End of ignominious Assange saga
Troublemaker, freedom fighter or “attention seeker of the worst kind”, as John Howard described him a decade ago, Julian Assange has done his time, very painfully. He avoided extradition to the US, where he faced 18 counts from an indictment for his alleged role in publishing troves of classified military and diplomatic documents. But he spent more than five years in Britain’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, isolated in a 2x3m cell, 23 hours a day, with atrocious food. Before that, he spent seven years in the Ecuadorean embassy in London after being granted asylum. It was revoked in 2019. He also spent years avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted by an investigation into alleged rape and sexual assault claims by two women, from 2010. The cases were later dropped.
Other than Assange’s citizenship, Australia has had little skin in the saga. Being fair-minded, most Australians would be pleased that he is free to rejoin his family and get on with his life. As a spokesman for Anthony Albanese says, Assange’s case “has dragged on for too long and there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration”. Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham welcomed the fact that a US plea deal will “bring this long-running saga to an end”. Assange will return to Australia as a free man but a convicted felon under the terms of the US plea deal.
Accompanied by Australia’s high commissioner to London, Stephen Smith, Assange is expected to plead guilty in a court in the US territory of Saipan, in the Western Pacific, to a felony charge of conspiring to obtain and distribute classified information. His punishment will be 62 months’ jail – the time spent in Belmarsh.
It may be contrary to his nature and ego, but Assange should keep a low profile from now. At a difficult time for the nation and its allies strategically, Assange should desist from masquerading as a freedom fighter or journalist. He was neither.
He was a cyber publisher, who, assisted by former US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, exposed hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents, a video of a Baghdad airstrike and papers from the Iran and Afghanistan wars. Manning was jailed from 2010 to 2017, when her 35-year sentence was commuted by Barack Obama.
In February, the BBC reported that lawyers for the US told a High Court hearing in London that Assange “put lives at risk” by releasing classified US documents, revealing the names of sources when WikiLeaks released unredacted files on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Four years earlier, Woolwich Crown Court, in southeast London, was told by James Lewis QC, representing the US, that sources whose names were revealed by Assange subsequently “disappeared”. His lawyer said the charges were politically motivated by the US.
There is a valour in speaking truth to power and accepting the risks and consequences, as former CNN war correspondent Michael Ware and Justine Rosenthal wrote in Inquirer in April. But, they argued, “Assange fails, in his role as megaphone, to do anything but avoid accountability. He is a traitor who revealed our military methodologies in a time of war. He could have redacted details, he could have extracted analysis and made his point as a reporter while still removing threats to human life”. Whistleblowing is vital in defending the public interest against corruption and incompetence. But the mass release of unredacted documents, especially in wartime, undermines the security interests of the nation and its allies. Assange should find something else to do. As Ware and Rosenthal predicted, his release “ will again test his true nature”.