“Enough is enough. There’s nothing to be served by the ongoing incarceration of Mr. Assange.”
So declared Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia, homeland of Julian Assange, as the appeal to prevent his extradition to the US moves forward.
April 16th was the deadline for the US to give assurances sought by the UK where he is imprisoned, that he will get a fair trial if a US indictment stands to move him to American soil.
Assange’s wife Stella Assange was far from impressed by the American pledge; she said the US had provided “blatant weasel words” instead of assurances about his treatment.
Assange, you might remember, became infamous for publishing documents on Wikileaks that revealed possible crimes committed by the US military. He sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years. The US government has been on a relentless PR campaign to have him locked away in an American penitentiary since 2019. UK law enforcement officials took him into custody and he has been in a London high security prison since then.
Before being shipped to the US for a trial, the UK wanted three assurances:
- That he would be protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech;
- That he is not “prejudiced at trial” due to his nationality; and
- That the death penalty is not imposed.
BTW, the death penalty has not been used in the UK since 1965. The murder rate in the UK is 1 per 100,000; in the US it is 6 per 100,000…just in case anyone was wondering if the death penalty does any good in preventing crime (No, quite the opposite; it looks like the death penalty promotes crime. Of course, the death penalty is a crime…committed by the state).
Stella Assange was critical of the “non-response” the US gave to those three conditions.
“The US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can ‘seek to raise’ the First Amendment if extradited…[this] does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.”
The US did provide assurances that the death penalty was off the table.
The UK judges will now consider the American response plus counter-arguments from Assange’s lawyers at a hearing in May.
President Biden had said that he “was considering” a request from Australia to drop the case. Prime Minister Albanese had asked him to “bring the matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia”.
The UK government had first authorized his extradition in June of 2022, but delays imposed by Covid-19 and Assange’s deteriorating health – influenced by long confinement – have prevented his removal to America.
His crime essentially was to embarrass important people and reveal the flaws in major public policies and institutions.
One of the secret videos that he released showed a US helicopter shooting 18 civilians in Iraq as the crew laughed.
The Assange case is about who we should punish more: the person who told the truth or the killers pulling the triggers for the state.
As one of the mothers of an American convicted in the My Lai massacre of civilians in Vietnam put it: “I gave them my son and they sent me back a murderer.” The war in Vietnam triggered a similar case to Assange, with the publication of the Pentagon Papers five decades ago. James Goodale, the lawyer who defended The New York Times when it published the papers, said of the Assange case that “If the prosecution succeeds investigative reporting based on classified information will be given a near death blow.”
The Assange case has split public opinion between those seeking liberty and those demanding punishment for treason.
Trump, as one might expect, was hell-bent on punishing Assange. Biden for some reason made a conscious decision to press ahead with Trump’s malicious pursuit of Assange. Yet a few days ago, Biden let it be known that the US was considering Australia’s request to drop the charges. Albanese had specifically said: “We’ve used all of our diplomatic efforts at every level to communicate that it is time that this was brought to a close. Enough is enough. There’s nothing to be served by the ongoing incarceration of Mr. Assange.”
In other words, free Assange and return him to Australia.
Assange makes us focus on how much we are being misled by our government, and whether we have a duty to try to correct it.
A book called The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets, by Matthew Connelly, strips bare the misuse of power in protecting political embarrassment through the “secrecy” label.
Its premise is that if, at the end of the day, our government is not even accountable in the court of history, it truly is accountable to no one.
Official secrecy has grown completely out of control. It has created fear far outside the confines of government offices, defense contractors, and newsrooms. Even in the halls of academia, and inside elite foundations, people have come to fear prosecution just for doing research on state secrecy.
The ‘declassification engine’ is a platform that combines big data, high-performance computing, and sophisticated algorithms to reveal what the government did not want us to know, and why they did not want us to know it. Secrecy today is stimulated by technology the government has built over decades in order to surveil us.
It is so lopsided that the government is spending $80+-billion on military research and development – ten times what it is spending on the National Science Foundation.
Secrecy is never just about national security. It serves the interests of people who wanted to avoid democratic accountability.
Now there are over 28-million cubic feet of government files locked up in records centers all across the country. This is equivalent in volume to 26 Washington Monuments. The volume of classified information in digital form is already orders of magnitude greater. The United States spent $18.4 billion in 2017 trying to keep its secrets. That was close to double what it had been spending five years previously. If there were a Department of Secrets, it would now have a budget almost double that of the Department of Commerce, and almost 50 percent bigger than that of the Treasury Department. The government estimates it would need two million people to review the petabyte of data produced by that one intelligence agency alone to decide what could be declassified.
Notwithstanding the exponential growth of classified data, the government is spending less than half as much on declassification as it was spending twenty years ago, and about a fifth as many pages are being released each year.
Despite the fact that the US Constitution says nothing about a President’s authority to keep secrets, Presidents have consistently refused to accept reasonable limits to their power to define state secrets, because it is one of the few ways in which they can be completely unaccountable.
We have an ongoing case where one former President kept boxes of national secrets in the bathroom of his Florida home. He had a secret meeting with the Russian President and a month later America’s agents started to disappear around the world.
Secrecy can have tragic consequences. There is a lot of evidence that the attack on Pearl Harbor was the consequence of a US strategy to keep pushing Japan up against the wall so as to provoke a war in the Pacific that would trigger a world war against Germany — Roosevelt’s ultimate goal. Japan evidently was prepared to evacuate China to keep America happy. But though FDR was deliberately provoking Tokyo, of course, this does not mean that he expected, much less wanted, Japan to destroy the Pacific battle fleet. But we will never know what America really did. It’s a secret.
Despite the billions spent and the containment policies, some secrets can prove easy to break. Leon Theremin was a genius in the gulag prison of the Soviet Union who invented an entirely new kind of wireless surveillance system in 1945. Seven years later a CIA technician at the US Embassy in Moscow discovered it. It was concealed the whole time inside a gift the youth organization Young Pioneers had presented to the ambassador: a wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States. “The Thing” consisted of a microphone precision-tooled so the diaphragm would vibrate with the sound of human voices. The device was undetectable when it was not in operation, and it could continue working indefinitely. He also realized that the sound of human voices made window panes vibrate. If infrared beams were bounced off the panes they could pick up conversations.
The Soviets had likely been able to read most if not all encrypted communications in and out of the US Embassy in Moscow from 1953 to 1964, a period that included some of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War — from negotiations to end the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But Moscow did not use this intelligence to their own advantage, with one important exception: a 1953 cable warning that the United States was prepared to escalate in Korea if the communists did not accept the last proposal at the armistice negotiations in Panmunjom — which they promptly did.
The decryption of US naval communications from 1967 to 1984 allowed the Soviets to rest easier at night for nearly forty years.
In all this history of failed secrecy, a senior CIA official who spent many years working with the NRO came to the conclusion that: “The best engineering decisions are the ones debated in public. The very worst are the ones hidden from scrutiny under the cloak of security.”
Efforts to push back against government surveillance, even the exposure of illegal surveillance, did nothing to deter or discourage the continued expansion of these programs. Instead, officials targeted the organizations that tried to hold them to account, and found new ways to exploit their quasi-legal powers to aggregate even more data. If anything, the fact that no one ever paid a price for crossing even clear red lines emboldened officials to push still further.
The USA PATRIOT Act, passed with scant debate, has been one of the worst civil rights offenders. It authorized the president to allow the FBI and the NSA to spy on citizens without a warrant. Through the use of so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), companies are compelled to give access to user data without any prior approval from the Court.
True national security requires a strategy that integrates the different means and ends essential to defend the country, and does not lose sight of the human beings who are on the front line. A titanium exoskeleton does little good for a soldier if he must live in vermin-and-mold-infested military housing that sickens him and his entire family.
National security is social, not technical.
Protected by secrecy, the defense sector is best understood as a highly regulated industry with relatively low returns on investment. In fact, it may even be a money loser for the economy as a whole, considering the costs — including opportunity costs — of building secret weapons, fighting forever wars, conducting global surveillance, and controlling technology exports. The collateral damage all this inflicts on the “made in USA” brand is beyond measure.
Americans do not have a real choice if they do not know what they are voting for, and what they could be voting against. That, in the end, is the core problem, but it actually starts at the top, with the president’s sovereign power to decide what the people are allowed to know and when they are allowed to know it.
This is what Assange was fighting against.
In total, Wikileaks published over 90,000 confidential documents about the Afghanistan war and 400,000 documents about the Iraq war. Those were provided by former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. She was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in jail, but President Obama commuted her sentence after four years.
Assange himself would be tried under the Espionage Act—a rarely used 1917 law designed to punish those who interfere with “the war effort.” He has been accused of 17 counts of espionage and one of computer misuse. He could face over 170 years in jail.
The problem is that the secrets he has been accused of ‘stealing’ should not have been secrets at all.
The American public has a right to know what its representatives are doing. Those representatives have steadily raised the curtains around their activities each year. There is no coordinated push-back to limit the power they are stealing. Accountability gets less each year.
The My Lai massacre reveals how hard it is to bring leaders to justice.
More than one hundred Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, were butchered by American soldiers. Some of their bodies were carved with the initials “CC” – Charlie Company. One of the helicopter pilots made a complaint, which was dismissed as false. He was assigned increasingly dangerous missions and was shot down five times. One of his colleagues had more success sending a letter to members of Congress and the media. Even with the spotlight on them, the military dismissed the charges against a dozen men before trial. In stark contrast with the Nazi defendants at the Nürnberg trials after WW2, the members of Charlie Company successfully argued that they had simply been following orders. One person was found guilty but was released after a few years.
The trial did, however, contribute to the massive public disillusionment with the war in Asia.
The lesson is that secrecy and behind-the-scenes dealing may hide and protect the guilty, but a revelation of the truth will bring justice to public policy.
Amnesty International has this in mind when it called for all charges against Assange to be dropped:
“Authorities in the USA must drop the espionage and all other charges against Julian Assange that relate to his publishing activities as part of his work with Wikileaks. The US government’s unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange for having published disclosed documents that included possible war crimes committed by the US military is nothing short of a full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression… The fact that he was the target of a negative public campaign by US officials at the highest levels undermines his right to be presumed innocent and puts him at risk of an unfair trial.
“Julian Assange’s publication of disclosed documents as part of his work with Wikileaks should not be punishable as this activity mirrors conduct that investigative journalists undertake regularly in their professional capacity. Prosecuting Julian Assange on these charges could have a chilling effect on the right to freedom of expression, leading journalists to self-censor from fear of prosecution.”
Amnesty International agrees with Stella Assange that the US assurances are “not worth the paper they are written on.”
Biden’s new stance may unlock the doors to a plea deal.
In a sense, Assange has been imprisoned since entering the Ecuadorian Embassy.
As Rupa Subramanya noted in The Free Press, if Assange is convicted “We will be left with a hazier understanding of our leaders’ decisions and a more fragile democracy. Assange did a public service…To stand by while he is prosecuted is to allow a fatal attack on journalism itself.”
That would be a disaster for every American. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are now widely seen as flawed decisions. How different would things be if we’d never known the truth about these conflicts?
Yes, WikiLeaks was unbalanced in its revelations. It published Hillary Clinton’s emails, but not similar documents about the Russian government.
It sought to bring down power in the US, not abroad.
Julian Assange did a public service. Until the US gets its system clean, we have to rely on acts of individual courage to keep us free. Perhaps, ultimately, that is what freedom will always need. But it would be nice to start off with a rebalancing of power, so that we do not need a self-sacrificing hero to push our train back on the tracks every few years.
Power will continue to tempt people to sway from the duty of righteous behaviour. We need to examine them. We can’t punish the examination tool for the result it finds; if Assange had found no illicit behaviour there would have been no outrage.
It has been alleged that Assange put people’s lives at risk when he published certain information. So did the publication of the facts about My Lai – but the bigger risk is that more lives will be thrown away by leaders who were out-of-control.
The problem is not with the spotlight; the problem is with the image it reveals.
Now, where is the punishment for the crimes that Assange uncovered?
That is what we should be focussing on.
And leave Julian Assange alone. Fast forward, I imagine in years to come he will be a national folk hero; you can feel it as this story builds.
If extradited, Julian Assange would be the first publisher to be prosecuted in the US under the Espionage Act.
He is guilty of nothing more than journalism.
This is what we need to keep the powerful under scrutiny.
We’ve seen what they do when they think they can escape examination.
All we really have to know about who is guilty, is to reflect that Donald Trump wanted the CIA to assassinate Assange. That was after Assange turned down the offer of a pardon from Trump if he would say that Russia was not behind the leaks of Hillary’s emails.
And know now that Trump is closer to jail than Assange is.
Perhaps there is justice after all…
Now the moral compass needs to point to those who have been protected all these years. There must be payback for evil.
Guilty people want Assange punished.
We should be able to look through the records and find out why.
I could not disagree with you more. I have been trained both as a journalist and in military intelligence. My top secret crypto security clearance allowed me access to very sensitive military information that wasn't simply classified and restricted for nefarious reasons but for broader national security reasons that allow intelligence systems to operate.
"In total, Wikileaks published over 90,000 confidential documents about the Afghanistan war and 400,000 documents about the Iraq war. Those were provided by former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. She was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in jail, but President Obama commuted her sentence after four years."
Assange did not do a journalist's job of evaluating and protecting sensitive national security data but simply dumped it on the World Wide Web for mass consumption. He coerced his source, analyst Chelsea Manning, to commit a crime and did not protect his/her identity afterwards. He did not release the information through responsible media channels like Daniel Ellsberg did through The Washington Post with the Pentagon Papers focused on the Vietnam War. The WP did a responsible job of editing and explaining the information to the public. Assange did not and data dumping of stolen classified documents is NOT protected under the First Amendment rights. Assange violated Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution by giving aid to enemies of the U.S. and violation of U.S. Espionage laws. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S3-C1-1/ALDE_00013524/#:~:text=Article%20III%2C%20Section%203%2C%20Clause,on%20Confession%20in%20open%20Court.
"If you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime." Assange deserves his day in court. Like Manning, he can be pardoned afterwards, but it is important to set boundaries on espionage activities and have a precedent legally set. A crime has been committed. It won't be "enough" until a judge says so.