Imagine A Free Julian Assange (Opinion)

Imagine a free Julian Assange.

As the Biden administration doubles down on war and censorship, imagine a fully operational WikiLeaks working closely with courageous and independent journalists to challenge the censorship regime in the mainstream media where the Biden administration’s narratives on Ukraine, Gaza, and COVID are showing signs of collapse.

Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, imagined just such a fate on Monday night when he shared an AI video of Assange strutting out upon an open-air catwalk among throngs of Australian supporters cheering his release. Why did Shipton dare to hope?

On Tuesday, the High Court in London heard the Biden administration’s response to Assange’s claims that the journalist’s life would be in danger if extradited to America and that it would be impossible for Assange to receive a fair trial there in the Eastern District of Virginia. Last week, in what was either a gaffe or perhaps a hint of things to come, President Biden claimed to journalists that he was considering Australia’s pleas to release Assange, suggesting that he just might, on Tuesday, drop the Espionage Act charges his Justice Department inherited from the Trump administration.

No such luck.

Despite pressure from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promised to free Assange on day one, Biden has not relaxed his stance on criminalizing journalism and his factotums refused to drop the charges on Wednesday, while his opponent Donald Trump has indicated holding the same positions. The uniparty’s consensus on endless war and censorship is, of course, threatened by journalists like Assange. But will the United States sacrifice its bedrock principle of free speech in order to exact revenge on the most innovative journalist of the twenty-first century?

The next few months will tell the tale. As for next steps in this case, Wednesday’s proceedings did offer a glimmer of hope. In the Biden administration’s response to the High Court’s request for assurances that Assange would be treated fairly, the American lawyers offered startlingly weak arguments. Stella Assange, the lawyer and wife of the journalist, gave this reply:

The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty. It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S. citizen. Instead, the U.S. has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can “seek to raise” the First Amendment if extradited. The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in U.S. prison for publishing award-winning journalism. The Biden administration must drop this dangerous prosecution before it is too late.

Is there indeed reason to hope that Biden, who once compared Assange to a “hi-tech terrorist,” as reported in The Guardian, will do the right thing? Perhaps. The New York Times, which often does seem to be nothing more than a PR blog for the Democrats, is said by The Intercept to be in the midst of a mutiny over the administration’s wartime policies and has begun to leak at a feverish clip. And, rather stunningly, even the Times this year published a bitter and grudging editorial by James Kirchick who conceded that the “wraithlike” and “morally dubious” Assange deserved to be free.

Kirchick goes to great lengths to convince Times readers that Assange is deplorable and a friend of Russia. However, we at Honest Media do not think one needs to piss on Assange in order to save him from the public burning.

Through the privileging of primary documents over narrative warfare, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks evolved journalism into a more democratic, scientific, peer-reviewed enterprise. Assange, who revealed American war crimes in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan is, without question, the most innovative journalist of the twenty-first century. And he deserves to be free.

Yesterday.