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JULIAN Assange was already on a flight to Australia by the time the news broke early yesterday of a plea deal with the US, whereby he would plead guilty on a single count of violating the Espionage Act in exchange for being liberated.
This isn’t an ideal outcome — he ought never have to been incarcerated in the first place, and cannot conceivably be compensated for the seven years he spent holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, let alone the nearly five years he endured in a tiny cell in Britain’s high-security Belmarsh prison.
Nonetheless, it’s a delightful alternative to what might have unfolded: extradition to the US; facing a court that may well have concluded that punishing those who expose crimes was more in keeping with the ideals of ‘the land of the free’ than pursuing the actual criminals; and a prison term effectively tantamount to a death sentence.
What hopefully turns out to be the final scene in the last act of a sordid drama should be over by the time you read this. It was scheduled to unfold this morning in a courtroom on Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, an American Pacific territory closer to Australia than to the continental US. A federal judge is expected to sign off on the deal, whereafter Assange will return home as a free man. No one can guarantee that nothing will go wrong, but the chances are small.
In recent years, there has been a bipartisan Australian push to secure Assange’s freedom — combined with a bipartisan consensus on geo-strategically subordinating Australia to the very same empire whose depredations WikiLeaks helped to lay bare — which may have played a role in influencing the Biden administration’s decision-making. The primary consideration, though, is likely to have been that pursuing Assange’s prosecution could compromise what had already been achieved by persecuting him: to deter anyone contemplating the idea of following in WikiLeaks’ footsteps.
Those who target journalism are the criminals.
Throughout its existence, the American empire’s primal urge has been driven by the fear of any individual or nation setting an anti-imperial example that others might seek to emulate: from Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, to Cuba, Vietnam, Chile and innumerable others. Among whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg — who exposed the deep state’s actual thinking on Vietnam — stands out as a worthy exemplar who escaped extended incarceration only because the Nixon administration slipped up.
WikiLeaks’ key collaborator, Chelsea Manning, a soldier during the US deployment in Iraq, was sentenced to 35 years in prison after a court martial. She served seven years before being reprieved by Barack Obama in one of his few acts of decency shortly before he handed over to Donald Trump. The Obama administration also decided against pursuing Assange on the sensible grounds that the logical consequence of targeting him would entail similar proceedings against The New York Times and other outlets that had republished selections from WikiLeaks’ trove of documents.
It would be difficult to argue that the ‘Iraq War Logs’, the ‘Afghan War Diary’ and the more than two million diplomatic cables (which helped to trigger the short-lived Arab Spring) did not serve the public interest. The main US argument has been that the unredacted names of operatives and collaborators exposed them to retaliation, but there has never been any corroborating evidence of dire consequences. The main consequence for the empire was embarrassment, as its routine war crimes and frequently indefensible diplomatic machinations were publicised.
The US Democratic National Committee leaks on the eve of the 2016 polls particularly incensed the losing party, but suggestions that he should be assassinated had been made even before that. When Assange faced extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual misdemeanours, he claimed it was part of a ploy to extradite him to the US. Many of us were sceptical, but subsequent events bore out his suspicion.
His refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy became more uncomfortable after a change of government in Quito, and he was spied upon and maligned before the UK authorities were invited in to cart him away to Belmarsh. Whatever his flaws as a human being, the WikiLeaks founder and editor has done the world a great service by ripping off the empire’s last shreds of self-ordained respectability. Amid the American war-mongering in Europe and the Middle East — with Biden’s ill-disguised backing for the genocidal Zionist project — the world needs more revelations and clarifications of the WikiLeaks variety, and far greater freedom for journalists from Palestine to Pakistan, India and far beyond.
Fresh revelations are unlikely to come from Assange — and Julian undoubtedly deserves to be left in peace. But, hopefully, the seeds he has sowed will bear fruit time and again.
Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2024
