Julian Assange’s lawyers are making a last-ditch effort this week to prevent the WikiLeaks founder from being extradited to the United States on spying charges. If found guilty, investigative journalists could be prosecuted for publishing news that the government doesn’t want the public to know, and they risk up to 175 years in prison.
Assange has already spent five years in high-security Belmarsh prison and seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid deportation.
His first crime occurred in 2010 when he published a large volume of U.S. diplomatic, military, and political documents, many of which were related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Excerpts from these papers are: of new york times, guardian, der spiegel, el pais and Le Mondeto the severe embarrassment of the United States and other governments that have pursued Assange ever since.
For most of that period, Assange disappeared from public view, or it would be more accurate to say that he “disappeared” by the media, most notably by the newspapers that once published front-page revelations about Assange. . He reached this pariah status not long after being hailed as the new Daniel Ellsberg, the iconic whistleblower of the ’70s who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.
Assange quickly became the victim of a competing “cancel culture” of the right, left, and center, whose protagonists united to condemn him for very different reasons. On the right, he was pilloried as a spy, not as a journalist who harmed the United States and risked the lives of American agents and allies by exposing American secrets. The second, more pernicious attack came from the more liberal side of the political spectrum, stemming from rape allegations made against Assange in Sweden in 2010, for which he was investigated but not prosecuted. Ta.
The Assange case soon became too much for many media outlets to handle, and has since become a stale news story that no one wants to revisit, despite new developments.
Mr. Assange is making a last-ditch effort to avoid a trial and possible imprisonment in the United States because he is too ill to come to court, but his actions have infuriated the United States government and its security services. It is important to dispel common myths. This was to release a vast trove of 251,287 diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 classified military reports from the Iraq War, and more than 90,000 classified military reports from the Afghanistan War.
Many of these reports and cables concerned small changes in the war that were embarrassing but not condemnatory. For example, one short report described how U.S. Marines shot and killed a woman riding in a car at a checkpoint on the outskirts of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, injuring her husband and three daughters. The suspect fired because the occupants of the vehicle could not be identified due to sunlight reflecting off the windshield. Another report recorded how American soldiers shot and killed an Iraqi man who had “crept behind the sniper’s position” and who turned out to be their translator.
But the most infamous incident of the Iraq war, brought to light by WikiLeaks, was the video shot by the gun camera of a US Apache helicopter that killed 12 civilians in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. Ta.
The United States falsely claimed that the dead included two local Reuters reporters, but that they were “terrorists.” Video of the killing was known to exist, but the Pentagon refused to release it despite Freedom of Information Act requests.
Enraged by what the video revealed about the US war effort, a junior US intelligence analyst named Chelsea Manning released the entire archive to WikiLeaks. The ruthlessness of two helicopter pilots who shot down civilians in the sky still has the power to shock. “Hahaha, I hit you,” one person says. “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” said the other.
The U.S. government and the Department of Defense quickly fired back against Assange and WikiLeaks, claiming that the revelations would lead to the deaths of the individuals named in the cables and reports. To this day, many people accept this accusation, but led by senior counterintelligence officer Brigadier General Robert Carr, who sought to show that at least some of the people identified by WikiLeaks were at risk. The Pentagon Review Task Force came up with nothing.
In testimony at Manning’s sentencing hearing in July 2013, Kerr said his team of 120 counterintelligence officers had identified people they believed had been killed or harmed as a result of the WikiLeaks big scoop. He revealed that he could not find anyone.
When it comes to revealing vital U.S. government secrets to the delight of enemies, the classified documents released by WikiLeaks were available to vast numbers of U.S. government employees with a simple password.
A U.S. government official I met in Kabul during the WikiLeaks scoop said the U.S. government was not naive enough to believe the information was stored in a database known as Sarpnet, which is accessible to up to 500,000 people. Ta. It turned out to be Private Manning, but it was likely to remain classified for a very long time.
But what really condemned Assange in the eyes of international opinion was not his charge of endangering the United States and its agents, but his status as a suspected rapist. Some dismissed the charges as politically motivated or unwarranted. Others, many of whom would normally defend press freedom, argued that he should be tried for sexual assault. Assange was never indicted by Swedish prosecutors, who dropped the case three times and re-filed it three times over a nine-year period.
On September 12, 2019, Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, sent a 19-page letter to the Swedish government. After a detailed review of the judicial proceedings against Assange, he concluded: “Since 2010, Swedish prosecutors have [have done] All to maintain the unqualified “rape suspect” narrative without any progress and no charges being filed.
Assange refused to travel to Sweden because he would then be extradited to the United States. He offered to speak by video to Swedish prosecutors in London, but they refused. The investigation was finally closed in 2019.
These latter developments were sparsely reported by the world’s largest newspapers, which prominently published Assange’s revelations in 2010, but distanced themselves from him shortly thereafter. Often they claimed that he was a “narcissist” – a difficult person. In reality, the government’s longstanding determination to criminalize criticism of its actions, combined with the various cancel cultures of the time, led to Assange being placed in solitary confinement and likely kept there for the rest of his life. .