It would be the political persecution of the 21st Century. A publicly orchestrated campaign of mobbing, libelling and black balling by the most powerful country on the planet of a publisher who, using novel technological means, enlivened a moribund fourth estate by linking, ever more closely, the leaking whistleblower and the scribbling journalist.

After 2010, Julian Assange, founder of the publishing organisation WikiLeaks, found himself the subject of intense interest in US national security circles. In September, a trove of over 250,000 cables from the US State Department were released on the organisation’s website, much of it useful as a window to Washington’s policies towards allies and adversaries. The bounty, over the period, also included 90,000 activity reports on the US war in Afghanistan, 400,000 activity reports on the US-led invasion of Iraq, and 800 Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF GTMO) briefs on detainees.

The Obama administration, while initially teasing the options for prosecuting Assange, found the project, and prospects, too onerous. Not so the Trump administration, where Assange and the WikiLeaks organisation came to be seen as enemy information guerillas for hire. Central Intelligence Director Mike Pompeo to see the publishing outfit as a “hostile intelligence service” that fetishized transparency politics while aiding US adversaries.

Tenanted as a defiant, if ailing political asylee in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy for seven years, he was eventually, on agreement between the US, UK and Ecuadorian governments, dragged out in 2019.

Having been mocked for his fears that Washington wanted his scalp, he faced two indictments, the latter superseding the former. The June 2020 superseding indictment........

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