Pressure is building up on the Biden administration to drop its charges against Julian Assange
Still, there's no clear sign when/if the Australian journalist will finally be released
US President Joe Biden was going to visit Australia for the Quad leaders’ summit yesterday but he cancelled his trip due to the domestic debt ceiling crisis. Assange’s family and supporters saw this visit as an opportunity for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to bring up Julian Assange’s case to Biden’s attention and advocate for the long due release of the Australian from his incarceration in Belmarsh prison in London.
Assange’s wife Stella is currently in Australia where she gave a very moving and poignant speech at the National Press Club on Monday. She spoke about the political dimension of her husband’s case and its grave implications for press freedom globally, but also about the personal tragedy her family is suffering because of it.
Julian’s case is the most brutal attack on press freedom that the Western world has seen in the last 70 years. A foreign government is using the political offences in its statute to big books to indict a foreign national abroad because what he or she published in a different country. Accurate, damning publications, exposing their war crimes. If sovereignty is to mean anything, if jurisdiction is a proper legal and political reality, the case against Julian cannot be understood as anything other than absurdity, a stupefying decision of egregious overreach. The case is the worst and most enduring legacy of the Trump administration, it is not just outlandish, but extremely pernicious. Julian is being used as a deterrent to bully journalists into submission. The case against him sends the message that each of you in this room, are fair game. It is a show of contempt of democratic accountability and of the rights of victims of government wrongdoing. The case against Julian provides a gaping hole through which any country can legitimise the imprisonment of journalists, and dissidents, including other Australian journalists.
Assange’s wife and his long-time legal defender — the Australian barrister Jennifer Robinson, both pointed out the crucial role of the Australian government in bringing the case to a close. Robinson welcomed the publicly voiced position of both current Australian PM Albanese and the new Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd that Assange must be released and allowed to come home.
Albanese is still laser focused on his quiet diplomacy around the resolution of the case, though, and this naturally produces more and more skepticism about the effectiveness and sincerity of his government’s tactic.
Earlier this month, the US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy met with members of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange Group. This came just weeks after 48 members of the Australian parliament appealed to US Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the extradition proceedings. Garland was also urged to drop the case by members of the Squad of the US Democratic Party, led by Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.
In April, Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK Stephen Smith visited Assange in Belmarsh. Some people took this as a positive sign which would hopefully play a role in Assange’s eventual release, others were more skeptical, perhaps rightly so given the somewhat defeatist rhetoric coming from Albanese’s foreign ministry on this question.
Latin American leaders like Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador continue to advocate for Assange’s release and have ironically been more firm in their language around the case than Australian PM Albanese.
More and more journalists and press freedom organisations, whether they sympathise with Assange personally, or are rather worried about the fate of journalism in general, continue to openly voice their concerns. The director of the CPJ — the Committee to Protect Journalists Jodie Ginsberg, encouraged the UN to take a stand and defend Assange at World Press Freedom Day Global Conference in New York few weeks ago.
World Press Freedom Day also proved to be an appropriate time for journalists and activists to confront officials from the Biden administration about the case. At a press briefing on May 3rd, Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked the US State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel whether or not DOS viewed Julian Assange as a journalist who “would be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day”. Patel said it didn’t matter “how they [The State Department] categorise any person” and pointed out several times that “Mr. Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States”. When Lee kept probing, Patel insisted he was “not going to offer a prescriptive assessment” on the WikiLeaks founder and closed the exchange stating he had “sufficiently answered” the question.
The same day, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was confronted with a similar question, to which she firmly declared that she was “not going to weigh in on comments about Julian Assange”. She nevertheless minced her words trying to explain how important press freedom is for our democracy and how President Biden is committed to protecting journalists so that they can report the truth freely.
Both of these events received deserving backlash on social media and in alternative news outlets.
Why the Biden administration engaged in mental gymnastics instead of directly denying Assange’s journalistic status, calls for some reflection, given US officials’ former zealousness to call him a “high-tech terrorist” and their readiness to help close any “gaps in the law” which would prevent his prosecution.
Despite President Biden’s conviction that “journalism is not a crime”, media freedom is becoming ever more restrained under the drumbeat of “disinformation experts”, proponents of self-expression and democracy fighters, who demand censoring and even criminalising views that embarrass them or they simply disagree with.
Sadly, Assange is not the only one whose freedom and human rights are being violated because he exposed the hypocrisy and criminality of those in power. Daniel Hale is still being held in a CMU (Communications Management Unit) in Illinois for revealing the Obama administration drone programme. Another Australian, David McBride is facing trial this year for blowing the whistle on war crimes perpetrated by the Australian military in Afghanistan between 2009-2013.
There’s also a lot of mystery around the arrest of a former US, current Australian citizen — Daniel Duggan, in New South Wales in Australia last October. The United States has requested the extradition of the former Marines fighter pilot, accusing him of violating US arms control laws by training Chinese military pilots to land on aircraft carriers, conspiracy to export defence services to China, and money laundering. Duggan is being held in very restrictive conditions and marked as “high-risk” prisoner despite the fact he has no history of legal transgressions either in the US, Australia, or China. Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus approved the extradition but Duggan’s lawyers are appealing on the grounds that the Australian Intelligence services used illegal means to lure their client to come back to Australia from China.
In 2018, the US Department of Justice formally indicted Julian Assange for his 2010 publications of classified documents exposing US military war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. In 2020, the indictment was amended with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count under The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. US Department of Justice accuses Assange of “unauthorized obtaining and receiving of National Defense Information”, in other words — regular journalistic activity, and a “conspiracy to commit computer intrusions”.
In 2021, the computer intrusion charge crumbled when the US government’s star witness — the Icelandic national Sigurdur Thordarson admitted he was approached by the CIA to manufacture the allegations in exchange for judicial immunity on criminal charges against the Icelander. Since April 2019, Assange has been held on remand without a conviction in a high security prison in London. His legal team is currently appealing former British Home Secretary Priti Patel’s approval of the DOJ’s request for Assange’s extradition to the United States.
Julian Assange is a journalist. He published truthful and accurate information. Whether the US government wants to admit this or not, that doesn’t change the facts. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s Biden or Trump or someone else in the White House — their words of appreciation for a free press ring just as hollow. Meanwhile, the only justice served is a reversed one — those who expose state criminality are destined to rot in a jail cell, while the perpetrators of it go to flashy dinner parties to congratulate each other for a job well done — keeping the lights out in something that barely resembles a democracy anymore.