Assange Is Free: Press Freedom Still Bound by US Law

Julian Assange is free after over a decade long battle against the US empire in its war against press freedom. The silver-haired Wikileaks editor-in-chief stood at the crux of the future of press freedom and publishing rights, where his trial would dictate whether modern empires would ever be able to be questioned and held accountable for their imperialist crimes.

For over five years, Assange was held in isolation for 23 hours a day in a tiny 2×3 meter cell in London’s Belmarsh Prison, home to the UK’s most notorious prisoners, such as Charles Bronson and David Carrick. It was revealed, following a visit by the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, that Assange began showing signs of psychological torture during his stay in Belmarsh.

Additionally, If we were to count his time under house arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange’s detention in the UK spans the better part of 12 years. His time at the embassy saw him subject to harassment by officers who had stationed round-the-clock guards around the building with orders to arrest Assange if he stepped outside of the embassy’s walls.

Assange’s imprisonment and fight against being extradited to the US is the major journalistic battle of this century. The Australian national showed the world through leaking documents across multiple mediums of communications the crimes committed and malpractice conducted by the US and her allied forces domestically and abroad.

The Trial

One of the initial leaks that put Assange in the crosshairs of the US came in way of a 39-minute video leak dubbed “Collateral Murder,” in which two US Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopters were seen to stalk, fire, and kill over a dozen Iraqi civilians, of whom were two Reuters war correspondents Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen.

“I have five to six individuals with AK-47s,” the US soldier said as he scoped out a group of Iraqis standing on a road in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, Iraq. The US military claimed the group to be legitimate targets, dubbing them as anti-Iraqi forces. US protocol during the Iraq war was to engage in combat with anyone when they felt threatened. “He’s got an RPG!” One of the helicopter operators shouted about the camera Noor-Eldeen slung over his shoulder before firing 30mm rounds at the group of civilians.

The first strike on the group killed seven men, including Noor-Eldeen, Chmagh survived the first leg of the massacre and attempted to crawl away after being injured in the attack. Soldiers could be heard laughing on the video, “hahaha I hit ‘em, I hit ‘em,” one of the pilots chuffed. Apache pilots directed ground troops to advance onto the position of the attack to clear the area following their “keep shoot’n” orders against the men.

A van of schoolchildren pulled up alongside the wounded Chmagh in an attempt to load him into the vehicle and bring him to safety. In the video leaked to the public, children can be seen sitting in the passenger seat of the van while men went to aid the wounded journalist.

“Engage,” the commander told the two Apaches to unload on the van despite the clear presence of children. “Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield!” One of the pilots said after another massacre of innocent Iraqis had just been committed.

US soldier Ethan McCord, one of the ground troops sent to clear the scene of the attack, said during the United National Peace Conference in 2010 that upon approaching the van, he saw “a small girl about four years old on the passenger side of the bench seat … She had a severe belly wound and was covered in glass.”

McCord and a medic took the girl, with glass in her hair and eyes, to a nearby building where an Iraqi civilian helped clean her wounds. The US soldier recalled that beside the the girl, a boy of about seven years old had a head wound from the attack and, hunched over the children in a protective manner, was a man suspected to be the father. McCord’s platoon leader told him to “stop worrying about the kids.” Moments prior to these scenes shown in the leaked video, US military commanders can be heard saying, “it’s their [the Iraqi civilians’] fault for bringing their kids to a battle.”

Another leak that would get the black hand of the US placed on Assange’s head was the Guantanamo Files leak. Wikileaks published “thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to 2008 and never seen before by members of the public or the media,” that exposed the truth of the notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay as part of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

Dubbed the “Gitmo Files,” Wikileaks exposed the US’ schizophrenic criteria used to decide whether someone would be deemed a threat to Washington’s interests or not. Detainees revealed in the leaks include Mohammed El-Gharani, a 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped due to suspicion of potentially holding knowledge of local Taliban leaders. US personnel also detained a man in his late 80s who suffered from senile dementia.

The over 700 leaked documents took the lid off of one of the US’ most secretive detention centers. The leaks showed what the US uses as indicators for suspects, including the simple ownership of a certain Casio watch. It also released information that the US would torture detainees at Guantanamo prison.

The Gitmo Leaks revealed that an Al-Jazeera journalist had been captured and detained for six years, the subject’s dossier read that his reason for capture was “to provide information on … the Al-Jazeera news network’s training program, telecommunications equipment, and news gathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with [bin Laden].”

This is what the US feared most. That their crimes be put up and displayed for all eyes to see. This move by Assange to publish these documents made him persona non grata, wanted dead or alive by Washington as she followed the Australian national like a panther stalking its prey, waiting for one slip up to pounce and sink her teeth into the victim.

Following multiple leaks, the CIA began plotting ways to neutralize the Wikileaks editor in order to prevent him from further allowing informed voices to leak state secrets.

Vault 7 was the catalyst for ultimate CIA assassination plans against Assange as the leak revealed the agency’s clandestine electronic surveillance and cyber warfare capabilities. The CIA would describe Wikileaks as a “non-state intelligence service.”

A former high-ranking counterintelligence official told Yahoo News that senior CIA and former president Donald Trump administration authorities requested “sketches” and “options” as to how to carry out the assassination of Assange. The official later added that discussions over kidnapping and killing Assange occurred “at the highest level” of the Trump admin, highlighting that “there seemed to be no boundaries.”

Pompeo was the newly installed CIA director at the time, the exposure of covert CIA information meant that he was out for revenge. A former Trump national security official revealed that Pompeo and other agency heads “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7 … They were seeing blood.”

“As an American citizen,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s US lawyer, said. “I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information.”

It is this planned treatment that foreshadowed what would potentially be Assange’s fate had the UK courts decided to extradite him. Thankfully, despite agreeing with all the false claims of Wikileaks putting people’s lives in danger – it was found out through investigations that no one was harmed in the slightest due to any of the leaks – and other charges placed against Assange, the UK judges realized that if he is to be extradited to a US prison, that his safety could not be guaranteed.

However, despite all of the news that Assange aided the world in, Wikileaks has been suspected by some actors to have, at times, worked in favor of the imperialist aims of the US.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the time of his presidency, said that Wikileaks was seeking to sow regional conflicts following a leaked cable that revealed that the head of Saudi Arabia’s political affairs, Prince Turki bin Faisal, met with the US Foreign Relations Committee Staffer Bradley Bowman and told him that an attack on Iran could be the only course of action to stop Tehran from gaining access to nuclear weapons.

The Syria Files targeted one of West Asia’s prime resistance members by releasing the emails of the senior officials of the governing Ba’ath Party. But, in typical Wikileaks fashion, Assange said in a statement, “the material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s external opponents.”

Some of their leaks have also been used as evidence by online voices to say that the Lebanese resistance organization Hezbollah earns money through the sale of illicit drugs – a myth that has yet to have any backing evidence brought forward to courts across the US, Europe, or West Asia. The claim that Hezbollah participates in drug trafficking was a part of the gifiles leaks, a collection of millions of top emails sent from the US Strategic Intelligence publishing company Stratfor. Wikileaks published the leak and left the public to sift through what is and is not credible information. Such claims against the Lebanese resistance group could be internal disinformation often used by intelligence agencies, who – as Mike Pompeo admitted – lie in order to justify their objectives, in this case, slandering Hezbollah in order to justify their clandestine operations against the Lebanese resistance.

The Show Goes On

While Assange’s freedom marks a victory for Wikileaks’ editorial liberty, not much has changed in the rights of the press on a broader scale.

His freedom is to be celebrated, and it cannot be downplayed how wonderful it is for Assange to be able to reunite with his family and finally be able to rid himself of the public target that the US has placed on his back. But, journalists will still have to face the wretched nature of Washington’s’ horrific track record when it comes to dealing with the press.

The Wikileaks editor-in-chief was charged with violating the Espionage Act on 23 May 2019 over the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs leak under the Donald Trump White House. On 24 June of this year, he pled guilty to one of the charges of violating the US law for unlawfully conspiring to obtain and publish classified national defense information. In doing so, Assange’s extradition charges were dropped.

His plea just gave the US what it wanted, in that Assange admitted that he worked towards obtaining classified files rather than just being a mouthpiece for which leakers can broadcast their findings as similar outlets do. Through his pleading guilty, it cut a potential case against the US Act, which holds public interest defense, something that political news outlets rely on, as a nonissue.

In the future, courts may be able to use Assange’s admission as fuel to ignite a future fight against journalists who seek to share the truth of these empires with a global audience. This fear is further heightened as the previous two US presidential administrations, Barack Obama and Trump, had a bipartisan consensus against the press, and that sentiment has only grown within US administrations.

Current US President Joe Biden could have dropped the charges against Assange but instead decided to continue Trump’s case against the Wikileaks editor. Biden used the continued trial of Assange to his advantage as he seeks to boost his favorablilty among the American exceptionalist crowd. As the elections edge closer, Biden will chalk up Assange’s guilty plea as a win for his camp and claim to be protecting American interests where Trump failed to convict the, in Biden’s words, “high-tech terrorist.”

American prosecutors can also use Assange’s plea to charge other journalists and publishers under the Espionage Act regardless of who comes into office, be it Democrat or Republican. The admission to guilt has given US judges the perceived power to prosecute anyone under the Espionage Act, be they US citizens or not. However, the situation for press freedom would have been much more bleak and dismal had Assange been fully extradited without a plea deal, which would have given the US government a legal precedent to hunt and target journalists around the world and essentially kidnap them for a sham trial in the US.

Washington’s power to silence the press only grew stronger through this trial. Manufacturing consent policies of publications had already dictated the details and narratives one could use, but the Espionage Act is the venom of the snake, clotting the blood of the victim into which the US sunk her fangs.