The Four Fathers Release ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’, Marking Julian Assange’s 50 Days as a Free Man

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Thursday August 15 marked 50 days since Julian Assange landed in Australia as a free man, after five years in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, fighting his proposed extradition to the US for publishing — with some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers — classified US files leaked by Chelsea Manning. Prior to his time in Belmarsh, he had spent nearly seven years confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, where he had successfully sought asylum in June 2012, until his asylum was abruptly withdrawn in May 2019.

To mark the occasion, The Four Fathers have released ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’, an amended version of our song ‘Warriors’, about Julian and Chelsea, which we first released in February, with the last two lines changed to celebrate Julian’s 50 days of freedom.

In the original, I sang that the price of Julian’s actions was “Extradition and life imprisonment and the end of the freedom of the press”, while the new version changes that to “Five years fighting extradition in Belmarsh until a plea deal set him free” — the plea deal that he signed in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a US Commonwealth in the Pacific, prior to his arrival back in Australia on June 26, where he was reunited with his wife and his sons.

You can listen to ‘Warriors (Freedom Version)’ on Bandcamp, via the link below, and, if you like, please feel free to share it, and, if you wish, to buy it as a download.

For the first time in over 12 years, Julian has been able to savour the liberty that most us take for granted — including, crucially, those journalists (myself included) who worked with WikiLeaks on the publication of the files leaked by Chelsea Manning — as shown in the photo we used as the cover of our new release, of Julian with his wife Stella and their sons, which was posted by Stella on X on July 22, and which has had 1.5 million views.

Julian hasn’t made a public statement since his release, and, as Stella pointed out just last week, “Julian is not currently on ANY social media. I and WikiLeaks will announce and verify any accounts he does eventually use.” She posted because she had been “warned of multiple fake accounts posing as Julian”, adding that “People posing as Julian are either trying to scam you, manipulate you or harm Julian’s reputation.”

While many of Julian’s numerous supporters are no doubt hoping that he will soon make a return online, I can completely understand if, after his long ordeal, he needs time — and perhaps a significant amount of time — to recover.

It’s also worth remembering that, although Julian’s release was long overdue, and spared the US government from a painful and fundamentally unwanted trial, in which they would have been obliged, however much they pretended otherwise, to put the First Amendment and the freedom of the press on trial, they did secure a tiny victory in the plea deal, which obliged Julian to concede that he had violated the US Espionage Act on a single count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents.

As he explained in the court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, “Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information. I believed the First Amendment protected that activity but I accept that it was … a violation of the espionage statute.”

Personally, I hope that Julian does eventually make a return, as a kind of freelance global ambassador for the freedom of the press, highlighting the need for governments to be held to account for their actions by principled journalists — and also pointing out, as he has so often before, that most of what passes for journalism is actually nothing more than stenography for the ruling elites.

Since October 8 last year, when Israel began a genocide of the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip in response to attacks by Hamas and other militants in Israel on October 7, I’ve been reminded of something he said many years ago, which absolutely nails how the mainstream media in the west played such a crucial role in seeking to justify this absolutely unjustifiable slaughter: “Nearly every war started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could’ve stopped it if they hadn’t reprinted government propaganda.”

How right he was, and how desperately shameful it is that, when Israel began its retaliation, amidst spine-chilling statements of genocidal intent, the mainstream media — and the political elites they serve — didn’t murmur even a whisper of dissent, all uniting to declare that Israel had “a right to defend itself”, even though Israeli politicians and their media had made clear that “defending itself” meant genocide.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.