West's treatment of Assange shows it no longer cares about freedom of the press (2024)

We never used to have dissidents in Britain. We do now.

We had eccentrics, tricky customers and nonconformists. Only our enemies had dissidents. Soviet Russia and communist China locked up those they disagreed with and let them rot in jail. All too often they tortured and killed them.

Think of the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the height of the Cold War, or more recently how the Chinese artist Wei Wei has been persecuted by the Beijing authorities because he stood up for democracy.

Of course, Julian Assange is not a great novelist like Solzhenitsyn or a great artist like Wei Wei, but he does share one really important quality with those two great men.

Bloody mindedness.

The Russian authorities would have loved Solzhenitsyn had he followed the course taken by so many others and concentrated on writing patriotic novels.But he chose to tell the truth about the gulag system.

Assange made the identical decision about the war on terror.

It’s natural that the US security establishment should hate him, just as they hated Daniel Ellsburg, the whistleblower who, 50 years ago, was prosecuted for his role in the Pentagon Papers revelations, which exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos.

The prosecution against Ellsburg failed because the rule of law was still respected in the West 50 years ago. Much later the famed whistleblower spoke of his deep fellow feeling for Assange.

A moral choice

Assange, with his deep and imaginative understanding of information technology, could probably have made an effortless fortune after the internet took off at the end of the last century.

Instead, like Ellsburg, he made the moral and sacrificial choice and ended up telling the truth about the terrible crimes committed by the United States (and Britain) during the war on terror.

Thanks to him we know about the US helicopter gunmen laughing as they shot and killed unarmed civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists. An incident that the US military lied about, claiming at first that the dead were all insurgents.

Wikileaks revealed the true number of civilians killed by the US army in Iraqfar morethan previously admitted.

WikiLeaks also disclosed the systematic nature of the abuse meted out to the inmates at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the fact that 150 innocent inmates were held for years without charge.

Here, in Britain, we learnt about the cynicalvote-trading with Saudi Arabia to ensure that both countries were elected onto the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2013, as well as links between members of the police and army and the fascist British National Party.

There were so many uncomfortable revelations in every country. But the relentless persecution which followed was an obscene betrayal of the values the United States and Britain claim to champion.

The Assange story is in essence a morality tale.

Collective failure

The crimes committed by the Bush-Blair alliance have caused untold mayhem and destruction across the Middle East. But they also changed us here in the West. As the treatment of Assange shows, the West has ceased to care about fundamental values like human rights and liberty.

Future generations of investigative journalists may look back aghast at Fleet Street’s collective failure to blow the whistle on the extradition of Assange

In the United States, the First Amendment, which enshrines free speech in the Constitution, was tossed aside.

We, in Britain, were different - or so we told ourselves. But the Assange case proved otherwise. It is well known that Britain values its "special relationship" with the United States.

But does that special relationship have to involve the level of grovelling we have seen from successive British home secretaries to a US government intent on leveraging a grossly unequal extradition treaty to extract Assange from Britain and put him on a plane to the United States where he would spend the remainder of his life in a high-security jail?

As my friend Peter Hitchens, one of the tiny number of British journalists who has taken a principled stance over Assange, points out in today’s Daily Mail, Britain has toadied shamefully to the US. "Good heavens," wrote Hitchens "I would not even want an ally so subservient and sycophantic. Surely you want a bit a bit of spirit among your friends, or they won’t be much use to you in a fight."

The silence of so many newspapers and media organisations over Assange strongly indicates that they couldn’t give a damn about a free press. Future generations of investigative journalists may look back aghast at Fleet Street’s collective failure to blow the whistle on the extradition of Assange.

If they had, he might not have had to plead guilty under the Espionage Act. As he has - and who can blame him? - we're all in trouble.Any story that depends on obtaining documents from US government sources will become impossible.

One paper, the Economist, actually called for Assange's extradition. The paper argued in April 2019 that "neither journalists nor activists, like Assange, have carte blanche to break the law in exercising their First Amendment rights" - echoing a US talking point.

Starmer complicit?

Just one final thought about the Assange story, and a highly pertinent one a week ahead of the UK's general election.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was director of public prosecutions (DPP) in the wake of the Wikileaks revelations.

We may never know the extent of Starmer's complicity in the targeting of Assange

During this time, the DPP oversaw the proposed extradition of Assange to Sweden over sexual assault allegations. "During Starmer’s time in post,"reported the website Declassified, "the [Crown Prosecution Service] was marred by irregularities surrounding the case of the WikiLeaks founder.

"The organisation has admitted to destroying key emails related to the Assange case, mostly covering the period when Starmer was in charge, while the CPS lawyer overseeing the case advised the Swedes in 2010 or 2011 not to visit London to interview Assange."

The destruction of key documents means we may never know the extent of Starmer's complicity in the targeting of Assange. Since he is all but certain to become British prime minister this time next week, that should worry everybody who cares about the freedom of the press in Starmer's Britain.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.