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Julian Assange speaks to the media from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2017. Two years later, Ecuador evicted him. He has remained in a high-security London prison ever since.
Editor’s note: Alan Rusbridger I am the editor of the British political monthly magazine. prospect magazine He was editor-in-chief of the Guardian newspaper from 1995 to 2015. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.read more CNN Opinion.
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Imagine this. Let’s call her Gillian, a determined American journalist. I’m sneaking a look at articles about India’s nuclear weapons program. But there’s a problem. It is the Indian Official Secrets Act, 1923. Gillian has her base in London, but when she is finally able to publish her story, the Indian government is bent on revenge.
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Alan Rusbridger
Gillian needs to be set as an example so other journalists don’t try to follow in her footsteps. The Indian government then applied for her extradition to face trial in Delhi. She could face up to 10 years in prison.
Will London extradite Gillian? Will Washington sit idly by and accept the possibility of American journalists languishing in Indian prisons?
Keep dreaming. That will never happen. There will be a global outcry of journalists. And the British and American governments will secretly make sure everything is gone.
Now, forget about Gillian and think about Julian.
He is an Australian “journalist” living in London. However, what he is trying to divulge is not India’s national secrets, but America’s. The Americans are furious, at least after a while, and threaten to extradite him and imprison him. But in Julian’s case, there’s no howl of anger, just vague murmurs of disapproval.
The clue is in the inverted commas around “journalist”. In my opinion, Julian Assange is identified as a journalist in a sense. He is also a publisher, entrepreneur, activist, whistleblower, information anarchist, and hacker. That’s true of many of this new breed of cyber warriors.
But in the work we did together when I was editor of the Guardian and he was editor of WikiLeaks, we collaborated on a series of groundbreaking articles that were completely journalistic.
But for many journalists, Assange is not a proper “journalist” and simply cannot understand what his fate has to do with theirs. I think that’s a mistake.
Mr. Assange may learn his fate this week when judges at Britain’s High Court consider final statements from lawyers on both sides of his extradition case to the United States. In the United States, Mr. Assange could face a long sentence in a maximum-security prison.
Stephanie Lecoq/Reuters
Demonstrators supporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gather at Place de la République in Paris on February 20, 2024, the day Assange appeals his extradition to the United States in a British court.
I first met Assange in 2007, when he was relatively unknown on the internet and living in Kenya, where digital spaces allow dissidents and whistleblowers to publish valuable, if embarrassing, information. I was experimenting with the possibilities.
It was a time of optimism about how the internet could challenge structures of power. In January 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about the possibility of what she called a “new nervous system for the planet.”
She described a vision of semi-subterranean digital publishing that champions transparency and begins to challenge the authoritarian and corrupt old world order: “the samizdat of our time.” But she also warned that repressive governments are “targeting independent thinkers who use these tools.” She had regimes like Iran in mind.
It didn’t take long for Mr. Clinton to realize that this new samizdat publishing system was literally out of control. Even by her own government.
In addition to the Guardian, a handful of other established news organizations around the world, including The New York Times, El País, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel, also have access to the vast amount of information Chelsea Manning collected during her time in the U.S. Army. Collaborated with Mr. Assange on leaking documents.
It has often been a difficult road – even Assange’s greatest supporters agree that he is not the easiest person to work with – but together we have done valuable journalism.
Sarah Ellison wrote in Vanity Fair: Given the scope, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, this collaboration yielded her one of the biggest journalistic scoops of the past 30 years by any standards. ”
Mr. Clinton didn’t agree, and neither did prosecutors. Manning went to prison and Assange went into exile. However, the U.S. government at the time maintained a sense of balance against the damage. One of then-President Barack Obama’s final acts was to commute Ms. Manning’s sentence so that she would only serve seven years of the 35 years she was sentenced to.
There is a genuine public interest in publishing details of civilian killings in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in US authorities turning a blind eye to the systematic torture and murders committed by their Iraqi allies in 2009. I continue to believe that there was.
A mainstream news organization would have been happy to tear down a 2010 “collateral murder” video that used footage from an Apache helicopter to capture the murder of 12 innocent people, including two Reuters news staff.
Now, it is true that Assange was ahead of his mainstream news collaborators in the scope of what he published through WikiLeaks. It’s also true that he lost much sympathy for his role in the subsequent leak of emails stolen from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in 2016.
But Assange, 52, is not being pursued in the 2016 breach. Instead, the attempt to extradite him for “espionage” appears to be a long-awaited attempt to extradite him, who spent nearly five years in a British maximum-security prison. Punish whistleblowers and discourage journalists, traditional or otherwise, from sticking their necks out where they are not welcome.
More than 50 years ago, history was made when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected then-President Richard Nixon’s attempt to prevent the Washington Post and New York Times from publishing the so-called Pentagon Papers.
By the time of her death last year, Daniel Ellsberg — the Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden of her day — was seen as something of a hero for exposing the hidden truths of the Vietnam War.
Wally Fung/Associated Press
Daniel Ellsberg, co-defendant in the Pentagon documents case, speaks to the media outside the federal building in Los Angeles on April 28, 1973.
No one knows how Assange will be viewed a generation from now, but his cause should galvanize support among journalists – the weight of the Pentagon documents case could easily be reversed. Just because.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told President Joe Biden: “Enough is enough.” We hope that the British courts that are about to hear this case will agree.
