The news necessarily leaves a bittersweet aftertaste, bordering on bitter. Julian Assange was released this Monday after an agreement with United States prosecutors. He took a plane – the costs of which he will have to pay – that took him to Bangkok, from there to a US territory in the Pacific Ocean, the Northern Mariana Islands, where a US judge will most likely ratify the agreement, and then he flew to his country. native, Australia. One cannot but rejoice at this result. For him, for his family, for his wife, Stella, for the two young children who have only known his father behind bars. On the other hand, it is impossible not to regret that the founder of Wikileaks has spent a total of 11 years in prison, trying to avoid his extradition to the United States. It is also impossible to ignore the message that all this sends to the world, to investigative journalism, to the defenders of press freedom and all those citizens, in any country, who count on this as a fundamental pillar of the democratic societies in which they live or aspire to live.
The founder of Wikileaks accepted a single charge (having violated a law from the beginning of the last century, the Espionage Act, applied since then on very rare occasions and never to journalists), as well as a five-year prison sentence. The American justice system will take into account the time he has spent in a high-security prison in the United Kingdom fighting against extradition to the United States, so it is most likely that, once the agreement is ratified by the judge, Assange will be definitively released. The hearing will take place in the Mariana Islands (by the Spanish Queen Mariana of Austria) because the accused has refused to set foot on continental territory of the United States: he does not trust either the prosecutors or, in general, the judicial system of that country.
It is not difficult to understand the reasons for this. If he had been extradited to the United States, he would have faced a judicial process with a request for 175 years in prison. Turning 52, Assange had been trying to avoid extradition and subsequent trial for more than a decade. He first spent five years at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The rest, in a high security prison in the United Kingdom. The indictment by US prosecutors was, on the surface, so strong—17 criminal charges under the Espionage Act, passed in 1917 to protect against activities against state security, plus another criminal charge against the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act— as morally unsustainable.
Assange risked spending the rest of his life in prison for handing over secret US government documents to five newspapers —The New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and the country-. For a few weeks in 2010, many of you, or some of you, read articles based on those documents, 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables that sparked a global diplomatic crisis.
In short: Assange could have rotted in an American prison because you learned from the pages of this newspaper about Washington’s incompetence and double standards in its relations with allied Arab countries or with Pakistan; of her abuses and attacks on civilians in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; of the maneuvers to obtain the file in the National Court in Madrid of three cases that in one way or another affected them (among them, the death of journalist José Couso in Baghdad); of the pressures to force Spanish banks and companies to abandon the businesses that they were carrying out in Iran in accordance with international legislation, as well as numerous issues in Latin American countries: from the involvement of Cuban advisors in Venezuela to the opinion of the US Embassy on the Mexican army, passing through the mental health of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina.
Wikileaks also published several pieces of information that hit the image and international credibility of the United States. The most notable piece—a video about 40 minutes long—was known as Collateral Murder (Collateral Murder). The images, recorded from the aircraft themselves, show an attack in Baghdad in 2007, in which two US Army Apache helicopters shoot at a group of 12 unarmed Iraqis, two of them collaborators with the Reuters news agency. For years, prosecutors maintained that the dissemination of all of the above put the lives of thousands of people at risk, US soldiers, civilians who collaborated with the embassies of that country or diplomats. They were never able to prove a single case. On the contrary, what all the information from Wikileaks does show is the irregular, unscrupulous or downright immoral way in which the US army behaved on numerous occasions and that only the lack of a conviction in an international court prevents it from being classified as crimes. of war.
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It is true that Assange is an uncomfortable victim, an unfriendly guy, whom many journalists in many newsrooms around the world do not consider a colleague. He is not, or is not a journalist in the sense that some consider he should be – half hacker, half an activist. In any case, he is not a suitable journalist for a case of such flagrant abuse by the US judicial and espionage apparatus (the Spanish chapter is especially embarrassing). For starters, he was accused of sexual abuse by two women in Sweden in 2010, shortly after we published the State Department papers. Assange refused to travel to Sweden to submit to police questions. He alleged that everything was a conspiracy to take him to the United States, try and convict him. Few of us believed him then. He offered to answer questions from the Swedish authorities in London, although they never showed interest in doing so. And then it was learned that, indeed, the United States had secretly convened a tribunal (grand jury) to charge Assange and request his extradition.
Wikileaks also published the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign team in 2016. Many therefore considered him a pawn of Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, or both at the same time. Nor was this a movement that earned him excessive sympathy in many newsrooms or in the sectors of society that normally mobilize in cases of state abuses such as those he has suffered now. And that abuse — and the consequences of it: years in prison, damage to his physical and mental health — remains. That abuse is the sentence, without trial, without defense, without spotlights, without basic rights in the West since the Enlightenment. That abuse is the message: to hypothetical leakers of the future, to journalists, to citizens around the world.
To begin with, all of us who participated in the dissemination of that news have doubted or feared at some point for our legal security: the media directors at that time (Alan Rusbridger, Bill Keller, Sylvie Kaufmann, Georg Mascolo and myself) , plus the forty or fifty journalists from Morning Express who made up the team that delved into tens of thousands of cables in order to decipher their secrets. Among them, as she herself recalled a few Sundays ago in these same pages, Soledad Gallego-Díaz, later director of the newspaper. But the warning is directed, naturally—or above all, one would say—to all the directors and journalists who have come and will come after us and who have faced or will have to face similar situations and dilemmas. Should we fear legal consequences of any kind? One would like to believe not. We are in Spain. But Assange is also Australian. Here the Constitution protects us. And in the European Union, laws and common sense. But who knows. Outside of that, I’m not so sure. And the political future does not seem to be shaping up in a promising way, precisely, for press freedom and the type of protections it requires.
Finally, Assange’s ordeal is enough intimidation for the Assanges of the coming decades. It can undoubtedly contribute to restricting journalistic investigation based on classified documentation. How much will we stop knowing about the functioning of the deep state? With its growing capabilities to control the movements of citizens, facial recognition, the ability to intercept communications and commit all kinds of abuses, democratic control is more necessary than ever. To whom are we going to delegate the supervision of all this? In the State itself and its agencies? If the parts of the state that we see and can examine (more or less) rarely work well, why should we assume that the ones we don’t see do? If abuses are committed in the parts we observe, how can we not be suspicious of what happens in the parts we don’t? Haven’t we learned how that ends? And the latter, beyond the journalists themselves, does affect you, dear readers. So be warned.
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