What Every Journalist Should Do

Patrick Cockburn writes:

Julian Assange is to be freed, if all goes according to plan, after five years of incarceration in Belmarsh high security prison for doing what every journalist should do. This is to find out information of importance and pass it on to the public.

It has really always been as simple as that, despite unrelenting efforts by the US and UK governments to pretend that what the founder of WikiLeaks did in publishing a hoard of US government documents in 2010 was not journalism but espionage.

Assange has taken a plea deal in which he will be found guilty of one charge of espionage, in return for the United States dropping its extradition request. After a hearing in the Northern Mariana Islands, he will walk free.

It was depressing but unsurprising to find that even now, many commenting on Assange’s impending release are repeating long discredited untruths about the original WikiLeaks disclosures. One falsehood that never seems to die is that the leak led to the death or risked the lives of US agents whose identities were disclosed.

But a Pentagon review taskforce headed by a senior counter-intelligence 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 the sentencing hearing of Chelsea Manning – the US soldier responsible for the leak – in July 2013, Carr revealed that his team of 120 counter-intelligence officers had been unable to find a single person who could be shown to have died or to have been harmed because of WikiLeaks’ disclosures.

As for the claim that the deep secrets of the US government were being revealed to its enemies, the classified documents published by WikiLeaks were available to some half a million US government employees, once they had obtained a simple password. I was told by a US security official in Kabul on the day after the WikiLeaks disclosure that the US government was not so foolish as to put truly secret information on SIPRNet, as the database was known, and imagine that it might stay confidential for long.

Prior to those five years in Belmarsh, Assange spent 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.

In practice, what Assange did by leaking was no different from what Daniel Ellsberg, the iconic whistle-blower of the 1970s, had done in leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.

What outraged the Pentagon and the US security services was not their enemies knowing these supposed secrets, but that a great trove of embarrassing information was now in the public domain. Suddenly 251,287 diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 classified army reports from the Iraq War and 90,000 from the war in Afghanistan were available. No history of these wars can be written without referring to them.

How then did Assange, unlike Ellsberg, achieve pariah status in the eyes of much of the media and the public? The explanation is that he became a victim of the “cancel culture” of the right, the left and the centre.

In the eyes of the right, he was a spy, while for liberals he was damned by allegations of rape made against him in Sweden in 2010, for which he was investigated but never charged. As with accusations of espionage made against Assange, the story of the rape investigation was widely misreported. Swedish prosecutors three times dropped the case and three times took it up again over nine years.

What was really happening was best summarised by Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in a 19-page letter sent on 12 September, 2019 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 original Assange disclosures prominently in 2010, but soon after distanced themselves from him. They claimed he was a “narcissist”, or a difficult person to deal with, as if such character flaws, supposing they existed, should ever deter a newspaper from protecting a source.

Unrelenting US government pressure to criminalise Assange combined with cancel culture to keep Assange in Belmarsh without mainstream media saying too much about the case. A well-sourced story in the US press about how the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Assange in the Ecuador embassy in London was largely ignored by the UK media.

A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials – eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal – quoted in a 7,500-word investigation published on yahoo!news into the CIA campaign against Assange.

It was only in November 2022 – 12 years after the WikiLeaks revelations – that the newspapers which originally published them wrote a joint letter to the US government saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”. The five news outlets said the documents told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money”.

The letter noted coyly that for Assange the leaks “had the most severe consequences”, and he had been arrested on 11 April, 2019 in London on a US arrest warrant, and held in Belmarsh high security prison – a place usually used for terrorists and members of organised crime groups.

The letter concluded that “disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalised, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker… Publishing is not a crime.”

Very true, but a pity the titans of the media had allowed 12 years to pass before saying so.