The Ruling Class’s Rules

The day before PACE declared that Assange’s prosecution had been politically motivated, Assange gave testimony at a hearing of PACE’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. Speaking before a packed room of parliamentarians, Assange sat between Stella and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson.

Before Assange testified, Þórhildur noted that WikiLeaks “published and revealed gruesome instances of war crimes, enforced disappearances, torture, corruption, abductions, and scores of different human rights violations.” As the Icelandic parliament noted, “Julian Assange did what investigative journalists routinely do. . . . Sadly, instead of prosecuting the perpetrators of the crimes so disclosed, the United States decided to prosecute the whistleblower and the publisher. Instead of convicting war criminals, they convicted the whistleblower and the journalist.” Þórhildur urged her PACE colleagues to address this injustice to prevent it from happening again.

When WikiLeaks became a household name following the release of the “Collateral Murder” video, which depicted US helicopters firing on Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, Assange became a public figure. He frequently gave speeches and interviews connecting secrecy with war and the pursuit of truth with the ability to right injustice. Some of these statements still periodically go viral on social media. But with Assange having been out of the public eye for so long and having been subject to torture and ailing health, it was unclear what to expect from his statement this week.

At the start of the speech, Assange acknowledged this. He stated it was difficult to convey the experience of “isolation for years in a small cell” and that he was not “fully equipped” to speak fully about what he endured. The journalist and former political prisoner apologized in advance that his “words might falter” or “not be polished,” as “expressing myself in this setting is a challenge.”

Yet once Assange began speaking, he was in his old form. He explained that WikiLeaks’ “journalism elevated freedom of information and the public’s right to know.” He described his time working on whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s documents as “being immersed in the world’s dirty wars and secret operations.” This experience left him with a “practical political vision”: “Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change.”

This came at a cost. Assange recounted the legal attacks (“lawfare”), surveillance, and various illegal CIA plots against him, describing it as a form of transnational repression. First, Manning was arrested. The United States surveilled WikiLeaks, bribed potential informants, and “pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and to freeze our account.” Yet the Barack Obama’s administration declined to prosecute the organization.

Things changed dramatically when Donald Trump was elected. He appointed Mike Pompeo, a “former arms industry executive,” to head the CIA and William Barr, “a former CIA officer” as attorney general. After WikiLeaks published a series of revelations about the CIA surveillance, the agency engaged in a number of illegal actions, including drawing up plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange. And the Trump Justice Department indicted Assange over the Manning-era revelations.

Assange said from the outset that WikiLeaks believed the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protected their actions. Never before had the US indicted a publisher or a journalist under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized disclosure of national defense information. Assange would describe this belief in law as “naivete.”

“When push comes to shove, laws are just pieces of paper, and they can be reinterpreted for political expediency,” Assange told the parliamentarians. “They are the rules made by the ruling class more broadly.”

Assange’s actions squarely fell under the protections of the law. But he angered the security state, which was powerful enough to push for a reinterpretation of a cornerstone of US law without any formal process. Of his decision to take a plea deal, Assange said, “I eventually chose freedom over unrealizable justice.”

Activists for Truth

At times, Assange’s appearance had a celebratory tone. Rapporteur Þórhildur announced how privileged she felt to have Assange there in person. Assange received his first applause from the assembled lawmakers before he had even spoken. And many members of PACE prefaced their questions by echoing Þórhildur’s sentiment, noting how glad they were Assange was free and in Strasbourg. Both Þórhildur and Sevim Dağdelen, a member of PACE from the German Bundestag, had visited Assange in prison, and this marked their first time seeing Assange as a free man.

While Assange mentioned how his journey from a maximum-security prison to an assembly of forty-six nations representing four hundred million people was surreal, he painted a somber picture of the current state of the world. When it came to the struggle against secrecy and censorship, the situation had gotten worse, not better since his indictment. He described freedom of expression as being at a “dark crossroad.” Impunity for abuses of power, secrecy, and retaliation for truth-telling, as well as a prevalence of self-censorship, were all, in Assange’s estimation, at an all-time high.

Assange repeatedly invoked the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. WikiLeaks needed a whistleblower to obtain and publish the “Collateral Murder” video; in today’s wars, horrors are being live streamed every day in real time. Russia has used the war in Ukraine to criminalize journalism domestically. As Asssange noted, under the United States’ precedent, Russia could also try to extraterritorially apply its domestic secrecy laws to journalists across Europe.

The wars in Gaza and Ukraine have seen hundreds of journalists killed. Unfortunately, as Assange noted, those wars have seen a severe breach of journalistic solidarity. Instead of journalists standing with any colleague censored or killed anywhere, “the political and geopolitical alignment of media organizations causes them to . . . cover only certain victims.” It was a trend Assange noted that was visible in his own case.

But Assange’s speech was not pessimistic. He said free speech was at a crossroads, not in its death throes. He implored the assembled lawmakers to take action now to make sure “the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.” He implored journalists to have solidarity with each other. And alluding to debates about whether he was a journalist or an activist, he stated, “journalists must be activists for the truth.”

The US Exception

The warm reception Assange received from the European parliamentarians was a sharp juxtaposition to the reaction he has received in the United States. The fact that the following day parliamentarians from across Europe, many of them from the United States’ NATO allies, voted to decree Assange a former political prisoner and call on the United States to amend its Espionage Act, shows how out of step the US government has been with the rest of the world in its persecution of Assange.

To millions around the world, Assange was a political prisoner, a journalist who took on the world’s sole remaining superpower by exposing its dark crimes, and who almost lost everything in the process. Assange’s liberation came not as the result of legal protections for human rights but from the global movement in support of him.

Celebrating Assange’s freedom is certainly important. Such victories are too rare not to savor. Assange exposed terrible crimes from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its “global war on terror.” But we now face new wars with new crimes. And the price for telling the truth about them is only getting steeper.