Defend Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: Press Freedom Depends On It

Julian Assange, photographed after his arrest at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Thursday April 10, 2019 (Photo: Henry Nicholls/Reuters).


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Last week, when Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after the Ecuadorian government withdrew the asylum it had granted to him after he sought shelter there in 2012, I was about to set off on a long weekend away, without computer access, and I only had time to write a few brief paragraphs about the significance of his case on Facebook.

I noted that his arrest “ought to be of great concern to anyone who values the ability of the media, in Western countries that claim to respect the freedom of the press, to publish information about the wrongdoing of Western governments that they would rather keep hidden.” 

I also explained, “Those who leak information, like Chelsea Manning” — who leaked hundreds of thousands of pages of classified US government documents to WikiLeaks, and is now imprisoned because of her refusal to testify in a Grand Jury case against WikiLeaks — “need protection, and so do those in the media who make it publicly available; Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as much as those who worked with them on the release of documents — the New York Times and the Guardian, for example.”

I added that I had worked with WikiLeaks on the release of the Guantánamo files in April 2011, along with journalists from the Washington Post, McClatchy, the Daily Telegraph and numerous newspapers throughout Europe, and pointed out, along wth posting a link to the page on WikiLeaks’ website showing all the media outlets (myself included) who have worked with WikiLeaks over the years, that “everyone who worked with WikiLeaks needs to make sure that they all fight as tenaciously as possible to prevent Julian Assange’s extradition to the US.” 

Those files — classified US military files from Guantánamo — were extremely helpful, as they revealed the extent to which the so-called evidence against prisoners consisted of unreliable statements made by their fellow prisoners, who were named in the files, but had never been named in any of the other Guantánamo-related documents that the US government had been forced to release over the years via Freedom of Information legislation. My unfinished, million-word assessment of those files is here.

I concluded my Facebook post by stating, “If the US succeeds in taking down Julian Assange, no journalists, no newspapers, no broadcasters will be safe, and we could, genuinely, see the end of press freedom, with all the ramifications that would have for our ability, in the West, to challenge what, otherwise, might well be an alarming and overbearing authoritarianism on the part of our governments.”

The indictment

Since the initial news of Assange’s arrest, the intentions behind it have become clearer. The US Justice Department has unsealed an indictment against him, which, as Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted in an article for the Guardian, includes just “one count of ‘conspiracy’ to violate a computer crime law when he allegedly offered whistleblower Chelsea Manning help in cracking a password in 2010.” As Timm also explained, “The indictment does not allege they ever did crack the password, nor do they allege it helped Assange get any documents from Manning.”

As Jameel Jaffer and Ben Wizner pointed out for Just Security, “Hacking government databases isn’t protected by the First Amendment, and it isn’t a legitimate part of investigative journalism. But the indictment is troubling nonetheless. It characterizes as ‘part of’ a criminal conspiracy journalistic activities that are not just lawful but essential to press freedom.”

These commentators — and many others — were rightfully alarmed that, as Trevor Timm put it, it was clear that the Justice Department was “using the conspiracy charge as a pretext to target Assange and potentially criminalize important and common journalistic practices in newsgathering at the same time”; primarily, as Timm described it, “using encryption and protecting the anonymity of sources”, which, as he also noted, are “are virtually requirements in an age where leak investigations are common.”

The fear, therefore, is that the single charge to hook Assange will be followed by more charges if he ends up on US soil — charges perhaps involving espionage. As Jameel Jaffer and Ben Wizner explained, “While Assange wasn’t charged with violating the Espionage Act — the World War I-era law that criminalizes unauthorized dissemination of ‘national defense information’ — the indictment states that the purpose of the conspiracy for which he was charged was to violate the Espionage Act. This raises the question whether this indictment is just an opening salvo aimed at easing the path for extradition, with more substantial charges to be added later.” Furthering these suspicions, an affidavit was unsealed on Monday providing more detailed information about the case against Assange.

For the Guardian, Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, weighed in against mainstream journalists dangerously suggesting that Assange’s work — and that of WikiLeaks — isn’t journalism, but “activism.” He drew from a column for CNN by Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer, correspondent and world affairs columnist, who as CNN put it, “is a frequent opinion contributor to CNN and the Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review.” 

Ghitis wrote that Assange “is not a journalist and therefore not entitled to the protections that the law – and democracy – demand for legitimate journalists”. As Robinson explained, “This is a dangerous position. Generally, the law doesn’t actually distinguish between ‘journalists’ and ‘non-journalists’, giving everyone the same protections. This is for good reason: if such a distinction becomes legally relevant, it means the government is empowered to decide who the True Journalists are.”

As Robinson also reminded readers, “The Obama administration fished for years to find a charge that would stick to Assange, but ultimately couldn’t find a way of going after him that wouldn’t also criminalize ordinary acts of journalism. Donald Trump’s government is less scrupulous.”

Or, as Trevor Timm put it, “Despite Barack Obama’s extremely disappointing record on press freedom, his justice department ultimately ended up making the right call when they decided that it was too dangerous to prosecute WikiLeaks without putting news organizations such as the New York Times and the Guardian at risk.”

Legitimate criticism of Assange

None of the reasons given above for defending Julian Assange against US overreach is meant to defend him against other complaints. He sought asylum from Ecuador in 2012 to avoid facing potential extradition to Sweden to face rape and sexual assault charges. If there is still a case to answer in Sweden, he should be sent there to face those charges. 

He also alienated numerous former supporters during the 2016 US Presidential Election through leaks designed to damage Hillary Clinton, which can only have ended up helping Donald Trump.

It is also true that, over the years, Assange repeatedly showed a disturbing refusal to contemplate censoring anything in the documents he released. On Sunday, the Observer published an editorial describing hm as having “acted immorally and irresponsibly,” when WikiLeaks “dumped online thousands of unredacted secret diplomatic cables, potentially exposing thousands of individuals named in the documents to grave danger.” 

Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare also noted how Nick Davies of the Guardian, who worked with Assange on the release of the Afghan and Iraq war logs in 2010, until the relationship between the Guardian and Assange soured, “describe[d] Assange’s cavalier response to journalists’ concerns that releasing certain information could endanger the lives of Afghan civilians who had provided information to coalition forces.” Jurecic noted how Davies told Alex Gibney, who directed a film about Assange, that the WikiLeaks founder had said that “if an Afghan civilian helps coalition forces he deserves to die.”

I also witnessed this simplistic insistence that all information must be free in relation to the Guantánamo files, and the threat to a former prisoner’s life if his entire file was published unredacted, and I recall his inflexibility and the difficulty of reasoning with him.

Yet again, however, while these stories and others confirm a difficult naivety and intransigence regarding transparency, as well as a personality that regularly comes into conflict with others, none of it fundamentally detracts from Assange’s right not to be dismissed as a journalist and treated as some sort of terrorist, as Donald Trump wants. As Trevor Timm explained in his article, although “Assange is so disliked in journalism and political circles that many reporters and liberal politicians were publicly cheering” when the Trump administration released its indictment of him, this is a trap, “exactly what the Trump administration is hoping for, as the Department of Justice (DoJ) moves forward with its next dangerous step in its war on journalism and press freedom.”

As Timm proceeds to explain, “What’s the most effective way to curtail the rights of all people? First go after the unpopular; the person who may be despised in society and will have very few defenders. Assange fits this profile to a T. Once there is law on the books that says ‘this aspect of journalism is illegal’, it becomes much easier for the justice department to bring other cases against more mainstream government critics down the road, and much harder for judges to immediately dismiss them.”

His conclusion? “Instead of thinking, ‘I hate Julian Assange, so I’m glad he’s going to be punished,’ ask yourself this: do you trust Trump’s justice department to protect press freedom?”

If your answer isn’t no, you should really ask why it is that you should trust a government department that already had an unacceptable history of pursuing whistleblowers under Barack Obama, long before Trump shuffled into view, with his outrageous beliefs about journalism he doesn’t like. As Timm puts it, “Donald Trump has been furious with leakers and the news organizations that publish them ever since he took office. He complains about it constantly in his Twitter tirades. He has repeatedly directed the justice department to stop leaks, and he even asked former FBI director James Comey if he can put journalists in jail.” 

A president who thinks that way really shouldn’t be indulged.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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