Julian Assange's prosecution is exhibit A for the rapid erosion of modern democracy
The rise of the police state has never been so hawkish yet so soothing
The protracted legal battle between Julian Assange and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) might be coming to a head as the WikiLeaks founder is inching closer and closer to extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States. In June, a High Court judge rejected Assange’s latest bid for appeal of the U.S. extradition request which former UK Home Secretary Priti Patel approved last summer (following the Supreme Court’s refusal to grant Assange permission to appeal the High Court’s decision which first green-lighted his extradition in December 2021). This leaves Assange one last avenue for appeal on UK soil ― to a panel of two High Court judges, before the case is brought to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. If the course of this trial is anything to judge by, the prospect of success in both of these last legal steps is rather grim ― after all, it has been a judicial farce from its very inception.
Assange has now spent four years and four months in London’s maximum security prison HMP Belmarsh. When Ecuador invited the British police to drag him out of their London embassy on 11 April 2019, he was hastily sentenced to the unusually harsh punishment of 50 weeks in jail for skipping bail in 2012, when he sought asylum. Assange has long ago served that sentence and the only thing that’s keeping him imprisoned, is the wrath of the U.S. Government, readily served by their British counterparts. Australia’s PM Albanese and his Foreign Minister Wong are certainly not standing in the way as they continue to repeat “enough is enough” and “there is nothing to be served by his ongoing incarceration”, while timidly nodding along with the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken as he regurgitates lies and propaganda about their fellow citizen.
Seriously, if anyone still thinks that Assange is in prison for anything other than a demonstration of power and an outpouring of vengeance for what he revealed, they are ignorant fools who probably deserve what’s coming for them.
The U.S. DOJ has indicted Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917, making him the first journalist to be charged under this draconian and antiquated law. In 2020, a second, superseding indictment was added to the previously sealed first indictment from 2018. It comprises 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which collectively carry the absurd sentence of 175 years in prison. Assange is accused of“unauthorized obtaining and receiving” and “unauthorized disclosure of national defense information”, pertaining to a series of publications, leaked to WikiLeaks by former U.S. army analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, which they started publishing in April 2010, in collaboration with five of the largest media outlets ― The New York Times, the Guardian, der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde:
The Iraq War Logs which revealed 15,000 unaccounted civilian deaths in Iraq
The Collateral murder video ― the indiscriminate drone attack on 12 unarmed civilians in Iraq including two Reuters employees: Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh
Torture, abuse, and illegal detention of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba
The Afghanistan War Logs ― over 90,000 military reports which exposed civilian deaths, unintentional killings of members of the Afghan police, Pakistan’s secret support for the Taliban, drone malfunctions, CIA’s expansion of paramilitary operations
The State Department Cables ― a collection of around 250,000 diplomatic cables exchanged between the U.S. State Department and its embassies and outposts around the world. They detail secret plans for drone strikes in Yemen, spying and data collection of UN high ranking members, collusion between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. to strike Iran, allegations of corruption and criminality in Russia, embarrassing remarks regarding foreign state officials, and other cables revealing corruption and power overreach in the highest echelons of the U.S. Government with respect to their foreign policy.
Last month, it was reported that several British journalists and public figures, most of whom can hardly be described as Assange supporters, have been approached by the U.S. Justice Department to try and get them to testify against him, which is telling enough of the strength of their legal case. To their credit, none of these individuals gave into the intimidation attempts of the U.S. authorities, although they did acknowledge these invitations had made them more fearful of doing their job. Yahoo News spoke to James Ball, one of the journalists, who previously worked with WikiLeaks:
As a journalist, I need to be able to travel to the U.S. to work, and I am doing so this week. Also, other journalists are now being contacted in relation to the case. Both together make continued silence impossible.
Ball said the two years he avoided traveling to the U.S. on legal advice has "stifled stories I would otherwise have written for U.S. outlets. I had a real and credible fear of prosecution”.
Wikileaks’ revelations were extremely damning and embarrassing to the U.S. Government’s reputation both domestically and internationally, however, their authenticity has not once been put into question. Instead, the Pentagon and its intelligence agencies, together with their friends in corporate media (to the shame of those who previously partnered with Wikileaks and gladly received accolades and prizes for their reporting), have resorted to ugly character assassination campaigns against Assange in order to 1) divert the public attention from the state criminality WikiLeaks exposed), and 2) discredit Assange and WikiLeaks, and paralyse the public sympathy for them. They’ve successfully achieved the former but are struggling to achieve the latter.
Until recently, receiving and publishing classified information, which uncovered wrongdoing on the part of public authorities, even when that information was leaked or obtained through illegal means, was a core function of investigative journalism. Sadly for us all, the original purpose of journalism ― to hold the powerful to account, is becoming increasingly more difficult to come across in the traditional press, not only when it comes to Mr. Assange’s case but generally on topics of great public consequence.
Having an adversarial position towards those in power is what journalism is about. That of course, doesn’t mean being unfair to the political establishment and portraying them in a negative light by instinct, but it does mean reporting critically and truthfully, precisely because the public depends on the media to shape their views about the political reality we live in.
With its demands to extradite an Australian citizen from a European country to face trial in the United States under a U.S. law for publishing accurate information in the public interest, the U.S. Government is virtually criminalising journalism around the world and setting an alarming precedent which is already serving as an effective deterrent to other journalists from exposing state-sanctioned criminality and misconduct.
Notably, it also underscores America’s ambitions for universal jurisdiction to indict and imprison whomever they want wherever in the world they please just because they’ve dared to make public politically damaging information ― something that the British Government seems to have forgotten is prohibited under the UK-US Extradition Treaty whose Article 4 stipulates:
Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense.
The hypocrisy of this behaviour on the part of countries that so desperately want to be seen as democracies which respect the rule of law and the value of a free press, cannot be overstated. You don’t have to like Julian Assange or share his political views to recognise the real threat his prosecution and potential extradition pose to press freedom, civil liberties and the public’s right to know what our governments are doing in our name.
The flagrant violations of Assange’s legal, human and civil rights are astounding and unprecedented but well-documented in articles, video materials, podcasts, and three books which I encourage you to read if you’re genuinely interested to know what happened to Assange. They will give you a clear and thorough picture of the intricacies which a single article can hardly reproduce but which continue to be omitted and misrepresented by the legacy media:
The trial of Julian Assange: A story of persecution by Nils Melzer, Professor of International Law and former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. He conducted a two-year investigation into the 2010 allegations of sexual abuse against Assange in Sweden. Melzer’s account of the Swedish case and Assange’s mistreatment by the mass media and the political elite is particularly valuable, not only because of his esteemed credentials, but also because of his initial visceral bias against Assange.
His investigation, although actively obstructed by the “complete refusal of the involved governments to cooperate” as he put it, uncovers the strikingly dysfunctional relationship between the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA). It casts light on the long list of remarkable violations of due process and human rights, both towards Assange and the two women involved in the case during this unusually long nine-year preliminary investigation which was closed and reopened several times under curious circumstances, and finally dropped in 2019, when it had fulfilled its political purpose.
Secret Power: WikiLeaks and its enemies by Stephania Maurizi, an Italian investigative journalist who’s been a WikiLeaks media partner since 2009. Her book corrects the record on the accusations against Assange of having “blood on his hands” for “recklessly” dumping massive volumes of unredacted information which supposedly exposed informants to life-threatening danger. During Chelsea Manning’s court-martial in 2013, military officials admitted they hadn’t been able to attribute the death or injury of a single person to WikiLeaks’ publications. Maurizi also provides a first-person view of Assange’s character and how revolutionary and consequential WikiLeaks’ contribution is to the journalistic practice globally.
Guilty of Journalism: the political case against Julian Assange by Kevin Gosztola, a young American journalist whose work focuses on whistleblowers, primarily in America and the legal and illegal ways their governments use to punish them for revealing secrets they’d rather keep in the dark. Gosztola followed closely Chelsea Manning’s court-martial and has reported on Assange extensively. His book explains why Assange will never receive a fair trial in the United States (just as he’s not receiving one in the United Kingdom), giving examples with smaller-scale but just as important leaks from whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, Joshua Shulte.
Each of these brilliant books alone, is an invaluable source of information about what truly happened during Assange’s 13-year long battle for freedom, but together, they bear witness to the grotesque erosion of modern democracy and the courageous fight of so many people to restore Assange’s dignity and the public’s trust that genuine, quality journalism does still exist. They also illustrate in an extremely credible fashion the lengths powerful governments and institutions are willing to go in order to protect their power, deflect accountability, deceive their citizenry about who they really are, and crush all forms of dissent and scrutiny.
The controversy of the “hacking charge”
The second count in the superseding indictment accuses Assange of a “conspiracy to commit computer intrusions” (wrongly reported on as the hacking charge), alleging he helped Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash in order to access a government computer under false identity. This is the charge which was designed to distinguish Assange from the journalistic community and convince the public that the trial against him presents no hazard for press freedom because he didn’t act in a journalistic capacity.
It is still incumbent upon the U.S. Government to provide actual evidence of such conspiracy taking place, and it’s a bizarre accusation to begin with because Manning already had the necessary security clearance to access the classified databases. She had also already shared them with WikiLeaks by the time of the alleged conversation between her and the username attributed to Assange, so why would she need help using a back door to commit computer intrusion when she had already used the front door to download these very same archives?
Kevin Gosztola writes in his book:
The DOJ did not accuse Assange of hacking into a US military computer. He was accused of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” when he allegedly “agreed” to assist Manning in “cracking a password hash” to help her browse information databases anonymously…Patrick Eller, a computer digital forensic examiner responsible for a team of more than eighty examiners at US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters, reviewed the court-martial records for Assange’s defense. He testified during the evidentiary hearing in the extradition case in September 2020.
Eller found testimony from the US military’s own forensic expert that contradicted presumptions at the core of the computer crime charge. Password hashes are generally used to help authenticate users and passwords on a computer. Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash. According to Eller, at the time it was not “possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained”.
Eller’s statement submitted to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London was even more explicit.
Upon reading the indictment, it became clear that the technical explanation of the password hashing allegations is deficient in a number of ways which cast doubt upon the assertion that the purpose of the Jabber chat was for Manning to be able to download documents anonymously.
Jabber is the software Manning used to chat with the account allegedly associated with Assange. Manning had already downloaded the Reykjavik cable, Guantanamo Files, Iraq War Logs, and Afghanistan War Logs before the alleged exchange on password-cracking occurred…”The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password-cracking attempt were the State Department cables”, he (Eller) said. However, Eller acknowledged, “ Manning had authorized access to these documents”. (Gosztola, 2023, p.43-45)
To galvanise their trumped-up charge, the U.S. Prosecution expanded it in their superseding indictment of June 2020, alleging that Assange had enticed hacker organisations like Anonymous, LulzSec and other groups supportive of WikiLeaks to hack into various government networks and steal secret information, and even provided them with a “Most Wanted Leaks” list.
The veracity of this allegation relied entirely on the testimony of a former WikiLeaks volunteer ― the Icelander Sigurdur Thordarson. According to the indictment, Assange encouraged Thordarson to hack into an Icelandic ministry’s computer in 2010 and collect data about members of the Icelandic Parliament. Yet again, not only has the U.S. Prosecution not produced a shred of evidence to support this claim, but a year after the superseding indictment was issued, Thordarson casually admitted his testimony was manufactured when he was recruited by the FBI to lie in exchange for legal immunity in cases against the Icelander for sexual abuse of minors, money embezzlement and financial fraud. That fact was strangely brushed aside by the supposedly impartial British judiciary.
The DNC emails and the alleged Trump connection
When WikiLeaks published the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign manager John Podesta in 2016, this produced all kinds of unfounded theories about an alleged collusion between Russia, one of the then presidential candidates Donald Trump and WikiLeaks, or what became known as Russiagate. Although the DNC leak isn’t part of the publications for which Assange was indicted, I think it’s an important episode to address because it played a key role in the efforts to marginalise the WikiLeaks editor and further stifle the public support for him. The Russiagate scandal, which is now long debunked, is also another symptom of the fall of democracy in the Western world, and how easy it is to propagandise people on a massive scale when their emotions are pitted against their ability to think rationally.
The DNC emails didn’t reveal crimes per se but to claim they weren’t of public interest whatsoever or they shouldn’t have been published during an active presidential campaign, is nonsensical. These emails showed the extended efforts of the Hillary Clinton campaign to undercut the other Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and prevent him from taking the Democratic Party nomination. They also exposed the cosy and lucrative relationship of Mrs. Clinton with private corporate donors from Wall Street like Goldman Sachs whose business interests she vowed to put at the top of her priorities as president while at the same time promising the American people more regulation and stringent tax policies for the business capital. The leaked emails also gave insight into Clinton’s duplicity and morally questionable character during her time as Obama’s Secretary of State.
I still find it odd how the liberal and democratic establishment and their dedicated electorate continue to grieve the defeat of a candidate who called her opponents’ sympathisers “a basket of deplorables” and who has a horrific political record. Donald Trump, although he may not quite belong to the hawkish uni party in Washington, is an aberration of the same corroded system. His administration was the one to indict Assange but American history has seen far worse presidents (George W. Bush comes to mind), so the never-ending Trump craze is just comical at this point. As Assange himself has said, choosing the lesser of two evils won’t get us very far.
In April 2019, the U.S. Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller published his report on the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign, Russia and WikiLeaks to interfere in the 2016 elections and help elect Trump as the 45th president of the United States. The report concluded:
Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. The Russian contacts consisted of business connections, offers of assistance to the Campaign, invitations for candidate Trump and Putin to meet in person, invitations for Campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government to meet, and policy positions seeking improved U.S.-Russian relations (Mueller, 2019, p.5).
Mueller’s investigation also debunked the alleged connection between WikiLeaks and Roger Stone, former Trump advisor:
…the investigation did not identify sufficient credible evidence that would establish that Stone coordinated with WikiLeaks or that any contacts with WikiLeaks were attributable to the Campaign…While the Office cannot exclude the possibility of coordination between Stone and WikiLeaks or that additional evidence could come to light on that issue, the investigation did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government’s burden to prove facts establishing such coordination beyond a reasonable doubt. (Mueller, 2019, p.199).
Staying true to the journalistic ethics code, Assange has always refused to reveal his sources, and the DNC leak was no exception (though it’s unclear if he even knew who the source of the DNC leaks was since the submissions to WikiLeaks are anonymous. Mueller’s report concluded, however, that the DNC hack was performed by individuals acting on behalf of the Russian intelligence).
Interference in another country’s elections or domestic affairs is appalling and should not be justified under any circumstances, neither when the U.S. does it, nor when Russia does it. But even when information in the public interest is leaked by sources affiliated with intelligence services or governments, although this does pose a moral conundrum, that information should still be published provided it is true and benefits the public, and the DNC emails were absolutely vital because they gave the public a non-filtered view of a presidential candidate’s character.
The whole world demands Assange’s release, yet he faces imminent extradition
In the years following WikiLeaks’ publications, either because of the skewed image of Assange projected by the media or out of sheer indifference, the political support for him was rare to non-existent. Today however, more and more politicians are advocating for his release and voicing their concerns for the future of media freedom.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has received appeals to drop the charges from Australian MPs and members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party (the Squad). 2024 U.S. Presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Cornel West, and Marianne Williamson have all pledged support for Assange and vowed to drop the charges against him if they get elected. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva recently expressed his outrage with Assange’s continued detention during a visit to the UK, other Latin American leaders have also stood up for him.
European Parliament MPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have long been calling for attention to the case. Press freedom, human rights and journalistic organisations, and alternative media outlets have all recognised the urgency to free Assange and joined the campaign for his freedom. So have many celebrities, artists, whistleblowers, freelance journalists and public figures, as well as ordinary citizens. In July, Ben and Jerry's founder Ben Cohen was arrested while protesting in support of Assange in front of the Department of Justice, where he burned the US Bill of Rights. He was later released.
Of course, there are the occasional ignorant remarks on social media, but these people, apart from being wilfully blind to the facts around the case, seem to be unable to comprehend the importance of Assange’s work not only for journalism but also for civic freedoms, democracy and political accountability in the world. It’s truly maddening how so many people worldwide demand the liberation of this man and how these demands continue to fall on deaf ears. This should say something about our supposed role as the sovereign.
The British authorities have kept Assange fervently away from the public eye since his incarceration. In the beginning of April, Reporters Without Borders were scheduled to visit him in Belmarsh, however, on the day of the visit, they were not allowed to enter the prison due to “intelligence” they’d received the visitors were journalists. Probably because of the mounting public pressure, last week, the president of the International Federation of Journalists Dominique Pradalié was allowed to meet Julian in prison.
The Trust Fall: Julian Assange is the first documentary project of Australian film director Kym Staton. It just had its premiere screening in Australia on 30th July, and has recently been nominated for Best Documentary at the Playback International Film Festival. It also won an award for Best Emerging Director at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival. The film is still not released to a wider audience as it’s in its final stages of completion but it’s already being publicised in film festivals and the film crew are working on distribution deals around the world. Staton has reported that the premiere screening in Melbourne was a huge success. That is a sign his purpose with making the film ― namely to show the broader implications for independent media and democracy, and reconstruct Assange’s story true to the facts, is already being fulfilled.
You can watch the teaser here.
The end game
I think it’s safe to predict that those whose abuse of power and moral corruption Julian Assange exposed, will likely never see the inside of the prisons they throw their dissidents into, nobody will call them war criminals, nobody will ask for tribunals by the International Criminal Court. These are the moral trade-offs we should all be happy to swallow. But the U.S. and the British Governments still have a chance to save face before those who willingly surrender their freedoms and agency for short-term comfort and solace. Obama commuted Manning’s sentence probably because he was afraid of the legacy he’d leave if she was to succeed in her suicide attempts while in prison (she made two before she was released and a third one when she was jailed again in 2019 because she refused to testify against Assange).
Assange is said to be extremely resilient but a human being can only take so much. In January 2021, judge Vanessa Baraitser blocked his extradition because of the risk of suicide if he’s extradited. How this risk evaporated after the U.S. Prosecution offered questionable assurances that Assange won’t be put under SAMs, or special administrative measures (unless he did anything to justify them!), is truly amazing. During one of the appeal hearings two years ago, Assange suffered a minor stroke. Calls for attention to his progressively deteriorating physical and mental health have been made numerous times. When Nils Melzer visited him in Belmarsh together with two medical experts shortly after he was imprisoned, they all concluded that Assange was showing “all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture”.
Julian Assange is by no means the only victim of a clandestine judicial and political system but his case is the blueprint of the dystopian future democratic societies are comfortably sliding into. The advances of political organisations in democratic countries to censor voices which are politically inconvenient under the guise of concerns for the spread of disinformation and hate speech are harrowing not because offensive speech and propaganda are ideals we should celebrate, but because these very institutions have the largest incentive to restrain freedom of speech and evade accountability in order to protect their position, and we’ve seen so many examples of this in the past few years alone. This is a paternalistically authoritarian function we all should oppose no matter the motivations and circumstances driving it.
A recent Pew Research poll showed that 55% of Americans agree the government should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information. That is a 16% increase in the course of 5 years (in 2018, this number was 39%). 42% of Americans agree freedom of information should be protected, even if it means false information can be published, that is a 16% drop since 2018 when that number was 58%.
These results are not universal, the research was done locally in the U.S. but still, they are deeply worrying, because they show the gradual submission to the Huxleyan reality powerful governments and organisations are creating for us in the name of their nebulous concerns for national security, protection of democracy, minority rights, international relations and the like, which they alone get to decree with no right to scepticism or scrutiny ever allowed.
If our future is to live in a police state where it’s impermissible for citizens to hear and communicate difference of opinion, where we cannot express our civic position, where domestic laws and international agreements are trumped over political advantage, where simple questions of material truth confound world leaders, where insanity runs rampant, and journalists are thrown in jail for life if they expose state criminality, I’d much rather live in the past.