Julian Assange’s lawyers are making their final effort this week to stop the WikiLeaks founder being deported to the US to face espionage charges. If found guilty there, he risks a sentence of up to 175 years for charges that could be made against any investigative journalist publishing news that the Government does not want the public to know.
Assange has already spent five years in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh and seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London seeking to avoid deportation.
His original offence occurred in 2010 when he published a great hoard of US diplomatic, military and political documents, many of them relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Extracts from these papers appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde, to the acute embarrassment of the US and other governments, which have pursued Assange ever since.
During much of that period, Assange disappeared from public view, but it would be truer to say that he was “disappeared” by the media, most strikingly by those papers that had once published his revelations on their front pages. He achieved this pariah status not long after he had been lauded as a new Daniel Ellsberg, the iconic whistle-blower of the 70s who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.
Assange swiftly became a victim of the competing “cancel cultures” of the right, left and centre, whose protagonists combined to denounce him for very different reasons. From the right, he was pilloried as a spy rather than a journalist, who had damaged the US by revealing its secrets and endangered the lives of its agents and allies. A second and more damaging attack came from the more liberal end of the political spectrum, and stemmed from allegations of rape made against Assange in Sweden in 2010, for which he was investigated but never charged.
The case of Assange soon became too hot to handle for much of the media and then stale news that nobody wanted to revisit, despite new developments.
As Assange, who is too ill to come to court, makes his last bid to avoid trial and probable incarceration in the US, it is important to dispel the myths about what he did which so infuriated the US government and its security services. This was to release a giant trove of 251,287 diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 classified army reports from the Iraq war and 90,000 from the war in Afghanistan.
Many of these reports and cables were about the small-change of warfare, embarrassing but not damning. One brief report, for instance, related how a US Marine had shot and killed a woman in a car at a checkpoint outside the Iraqi city of Fallujah, as well as wounding her husband and three daughters. He had opened fire because he was “unable to determine the occupants of the vehicle due to the reflection of the sun coming off the windshield”. Another report recorded how US soldiers shot dead an Iraqi who was “creeping up behind their sniper position”, who turned out to be their own translator.
But the most infamous incident in the Iraq war revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures was the video filmed by the gun camera of a US Apache helicopter which had killed a dozen civilians in Baghdad on 12 July 2007.
The US falsely claimed that the dead were “terrorists”, although they included two local Reuters journalists. A video of the killings was known to exist, but the Pentagon refused to release it despite a Freedom of Information Act request.
Enraged by what this video revealed about the US conduct of the war, a junior US intelligence analyst called Chelsea Manning released the entire archive to WikiLeaks. The callousness of the two helicopter pilots shooting down the civilians below still has the power to shock. “Ha ha, I hit them,” one says. “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says the other.
The US government and the Pentagon swiftly counterattacked Assange and Wikileaks, claiming that the revelations would lead to the deaths of individuals named in the cables and reports. Many accept this accusation to this day, but a Pentagon Review Task Force headed by a senior counterintelligence officer, Brigadier General Robert Carr, which sought to show that at least some of those identified by WikiLeaks were endangered, came up with nothing.
In testimony given at Manning’s sentencing hearing in July 2013, Carr revealed that his team of 120 counterintelligence officers had been unable to find a single person who could be shown to have died or to have been harmed because of WikiLeaks’s great scoop.
As for the revelation of the deep secrets of the US government bringing joy to its enemies, the classified documents released by WikiLeaks had been available to a vast number of US government employees with a simple password.
A US official whom I met in Kabul at the time of the WikiLeaks scoop told me that his government was not so naïve as to believe that information stored on a database known as Sirpnet to which up to half a million people had access – one of whom turned out to be Private Manning – was likely to stay confidential for very long.
Yet what really damned Assange in the eyes of international public opinion was not the charges of putting the US and its agents in danger, but his status as a rape suspect. Some dismissed the accusations as politically inspired or unjust. Others, many of whom would normally have defended freedom of the press, said that he should be tried for sexual assault. Assange was never charged by the Swedish prosecutor who three times dropped the case and three times took it up again over nine years.
On 12 September 2019, Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, sent a 19-page letter to the Swedish government. Having undertaken a detailed review of the judicial proceedings against Assange, he concluded that “since 2010, the Swedish prosecution appears to [have done] everything to maintain the unqualified ‘rape suspect’ narrative” without progress being made or any charges issued.
Assange refused to travel to Sweden on the grounds that he would then be extradited to the US. He offered to talk to Swedish prosecutors in London or by video, but they refused. The investigation was finally closed in 2019.
These latter developments were sparsely covered by the world’s biggest newspapers, which had published the Assange disclosures prominently in 2010, but soon after distanced themselves from him. Often they claimed he was a “narcissist”, or a difficult person to deal with. In reality, perennial government determination to criminalise criticism of its actions have combined with the different cancel cultures of the age to put Assange in a prison cell and keep him there – possibly for the rest of his life.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Rami G Khouri
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
