Today marks the 17th anniversary of the establishment of media organisation WikiLeaks, which was founded by Australian editor, publisher, and activist Julian Assange with the aim of bringing important news and information to the public.
In 2010, WikiLeaks released video of a July 2007 incident in Iraq in which US soldiers shot and killed 18 civilians – including two Reuters journalists – from a helicopter gunship.
Later that year, the organisation published nearly 400,000 pages of secret military field reports from the US’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq containing evidence of war crimes by American soldiers and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, as well as a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables that detailed US espionage against the United Nations and the leaders of other countries [including “allies”].
Needless to say, the US was apoplectic about these revelations seeing the light of day.
The year was capped off by Assange being arrested in the UK over a rape allegation in Sweden.
Assange denied the charge [which was eventually dropped nine years later due to insufficient evidence] but it set in train a sequence of events that saw him take refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden.
There he remained – while continuing to preside over WikiLeaks’ publications, including 2016 emails that demonstrated the US Democratic Party has an ironic disregard for democracy in its candidate selection process – until April 2019 when Ecuador gave him the heave-ho for allegedly behaving like a “spoiled brat” and he was arrested by the UK authorities.
Two months later the US requested Assange’s extradition to face charges under its 1917 Espionage Act – the first time a publisher has been charged under this legislation.
He has not actually been accused of espionage, but of receiving, possessing, and communicating to the public information that he received from government whistleblower Chelsea Manning – in other words, the US says that standard journalist practice is criminal should it be sufficiently embarrassing to its interests.
That the US apparently believes an Australian citizen residing in the UK can be prosecuted under US law while at the same time not being afforded the right to constitutional free speech protections is an example of “doublethink” that would make George Orwell blush.
Assange has now been in a UK prison for four years while legal manoeuvring over the US extradition request continues [although a UK court ordered his extradition last year and an appeal was rejected by the UK High Court in June, it’s expected he’ll appeal again].
Meanwhile, some members of the Australian Government, which has hitherto been largely silent about the US’s desire to imprison one of its citizens for 175 years, have finally been stirred to action, and last month a bipartisan group of Ocker parliamentarians petitioned US counterparts to drop the prosecution.
In case it isn’t obvious, the US persecution of Assange gives the lie to the idea of the “rules-based international order” that Western countries like to invoke – clearly the US position is really “rules for thee, but not for me”.
It’s rank hypocrisy in which New Zealand is complicit by never once having raised an objection over the treatment of a man whose “crime” is simply speaking truth to an imperial superpower.
