The Political Persecution of Julian Assange

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"Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards," elatedly remarked a member of one of two US aircrews. "Hahaha. I hit 'em," rejoiced another. Though two children were wounded, isn’t it “their fault for bringing kids into a battle,” after all? “Collateral Damage,” the title ascribed to the infamous video displaying this gruesome act of state terror in which twelve innocent Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, were brutally gunned down in cold blood by a U.S. attack helicopter crew in Baghdad, was only one of many such atrocities revealed in 2010 to the public by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Later that year, WikiLeaks would publish hundreds of thousands of classified documents—known as the Afghanistan and Iraq “War Logs”— containing extraordinary revelations.

The documents published by Assange
… cut through the presentation of fatalities as being the inevitable product of the “fog of war,” supposed mishaps and errors. Mass murder was not an accidental by-product of the conflict, but an essential component of its character as a neo-colonial occupation of a hostile population.

And he has had a target on his back ever since. After a decade-long legal witch hunt against Assange for exposing its crimes, the U.S. government has now won an important victory. On December 10th, the Biden administration succeeded in its bid to extradite Assange when a British high court ruled in its favor. This decision overturns a previous U.K court ruling from January that denied the extradition request, citing risks to Assange’s health and safety posed by the U.S. prison system. But in the recent ruling, the appellate court was stern in its belief in the “assurances” provided by the U.S. that Assange would not be placed in the maximum-security ADX Florence Supermax, a prison known for its inhumane conditions. (Amnesty International has described the assurances as “inherently unreliable.”)

The legal saga goes back to 2012, when Assange was granted asylum by the government of Ecuador to take refuge in its embassy in the U.K to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was to face questioning related to sexual assault allegations. (It’s worth noting that not only was Assange never charged or convicted in relation to these allegations but, contrary to media smears, he had agreed to be questioned by Swedish authorities, on the condition that he be protected from extradition to the U.S., which the Swedish government never accepted.)

The Ecuadorian government, then led by the left-wing president Rafael Correa, had provided Assange asylum due to the “political persecution” he would face upon extradition to the U.S. The government’s statement further says:

… the judicial evidence shows clearly that, given an extradition to the United States, Mr. Assange would not have a fair trial, he could be judge by a special or military court, and it is not unlikely that he would receive a cruel and demeaning treatment and he would be condemned to a life sentence or the death penalty, which would not respect his human rights.

Assange’s practical imprisonment by the U.K. in the Ecuadorian embassy was forcefully condemned by the U.N. An expert panel concluded that his “arbitrary detention” had resulted in “continuous deprivation of liberty” and urged the U.K. and Swedish governments to grant Assange his right to free movement.

By 2019, Correa had been replaced by Lenin Moreno, a president with a more acquiescing attitude toward U.S. imperial and corporate interests who, fittingly, withdrew the asylum that Ecuador had provided Assange with for seven years. Soon enough, Assange was arrested by U.K. authorities and was placed in Belmarsh High-Security Prison, also known as “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.” And on 11 August 2019, Assange was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Espionage Act for engaging in a “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” According to the indictment:

… Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications.

The allegations are bogus. There is no proof whatsoever of any collaboration between Assange and Manning in obtaining any classified documents. The chat logs between the two, upon which the entirety of the DOJ’s case is based, provide no evidence of this. They merely show banal communication practices that are characteristic of any journalist-source relationship. Indeed, the U.S. government has been grasping at straws, searching for any justification to prosecute Assange for the “crime” of doing journalism. President Biden, staying true to the centrist’s promise that “nothing will fundamentally change,” has continued the Trump administration’s fight against Assange and, based on the recent ruling, is poised to succeed.

The Espionage Act is a draconian law with the sole purpose of protecting state criminals. Nonetheless, Assange has only engaged in the act of publishing classified documents, which is not a crime under the act. Major news outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post, too, published the same information, and have been doing so since time immemorial. Legally speaking, Assange’s work is of the same character.

Because of this significant hurdle—the dubious nature of the allegations—the imperial class has struggled to shift the conversation from the substance of the case to other, unrelated issues. One line of attack used to justify punishing Assange is to argue that the 2016 DNC leaks published by WikiLeaks helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election. Ignoring the irony that one of the revelations from the DNC leaks showed evidence of collusion between the Clinton campaign and the DNC against Bernie Sanders, the only viable progressive on the ticket and the candidate most likely to have beaten Trump, Assange is not on trial for the DNC leaks. Nor is he being punished for “colluding with Russia” or “helping Trump.” Rather, he is being extradited for publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes, and the bizarre focus on the DNC leaks is only designed to obfuscate this reality.

Another line of attack, literally, is assassination. A Yahoo News investigation revealed that in 2017 the CIA had discussed plans to kidnap, and even assassinate, Assange. To quote the Guardian:

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration went as far as to request “sketches” or “options” for killing Assange. “There seemed to be no boundaries,” a former senior counterterrorist official was quoted as saying.

In other words, the U.S. government contemplated the possibility of assassinating a journalist for the act of publishing information disliked by the foreign policy establishment. The precedent that this sets is, to say the least, highly troubling.

The establishment also likes to talk about his personality. Is Assange an “attention-seeker?” Or is he “an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda,” as Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken supporter of U.S. imperial exploits in the middle east, had pondered? Has Assange “put on weight?” Why didn’t he “bother to shave?” But as Noam Chomsky notes, Assange is not on trial for his personality:

Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.

There has been a concerted effort by the foreign policy and media establishment to discredit the idea that Assange is a journalist. According to Assistant Attorney General John Demers, “Julian Assange is no journalist.” Former CIA director Mike Pompeo, who later served as State Secretary under the Trump administration, described WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service.”

“Julian Assange is not a journalist. The Justice Department is right to indict him.”

“Julian Assange is an activist, not a journalist.”

“Julian Assange is not a journalist.”

“Julian Assange is no journalist, and he's had more than enough “due process.”

These are just some of the headlines written by corporate toadies justifying Assange’s prosecution. One could be forgiven for believing there to be an irony in corporate journalists siding against Assange. But there is no irony. Indeed, the raison d’etre of such partisan hacks is to serve power centers of imperialism and capital. They think themselves speakers of truth to power, but when someone like Assange actually does that, it exposes them for what they are: unscrupulous stenographers of the ruling class. Assange discolors their manufactured image of themselves as checkers of power. As Glenn Greenwald points out, in the centrist media there exists a peculiar resentment for Assange that could only be described as “professional jealousy.”

It’s also worth noting the silence on this issue of most conservative media pundits. (That is, if they do not outright support prosecuting Assange. See, for instance, notable “free-speech warrior” Ben Shapiro’s disgusting approval of Assange’s indictment.) It reveals how reactionaries, who otherwise feign concern about free speech, selectively weaponize the issue to fit their own partisan agendas.

The U.S. government’s war against Julian Assange is a war against journalistic freedom. It is a war against the first amendment. It sets a dangerous legal precedent and disincentivizes the risk-taking inherent to journalism. Even the Obama administration understood these dangers and thus decided against prosecuting Assange. Indeed, the prosecution campaign against Julian Assange is but a politically motivated operation designed to send a clear message: Those who pose a threat to imperial and corporate power shall be dealt with accordingly, no matter the cost to any ethical or constitutional norms. For this reason, Chelsea Manning faced years of torturous conditions in prison, and Edward Snowden is still being deprived of the freedom to live in his own country.

Exposing crimes has become the crime, and the “land of the free” pulls itself still deeper into the straits of authoritarianism.