Happy Birthday Robert, Happy Courtday Julian Assange

Looking Back On The History of the Wikileaks Founder's Imprisonment And Torture And How It Impacted My Own Life

Picture part of a series of graphics used as part of an awareness campaign by Stella Assange and Assange Defense. See Stella’s post for more information.

This Tuesday, 20 February, is my 29th birthday, which I will be celebrating by visiting a science museum and having a lovely high tea with my family and partner. It is also the day that Julian Assange might hear whether he will be extradited to the United States, where he will face 17 charges under the infamous Espionage Act for handling classified information, as well as a charge alleging a conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The charges can result in a prison sentence of 175 years in a maximum-security prison. The case is an incredibly grave threat to press freedom worldwide, not only because Assange is being prosecuted for the crime of publishing true information, but because he is not even a U.S. citizen. In other words, if this is allowed to happen, the United States, not to mention governments the world over, will feel free to prosecute ANYONE living anywhere on Earth for violating the law in a country that they are not even a citizen of.

It has been, wow, actually almost 14 years since WikiLeaks first rose to prominence after publishing a massive amount of diplomatic cables (documents detailing communications between officials / diplomats) and the famous ‘Collateral Murder’ video (2010) which showed the U.S. military killing civilians as well as two journalists from an Apache helicopter, and then shooting the people, two of which were children, who came to rescue them. It was of course just one of countless war crimes committed by U.S., U.K., and other Western forces active in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries in the region, but these leaks brought their actions to the forefront of public attention. Other documents published by WikiLeaks over the years include proof of the U.S. spying on allied governments like those of France and Germany and many other heads of state and officials (2015), U.S. sabotage of climate action prior to summits and its views of a melting Arctic as a lucrative business opportunity, massive corruption and exploitation of multinational corporations in Africa, secret drone strikes in the Middle East, the U.S. Democratic Party sabotaging Bernie Sanders’ political campaign in favour of Hillary Clinton (2016), and a torture manual for the U.S. extraterritorial prison in Guantanamo Bay (2007). Mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian can only dream of such a list of revelations, which should tell you all you need to know about why Assange and the site he founded are so hated and why they so desperately want to see him suffer until the end of his days.

I was 15 and still in high school at the time, and I remember everything that happened that year vividly. The outrage I felt at learning that our governments were committing such horrible crimes, and the even bigger outrage at seeing how they responded to these revelations. I had expected investigations, justice, and an immediate halt to the crimes. Instead what I saw was the U.S. government putting pressure on financial processors like Visa, MasterCard and PayPal who then proceeded to block payments to WikiLeaks, and a suddenly reopened alleged rape & unprotected sex case for which Swedish prosecutors wanted to bring Assange in for questioning again—and for which he was put on Interpol’s most wanted list—but for which they refused to come to the embassy, and the steadfast refusal of both the United States and Swedish governments to promise that he would not be extradited to the United States for his publishing work. The whole situation was just so evidently unjust, so clearly based on lies, all in order for these governments to get away with unspeakable crimes and punish those responsible for revealing them, so that no one else would ever dare to speak up again.

I cannot overstate what a huge impact on my life and the way I viewed the world these events made. Seeing clear proof of war crimes committed by Western governments and then seeing any pretense of law or justice so perversely subverted in order to jail the person who courageously brought those to light, completely shattered the image of the free and democratic West that I had been brought up with. Freedom of speech, journalistic freedom, the freedom to speak your mind without fear of imprisonment or other reprisals, that was the kind of society I thought I was living in. Only as long as you don’t go against those in power, was the lesson I was forced to learn. The fact that I was also in the middle of growing up, as well as still processing losing my father to cancer a little over two years earlier, made those years incredibly turbulent and complicated. My father grew up east of the Iron Curtain, and had decided to flee to the West at a time when there was a serious threat of a Russian military takeover. Hardly surprising that I was brought up on Disney and stories of freedom. The very fact that I can write these words and not (yet) have the police knocking on my door tomorrow, is something I have always held incredibly dear, precisely because I had always been told that that was not something you should ever take for granted. Perhaps that is why I refuse to compromise on these values, why I see them as the very basis of any type of meaningful freedom, and why I have decided that exposing truth, sharing information, and writing about injustice is what I need to be doing with my life. Not saying or doing anything about blatant crimes is simply not an option. Just like not speaking out against genocide is not an option. Like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, these kinds of principles are non-negotiable, and we lose a part of our humanity, of ourselves, if we do not do whatever we can to defend them.

Even as countless journalism awards were awarded to both Assange and WikiLeaks, and as United Nations Special Rapporteurs on torture said that he was a political prisoner and that his many years of detention amounted to torture, the crimes have never stopped. I’m not even referring to the war crimes here, although those have also never stopped. I’m referring to the absolute perversions of any notion of justice with regard to Assange. The millions and millions of pounds spent 24/7 guarding the Ecuadorian embassy that Assange fled to in order to avoid his extradition to Sweden and ultimately a life imprisonment in the United States, the surveillance of everyone inside and visiting that embassy including lawyers, CIA plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange, going after and imprisoning WikiLeaks’ sources, pressuring Ecuador into letting U.K. authorities drag Assange out of the embassy in 2019 in exchange for much-needed loans…

Let’s remind ourselves, that this was all supposedly because of an investigation into rape charges in Sweden, which had been dropped in 2017, then reopened again once he left the embassy in 2019, then conveniently dropped again the same year once the long-suspected U.S. indictment was issued.

…keeping him locked up to this day inside the maximum security Belmarsh prison, which “houses Britain’s most dangerous convicts”, confined to his cell for 23 hours a day (24 hours during the Covid lockdowns), which has seen his already fragile physical and mental health deteriorate to a point which I cannot even begin to imagine. All in order to get him extradited to the United States to face almost two centuries in prison, for which death is the only way out. Just like the U.S. government and all those complicit in its crimes want, while the real criminals still walk free. Free to stay in power and commit exciting new crimes, free to arrest more journalists, free to commit genocide. If I could have spoken these words to my younger self, I would not have believed them.

On the 20th, I’ll be celebrating my birthday and spending time with my loved ones, which in spite of everything that is going on in the world, is one of those things that keeps you sane through all the normalised insanity. I sincerely hope that Julian Assange will also have a cause for celebration, however small, but if the history that I have laid out for you in this post proves anything, it is that those in power will stop at nothing to deprive him of even the most basic of human necessities, regardless of whatever laws, protests, norms, or basic concepts of justice, morality, and decency they need to defile in the process.

For my paid subscribers, I will be sharing an excerpt from the novel I am working on in a separate post, in which you can read how the main character Stuart’s life has been impacted by the imprisonment of Julian Assange. Seeing as these were such important events for my own life, I wanted them to be equally important to Stuart’s life. If you are interested in my writing, or simply want to support my reporting, please consider taking a paid subscription.

You can follow updates on the ongoing trial here. Wondering what you can do to help? Make sure to share this post as well as any others that talk about this case and what it means for our freedoms. You can contribute money to Julian’s legal fees or the Assange Defense Committee. And you can of course show up at the London Royal Courts of Justice to protest, or at one of the many solidarity protests planned for 20 and 21 February (I found a list of locations at the bottom of this page, look online for pages that give you more information).

Also check out this post by his wife

Stella Assange

, where she lists 5 ways you can help Julian:

Prepare for DAY X. One Week Left.

Lastly, I would like to give a shoutout to

Indie

, who has been extensively sharing many different outlets, journalists, writers, commentators, and so on who have been talking about Julian Assange and his case. You can find a list of all these posts here.

Cover image courtesy of hafteh7 at Pixabay.

Julian Assange’s Day in Court