By Annie Domini
Julian Assange, easily the world’s most persecuted and famous journalist, is free at last. At the moment of writing this column, Assange is onboard a private plane that is costing him half a million dollars (which his family plans to pay off via crowd-funding donations appeal), to fly from Saipan, the capital of Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to Canberra, Australia, where his family awaits his return as a free man. His 14-year-long ordeal with the Anglo-American national security juggernaut that witch-hunted him most perniciously for his incredibly impactful guerilla journalism exposing countless crimes of the US-led “rules based order”, at last ends. However, the plea bargain that he was compelled to accept because of his failing mental and physical health, of pleading guilty to one count of felony under the obsolete US Espionage Act of 1917, exposes the ongoing injustice by the American empire of grotesque malfeasance.
The WikiLeaks founder, now 52, had been incarcerated in Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London, United Kingdom, for five years and two months, since April 2019 to 24 June 2014, suffering 23 hours of solitary confinement in a 2 metre by 3 metre cell. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Dr. Nils Melzer, in book ‘The Trial of Julian Assange’, detailed how inhumane the conditions in which Assange was kept were, where his mental and physical health deteriorated significantly. Assange also lived in the permanent fear of being assassinated by the trigger-happy apparatchiks of the Anglo-American empire at any point. Before Belmarsh, Assange was forced to stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years, without stepping out over the fear of being arrested and extradited to the United States and face a possible sentence of 175 years in prison for doing honest and fearless journalism exposing US war crimes in multiple continents.
The plea deal seems to be the United States’ attempt to garner positive coverage in an election year, at a time when President Joe Biden-led White House feels unparalleled heat over the active American complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The US Department of Justice issued the plea deal on 24 June 2024, saying that Assange would plead guilty to a felony charge under the US Espionage Act of “conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States”, as per the letter to Judge Ramona Manglona of the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan. As part of the deal, Assange would be sentenced to five years and two months of prison, which would be concluded as ‘time served’ in the UK Belmarsh prison, thus formally ending a decade and half of virtual and real incarceration of the man, whom the writer Arundhati Roy once described as the “feral prophet of truth”.
Assange chose to fly to Saipan as part of the plea deal since his acute distrust of mainland America and the dispensation therein remains intact. NMI is closer to Australia. Moreover, the plea deal is also the result of the decade-long movement that was spurred by Assange’s confinement in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012, and his formal imprisonment since 2019. Additionally, the current Australian government led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Ambassador to the US, former prime minister Kevin Rudd, carried out hectic backroom parleys away from media glare with their American counterparts to ensure Assange can come back home to Australia a free man.
Among Assange’s incalculable retinue of journalistic works exposing the crimes of the Anglo-American empire, several stand out. Since the founding of WikiLeaks in 2006, Assange went on to publish information and documents deliberately kept hidden by successive administrations in the White House. These include the ‘Collateral Damage’ video published in 2007, which showed US Air Force pilot aboard an Apache helicopter firing at innocent Iraqi civilians that killed a Reuters journalist; diplomatic cables showing crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan; documents revealing the heinous Guantanamo Bay policy of illegal rendition of prisoners; undercounting of Iraqi civilian deaths by 15,000; documents showing the National Security Agency spied on the Japanese, German, French government officials, including presidents and chancellor; among many others.
While WikiLeaks partnered with prestige publications such as the Guardian of the UK and New York Times of the US, these newspapers dropped him like hot potato when the cooked up charges of sexual assault against Assange surfaced in Sweden, forensically and demonstrably proved to vile fabrications in the book by Nils Melzer. In fact, establishment stenographers joined hands with their masters in the White House and 10 Downing Street to condemn and tar Assange as a rapist, an information terrorist who “endangered lives” and national security with his revelations. The Hillary Clinton campaign team during the 2016 presidential elections also smeared Assange as a Russian asset, colluding with Donald Trump to defeat the Democratic Party candidate, a dubious position augmented by the megaphones in the mainstream media such as NYT, Washington Post and the Guardian.
Only defense that Assange had was his band of fierce supporters inspired and enlightened by his journalism, independent media organisations that platformed human rights lawyers, journalists and intellectuals speaking up for Assange against the mala fide machine of relentless malaise. Along with his wife Stella Assange, who stood by him and led the campaign to free Assange, the incarcerated journalist had his champions in conscientious figures from all walks of like — former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis, former European Parliament Members Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, singer Roger Waters of the iconic British band Pink Floyd, giant public intellectual Noam Chomsky, writer Arundhati Roy, among countless others.
Today as Assange lands in Australia a ‘free man’, his plea bargain shows the Anglo-American can bare its fangs once again, since it considers truth and justice its biggest enemies, as it pursues endless wars in multiple corners of the world. To quote Assange: “The point is to take money out of the tax bases of the United States and Europe, route through Iraq, Afghanistan etc, and back into the hands of the transnational security elite; i.e., the goal is not a successful war, but an endless war.” Also: “Behind every war are the lies the media told to justify it.” These are the lessons that Assange taught the world to clearly see. Whether he’s able to continue with his journalistic work in Australia will be eagerly watched by his ardent admirers worldwide, even as the criminals he so thoroughly exposed through his publications still roam free. (IPA Service)
