our camp: the global working class.
Which does bring us to the limits of Assange’s political mission. Who knows where he has landed after his ordeal. He deserves time to recuperate with family, friends and his comrades.
But the Wikileaks project, while audacious, was a project that could be called ‘techno-anarchism’. Assange came out of the hacker community, no doubt sincere in his belief that the truth shall set you free.
Assange thought that the public could not fight to change the world if we didn’t know how it all worked.
The mission of Wikileaks was that tearing down the veil of the ‘secret state’ would make it possible for people to organise, forcing institutionalised power to crumble once the scales fell from our eyes.
While the glare of publicity is essential for democratic change, Assange has learnt to his own cost that isn’t quite how power works. It will take the organised democratic force of the working class on a global scale to tear down the power of imperialism. That is a task of audacious hope and imagination that is now ours to take up.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Declassified Australia.
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