Assange’s release

Julian Assange is a free man, for now. A legal pursuit that spanned over a decade, involving multiple countries, embassies and charges ranging from sexual assault to espionage finally concluded in a courtroom in the US Pacific territory of Saipan. The Wikileaks founder accepted a plea deal with the US Department of Justice that saw him pleading guilty to a single charge of espionage related to obtaining and publishing US military secrets. He is now headed to his home country of Australia. As part of the deal, Assange will be required to destroy information provided to WikiLeaks. Here, it is pertinent to remind everyone that the espionage that Assange has been charged with mainly involved publishing secret documents that exposed the war crimes of the US and its Western allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In other words, journalism. In the aftermath of the trial, one of Assange’s lawyers claimed that this was the first time in the 100-year history of the Espionage Act it had been used by the US to pursue a journalist or a publisher like his client. This is not the sort of behaviour one expects from the self-styled global champion of free expression and human rights.

That being said, Assange being cornered into accepting a plea deal and being charged under an act he still claims violates his First Amendment rights under the US constitution is not exactly a surprising outcome. If anything, Assange might be lucky that he does not have to spend several years behind bars in a high-security US prison, if the treatment of other US whistleblowers is anything to go by. Chelsea Manning, who allegedly gave hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks revealing wrongdoing by US officials in Iraq received a 35-year prison sentence. Jack Teixiera has been senteced to 16 years in prison for allegedly leaking Pentagon documents that contained sensitive information including about the war in Ukraine. And who can forget Edward Snowden, who has been forced to seek exile in Russia for revealing his government’s surveillance of its own people.

When put together, the message that the fates of these individuals send is that the US is keen to fight its wars and do other dirty work in secret. The irony here being that punishing citizens for revealing said dirty work is a cudgel that the US often uses to browbeat other governments, mostly those in the Global South and outside of its Western-Nato alliance network. As it turns out, the US is just as keen to keep its dirty work secret, all the better to keep getting its hands dirty, as any other so-called ‘authoritarian government’. The fate of Snowden in particular shows that even revealing abuses against American citizens themselves is not a safe zone. As far as professional journalists and other media practitioners concerned with pursuing the truth no matter where it leads are concerned, the trial of Assange and his ilk reveals that they have no friends outside of their fellow brethren. At some point, chasing the truth too far may well cost you your freedom if not your life. There is no champion in your corner.