Mick Clifford: Freedom of the press in grave danger as world turns back on Julian Assange
In wider society, the case has not caught the imagination, possibly because the figure at the centre of it, Julian Assange (pictured) does not make for a natural cause celebre. File photo: Victoria Jones/PA
If Julian Assange is extradited to the USA, history will not be kind to western media or politics.
Eight days ago, the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel gave the go-ahead for the Australian journalist to be extradited. He is wanted in the USA on spying charges, arising from the publication of Wikileaks in 2010, which exposed multiple war crimes by US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the time, Vanity Fair described the stories as “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years…they have changed the way people think about how the world is run.”
By any standard, this was public interest journalism, yet Assange, an Australian citizen, is being accused of spying. He received the material from intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, whose 35-year sentence was commuted by Barack Obama before he left office in 2017 following public pressure.
Despite that, the US government persists in hounding Assange. When the war crimes were exposed, Assange was hailed for his journalism. Today, most people just look away.
If he is extradited, his trial will be held in Elizabeth, Virginia, which is overwhelmingly populated by US military and intelligence personnel. Think of putting an alleged burglar on trial before a jury drawn from the neighbourhood where the homes were robbed. The outcome is, to the greatest extent, predetermined.
After a cursory trial, he will in all likelihood be sent to some hellhole of a super-max prison for decades for the rest of his natural life. There, as with the maximum-security Belmarsh prison in the UK where he has been held for the last three years, he will be in the company of the most dangerous and violent offenders in the system, as if he presents a danger to society and the way we live.
That is the scale of the potential human injustice that is unfolding.
By all accounts, Assange is not a personable individual. Editors and journalists who worked with him describe him as difficult. He fell out with many collaborators despite their admiration for his tenacity. He is reported to have been arrogant and dismissive of anybody who did not do as he said.
In 2011, he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London after Sweden requested his extradition on sexual assault charges. He vehemently denied the charges and claimed it was a ruse to get him to Sweden from where it would be easier to extradite him to the USA.
Since then, the charges have been dropped and Assange’s claim of duplicity certainly appears to have major credence. He was ejected from the embassy in 2019, having fallen out with his hosts.
In a media and political age when the personal story will trump principles or policy, character flaws are a major drawback in any campaign based around an individual. Conversely, such flaws elevate the importance of the principle at issue in the Assange case.
There are other complications in efforts to rally political and public support. His most vocal advocates in this country are Mick Wallace and Clare Daly, both of whom have invested huge time on his behalf in recent years.
While they are obviously passionate in defence of Assange’s work, neither has advocated in any major way for press freedom in general. In fact, both are big cheeses on the media operated by totalitarian states in places like Russia, Syria, and China. So it would be a stretch to accept that their defence of Assange is based on press freedom rather than antipathy towards the USA.
The other quarter in this country from which has emerged vocal support is elements within Sinn Féin. In recent years, various politicians and activists in the party have called for restrictions on press freedom. And the party is vocal in its admiration for Cuba, a country where journalists speak for power rather than to it and end up in prisons even worse than Belmarsh if they don’t toe the government line.
With such vocal advocates, it may well be that a wider audience would prefer to give the whole Assange case a miss. That would be a major mistake.
Press freedom is under attack across the world with the rise in nationalism, populism, and the drift towards totalitarian rule. There is no more stark example of this than the Assange case as it involves the USA, which nominally values the role of watchdog higher than possibly any other democracy.
This is the country where one of its founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, once declared that he if had to choose “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Yet now Jefferson’s successors hound a journalist whose work went to the heart of holding power to account. America plumbing such depths is bad enough, but another self-declared bastion of democracy, the UK, is colluding in the stitch-up.
It would be perfectly open to the home secretary to refuse the extradition but Patel and her boss, Boris Johnson, have bigger fish to fry. Having religiously pursued the hardest possible Brexit, the country is now desperately seeking trade deals, and nowhere more so than with the USA.
With such priorities, the dispatch of a troublesome journalist must be considered a small price to pay if there’s any chance of extracting some business from the Yanks. Against such a background, there has been muted protest at the treatment of Assange and what it heralds.
At national or EU level, the case receives little more than a shrug of the shoulders. Apparently, there are no votes or positive media coverage to be garnered from Assange so any principle attaching is quietly ignored.
In wider society, the case has not caught the imagination, possibly because the figure at the centre of it does not make for a natural cause celebre. This is classically how rights are eroded, long-standing principles quietly shelved, while everybody looks the other way.
Assange’s wife, Stella, the mother of their two small children, set out in the London Independent that which is unfolding before our eyes.
“What has long been understood to be a bedrock principle of democracy, press freedom, will disappear in one fell swoop.
“As it stands, no journalist is going to risk having what Julian is being subjected to happen to them. Julian must be freed before it is too late. His life depends on it. Your rights depend on it.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
