It was a messy ending to an often chaotic story. Julian Assange was released last week from Belmarsh prison to board a flight to the US-governed Pacific island of Saipan. There, under a special deal with the US authorities, he pleaded guilty in court to illegally securing and publishing classified documents in exchange for a prison sentence of five years, which he had already served in British prisons. And so, for the first time in 12 years, Assange found himself a free man.
Having to plead guilty to espionage was a necessity for Assange to gain personal freedom. But it raises wider questions about journalistic freedom. Assange has been charged with espionage not because he spied for a foreign government but because he did what many journalists do: he published classified material that the US government did not want the public to see. The charges Assange faced “rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day”, Columbia University’s Jameel Jaffer, an expert on free speech, observed in 2019 when the indictments were first brought. That is why “the indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom”.
The Assange saga has been running for so long that it is easy to forget how it began. In 2006, Assange and a group of fellow activists created WikiLeaks as a global publisher of politically sensitive leaked documents. Early revelations included exposés of corruption in Kenya and the Arab world and of the Chinese crackdown on civil unrest in Tibet.
Then, in April 2010, WikiLeaks released video footage, entitled “Collateral Murder”, of a US Apache helicopter mowing down at least 11 civilians, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, three years earlier on a Baghdad street. Washington had denied repeated freedom of information requests by Reuters to view the footage.
Shot from aboard the helicopter, the video shows a group of men, including the two journalists, walking across a street. Assuming they are insurgents, the helicopter opens fire. Eight are killed; Chmagh is wounded. Minutes later, a van, unconnected to the incident, drives through. Seeing the wounded Chmagh, the driver stops to take him to hospital. The helicopter again opens fire, killing Chmagh and three rescuers. Two children, also in the van, are severely injured. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing kids into a battle,” a member of the helicopter crew nonchalantly responds.
An American ground patrol then arrives. “It was at that point that I really realised what we were doing is wrong,” one of the soldiers, Ethan McCord, later told reporters. Together with Josh Stieber, another soldier from the same unit, McCord wrote “An Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People”, which acknowledged that “the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how US-led wars are carried out in this region”.
The video caused outrage across the globe. It also turned Assange into a marked man. “Collateral Murder” was the most shocking of a series of classified documents and field reports that WikiLeaks published as the “Iraqi War Logs” and the “Afghan War Logs”. These provided evidence of the torture of prisoners, the pressurising of foreign states not to investigate cases in which their citizens had been tortured by US forces, mass deaths of Iraqi civilians that had gone officially unrecorded, and secret arms deals to fuel conflicts that were publicly denied. Yet, for many, the real crime was not the torture or the killings or the cover-ups, but the act of bringing these to light. Prominent figures, including the then Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, even called for the killing of Assange. Mike Pompeo, as director of the CIA, reportedly explored in 2017 the possibilities of doing just that.
Much of the WikiLeaks material had been provided by Chelsea Manning, a US intelligence analyst who in 2013 was convicted of espionage and given a 35-year sentence, later commuted by Barack Obama. Relentless in its pursuit of whistleblowers, the Obama administration nevertheless refrained from taking action against Assange because, as a former Justice Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, told the Washington Post: “There is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists.”
The Trump government that followed had no such scruples. In 2019, US prosecutors charged Assange with 17 counts of espionage, having also secretly charged him the previous year with conspiracy to hack. Assange began a five-year fight against extradition that finally ended last week with the plea deal.
The messiness of the story derives also from Assange’s own actions. Critics, including from within WikiLeaks and from the organisation’s mainstream media partners, accuse him of failing to take seriously enough the need to protect from harm those who might be exposed in the leaked documents, of paying insufficient attention to redacting names and details of those (such as Afghan translators) who could face persecution or death. And, if the espionage charge to which he has been forced to plead guilty should never have been brought in the first place, there is another indictment for which he should have faced due process but managed to evade.
When Assange first sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, it was to escape extradition not to America but to Sweden, and to face charges not of espionage but of rape and sexual assault brought by two women. Assange and his supporters claimed it was a “set-up”, a dirty tricks campaign organised by Washington to ease extradition to the US.
Whatever the truth, the claims could only be tested in court. An allegation of rape is no less deserving of consideration just because the alleged perpetrator has played an important role in bringing truths to light. Assange’s refusal to face court proceedings sits ill with his claims about the importance of accountability and of the need “to act ethically”.
Yet, for all the messiness of this story, its core significance remains unchanged: America’s pursuit of Assange has been an assault on our ability to expose what those in power do not wish to be exposed and to hold them accountable for their actions. At a time when, from Russia to Gaza, from India to Ethiopia, to be a journalist is a particularly perilous occupation, defending the freedom of the press has rarely been such a vital task.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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