WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gives thumbs up after arriving at Canberra Airport in Canberra on June 26, 2024, after he pleaded guilty at a US court in Saipan to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate US national defence information. AFP
For his detractors and persecutors, Assange was a threat, as he was exposing secrets the empire-builders were determined not even their citizens should know. WikiLeaks was not revealing their secrets. Rather, it was revealing their crimes. WikiLeaks also exposed the Western imperialists’ hypocrisy, with which they promote human rights while violating them with impunity; they will preach democratic values to others but jealously guard the global dictatorship where others are expected to do what they say, not what they do.
Assange’s freedom from incarceration on trumped-up charges came at a price. He was forced to go for a guilty plea at a US court. Going for a deal with the imperialists may appear to be a betrayal of the cause he was standing for. It may be an anticlimax to the fight he had been engaged in for the past 14 years, insisting on the people’s right to know what their governments did. But he was compelled to plead guilty to the charge of espionage he did not commit because not doing so would only make his predicament worse.
After his release from Britain’s high-security Belmarsh prison, he appeared in a United States federal court in Saipan, part of the Northern Mariana Islands. The specific charge—conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information—carried a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison. However, the court released him, taking into consideration the time he had already spent in prison and the absence of physical injury resulting from the offence he is alleged to have committed. During the hearing, Assange calmly invoked the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to information, and the Espionage Act, pointing out the tension between free speech and national security.
The witch hunt against him began 14 years ago, with both the United States and Sweden seeking his extradition from Britain. The US wanted him extradited to face espionage charges, while Sweden wanted him for a sexual assault case. In 2012, he found asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but in 2019, with the socialist government losing power to a pro-US party in the Ecuadorian election, Assange became an unwelcome guest at the embassy. Ecuador revoked his asylum status, enabling the British police to drag him out of the embassy and then to prison.
He fought his extradition to the US, with appeal after appeal against adverse court decisions. Throughout his plight in detention, which in a sense echoed what Winston Smith, the main character in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 went through, free-speech advocates stood by him. Among them were Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, Argentina’s former president Alberto Fernandez, and award-winning journalist John Pilger. But his critics, including some mainstream Western media outlets, accused him of being a Russian agent, pointing out his refusal to carry files on Russia. He was also accused of playing a part, together with Russia, in undermining the democratic process in the 2016 US presidential election. WikiLeaks exposés on emails connected to Hillary Clinton were partially blamed for her defeat in the presidential race against Donald Trump.
Founded in 2006 against the backdrop of the United States’ war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, WikiLeaks started to expose the US-led Western empire’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the multinationals’ crimes against humanity, especially their dumping of toxic waste in Africa.
WikiLeaks’ Iraq Logs exposed video evidence of how trigger-happy the US soldiers were in killing unarmed civilians, including journalists. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we got to know that the empire’s soldiers commit rape, torture, and violations of international humanitarian laws.
The imperialists’ fury reached a breaking point when WikiLeaks published a large volume of US diplomatic cables that exposed coups, regime change ops, and other imperialist pursuits for global dominance. Instead of being grateful to Assange for vetting the cables before sharing them with the Guardian, the New York Times, and other top global newspapers, the empire and its cronies launched a witch hunt against him.
Governments, when their secret schemes or power-centred crimes are exposed, kill the messengers, label them as enemy agents, imprison them on trumped-up charges, or call them mentally deranged.
Addressing the media from the Ecuadorian Embassy balcony, Assange made a powerful speech that must shake the US conscience, if it has one. He said, “As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all of our societies... We must use this moment to articulate the choice that is before the government of the US. Will it return to and re-affirm the revolutionary values it was founded on? Or will it lurch off the precipice, dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark? I ask President Obama to do the right thing: the United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.”
Transparency in governance is a fundamental responsibility a state owes its citizens. After all, the state is a trust. It is not for nothing that it is engraved in democratic constitutions that sovereignty lies with the people. In an ideal democracy, there is no secret between the state and the citizen unless national security is at stake. But many democratic states invoke national security to hide their war crimes, their roles in terrorism, and corruption, which is a crime against their own people. Journalism believes in transparency in governance. Keeping people in the dark is an aberration of democracy. Hence, WikiLeaks’ publication of states’ wrongdoings.
Now that Assange is in Australia after he was released under a plea bargain, a question that bothers those who supported him during his fight against the Western imperialists’ efforts to silence him and stand by his cause is: Will he continue his journalism, exposing the crimes of governments, especially the imperialistic states that resort to wars, terrorism, regime changes, and resource plunder to make the poor nations poorer and rich nations richer? Will WikiLeaks bounce back to its journalistic activism and publish the cables that expose the Zionist conspiracies?
We hope Julian Assange won’t end up like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984—leading a meaningless life controlled by the establishment after his release from custody.
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