Via a Fundamentally Devious US Plea Deal, Julian Assange Will Soon Be a Free Man
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In unexpected and truly heartening news, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange will soon now a free man, reunited, in his home country of Australia, with his wife Stella and their two sons, Gabriel and Max (born in 2017 and 2019), who have only ever seen their father behind bars.
Assange was released from the maximum-security HMP Belmarsh in south east London, where he had spent over five years —1,901 days — in legal limbo, fighting extradition to the US to face espionage charges relating to his work as a journalist and publisher exposing US crimes and war crimes.
From Stansted Airport, he is being flown to the Northern Mariana Islands, a commonwealth of the United States, where, in exchange for his freedom, he has agreed to sign a plea deal admitting that he had “knowingly and unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning” to commit espionage against the United States by obtaining and disseminating classified national defence information.
Video: I Discuss Guantánamo and My Work with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks on Consortium News
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I’m delighted to be posting the video interview I undertook recently, discussing my work articulating and opposing the ongoing 22-year horror story of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and my work with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011, with Cathy Vogan and Elizabeth Vos of Consortium News, the independent news website established in 1995 by the late investigative journalist Robert Parry, which is now run by Cathy and Joe Lauria.
After the interview, I met Joe and Cathy at an event for Julian Assange in London, and was pleased to find two like-minded souls in the unending struggle to expose the truth about the state of the world, and to resist further crimes and abuses of power by those in charge.
In the interview, I began by explaining how I had become involved in the Guantánamo story, in 2006, and the forensic investigative work that was required to piece together — from documents reluctantly made publicly available by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation, including, for the first time, the names and nationalities of the prisoners — a coherent narrative about who was held in Guantánamo, and how the overwhelming majority of the 779 men and boys held there by the US military since January 2002 had no connection with terrorism, for my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007.
Julian Assange Wins A Major Battle in His Long War Against Punitive US Overreach
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Today, in the High Court in London, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange secured a major legal victory in his long struggle against a blatantly unfair US extradition request, which seeks his extradition to the US to face espionage charges relating to the publication by WikiLeaks, in 2010 and 2011, of classified US files leaked by Chelsea Manning, a US private who had worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.
Assange’s victory today came when the High Court judges in his case refused to accept US assurances involving two aspects of the extradition request: his right not to be prejudiced against because of his nationality (he is an Australian citizen), and his entitlement to the protections of the US First Amendment, the guarantor of freedom of speech, and the bedrock of protection for journalists and publishers who make available classified information which it is in the public interest to know about, whether it embarrasses governments, or even exposes crimes that they hoped to keep hidden.
Assange’s long struggle against extradition began over five years ago, in April 2019, when he was arrested and taken to HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, after the Ecuadorian government withdrew the asylum granted to him in June 2012, which had allowed to him to live, for nearly seven years, in the cramped confines of the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge.
Video: On the 13th Anniversary of WikiLeaks’ Release of the Guantánamo Files, My Interview with the Julian Assange Defence Committee
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13 years ago today, on April 25, 2011, WikiLeaks and a host of international newspapers — the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post, McClatchy, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, La Repubblica, L’Espresso and Aftonbladet — published, or began publishing “The Guantánamo Files,” a treasure trove of classified US military documents from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, the last of four significant releases, in 2010-11, of classified material leaked by Chelsea Manning, the first three being the Afghan and Iraq War Logs, and a vast archive of diplomatic cables.
I was also a media partner for the release of the files, having been asked by WikiLeaks, as an independent expert on Guantánamo, to investigate them, and to brief journalists from the mainstream media partners about their significance, which I did in the days following the release of the files on April 25. The publishing date had been brought forward abruptly, from an intended release date in May, after we heard that the Guardian and the New York Times had obtained them from another source, and were intending to preempt us with the files’ publication.
I still vividly recall getting a call about this on the evening of April 24, and then having to write an introduction to the files in a matter of hours, explaining their significance. This ended up on the front page of “The Guantánamo Files,” on the WikiLeaks website, as “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners,” and I also posted it on my website as “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies.”
I Discuss the Significance of WikiLeaks’ Release of ‘The Guantánamo Files’ in a Primary Sources Podcast with Clive Stafford Smith
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I’m delighted to be sharing with you an hour-long podcast about the significance of the formerly classified military files from Guantánamo (the “Detainee Assessment Briefs”), which were released by WikiLeaks as “The Guantánamo Files” in 2011, and on which I worked as a media partner. I took part in the podcast along with Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, and both Clive and I were invited to speak with the podcast’s host Chip Gibbons because of our long involvement with Guantánamo, and because we had both testified on behalf of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange at his extradition hearing in the UK in October 2020.
Chip works for Defending Rights and Dissent, formed in 2016 through the merger of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), founded in 2001 to resist the draconian post-9/11 Patriot Act, and the Defending Dissent Foundation, originally formed in 1960 as the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. They describe their mission as being to “strengthen our participatory democracy by protecting the right to political expression.”
Defending Rights and Dissent recently set up a podcast series, “Primary Sources,” in which, over the last six months, Chip Gibbons has interviewed the “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, James Goodale, General Counsel of the New York Times when the “Pentagon Papers” were published, human rights attorney Carey Shenkman discussing the Espionage Act, whistleblower and attorney Jesselyn Raddack, whistleblowers Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou and Matthew Hoh, and drone program whistleblowers Lisa Ling, Keagan Miller, Cian Westmoreland, and Christopher Aaron, and it was an honor and a privilege to be invited to join this extraordinary line-up of witnesses exposing the crimes of the US government over many decades.
Like a Wheedling Abuser, the US Makes Groundless Promises in Julian Assange’s Extradition Appeal
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In January this year, when a British judge refused to allow Julian Assange’s extradition to the US, to face espionage charges — and a potential 175-year sentence — for the work of WikiLeaks in helping to expose US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the groundless basis of most of the US’s supposed reasons for holding men indefinitely without charge or trial at Guantánamo, the US government should have backed down and allowed him to be freed to be reunited with his family.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling, sadly, avoided the heart of the case — whether publishing damaging material in the public interest is a crime (which it isn’t, and mustn’t be allowed to be, if freedom of the press is to mean anything) — but homed in unerringly on the considered opinion of a psychiatrist that, if transferred to a maximum-security prison in the US, awaiting trial, Assange, because of his mental health issues, would take his own life.
The ruling was a valid condemnation both of the brutality of the US prison system in general, and of its particular unsuitability for those with mental health issues, and it was a vivid reminder that, back in October 2012, Theresa May, when she was home secretary, had refused to allow the extradition to the US of Gary McKinnon, a hacker with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, on the very same basis, and that the extradition of Lauri Love, another hacker with Asperger’s, had been refused by two High Court judges in February 2018.
A Call to Free Julian Assange on the 10th Anniversary of WikiLeaks’ Release of the Guantánamo Files
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Ten years ago today, I was working with WikiLeaks as a media partner — working with the Washington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, Aftonbladet, La Repubblica and L’Espresso — on the release of “The Guantánamo Files,” classified military documents from Guantánamo that were the last of the major leaks of classified US government documents by Chelsea Manning, following the releases in 2010 of the “Collateral Murder” video, the Afghan and Iraq war logs, and the Cablegate releases.
All the journalists and publishers involved are at liberty to continue their work — and even Chelsea Manning, given a 35-year sentence after a trial in 2013, was freed after President Obama commuted her sentence just before leaving office — and yet Julian Assange remains imprisoned in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, even though, in January, Judge Vanessa Baraitser, the British judge presiding over hearings regarding his proposed extradition to the US, prevented his extradition on the basis that, given the state of his mental health, and the oppressive brutality of US supermax prisons, the US would be unable to prevent him committing suicide if he were to be extradited.
That ought to have been the end of the story, but instead of being freed to be reunited with his partner Stella Moris, and his two young sons, Judge Baraitser refused to grant him bail, and the US refused to drop their extradition request, announcing that they would appeal, and continuing to do so despite Joe Biden being inaugurated as president. This is a black mark against Biden, whose administration should have concluded, as the Obama administration did (when he was Vice President), that it was impossible to prosecute Assange without fatally undermining press freedom. As Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation stated in April 2019, “Despite Barack Obama’s extremely disappointing record on press freedom, his justice department ultimately ended up making the right call when they decided that it was too dangerous to prosecute WikiLeaks without putting news organizations such as the New York Times and the Guardian at risk.”
Video: The War on Journalism – The Case of Julian Assange
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In a prison cell in HMP Belmarsh, in south east London, which is supposedly reserved for the most violent convicted criminals in the UK, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and a non-violent individual who has not been convicted of a crime, awaits a ruling regarding his proposed extradition to the United States, to face disgracefully inappropriate espionage charges related to his work as a publisher of classified US documents that were leaked by US soldier Chelsea Manning.
The first stage of hearings regarding Julian’s extradition took place in February, and were supposed to continue in May, but were derailed by the arrival of Covid-19. In February, I had submitted as evidence a statement in support of Julian, based on having worked with him as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011. I expected to be questioned about my evidence in May, but, in the end, it wasn’t until September that the hearings resumed.
To coincide with the resumption of the hearings, a 38-minute film was released, “The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange,” directed by filmmaker Juan Passarelli, for which I was interviewed, in the esteemed company of of John Pilger, UN torture rapporteur Nils Melzer, lawyers Jennifer Robinson and Renata Avila, Julian’s wife Stella Moris, journalists Barton Gellman, Margaret Sullivan, Iain Overton, Max Blumenthal and Matt Kennard, WikiLeaks’ editor in chief Kristin Hrafnsson, and Conservative MP David Davies.
Radio: I Talk to Scott Horton About the Injustice of Julian Assange’s Extradition Case and the Importance of the Leaked Guantánamo Files
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Last week, during the fourth and last week of hearings regarding the proposed extradition to the US of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, two statements I made in his defence (via the tireless Gareth Pierce and her colleagues) were read into the evidence at the Old Bailey in London. The two statements were subsequently made available by Antiwar.com — the first, from February, is here, and the second, made last week, is here. A decision on the extradition case is expected to be delivered by Judge Vanessa Baraitser on January 4, 2021.
It took a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing in court to get my statements accepted, and for some time efforts were made to get me to testify in person, and to be cross-examined by the prosecutor, but — perhaps mercifully — the latter course of action didn’t eventually transpire, as the prosecutor, James Lewis, had, throughout the hearings, maintained “very systematic techniques of denigrating and browbeating” expert witnesses, according to the human rights activist (and former Ambassador) Craig Murray, who attended the hearings for the whole month.
My statements related to my work with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011, in which I noted how much of the supposed evidence used to justify imprisonment at Guantanamo was, as I described it in my first statement, information extracted from “the Guantánamo prisoners’ fellow prisoners who had been subjected to torture or other forms of coercion either in Guantánamo or in secret prisons run by the CIA”, or information which was equally “unreliable because fellow prisoners had provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.”
“The Use of Power and Ideology in Guantánamo”: New Academic Paper Focuses On My Book “The Guantánamo Files”
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Imagine my surprise last week when a post popped up on Facebook, which I was tagged in, that read, “The Use of Power and Ideology in Guantánamo: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Andy Worthington’s The Guantánamo Files.”
Clicking through, I found that it was an entire academic article focusing on my 2007 book The Guantánamo Files, published in the latest issue (June 2020) of the European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, a publication by EA Journals (European-American Journals), part of the UK-based European Centre for Research Training and Development, which is “an independent organisation run by scholars mainly in the UK, USA, and Canada.”
Written and supported by students and supervisors at GC University, in Faisalabad, Pakistan, the abstract explains that “[t]he research deals with the use of power and ideology in Andy Worthington’s The Guantánamo Files (2007) as the narratives (generally called Gitmo narratives) of the detainees show the betrayal of American ideals, [the] US constitution and international laws about human rights. Since its inception, Guantánamo Bay Camp is an icon of American military power, hegemony and legal exceptionalism in the ‘Global War on Terror.’”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
