Journalistic freedom is on trial alongside Julian Assange

During the First World War, the Espionage Act was used to imprison 1200 anti-war activists for “allegedly disloyal, seditious or incendiary speech.” Senator Joe McCarthy and J Edgar Hoover mirrored this repression when they used the legislation to prosecute socialists during the “Red Scare”.

Daniel Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act when he published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and revealed the US’s illegal bombings of Cambodia. Four decades later, Chelsea Manning faced similar charges – and was sentenced to 35 years behind bars – for exposing state-sponsored war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. You don’t have to be a spy to violate the Espionage Act. You just have to dare to make the leaders of the “free world” squirm.

Now another “creature of disloyalty” is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act: Julian Assange.

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Last week at the High Court in London, the WikiLeaks founder’s lawyers launched a final effort to prevent his extradition to the US, where he faces life – and likely death – in prison. By publishing millions of leaked documents for the world to see, the Australian journalist laid bare the brutality of US military interventions in the Middle East. Assange has been the subject of a political prosecution ever since.

Having spent the previous seven years seeking asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, Assange was remanded in one of Britain’s toughest prisons, HMP Belmarsh, in April 2019. He has remained in prison ever since, waiting for the British courts to decide whether to approve his extradition to the US. In 2021, a Yahoo News investigation revealed that senior CIA officials had even requested “sketches” for assassinating Assange.

One of Assange’s most famous publications was Collateral Murder. This video showed 39 minutes of gun-sight footage from a US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, in 2007. Nine men were killed in the attack, including two Reuters journalists, and two children severely wounded. At one point in the film, an American crew member shouts “Hahaha. I hit ‘em”, another responds “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.” Seventeen years later, no-one responsible for this war crime has faced justice.

Another of WikiLeaks’s prominent publications were the Guantánamo Files. Having already documented the use of extreme psychological torture in the US’s Cuban prison, in 2011 WikiLeaks revealed that among those Afghan civilians held in Guantánamo were taxi drivers, people suffering from mental illness, and, in one case, an 89-year-old man with severe dementia. The files revealed that most of Guantánamo’s tortured detainees were “innocent” or only “guilty of minor crimes.”

“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will… if we’re going to be successful,” said US vice president Dick Cheney in September 2001. “That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for the US to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Assange and WikiLeaks exposed the “dark side”. They showed the US “war on terror” for what it was, a disastrous decades-long strategy to entrench American hegemony.

To this day, Assange has been found guilty of no crime. However, his five-year incarceration in HMP Belmarsh is confirmation that exposing egregious human rights violations bears a far harsher punishment than committing them. Those who violated the Geneva Conventions at Guantánamo are free. Those politicians whose decisions left millions dead, millions more displaced, and an entire region destabilised still inhabit the corridors of power. Meanwhile, the man who helped bring their crimes to light languishes in prison.

The last four months have been among the deadliest on record for journalists. At least 88 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October. These heroes have documented Israel’s genocidal war on our TV screens and social media timelines. The victims of the war on terror, however, did not have social media. They had WikiLeaks. By publishing the Iraq and Afghan War logs, WikiLeaks showed the world what “nation-building” really meant.

Just as Britain was a willing accomplice in the war on terror, today the British state is once again complicit in US crimes. This time through its approval of Assange’s extradition.

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Two years after the US Congress enacted the Espionage Act, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote that “to tell the truth is to achieve a revolutionary act.” His words are an apt reminder of the importance of Assange’s work. Gramsci was himself imprisoned by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1926. At the trial, Gramsci’s prosecutor argued: “We must stop his brain from working for 20 years.”

The US is attempting to do the very same to Assange. After five years of incarceration, he was too unwell to attend or even watch his own extradition hearing last week.

The High Court’s ruling will not only decide Assange’s fate. Their decision will have historic implications for press freedom in Britain and around the world. Journalism itself is on trial.

In this context, like him or loathe him, an obligation is placed upon all of us who believe in journalistic freedom – and oppose the impunity of war criminals – to unite in opposition to Assange’s extradition.