The United States fighting to persecute Julian Assange is a distraction from its war crimes exposed by WikiLeaks the same way the United States’ recent response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a distraction from its active participation in some of the world’s largest ongoing humanitarian crises (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria). Julian Assange must be freed not just for the freedom of journalism and the public’s “right to know” but as resistance against this larger imperialist project.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has spent over a thousand days in prison while the persecution of Wikileaks has been going on for over a decade. As Assange continues to remain in prison and the US fights to extradite him, we look closely at the facts and narratives that mainstream media has been shying away from. This case has serious implications for all of us, environmentalists included, and we have a stake in resisting his prosecution. Here’s why.
A quick primer: Who is Julian Assange? And why is he in Belmarsh Prison (London, UK)?
In 2006, Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in Iceland. The site anonymously publishes documents leaked to it by government officials and corporations. With the mission to fight against censorship, they became the leading platform for the distribution of classified documents on war and corruption. The International Federation of Journalists called WikiLeaks a “new media organisation based on the public’s right to know.”
By early December 2010, the US government began to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act (1917). In 2012, Assange received asylum at Ecuador’s embassy in London. In April 2019, Ecuador’s government – in exchange for a deal with the International Monetary Fund – handed Assange over to British authorities. Assange was taken to Belmarsh prison to await hearings for extradition to the United States.
Currently, Julian Assange currently sits in a jail cell in Belmarsh, waiting to be returned to the US, charged for a total of 18 crimes, which together carry a maximum sentence of 175 years.
Exposing crimes is not a crime
To say Julian Assange must be tried under the Espionage Act for releasing classified information is to say that all investigative journalists must be persecuted for doing their job. WikiLeaks continues to expose injustices around the world. It has been releasing videos and publications unveiling the torture and serious human rights violations of detainees (most of whom haven’t even been charged, by the way) at Guantánamo Bay. Wikileaks also published the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diaries, which contained materials that suggested that US forces had committed war crimes in both countries.
On 5 January 2010, Chelsea Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from US servers and sent them to WikiLeaks with a note that read, “This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st-century warfare.”
Wikileaks and Assange went through the footage and published the full video from the Apache helicopters on their website under the title Collateral Murder on 5 April 2010, a classified video from 2007 showing US forces killing civilians, including employees of the news organisation Reuters. This horrifying video had an enormous impact on public opinion about the nature of US warfare.
When WikiLeaks released the video, then twelve-year-old Sajad Mutashar said, “I want to get our rights from the Americans who harmed us.” His mother, Ahlam Abdelhussein Tuman, said, “I would like the American people and the whole world to understand what happened here in Iraq. We lost our country and our lives were destroyed.” When WikiLeaks and Assange released that video, they embarrassed the United States government. As the public found out about these war crimes, all its claims of humanitarian warfare lost credibility. It is from this point onwards that the US government sought to punish Assange.
To be fair, it’s ironic to even call them “war crimes”. War itself is a crime. As Vijay Prashad emphasised during a speech at the Belmarsh Tribunal, following the escalation of violence in Ukraine, “We shouldn’t be talking about war crimes because war is a crime, and the biggest crime is the war on the poor. Rosa Luxemburg put it beautifully. She said, “in peacetime, workers of the world unite. In wartime, workers of each country slit each others’ throats.” War is never good for the poor, for the workers. War is a crime that produces crimes.”
Profitability of prisons: the “prison industrial complex”
While wars have been de-criminalised by those in power, truth-telling is being unjustly criminalised. It’s important to talk about “crime”, especially since climate justice and transformative justice go hand in hand. Climate justice is about centring those at the margins. As environmentalists, our fight extends to people in prisons who are often locked up in toxic, suffocating and disabling environments for “crimes” that are defined by how dangerously they challenge the status quo.
American author and abolitionist Angela Davis talks about the prison industrial complex in her book, Are Prisons Obsolete, in which she refers to prisons as “black holes” into which the undesirables of society are deposited. “The prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas.”
According to Critical Resistance, the prison industrial complex is a term used to “describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” With regards to Assange: he’s been kept in solitary confinement for long periods of time during his time at Belmarsh Prison which had significant effects on his health. In fact, in January 2021, Judge Vanessa blocked Julian Assange’s extraction during the British court decision, acknowledging that if he were to be held in the deplorable conditions of an American prison, he would risk killing himself due to his deteriorating mental health.
Judge Vanessa’s ruling sheds light on everything abolitionists have been advocating for: prisons are not reformative, they’re inhumane. For journalists, yes, but especially for the marginalised. The Julian Assange case reveals a generalised systemic failure that we cannot ignore. So many more political prisoners who do not make it to the mainstream news are persecuted and held in prisons.
The urgent need for climate whistleblowers (and laws that protect them)
There’s a worrying history of oppression of political activists and journalists and #FreeAssange is certainly not the first. According to Defending Rights & Dissent’s report, Chelsea Manning was kept alone in her cell for over twenty-two hours a day. Despite the US government’s best attempts to have her sentenced to 60 years, she was given a 35-year sentence.
According to the National Whistleblower Center, a “climate change whistleblower is a person who discloses information about violations of law, mismanagement of funds, abuse of authority or other wrongdoing that exacerbates climate change.” Donziger exposed Chevron by suing on behalf of more than 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous peoples who claimed that Chevron had polluted their rainforest. In 2011, Chevron filed a suit against Donziger, accusing him of judicial bribery and faking scientific studies. For every high-profile case like Donziger’s, untold numbers go unreported.
Guardian did a whole piece on whistleblowers muzzled by the Trump administration. As the National Whistleblower Center (NWC) found in its July 2020 report, Exposing a Ticking Time Bomb, there is abundant evidence that fossil fuel companies are deceiving the public about the impacts of clean energy policy. In a time like this, climate whistleblowers must be protected. They deserve every full legal support, not retribution.
People’s movements worldwide are demanding freedom for Assange. Here’s what you can do.
Mobilise. Last week, on February 25, people’s movements and organisations demanded that Assange be released immediately. They took to the streets, with protests outside embassies and consultants of the United Kingdom and the United States. This is not the end. For as long as Assange isn’t returned extradited, there is hope and space for more mobilisation.
Send a letter. Sign this letter drafted by the International Peoples’ Assembly and send it to your local British Embassy or consulate telling them to respect their legal responsibilities.
Participate. Follow the International Peoples’ Assembly on social media to learn more about Assange’s case and his contributions to the anti-imperialist struggle today. Share our materials with your communities and movements. Help us get the word out about why we must #FreeAssangeNOW! Register