After five years of incarceration in Belmarsh high-security prison, having already spent seven years in political asylum—what was tantamount to house arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy—Julian Assange was finally permitted by the British government to return to his homeland of Australia. The deal Assange made with the U.S. government to end its extradition quest and thereby secure his release can be viewed in one of two ways. On its face, the deal required that Assange “confess” to a felony which he did not commit, accepting a sentence of prison time already served.
The second way of understanding what Assange did is that he confessed to the “crime” of journalism, while acknowledging that the U.S. government construed him to have violated one of its laws, the Espionage Act of 1917. (Scott Horton interviews Kevin Gosztola, author of Guilty of Journalism (2023), and they discuss the second interpretation here.) Assange made the following statement during his appearance before Judge Ramona Manglova at the U.S. district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, located in the western Pacific Ocean:
“Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information. I believe that the First Amendment protected that activity but I accept that as written it’s a violation of the Espionage Act statute.”
Assange’s attorney Barry Pollack further clarified that Assange believed “that the conduct of issue should be protected by the First Amendment but understands that no court has held that there is a First Amendment defence to the Espionage Act, he understands that his conduct violates the terms of the Espionage Act, and is pleading guilty on that basis.”
The judge accepted Assange’s admission of guilt for one felony charge (under section 793 of the Espionage Act), “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.” He was then sentenced to time served, and pronounced a free man. Supporters of Assange and Wikileaks all over the world rejoiced at the surprising development, having mostly resigned themselves to the depressing likelihood that Assange would be made into a martyr for future generations to pay tribute to on holidays established in his name, with tourists snapping photos of effigy statues in city squares, and future politicians issuing lengthy speeches in which they would lament the obvious miscarriage of justice. Instead, Assange walked out of Belmarsh prison onto an airplane which transported him to the court where his protracted dispute with the U.S. government was concluded, after which he flew to Canberra, Australia, to reunite with his family and resume his life.
From a human perspective, one can only be cheered by the news, which reignited what had become among some a nearly extinguished hope for the future. Exemplifying this reaction, Assange’s compatriot Caitlin Johnstone titled her June 26, 2024, piece: “Hell, Maybe ANYTHING is Possible.” Many of us following the case had been convinced, after years of the U.S. government’s active pursuit and persecution of the most effective antiwar activist and publisher in the twenty-first century, that Assange would probably come to ruin one way or another while awaiting extradition or after having been buried in a federal prison to rot away in the United States. With a long list of notable figures who died under mysterious circumstances while in custody by or at the request of the U.S. government, it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that Assange would become a martyr, eventually written into the annals of history, but in the meantime dismissed by officials as a victim of suicide, or something along those lines.
The cases of John McAfee, Aaron Swarz, Jeffrey Epstein, and other high-profile figures involving alleged suicides (or accidents, such as journalist Michael Hastings’ fatal single-vehicle crash) did not bode well for Assange. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was herself known to have attempted suicide while incarcerated, having been convicted of six violations of the Espionage Act and sentenced to an excruciatingly lengthy sentence (35 years). It was starting to seem as though Assange would suffer a similar or even worse fate (facing up to 175 years), given the wily ways of the U.S. justice system, particularly in matters said to involve national defense.
A dedicated group of Assange activists, who have chronicled the story for years, organizing protest events and publishing books detailing the many dubious aspects of the case, have long observed that this prosecution represented an assault not only on the person known as Julian Assange, but also on the vocation of all journalists. Investigative reporters depend on leaks from morally motivated insiders—whistleblowers—in order to break important news to the populace otherwise ignorant of what their governments are doing in their name and with their money.
Before his unexpected deal involving a guilty plea, the admission of one violation of U.S. law and acceptance as a sentence of time already served, Assange was to be indicted on multiple charges under the Espionage Act of 1917, which had been used in the twenty-first century to convict several U.S. citizen whistleblowers, two salient examples being Daniel Hale, for revealing disturbing details about the drone assassination program, and John Kriakou, for exposing the waterboarding program. The case of Assange was on its face quite curious, suggesting as it did that somehow non-U.S. citizens were required to abide by U.S. laws, even when they resided and worked outside the United States. Should the case have succeeded, it would have set a new precedent according to which any person—notably, all journalists—residing and working outside the United States could be indicted for violating U.S. laws, regardless of their citizenship.
Exacerbating an already dubious case was the evidence brought forth by Assange’s defense team according to which the U.S. government had spied on him and his attorneys while he was residing in the Ecuadorian embassy, violating any semblance of legal protocol. The case took a turn for the worse when Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, slated to be a “star” witness establishing Assange’s guilt, openly admitted, in a published confession, to having fabricated his testimony in order to secure immunity from prosecution for crimes allegedly committed by him.
Chelsea Manning, who stole the relevant trove of documents published by Wikileaks, resolutely refused to serve as a witness in the case of Julian Assange. After Manning was granted a commutation by President Barack Obama, who reduced her sentence to time already served, she was then re-imprisoned, this time cited for civil contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury. After 256 days, during which Manning was fined $1,000 per day, the judge eventually ordered that she be set free once again.
Most criminal cases in the United States end up being dismissed, and there are sound jurisprudential grounds for believing that, even if Assange had eventually been extradited, his case would never have made it to trial, first, because of the lack of witnesses and, second, and more devastatingly, because of the prosecution’s abject violation of lawyer-client confidentiality—assuming that the spying which reportedly transpired in the Ecuadorian embassy could be documented to a judge’s satisfaction.
Some have opined that the turn in the tide came with the final British court’s decision to allow Assange to appeal his extradition to the United States on grounds of free speech. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Assange would be protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, given that he is not a U.S. citizen and has never resided in the United States. But, surely, if Assange is subject to prosecution under U.S. laws, then he should, in consistency, be protected by them as well. Assange’s wife, Stella, among other people, has suggested that the space for a plea deal was opened up by the most recent British judge’s willingness to allow an appeal on free speech grounds. In their appeal, Assange’s defense team could have been expected to expose the hypocrisy of the U.S. government in, on the one hand, claiming to be an open society the constitution of which has free speech as one of its pillars and, on the other hand, denying a journalist the right to report factual findings and a publisher the right to share such revelations with the world.
Had Britain agreed to extradite Assange, and had he been convicted in a U.S. court of law, this would have represented a complete capitulation to the wholesale hegemony of the U.S. military state, making it impossible for journalists to take issue with the government’s serial war crimes without risking their own liberty or even life. The future history of the world, then, would have been, at least as far as anyone now living could see, said to coincide with the carefully composed propaganda cover stories of the U.S. military state, according to which every intervention by the U.S. government is, by definition, good, and anyone who disagrees with the state’s pronouncements is, correlatively, in violation of the law: a criminal and dangerous miscreant. The grand irony, of course, is that what Assange sought to expose was the malfeasance of governments, most starkly, the serial war crimes of the U.S. government.
During the Trump administration, the whole affair took on a decidedly Mafia-esque quality, given that such organizations are notorious for silencing inconvenient witnesses to their crimes. In his zealous pursuit of Assange, Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo reportedly entertained even the possibility of murdering the troublemaker. (By proclaiming that the persons who leaked this information should all be prosecuted, Pompeo inadvertently confirmed the shocking revelation.) For a democratic republic to conduct itself in such a manner would be a contradiction in terms—or a simple proof that it is not what it purports to be. Republics have laws and rules and procedures used to adjudicate disputes.
Given its myriad problems, it is at least conceivable, perhaps even plausible, that had Assange’s case made it to a U.S. court, it would have been dismissed on procedural grounds. The concern among some of Assange’s sympathizers, however, was that the ultimate aim of the U.S. government was in fact to silence the muckraking publisher, by hook or by crook. In their view, the Wikileaks founder was being slowly tortured to death in solitary confinement, ground down by stretching out his detainment in Belmarsh prison for as long as possible—with or without an eventual trial.
Even setting to one side the disturbing evidence that the U.S. government spied on and plotted to murder Assange, the very criminalization of attempts to expose a government’s crimes is itself a capitulation to the perpetrators’ own perspective on what they do. In the case of U.S. war crimes, whistleblowers and the journalists who report their findings take issue specifically with the narrative used to maintain the support by the taxpaying populace of the government’s missions of mass homicide and terrorism abroad. Assange’s organization Wikileaks published the enormous Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, detailing the sordid details of how the War on Terror was being conducted. A particularly accessible and jarring piece of evidence for the general public was Collateral Murder, a widely disseminated short video clip in which the modus operandi of the U.S. military was displayed in a disturbing and unforgettable way.
In response to the public outcry against Collateral Murder, the summary execution of camera- and tripod-toting Reuters journalists mistaken for terrorists was investigated by the Pentagon, which predictably concluded that the soldiers involved had followed proper protocol in ending the lives of a group of civilians in New Baghdad, Iraq, on July 12, 2007. The usual “fog of war” apology was invoked to explain how in war “mistakes are made,” and “under the circumstances,” the killers had done nothing wrong. No one bases conclusions in civil society about an alleged murder solely on the testimony of the perpetrator, but in matters of U.S. war, this is how things are nearly always done.
Illustrating to the U.S. citizens funding the seemingly interminable Global War on Terror how their tax dollars were being spent could only increase resistance to the endless incursions abroad, but the U.S. government sought to stop Julian Assange in his tracks, and broadcast a message to deter likeminded critics from even considering the possibility of publishing the ugly secrets of what U.S. wars in fact entail. Assange’s “deal with the devil” required him to accede to a lie, accepting a prison sentence for having mishandled classified documents, when in fact it was never his obligation to handle U.S. documents in any way, given that he is an Australian, not a U.S. citizen. (Does anyone maintain that Assange is obligated to abide by the laws of North Korea, where he does not and has never lived?)
Assange agreed to the plea deal not in order to appease those in charge of the murderous war machine but to save his own life. After years rotting away in a concrete dungeon, deprived of daylight and the freedom to communicate with and live in the world into which he had been born, it was only natural for Assange to leap at the chance to breathe fresh air once again, and to live with his wife and two sons as a free man for the first time ever. (His sons Gabriel and Max were born while Assange was living in the Ecuadorian embassy.)
The primary concern for Assange must have been to secure his own liberty, without which he could never do anything again with his life, and no reasonable person could fault him for that. Given his high level of intelligence, the wager which went through Assange’s mind may have been that, if he refused to accede to the plea deal, then he would never be allowed to walk free and, correlatively, his work as a critic would also be through. In fact, since Assange’s internet access was taken away from him in 2018, he had already been effectively silenced, incapable of sharing new revelations or ideas with the world.
What the outcome of the case of Julian Assange illustrates is that an already corrupt regime will force good persons of integrity to compromise their own principles in order to be granted what was never the regime’s to withhold: the liberty to speak truthfully. Was Assange wrong to capitulate to the U.S. government? Of course not. His acceptance of a plea deal, a conviction of guilt and a sentence of time served, illustrates that, in reality, people must sometimes make hard choices, and, on balance, given what was at stake, it was better to tell a small lie—which, by the way, everyone knew was a lie—to secure the ability to say anything in the future, including unsavory truths. In Assange’s view, exposing the truth is the only way to call a halt to wars, which are invariably based on mendacious propaganda. War in this way corrupts the citizenry itself by deceiving them into acceding to practices which most persons would not, if fully informed, rationally condone. As Assange himself so pithily explained, “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”
By making a deal with the devil, Assange secured the ability to avoid what would have been tantamount to an infinite number of lies by omission: the permanent muffling of his voice and the smothering of his critical faculties. The removal of Assange forever from the world in which wars continue to proliferate—maiming and terrorizing and annihilating countless human beings—would have supported the war machine far more effectively than did this small capitulation to a narrative composed by authorities to permit the U.S. government to save face after having persecuted a truth teller for more than twelve years while feigning to be a champion of free speech.
Now we must all rally for a complete pardon of Assange on the grounds that, in fact, he never committed any crime at all. It seems unlikely that the U.S. government would go so far as to admit that its bogus case had no merits whatsoever, but by continuing to discuss what was done to Julian Assange, we can at the very least help to disabuse people of the false narratives used for years to discredit and vilify him as a Russian asset and a rapist. Let us celebrate the liberation of Assange by refusing to permit the U.S. government’s version of the story of how his case was concluded to be etched into the annals of history. Poetic justice will be achieved when Wikileaks (or a like-minded organization) publishes the internal memos which led to this felicitous turn of events.
Ultimately, the outdated and overly vague Espionage Act must be rescinded by congress, on the grounds that it makes whistleblowing all but impossible, requiring as it now does a willingness to endure a superhuman amount of self-sacrifice. The text of the Act has changed over the more than century since its ratification, but the core remains the same, and clearly assumes that the U.S. government can do no wrong, when the whole point of whistleblowing is to expose government malfeasance. In most prosecutions under the Espionage Act, the government has focused on the danger faced by persons exposed through disclosure of state secrets. But if the government were not committing what are easily interpretable as crimes, then there would be no such danger at all. And were government officials not permitted to act without effective oversight and with complete impunity, then they would be much less likely to commit crimes in the first place.
