IIt was a messy ending to a messy story. Julian Assange was released from Belmarsh prison last week and boarded a flight to the US-administered Pacific island of Saipan. There, under a special agreement with US authorities, he pleaded guilty in court to illegally obtaining and disclosing classified documents and received in return a five-year prison sentence that he had already served in a British prison. Thus, for the first time in 12 years, Assange was free.
To gain his personal freedom, Assange had no choice but to admit to espionage. But it raises broader questions about journalistic freedom. Assange was charged with espionage not because he spied for a foreign government, but because he did what many journalists do: publish classified material that the U.S. government doesn’t want its citizens to see. The charges against Assange “rest almost entirely on what investigative journalists do every day,” free speech expert Jameel Jaffer of Columbia University noted when the indictment was first filed in 2019. “The indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom.”.
The Assange story has been going on for so long that it’s easy to forget how it began. In 2006, Assange and a group of fellow activists founded WikiLeaks to publish politically sensitive leaks of documents worldwide. Early revelations included exposing corruption in Kenya and Arab World He also mentioned China’s crackdown on popular uprisings in Tibet.
Then in April 2010, WikiLeaks announced: “Collateral murder”The footage shows a U.S. Apache helicopter mowing down at least 11 civilians, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor El-Deen and Saeed Kumag, on a Baghdad street three years ago. Washington has denied repeated Freedom of Information requests by Reuters to see the footage.
Video taken from a helicopter shows a group of men, including two journalists, crossing a street. Believing them to be rebels, the helicopter opens fire, killing eight and wounding Kumag. A few minutes later, a van unrelated to the incident passes by. Seeing the wounded Kumag, the driver stops to transport him to hospital. The helicopter opens fire again, killing Kumag and three rescue workers. Two children in the van are also seriously injured. “Well, it’s their fault for getting the children into the fighting,” one of the helicopter crew replies nonchalantly.
Then the American ground patrol arrives. “That’s when we really realized what we were doing was wrong.” One of the soldiers, Ethan McCord, later spoke to reporters, along with another soldier from the same unit, Josh Steber, who wrote: “An Open Letter to the Iraqi People on Reconciliation and Accountability”acknowledged that “the acts depicted in this video are a daily occurrence in this war and are consistent with the nature of how the U.S.-led war is waged in the region.”
The video sparked outrage around the world and made Assange a target. “Collateral Murder” was the most shocking in a series of classified documents and field reports released by WikiLeaks in its “Iraq War Record” and “Afghanistan War Record,” which detailed the torture of prisoners, Foreign pressure their Civilians were tortured by US troopsMass Iraqi civilian deaths not officially recorded, and secretly Arms trade fuels conflict They were publicly denied, but to many people the real crime was not the torture or murder or the cover-up, but the act of exposing them, to the point that prominent figures, including then-Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, called for Assange’s death. Mike PompeoAs director of the CIA, he reportedly explored the possibility of doing just that in 2017.
Much of the WikiLeaks material was later exposed by Robert Mueller, who was convicted of espionage in 2013 and given a 35-year sentence. Sentence commuted by Barack ObamaRelentlessly Pursuing whistleblowersThe Obama administration nevertheless refrained from taking action against Assange, as former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller put it. The Washington Post: “Unless the same theory is applied to journalists, there is no way he can be prosecuted for publishing information.”
The Trump administration that followed had no such qualms: US prosecutors indicted Mr Assange on 17 espionage charges in 2019, after secretly indicting him on hacking conspiracy charges the year before. Mr Assange launched a five-year fight against extradition that only ended with a plea deal last week.
Confusion about this story also comes from Assange’s own actions. Critics have Includes information from inside WikiLeaks And he has been accused by the organization’s major media partners of not taking seriously the need to protect from harm those who might be exposed in the leaked documents, and of not being careful enough to redact the names and details of those (such as the Afghan interpreter) who might face persecution or death. And if the espionage charge to which he was forced to plead guilty should never have been brought in the first place, there is another charge to which he should have received due process but was able to escape.
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When Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, it was to avoid extradition to Sweden, not the United States, and not on espionage charges. Rape and sexual assault by two womenAssange and his supporters claim it was a “trap”, a dirty ploy engineered by Washington to facilitate his extradition to the US.
Whatever the truth, the allegations can only be tested in a court of law. The rape allegations are not unworthy of consideration just because the suspect played a key role in uncovering the truth. Assange’s refusal to be tried in a court of law is at odds with his claims about the importance of accountability and the need to “act ethically”.
But despite the confusion of this story, its core importance remains: America’s pursuit of Assange was an attack on our ability to expose what those in power don’t want exposed, and to hold them accountable for their actions. From Russia to Gaza, India to Ethiopia, being a journalist Particularly dangerous occupationsProtecting a free press is a mission more important than it has ever been.
