If democratic societies cannot appreciate what Wikileaks and Julian Assange have done for them, they don't deserve anybody to fight for their freedom
Tragically, the rest of us will have to suffer with them
There is a saying in Bulgarian that the saber cannot cut a bowed head. In other words, if you obey authority, your life will be easy and comfortable.
When someone defies authority, especially when that authority is illegitimate, we tend to view their act as courageous. I think that behaviour has less to do with courage, and more to do with determination to defend a moral principle, particularly when the personal cost stemming from such actions is enormously high. Perhaps, if more people prioritised their moral integrity instead of their comfort, standing up to power wouldn’t be so remarkable and we would actually be living as truly free human beings.
Couple of months ago, a book called Secret Power: Wikileaks and its enemies, came out of print. Its author is Stefania Maurizi, an Italian investigative journalist, one of the few journalists who have worked continuously with Wikileaks since 2009.
In November last year, Stefania visited the UK for a press conference about her new book. When a journalist from the German National Public Radio asked her if she had “any positive proof” of her “thesis”, namely that there is a secret power which wants to kill Assange, my jaw dropped. Although Stefania herself seemed amazed at such a question, she quickly corrected this journalist that this was not a matter of a hypothesis but of facts. Had this reporter read Maurizi’s book, or the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer’s book The trial of Julian Assange, or simply did her job and carefully studied the case from its very beginning, she would have reached that conclusion herself.
As Maurizi phrased it, the evidence is right in front of our eyes, we simply need to put the pieces together. It doesn’t really take a conspiracy theorist, or some deranged interpretation for the existence of the deep state, to realise what Assange’s persecution is about and why the public smears against him were so vital to those in power, and it’s truly shameful that we continue to witness such blatant ignorance dressed up as an attempt to be objective.
To some degree, I can understand ordinary citizens’ lack of proper understanding about Julian Assange’s case. It does require a lot of focus and dedication to work out all the details and misrepresentations of Assange’ character and the case proceedings, that it’s expected for the average person to not be able or willing to invest that kind of time and effort. I personally have spent hours, days and months trying to understand what happened, reading books and articles, watching documentaries, interviews, listening to podcasts and radio programmes, on both ends of the story. It’s a lengthy and frustrating process. It doesn’t paint a beautiful picture and it definitely doesn’t give high hopes for the future of so-called democracies if we continue this course — a course of blissful ignorance, of wishful thinking, of mind-boggling corruption and double standards.
If you’re a journalist, however, questioning authority and defending the interests of the public is the essence of your profession. Uncovering abuse of power and speaking the truth no matter what, is at its core. As Stefania Maurizi has said on numerous occasions, it doesn’t win you powerful friends, only powerful enemies. If this sounds unacceptable, though, you should have opted for another profession, I’m afraid. Because real journalism isn’t what we are witnessing today in the mainstream press — at best, what these outlets are, is traders in deception, hysteria and hatred.
My critique, of course, isn’t aimed solely at that single journalist. Many journalists have failed and continue to fail to grasp the preposterous and vindictive abuse perpetrated against Assange for 13 years. I’ve many times wondered why that is. Some people say it’s because of jealousy, because Assange and Wikileaks got to publish hugely important scoops while traditional media were waiting on the sidelines. But that’s not entirely true since Wikileaks have published in collaboration with some leading newspapers like The Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel. These establishment outlets did get to win prizes and accolades thanks to Wikileaks, only to abandon them when the fame was over and things got dangerously tense.
In a recent piece, titled Why the western media is afraid of Julian Assange, British journalist Jonathan Cook, argued that media outlets don’t define themselves as liberal or conservative, serving the working or the middle class, based on any particular ideology, but based on their interest, depending on what demographic group they want to target, and what conceptual framework fits the narrative convenient for their owners. Cook wrote:
Journalists operate within ideological parameters strictly laid down by their outlet’s owner. The media doesn’t reflect society. It reflects the interests of a small elite, and the national security state that promotes and protects that elite’s interests.
Those parameters are wide enough to allow some disagreement—just enough to make western media look democratic. But the parameters are narrow enough to restrict reporting, analysis and opinion so that dangerous ideas—dangerous to corporate-state power—almost never get a look-in. Put bluntly, media pluralism is the spectrum of allowable thought among the power-elite.
According to Cook, fear, rather than envy, is what dictates corporate media’s lack of any meaningful support for a fellow journalist — meaning Assange. As he put it, Wikileaks created a system that threatened not only state power, but the position of authority corporate journalists currently enjoy. The way Wikileaks do reporting, practically makes corporate journalism obsolete. It dismantles the revolving door between corporate journalists and politicians, and it becomes very hard, if not impossible for them to manufacture the truth and manipulate public opinion.
Surely there is a group, albeit small, among these corporate journalists who genuinely, but nonetheless superficially, buy into the smears and lies about Wikileaks and Assange, and they truly believe in the virtue of their governments. As astonishing as that is, I’ve come to observe that some people, be they journalists or not, genuinely subscribe to the ideal of democratic societies. They cannot imagine that democracies can be as corrupt and criminal as they actually are. In some ways, that’s explicable because something has to distinguish these societies and social groups from autocratic countries and people who hold extreme views.
Calling oneself a progressive, a liberal, a democrat, carries an understandable appeal for many. It used to mean something noble and good. It used to mean someone who believes in civic liberties, justice, and freedom of thought. Tragically, nowadays, it means professing a narrow selection of groupthink views — accepted beliefs, be they political, cultural, economic or scientific, forced upon oneself by what looks like the majority. On their surface, these beliefs might seem virtuous, but on a closer inspection, they reveal a striking level of hypocrisy, a corrosive world of delusions, designed to enslave minds, incite perpetual fear, crush dissent and bully into conformity, packaged as democracy.
As Stefania Maurizi writes towards the end of her book:
Secret power acts with impunity in democracies just as it does in dictatorships. In authoritarian countries it uses an iron fist, and commits many of its crimes and abuses in broad daylight, in part to intimidate and bring the population to heel. In democracies, by contrast, the iron fist of secret power is often concealed inside a thick velvet glove.
A dictatorship would have sent goons and hit men to get rid of Julian Assange and the Wikileaks journalists after the very first publications. The United States military-intelligence complex and their allies, on the other hand, have used, and will continue to use, less outwardly brutal methods. Under Mike Pompeo, the CIA did plan to kidnap Assange and others, but ultimately decided against it. The U.S. authorities opted for a judicial path rather than an extra-judicial one. No doubt this is preferable. But the point is that there is no need to be physically brutal when you can bring down a journalist through psychological rather than physical torture. It is not necessary to burn Julian Assange’s arms with cigarettes when you can bring him to the brink of suicide through ten years of arbitrary detention with no possible way out. It is not necessary to send goons to block the publications of a media organization when lawfare and keeping its journalists and publishers in a climate of relentless intimidation is equally effective. (Maurizi, 2022, p. 328-329).
A month after Assange was dragged out of his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April 2019, BBC broadcast an interesting episode of The Real Story podcast under the title Does Wikileaks matter?
To their credit, the BBC promoted a range of views in the conversation —from sympathetic to agnostic to outwardly opposed to Wikileaks and Assange. Stefania Maurizi was one of the debaters. The other two were Philip de Salvo, a journalism lecturer in Switzerland and Paul Stott, member of the Centre on radicalisation and terrorism at the Henry Jackson Society in the UK.
The debate revolved around the ethics of disclosing vast amounts of information to the general population, the role of whistleblowers, the case against Assange and some of the so-called controversies around the organisation.
I think there is a case to be made against publishing huge volumes of information, but as Maurzi pointed out several times during the discussion, with the exception of a few cases when Wikileaks published unredacted documents, the organisation has performed journalistic analysis, redaction and verification of the leaked materials together with their media partners and in line with journalistic practices.
Contrary to what’s been reported, it was not Wikileaks, but traditional media outlets, namely the German Der Freitag and the British The Guardian who failed to guard the classified archives of information provided to them by Wikileaks, thus potentially putting lives in danger. As Stefania Maurizi explains in her book, when ex-Wikileaks employee Daniel Domscheit-Berg was suspended from the organisation, he took around 30 000 documents which belonged to Wikileaks, among them the unredacted Cablegate files. In August 2011, the German weekly Der Freitag, which was going to be a media partner for Domscheit-Berg’s organisation OpenLeaks, reported that the full archive of the US diplomatic cables, along with their encryption password, was available on the internet. Couple of months earlier, two Guardian journalists — Luke Harding and David Leigh disclosed the password in their book “Inside Julian Assange’s war on secrecy”. In September 2011, the full unredacted cables archive was published by Cryptome, a New York based website founded by Cypherpunk John Young. The next day, Wikileaks published the cables on their website, after making several attempts to alert the US Department of State of the leak and asking them to intervene and help redact sensitive details, only to get stonewalled and encouraged not to publish anything but close down the organisation altogether. And yet, the lie about Wikileaks’ supposed irresponsibility of dumping the unredacted information online gets propagated time and again because it’s central to the US government’s indictment against Assange. It’s also critical to maintaining the public’s animosity toward him. Here’s Wikileaks’ statement on the leaked password.
As Stefania Maurizi pointed out in her conversation with BBC, we continue to debate potential harm when none such has surfaced after 13 years, while the exposed crimes and state criminality revealed goes unnoticed, unpunished and brushed off as an afterthought. She stated:
I realise that publishing massive databases creates problem, at the same time, try to get this information through the Freedom of Information Act, there is no way…As we speak, a new drone whistleblower was arrested, was charged with the Espionage Act but try to get any accountability and oversight on the drone wars. I’m not sure if you know that two years ago the family of the victims in Yemen basically went to a US court to appeal their case and basically, the judge dismissed their case but the judge was very open about the fact that there is no oversight; she even wrote congressional oversight is a joke, democracy is broken. It’s really important to realise this.
Asked if she took issue with Assange’s freedom of information absolutism — “publish and be done no matter the consequences”, she responded:
I have been there for the last ten years. I saw what happened, I mean they've published millions of documents and only in seven occasions, only with seven releases there was very little content curation…Those documents are tremendously important. The Washington Post just used them for investigating the Kashoggi murder. I think it is a kind of dirty war against Julian Assange. We are discussing victims that never were. I mean, we are not discussing the tens of thousands people abused, killed, tortured by these entities which have no oversight….so I think we are focusing on the wrong issues rather than realising how crucial it is that you can publish this information and you can do it safely without sacrificing your life. Not only Julian Assange, take for example Sarah Harrison, the journalist who went to Hong Kong to help Edward Snowden. I mean, she’s at exceptional risk, very serious risk of ending in jail, I mean, just for helping a source who exposed the NSA mass surveillance for idealistic reason.
The 2016 leak of DNC (Democratic National Committee) correspondence and Hilary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta’s emails were also raised in the BBC programme. To claim that these leaks had no public interest, and the timing of their release — during an active presidential campaign, was inappropriate, as the British journalist James Ball (who previously worked for Wikileaks), did, is bizarre. While the emails didn’t reveal criminality per se, they did expose unethical behaviour on the part of the Democratic Party, and that is critical to forming public opinion about a presidential candidate. I’m also sure Wikileaks would have published this information in the same manner had it been related to the Republican Party or Donald Trump. But naturally, it was more convenient for the Democratic Party to bolster the Russiagate narrative than admit any wrongdoing, however benign.
On the question of whether the DNC leaks made her think more carefully about how journalists should handle leaked information with regard to whom it’s coming from, Maurizi said:
Of course you don’t want to be a tool of people who have an agenda especially if it belonged to the intelligence world. In the case of the Podesta emails, I was a media partner for the Podesta emails and I could tell you that basically, I was alerted the day before, so it was not a last-minute release as many, as all newspapers keep reporting...I don’t have the truth, I can tell you only what I experienced, what I witnessed on my side as a media partner. I was alerted the day before, so it was not a last-minute decision. Even in the Podesta emails, look, it was not a campaign gossip, I understand Podesta was upset. At the same time, they exposed Hilary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, so basically what she was telling to Wallstreet.
“Sure, there was substance in there”, the podcast host Chris Morris interjected.
He then turned to Paul Stott from the Henry Jackson Society and asked him if it made any difference if leaks are made about individuals rather than states. Stott’s response:
I think part of this really comes down to the problem of the Wikileaks business model. If your business is leaking, then there’s always gonna be this constant thirst for getting more sets of documents, so over time, the quality control is going to shift, is going to fall…The danger is if you’re going from, if you like, working with whistleblowers to working potentially with a foreign government that’s indeed a country that’s controversial as Russia is, that isn’t arguably a liberal democracy, that’s much more problematic.
We of course, don’t know for sure if it was the Russian state or some hackers or someone else who relayed these leaks to Wikileaks. But Stott’s reaction raises the question: why the revelation is problematic if the information is authentic and accurate, if it represents true facts? I agree with Philip de Salvo’s assessment that if the information is genuine and serves the interest of the public, even if we are aware it could be coming from a state actor, it’s still important that we publish it.
Just days ago, on the 7th March, another important book about Assange’s case was released — Kevin Gosztola’s Guilty of journalism, The political case against Julian Assange. Like Maurizi, Gosztola is one of the few journalists who have been meticulously reporting on the Assange case for the last 10 years. His book examines the US government’s indictment, its ramifications for press freedom and the crackdown on whistleblowers — a question central to Gosztola’s work.
I urge anyone who wants to engage with this case in good faith and genuinely seeks the truth, to read these books. Andrew Cockburn’s recent article for Harper’s Magazine is also a great account of the events which unfolded in recent years.
I think it’s important to point out that more and more people are beginning to shift their opinion thanks to the efforts of journalists, Assange’s lawyers and family, activists and supporters. However, despite all these efforts, this unlawful trial and human rights abuse still has no end in sight. On 11th April, Assange will have spent four years held on remand without a conviction in Belmarsh prison in London. As many people have emphasised, this is a political case and needs political intervention to be brought to an end.
Last week, the fifth chapter of the Belmarsh tribunal convened in Sydney, Australia. Launched in 2020 and inspired by the 1960s Russell-Sartre Tribunals of the Vietnam War, the Belmarsh Tribunal gathers expert witness testimony from journalists, intellectuals, activists, politicians, and lawyers with regard to Assange’s case. It also highlights the crimes and corruption exposed by Wikileaks, the lack of due process in the trial against Assange, and demands the US government to drop the charges. Its previous sittings were in London, New York City and Washington DC. It was encouraging to hear Australian politicians voicing their support for Assange during last week’s sitting in Sydney. We can only hope their support can put enough pressure on Australia’s current PM Anthony Albanese to make him finally act on his words, although the absolute disengagement of Australia in this case until now, is shattering.
The documentary film Ithaka, produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton is currently on tour in the United States. There are also screenings in some European cities. It focuses on the efforts of Assange’s family to raise awareness to the case and demand his long-due release. At one point in the film, Assange’s father John says:
Things can only get worse for Julian, they cannot get better, the time has gone. It’s all gone away. He’s 49. It’s all gone. And the same for me, cause…well, me more so than him but his situation is parlous, parlous because it might take his sanity, as well.
These are very strong words but they are not a product only of the emotional connection between a father and his son who’s suffering tremendously. Nils Melzer, who visited Assange in Belmarsh prison shortly after he was incarcerated, has on numerous occasions expressed concern that Assange has been subjected to prolonged psychological torture and inhumane treatment. In 2016, during Assange’s asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a report that he has been detained arbitrarily and appealed to the UK and Swedish governments “to assess the situation of Mr. Assange to ensure his safety and physical integrity, to facilitate the exercise of his right to freedom of movement in an expedient manner, and to ensure the full enjoyment of his rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention”. Neither the UK nor Sweden were moved by this appeal.
Doctors for Assange is a group of around 400 independent doctors from around the world who, since 2019, have been sounding the alarm about the mental and physical distress “deliberately inflicted” (their words) on Assange. Their open letters to the UK Home Secretary, the US Department of Justice, and the Australian Government have in most cases been completely ignored, or in the case of the current Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade — fraught with misrepresentations and underscored by cold indifference.
John Shipton is right, nobody can give Julian Assange these years back, they’re lost forever. But the US government’s abhorrent thirst for vengeance can be stopped at any moment, and the more this is delayed, the further so-called democracies are drifting away from their supposed belief in the rule of law, freedom and dignity.
What the powers that be are trying to do by keeping Assange locked away from the public in all forms possible, will never succeed. There will always be idealists who are more determined to risk their comfort in life to defend a moral principle and speak the truth, than bow their head before a corrupt political system. The rest of us can only support them in their fight and follow the example, and I genuinely hope Assange lives to experience again what that freedom feels like.
That is so kind of you, thank you so much for sharing this!
I think you should take that very last part with the asterisk and make it if not in the lede, then right after it. This is the proper context for everything else you have written here.