Media organisations call on US to drop charges against Assange

Media organisations call on US to drop charges against Assange
Credit: Thierry Roge/Belga

Major media outlets including The New York Times and The Guardian have published an open letter calling on the US government to drop its prosecution of Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange.

"Publishing is not a crime: the US government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets," the letter, which was published on Monday, reads. "This indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America's first amendment and the freedom of the press. Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists."

Assange, a native Australian, has spent the past four years in Belmarsh prison — previously known as 'Britain's Guantanamo Bay' — where he has been subjected to "psychological torture", according to the UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer.

Assange's extradition to the US on espionage charges was formally approved by Priti Patel, the UK's then-Home Secretary, in June this year. His lawyers filed an appeal against the decision in August, arguing that Assange is "being prosecuted and punished for his political opinions".

In addition to The New York Times and The Guardian, the letter's signatories include Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País — all of whom have collaborated with Wikileaks at some point over the last ten to fifteen years.

A legendary leaker

Assange rose to fame more than a decade ago, after Wikileaks published a number of highly sensitive secret documents which appeared to prove nefarious and even criminal conduct by the US and other governments.

Perhaps most notoriously, in 2010 the organisation released a video — entitled 'Collateral Murder' — which showed a US Apache helicopter launching an unprovoked assault on a group of unarmed individuals in Baghdad in 2007. The attack led to the deaths of more than a dozen people, including two Reuters news agency employees.

In addition, Wikileaks has released documents alleging tens of thousands of previously unreported civilian deaths during the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has published evidence that the British government trained a notorious 'death squad' for several years in Bangladesh.

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It also leaked private emails from senior members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showing that the DNC establishment heavily supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy over that of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primaries — support which even included the surreptitious provision of debate questions in advance to Clinton.

'A dangerous precedent'

In a thinly-veiled appeal to current US President Joe Biden — who also served as Vice-President to former President Barack Obama from 2009-2017 — the media organisations' letter notes that the Obama adminstration's own Justice Department ultimately decided against attempting to extradite Assange precisely for fear of the precedent it would set:

"The Obama-Biden administration, in office during the WikiLeaks publication in 2010, refrained from indicting Assange, explaining that they would have had to indict journalists from major news outlets too," the letter reads. "Their position placed a premium on press freedom, despite its uncomfortable consequences. Under Donald Trump however, the position changed. The [Department of Justice] relied on an old law, the Espionage Act of 1917 (designed to prosecute potential spies during world war one), which has never been used to prosecute a publisher or broadcaster."

If successfully extradited, Assange faces up to 175 years in prison.


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