Assange's slow death at the hands of the US empire
By creating a platform for whistleblowers, Julian Assange invited the wrath of the US empire and is paying with his life.
Julian Assange is a divisive figure. Most people who have taken an interest in the Australian editor and publisher tend to fall categorically to one side or the other. He’s either a hero to defend and celebrate or a criminal to prosecute and lock away. Either a champion of transparency at the highest levels and holding the world’s most powerful groups to account, or a wreckless activist putting the operations of the world’s intelligence agencies at risk.
By creating a secure online platform for whistleblowers to publish incriminating documents from within secret organizations and agencies, Assange attracted powerful adversaries with the means to fight back against his efforts.
Those enemies have sought to confound the man with his idea, to conflate the life of the Australian citizen with the global transparency-promoting platform he created. They have sought to make an example of the man as a warning to those who might follow, to dissuade anyone from taking on the global war machine and facilitating the disclosure and exposure of international corruption and war crimes.
Julian Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006. The concept was simple and summed up in the initial slogan: “The method is transparency, the goal is justice.” With the use of encryption and digital safety protocols, the website provides a secure platform for whistleblowers from any organization across the world to anonymously deposit content that exposes wrongdoing for Wikileaks to review and publish.
Exposing war crimes
What became the existential problem for Assange is that Wikileaks was successful. It was successful in garnering the trust of whistleblowers and in disseminating the content they provided. Despite years of internal squabbles and managerial failings after it was founded, the platform brought to light numerous war crimes and cover-ups, committed especially by the US military and its various spy agencies.
The platform’s first major, significant disclosures were in 2010 under the names “the Iraq war logs” and “the Afghan war diary.” The thousands of documents exposed war crimes and torture committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were provided to Wikileaks by Chelsea Manning.
In return, the US launched a criminal investigation into the leaks in 2010, the same year that “an arrest warrant for Assange was issued for two separate sexual assault allegations in Sweden. The UK ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden, prompting him to enter the Ecuadorian embassy in London in August 2012, claiming political asylum. He feared that if he was extradited to Sweden he would in turn be extradited to the US,” according to The Guardian.
Assange has been locked up in London's Belmarsh prison since April 2019 after British police extracted him from the Ecuadorian embassy. He spent 7 years as a “guest” of Ecuador to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He has now spent a further 5 years as a “guest” of the British prison system despite not being convicted of a crime. He has spent 12 years deprived of liberty. His physical and mental health have suffered significantly throughout his isolation.
Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Sky News in February 2024: “He has good and bad days in [Belmarsh prison] in terms of his mental health,” but said Assange was in a “delicate state of health,” referring to his “mini-stroke” and other health “episodes” in the prison.
A wanted man
The Wikileaks founder is wanted on 18 charges by the US government, which accuses him of conspiring to hack into military databases to acquire sensitive information.
His merciless persecution by the United States has little to do with who he is as a person or the laws he may or may not have infringed, and everything to do with what Wikileaks represents.
Wikileaks was the unignorable thorn in the side of a military intelligence complex with the largest budget in the world accustomed to operating in the shadows of unaccountability according to its own mandates with little regard for international law. Wikileaks exposed official records containing the US military’s hypocrisy, cruelty, and disregard for human life that amount to war crimes.
In return, the US war machine has carried out and plotted campaigns to discredit, intimidate, imprison, and assassinate Assange.
In June 2019, the US Department of Justice formally asked UK authorities to hand Assange over to the US. It was the same year Swedish authorities dropped the rape investigation against Assange, saying the evidence was not strong enough to bring charges, partly due to the passage of time.
The extradition hearings began in February 2020 but were adjourned after a week.
In January 2021, in London, Judge Vanessa Baraitser concluded that Assange should not be sent to the US due to his frail health, adding there was a risk he would attempt suicide. In October 2021, he experienced a mini-stroke. He also broke a rib while coughing. The UK district judge blocked his extradition because he would likely kill himself in US custody.
Assange faces 175 years in prison if he is extradited to the United States. “If he gets extradited he will be put in a hell hole that is so deep that I fear I will not be able to see him again,” his wife Stella Assange said in February 2024.
Stella Assange, who has two children with the WikiLeaks founder, aged five and six, decries how this case has “normalized brutalizing and intimidating journalists everywhere.” They met 13 years ago, at the Ecuadorian Embassy. They were married inside Belmarsh prison, a little over a year ago.
US war crimes
WikiLeaks first came to international prominence in 2010 when it released hundreds of thousands of secret classified files and diplomatic cables in what was the largest security breach of its kind in US military history, which US prosecutors say imperiled the lives of agents named in the leaked material. It was later revealed that the source of the leak was Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst who had become disillusioned with the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2013, “she was sentenced to 35 years in prison in a military court-martial—a sentence President Obama later commuted to about seven years. She was imprisoned again in 2019 on a civil contempt charge for refusing to testify in a grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks, but was released the following year.”
The persecution of Chelsea Manning (US military), Edward Snowden (NSA contractor at Booze Allen Hamilton), Thomas Drake (NSA senior management) and countless other whistleblowers indicates a pattern that constitutes what has been called the US’s “war on whistleblowers.” Assange generated “unfounded conspiracy theories” when he hinted that Seth Rich may have been killed as the source of the 2016 Democratic National Committee emails leak exposing fraud favoring Hillary Clinton as the DNC “tried to aid [Hillary] Clinton and hamper [Bernie] Sanders.”
The persecution of Julian Assange and Wikileaks has revealed that for the United States and its allies, “state secrets trump revealing state crimes,” in the words of Stella Assange. “They want impunity, they don’t want to be scrutinized, and journalism stands in the way.”
Collateral Murder
One of the most shocking Wikileaks disclosures was a classified US military video depicting the “indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad—including two Reuters news staff. The video, shot [in 2007] from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed and stated that they did not know how the children were injured. After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the US military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own ‘Rules of Engagement’.”
Wikileaks released both the original 38-minute video and a shorter version that it received from several military whistleblowers. Here is the shorter version:
US-focused disclosures
Wikileaks was responsible for major disclosures that made the US power establishment uncomfortable.
Iraq War Logs (2010): WikiLeaks released nearly 400,000 classified US military documents, which documented a higher number of civilian casualties than previously acknowledged by the US government. It shed light on the true human cost of the war, including incidents of civilian deaths caused by coalition forces. The logs contained evidence of widespread torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees by Iraqi security forces, sometimes with the knowledge of coalition forces, and numerous incidents of collateral damage, including airstrikes that resulted in civilian deaths and destruction of property.
Afghan War Diary (2010): WikiLeaks published over 90,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan. Similar to the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary contained evidence of a higher number of civilian casualties than previously acknowledged by official sources and revealed details of covert drone strikes conducted by the United States in Afghanistan, including civilian casualties and collateral damage.
Cablegate (2010): WikiLeaks released a trove of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from US embassies around the globe. The cables contained numerous allegations of corruption and misconduct by government officials around the world. These revelations tarnished the reputations of some political figures and raised concerns about the prevalence of corruption in international affairs. Some cables detailed US efforts to gather intelligence and conduct espionage activities abroad, including surveillance of foreign officials and diplomats. These revelations strained diplomatic relations and fueled suspicions of US espionage among foreign governments.
Guantanamo Bay Files (2011): WikiLeaks published classified documents detailing the detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The files revealed instances of harsh treatment and abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including allegations of torture and inhumane interrogation techniques. Many of the files documented cases where detainees were held without sufficient evidence to justify their detention or without being charged with a crime, and revealed cases of mistaken identity, where individuals were detained based on faulty intelligence or inaccurate information.
DNC Email Leaks (2016): WikiLeaks released thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 US presidential election. The leaked emails revealed apparent bias within the DNC against Bernie Sanders as some emails suggested that DNC officials favored Hillary Clinton over Sanders, raising allegations of collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign during the primary election season. The emails contained discussions between DNC officials and members of the media, suggesting a level of coordination and influence over news coverage.
Vault 7 (2017): WikiLeaks published a series of documents and files, collectively known as Vault 7, which detailed the hacking tools and techniques used by the CIA. Revelations included CIA-made viruses that infect smart TVs transforming them into covert microphones and the CIA’s ability to track a smartphone user's geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone's camera and microphone, as well as “automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and more.” The Vault 7 file also alleged that “the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation,” giving their “possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.”
To date, the only people prosecuted for the revelations are the whistleblowers themselves. The 52-year-old founder of Wikileaks is wanted by US authorities on 18 counts, including one under the US Espionage Act.
This is the first time in the history of US criminal prosecution that the Espionage Act has been used against a journalist, media outlet or broadcaster. The charges were brought against Assange after the release of the damning Vault 7 files, not in the aftermath of the 2010 Iraq and Afghanistan releases.
In an opinion piece published in 2022, five international media outlets—Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, The Guardian and El País—expressed their concern that such an indictment “sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America's First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
How can Assange be accused of espionage when what he did was publish the documents passed on by Chelsea Manning? Why aren't the publishers of The New York Times and The Guardian also being prosecuted for espionage for publishing the same documents in partnership with WikiLeaks?
Evidence given at Chelsea Manning’s sentencing hearing in 2013 revealed that a team of 120 counterintelligence officers had been unable to find a single person who could be shown to have died because of WikiLeaks’s revelations.
Persecuted for life
As The Guardian wrote in 2019, “When Julian Assange, disguised as a motorcycle courier, first walked up the steps of Ecuador’s small embassy behind Harrods in central London and asked for asylum, few people—including, surely, Assange himself—could have imagined it would be almost seven years before he next exited the front door.”
Julian Assange's possible final legal challenge to stop his extradition from Britain to the United States was held at London's High Court on February 20 and 21. During the public hearing, two judges reviewed an earlier ruling that had refused Assange permission to appeal. Assange was absent from court for the two-day session, and did not follow the proceedings via video due to illness, his lawyer said. The judges have yet to deliver a verdict.
Julian’s wife Stella Assange says she is “optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the US government.”
Pompeo-planned kidnapping and murder
After the publication of the Vault 7 files which detailed the CIA spying tools deployed against the world, then-head of the CIA Mike Pompeo led the charge in drawing up plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange in 2017 during the Trump administration. When Yahoo News broke the story, it revealed that senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration requested “‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. ‘There seemed to be no boundaries.’”
Mike Pompeo dedicated his first-ever speech as head of the CIA to the threat he suggested Wikileaks posed to the United States, deeply embarrassed that the organization’s secret illegal spying practices had been disclosed.
Final moves on a shrinking chessboard
Assange has spent over a decade in the UK as he exhausts all his legal options to avoid extradition to the United States.
Assange’s lawyers have argued that “their client cannot be extradited and sent to a country that wants to kill him referring to [the] Yahoo News report, which claimed the CIA was plotting to kidnap or assassinate him back in 2017.” They also asked the Royal Courts of Justice in London how can “exposing crime and torture be worse than committing them?”
According to The Guardian, what emerged from the February hearings was that Assange would likely avoid the potential sentence of 175 years in prison, though “he would probably face a sentence of between 30 and 40 years. For a 52-year-old in poor health that almost certainly means dying behind bars.”
If the High Court rules against Assange, he will have exhausted his UK legal options. Stella Assange has said he would then ask the European Court of Human Rights to temporarily halt the extradition. There is a chance however that Assange may be extradited to the US in the window of time between the UK judges’ ruling and his application to the ECHR to halt the process. Then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel signed off on his extradition in June 2022, paving the way for the UK to ship him to the US at the first legal opportunity.
By refusing to stand up against the “war on whistleblowers” driven by the United States, governments everywhere are complicit in keeping the crimes committed by state actors in the dark, guilty of failing to protect and harbor those who expose war crimes and wrongdoing. Defending Assange is to defend transparency, accountability, and journalism.
This case is not about Julian himself. It never has been.