Assange: the transnational threat to expression

Published: 02-10-2024

On Tuesday, October 1, 2024, Mr. Assange spoke before the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Humanity

At Julian Assange’s first major public meeting since gaining his freedom, he declared his humanity and compassion. He was not yet “fully equipped to speak about what (he) endured” during his incarceration. Nor could he “anymore speak about the death by hanging, murder and medical neglect of (his) fellow prisoners”.

One was immediately reminded of the statement that Craig Murray, former ambassador, Wikileaks contributor and friend of Mr. Assange, made upon his release from a Scottish prison where he was also imprisoned for journalism (see Sources). Murray’s work exposed the persecution of Scottish independence and political leader Alex Salmond as politically motivated and orchestrated.

Both spoke about the conditions of their fellow prisoners during their first opportunity to make a prepared public statement.

Just journalism

Mr. Assange’s comments to the committee highlighted the precedent of the US legal charges that, while filed against him, pose a transnational threat to political expression and journalism:

I want to be perfectly clear. I am not free today because the (legal) system worked. I am free today, after years of incarceration, because I pleaded guilty to journalism.

I pleaded guilty to seeking information from a source. I pleaded guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pleaded guilty to informing the public of that information. I have not pleaded guilty to anything else.

I hope that my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of existing safeguards and help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable. As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I lament how much ground was lost during that period, how the expression of the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished.

I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship. It’s hard not to draw a line between the US government’s persecution of me, crossing the Rubicon by criminalizing journalism internationally, to the cold climate for freedom of expression that now exists.

Mr Assange discussed a key topic of the report to be presented shortly by the General Rapporteur on Political Prisoners Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir (Iceland) for which the PACE Commission meeting was convened; the suppression of speech and political expression, and the attack on the publication of facts.

Collateral assassination and secret policy

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream to educate people about how the world works so that through understanding we could create something better.

If we have a map of where we are, we can understand where we might go. Knowledge allows us to hold power to account and demand justice where there is none. We have obtained and published the truth about tens of thousands of hidden victims of war and other invisible horrors, about programs of murder, rendition, torture and mass surveillance. We revealed not only when and where these things happened, but often the policies, agreements and structures behind them.

When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous CCTV footage of an American Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing Iraqi journalists and their rescuers to pieces, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world. But we also used the interest in this video to alert people to the secret policy on when the U.S. military could use lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could be killed before more approval would be obtained.

In fact, 40 years of my potential 175 year sentence consisted of obtaining and releasing these policies.

Shrink and attack the US Constitution

President Obama’s Justice Department has chosen not to charge me because it recognizes that no crime was committed. The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Former US Senator, Democratic Party presidential candidate and Secretary of State John Kerry is currently working on that reinterpretation. On 29-09-2024 he said during a meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF):

…our First Amendment is a major obstacle to being able to simply eradicate it (disinformation) from existence.

— John Kerry (quoted in RealClear Politics)

For Kerry, disinformation is a political opinion that makes it “more difficult to reach consensus.”

State abuse by the intelligence service

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of fringe political parties, its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole. We exposed the CIA’s massive production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of anti-virus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones. (WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release)

CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retaliation. It has now been made public that the CIA, under Pompeo’s express direction, has drawn up plans to kidnap and kill me inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorize them to go after my European colleagues, exposing us to theft , hacking attacks and planting false information. My wife and my son were also targeted.

A CIA asset was permanently assigned to locate my wife and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six-month-old son’s diaper. This is the testimony of more than thirty current and former US intelligence officials who spoke to the US press, and is further corroborated by data seized during the prosecution of some of the CIA officers involved.

The fact that the CIA is attacking me, my family, and my associates through aggressive, extrajudicial, and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organizations engage in transnational repression. Such repression is not unique.

The unique thing is that we know so much about this, thanks to countless whistleblowers and judicial investigations in Spain.

Mr. Assange’s emphasis was not on the CIA’s targeting of him and his family and colleagues. On the contrary, thanks to the efforts made to investigate the CIA’s crimes, the public has been given a detailed account of the actions the CIA takes to suppress.

There remains an awful, ongoing parallel. None of the war criminals exposed in Wikileaks’ publications have been charged, let alone brought to justice. Only the whistleblowers and the publisher have seen a court effectively charged with revealing the secrets of government officials and their crimes. The same “persecution of whistleblowers and publishers” applies to the crimes of the CIA. To gain his freedom from the practice of law, which involved the CIA (US government) spying on and paying for legal meetings false testimony from a convicted fraudster and pedophile (Sigurd Thordanson) had to plead Assange – guilty of journalism, guilty of publishing authentic documents.

Wikileaks has a perfect publishing record. All his publications are authentic documents. This is why Mr. Assange was psychologically tortured and imprisoned.

The US, and especially its Central Intelligence Agency, could not allow the success of an innovative method of exposing crimes through publishing the secrets it could not keep.

The ‘secret’ documents describing unknown crimes are legal. Publishing it is not.

The Transnational Threat to Speech

…the US government has taken a dangerous new global legal position: only US citizens have the right to free speech. (…) Europeans and other nationalities do not have the right to free speech, but the US claims that the Espionage Act still applies to them no matter where they are. The Europeans in Europe must therefore obey the American secrecy law without any defense.

As far as the US government is concerned, maybe an American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to. But for a Frenchman in Paris, this is a crime without defense, and he could be extradited like me.

Now that a foreign government has formally claimed that Europeans do not have the right to free speech, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit. (…) The rights of journalists and publishers within the European area are seriously threatened.

Transnational repression cannot become the norm here. As one of the world’s two great standards that define institutions, PACE must act.

The criminalization of newsgathering activities threatens investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally condemned by a foreign power for requesting, receiving and publishing truthful information about that power while in Europe.

The basic issue is simple. Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their work.

Journalism is not a crime. It is a pillar of a free and informed society.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, if Europe wants a future where freedom of speech and freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few, but rights guaranteed to all, then it must act. my case never happens to anyone else.

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Sources

Assange: ‘I am free because I pleaded guilty to journalism’ / Assange: ‘My naivety was believing in the law’Julian Assange (Machine generated transcript of his statements before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Council of Europe), Consortium News, 01-10-2024

• The quotes used in the article above are based on this transcript, edited for clarity and to correct obvious machine errors. My apologies in advance if I missed anything.

Craig Murray is released: Great Britain scores an own goalYesXorNo, 01-12-2021

Key witness in Assange case admits to lying in indictmentBjartmar Oddur Þeyr Alexandersson & Gunnar Hrafn Jónsson, Studin, 26-06-2021 (https://stundin.is/grein/13627/key-witness-in-assange-case-admits-to-lies-in-indictment/ )

Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools RevealedWikileaks, 07-03-2017

John Kerry tells WEF: Our First Amendment is a major obstacle to pushing down disinformationTim Hains, RealClear Politics, 2024-09-29

WATCH: Assange’s testimony in Strasbourg – LIVE!Consortium news, 9/30/2024

Craig Murray’s full statement following his release from Saughton Prison, Edinurgh, Alba Party, their YouTube channel, 11/30/2021

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