Julian Assange and the War on Truth

My conversation with Stella Morris

Today was an important day in the ongoing drama surrounding Julian Assange. While it was a thin victory, it was a victory nonetheless: Assange was granted the right to appeal his case to the British High Court, based on questioning America’s assurances he would be treated humanely in the United States.

The bigger issue, of course, is that Assange should not be extradited at all. He should not be prosecuted at all. The entire drama is a war on the free press, and by extension a war on truth.

There is so much noise today, so many topics competing for our attention on both personal and political levels. It can be hard to curate them all, to recognize what issues matter most in the larger scheme of things. It isn’t necessarily obvious that the case of Julian Assange is one of those “issues that matter most,” but I believe it is.

If America had allowed itself to truly take in the enormity of the mistake that was the war in Viet Nam - if people had allowed ourselves to grapple emotionally and psychologically with the horror of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese dying so tragically and unnecessarily - I don’t think Americans would have fallen so easily for the proposition that we repeat the same absurdity and invade Iraq. And if we had taken in the full realization of how tricked we were, how lied to we were, in order to get us to buy in to that proposition, then perhaps we wouldn’t have so easily acquiesced to a war in Afghanistan that bore far more scrutiny, given that after twenty years of being there the entire country fell to the Taliban within ten days of our departure. I don’t know how we keep calling ourselves “the most powerful military in the world” when we have now lost three straight wars in a row. And the moral failure involved in all of them - the unnecessary deaths of so many brave Americans as well as millions of people in far off lands - calls every American of conscience to a deeper level of questioning than is convenient to forces that be.

Questions like, what the hell is going on? Why does the United States continue to perpetrate such wrong minded misadventures, and why do we the taxpayers just keep funding them? Why aren’t we told more, informed more, let in on what’s going on more? Why isn’t someone telling us the truth?

There are those who have told us the truth, and have sacrificed terribly in order to do so. Julian Assange is foremost among them.

In 2010, Assange revealed evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq. Findings of atrocities that range from torture to murder, concealed through a dubious use of the classification system (the government is supposed to be able to classify information only if its exposure could endanger national security, not in order to hide its own culpability), were published by Wikileaks, an international non-profit organization Assange founded in order to publish news leaks and classified information revealed by anonymous sources. The information had been garnered from tens of thousands of documents received from a US soldier based in Iraq named Chelsea Manning.

Manning ultimately served prison time for her release of the classified documents. President Obama chose not to prosecute Assange, however, given that Wikileaks worked closely with the New York Times on the publication of Manning’s leaked material. Obama was concerned that in order to go after Assange he would have to go after the New York Times, presenting serious First Amendment issues he wasn’t willing to take on. President Trump then reversed Obama’s position and vigorously sought prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917. Some assumed this would be one of the many areas where Biden simply reverted to pre-Trump positions. On the issue of Assange, however, he did not.

Assange was given refuge for seven years in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. He was then forcibly removed by British police to Belmarsh prison there, where he has been held for the last three years under the most severe conditions. During that entire time the US government has sought his extradition to the United States to stand trial for espionage. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.

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The questions are so much bigger than Julian Assange. Since atrocities have been revealed, how common were they and has anyone been held accountable? Why is the US government working so hard to cover up war crimes? And why do journalists in the United States play the role of mere stenographers to Pentagon officials, rarely prying, rarely digging, too rarely doing their job of informing the American people of military madness being perpetrated in our name?

Daniel Ellsberg bravely, heroically published The Pentagon Papers in order to expose to Americans the lies that our government told in order to keep us fighting in Vietnam years beyond the time when it knew the war was essentially lost. He too, would have been prosecuted by the government had Nixon’s Watergate scandal not changed his fate. Today Ellsberg is one of Assange’s most ardent defenders, arguing that if anything the trial of Assange is an even greater test of press freedom and the right of the people to know.

Please listen to my conversation with Stella Morris, Assange’s fiancee and the mother of his children. They met years ago when Morris joined Assange’s legal team; her personal as well as legal defense of who he is, and why he did what he did, is a compelling feature in the larger drama that is the international rallying cry #FreeAssange.

One more thing: please contact your Congresspeople, as well as the White House, and ask that the prosecution of Assange be dropped. Julian Assange has suffered enough. President Biden could simply let this go.

And he should.FREE