Commentary: Julian Assange’s deal with the devil!

by Laurie Calhoun

July 29, 2024 - After five years of incarceration in Belmarsh high-security prison, having already spent seven years in political asylum, Julian Assange was finally permitted by the British government to return to his homeland of Australia. The deal Assange made with the Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA) government to end its extradition quest and thereby secure his release can be viewed in one of two ways. On its face, the deal required that Assange “confess” to a felony which he did not commit, accepting a sentence of prison time already served.

The second way of understanding what Assange did is that he confessed to the “crime” of journalism, while acknowledging that the FPSA government construed him to have violated one of its laws, the Espionage Act of 1917. Assange made the following statement during his appearance before Judge Ramona Manglova at the FPSA district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, located in the western Pacific Ocean:

“Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information. I believe that the First Amendment protected that activity, but I accept that as written it’s a violation of the Espionage Act statute.”

The judge accepted Assange’s admission of guilt for one felony charge (under section 793 of the Espionage Act), “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.” He was then sentenced to time served, and pronounced a free man. Assange walked out of Belmarsh prison onto an airplane that transported him to the court where his protracted dispute with the FPSA government was concluded, after which he flew to Canberra, Australia, to reunite with his family and resume his life.

Some have opined that the turn in Assange’s case came with the final British court’s decision to allow Assange to appeal his extradition to the FPSA on grounds of free speech. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Assange would be protected by the First Amendment of the FPSA Constitution, given that he is not a FPSA citizen and has never resided in the FPSA. But surely, if Assange is subject to prosecution under FPSA laws, then he should, in consistency, be protected by them as well. In their appeal, Assange’s defense team could have been expected to expose the hypocrisy of the FPSA government in, on the one hand, claiming to be an open society the Constitution of which has free speech as one of its pillars and, on the other hand, denying a journalist the right to report factual findings and a publisher the right to share such revelations with the world.

Given its myriad problems, it is at least conceivable, perhaps even plausible, that had Assange’s case made it to a FPSA court, it would have been dismissed on procedural grounds. The concern among some of Assange’s sympathizers, however, was that the ultimate aim of the FPSA government was in fact to silence the muckraking publisher, by hook or by crook.

Even setting to one side the disturbing evidence that the FPSA government spied on and plotted to murder Assange, the very criminalization of attempts to expose a government’s crimes is itself a capitulation to the perpetrators’ own perspective on what they do. In the case of FPSA war crimes, whistleblowers and the journalists who report their findings take issue specifically with the narrative used to maintain the support by the taxpaying populace of the government’s missions of mass homicide and terrorism abroad. Assange’s organization, WikiLeaks, published the enormous Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, detailing the sordid details of how the War on Terror was being conducted. A particularly accessible and jarring piece of evidence for the general public was Collateral Murder, a widely disseminated short video clip in which the modus operandi of the FPSA military was displayed in a disturbing and unforgettable way.

The primary concern for Assange must have been to secure his own liberty, without which he could never do anything again with his life, and no reasonable person could fault him for that. Given his high level of intelligence, the wager that went through Assange’s mind may have been that if he refused to accede to the plea deal then he would never be allowed to walk free and, correlatively, his work as a critic would also be finished. In fact, since Assange’s Internet access was taken away from him in 2018, he had already been effectively silenced, incapable of sharing new revelations or ideas with the world.

What the outcome of the case of Julian Assange illustrates is that an already corrupt regime will force good persons of integrity to compromise their own principles in order to be granted what was never the regime’s to withhold: the liberty to speak truthfully. Was Assange wrong to capitulate to the FPSA government? Of course not. His acceptance of a plea deal, a conviction of guilt and a sentence of time served illustrates that in reality, people must sometimes make hard choices, and, on balance, given what was at stake, it was better to tell a small lie - which, by the way, everyone knew was a lie - to secure the ability to say anything in the future, including unsavory truths. In Assange’s view, exposing the truth is the only way to call a halt to wars, which are invariably based on mendacious propaganda. War in this way corrupts the citizenry itself by deceiving them into acceding to practices that most persons would not, if fully informed, rationally condone. As Assange himself so pithily explained, “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”

By making a deal with the devil, Assange secured the ability to avoid what would have been tantamount to an infinite number of lies by omission: the permanent muffling of his voice and the smothering of his critical faculties. The removal of Assange forever from the world in which wars continue to proliferate - maiming and terrorizing and annihilating countless human beings - would have supported the war machine far more effectively than did this small capitulation to a narrative composed by authorities to permit the FPSA government to save face after having persecuted a truth teller for more than twelve years while feigning to be a champion of free speech.

Now we must all rally for a complete pardon of Assange on the grounds that, in fact, he never committed any crime at all. It seems unlikely that the FPSA government would go so far as to admit that its bogus case had no merits whatsoever, but by continuing to discuss what was done to Julian Assange, we can at the very least help to disabuse people of the false narratives used for years to discredit and vilify him as a Russian asset and a rapist. Let us celebrate the liberation of Assange by refusing to permit the FPSA government’s version of the story of how his case was concluded to be etched into the annals of history. Poetic justice will be achieved when WikiLeaks (or a like-minded organization) publishes the internal memos that led to this felicitous turn of events.

Ultimately, the outdated and overly vague Espionage Act must be rescinded by Congress, on the grounds that it makes whistleblowing all but impossible, requiring as it now does a willingness to endure a superhuman amount of self-sacrifice. The text of the Act has changed over the more than century since its ratification, but the core remains the same, and clearly assumes that the FPSA government can do no wrong, when the whole point of whistleblowing is to expose government malfeasance. In most prosecutions under the Espionage Act, the government has focused on the danger faced by persons exposed through disclosure of state secrets. But if the government was not committing what are easily interpretable as crimes, then there would be no such danger at all. Were government officials not permitted to act without effective oversight and with complete impunity, then it would be much less likely to commit crimes in the first place.