Pearls and Irritations

The liberation of Australian journalist Julian Assange in late June ended an ordeal lasting 14 years. But it does not lessen the responsibility of his persecutors. Washington, London and Stockholm all acted with the complicity of an institution supposed to speak truth to power and to protect the innocent – the press, for once, were not very supportive of another journalist.

Since 25 June, courtesy of a “guilty plea” agreement with the US Justice Ministry, Julian Assange was freed. However, the global press has not let off a euphoric fireworks display that could have welcomed the return to normal life of any journalist having been locked up for 14 years for having exposed war crimes.

The editorial ambience was tinted with a strange reserve. “His actions had divided opinion,” noted the Guardian (26 June 2024), principal daily of the “left” in the UK, which had published several dozens of articles hostile to the WikiLeaks founder. Invariably, the portraits accompanying the happy outcome devoted a considerable space to detractors: “a reckless leaker who endangered lives” (New York Times, 27 June), “a publicity seeker” (BBC, 25 June), “suspected of serving the interests of Moscow” (Franceinfo, 25 June), in short, a “shady character” (Le Monde, 27 June). For the French evening daily, this bad reputation is readily explained: “Julian Assange has not ceased to feed controversy”. A controversy that the journalists had themselves largely fed before describing it as a fact …
“… there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch”.

From this call to the murder of the “traitor”, broadcast on Fox News in 2010 by the Democrat-registered commentator Robert Beckel, to editorials of dubious support, to the fake news of the Guardian with respect to a claimed collusion of Julian Assange with Donald Trump and Moscow in 2018, the incarcerated journalist has been able to appreciate all the nuances of the media malevolence. The dominant subject was no longer the message — the content of the WikiLeaks revelations and the raw reality of American power that they disclosed — but the personality and ethics of the messenger, indeed even his hygiene (Daily Mail, 13 April 2019).

One could readily forget that the marriages between WikiLeaks and the mainstream press were celebrated in grand style, because they were ephemeral and self-interested. At the time the organisation burst onto the global scene in 2010, publishing classified documents entrusted to it by the whistleblower Chelsea Manning, former US military intelligence analyst, the windfall fed broadcast and print media for months. WikiLeaks then formed strategic partnerships with some prestigious newspapers to amplify the revelations that were overwhelming for Washington: the criminal conduct of its army in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the hell of the Guantanamo prison or the unsavoury inner workings of American diplomacy.

Regarding this last issue, known as “Cablegate”, the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde profit from scoops drawn from 250,000 diplomatic cables. On 25 December 2010, the editorial of Le Monde acclaimed Julian Assange as “man of the year”. Each media organ already knew this source of explosive content was a threat to the monopoly of legitimate information claimed by the mainstream media, but there then existed a precarious peace based on a division of labour. WikiLeaks supplied authenticated raw material to the media which screened it, prioritised it, and then claims the laurels for itself. This media ignores nothing of the philosophy of Assange who, like other IT whizzkids of his generation, dreams of a new age which would abolish the intermediaries compromised with power.

Moreover, on Christmas Day 2010, Le Monde accompanied its praise with a label — “the most controversial personality of the planet”— which would stick to the WikiLeaks founder and which would be dragged out whenever judicial proceedings will compel the media, between long stretches of indifference, to speak of the affair: “enigmatic and controversial ‘cyber warrior’” (Lexpress.fr, 19 May 2017), “controversial hero of a transparency somewhat murky” (Lepoint.fr, 7 September 2020), “controversial hero of free speech” (Agence France-Press, 10 December 2021, via Là-bas si j’y suis, 13 December 2021), “controversial figure at the centre of conspiracy theories” (‘Complorama’, Franceinfo, 29 April 2022). The adjective controversial had the peculiar property of adhering only to the shoes of the Western world’s dissidents.

However, for the media, the stakes of the Assange case were crystal clear: in May 2019, the US charged him under the 1917 Espionage Act, thus threatening the entire profession with criminalisation of journalism. His extradition could have signalled the complete capitulation of the fourth estate. The former “clients” of WikiLeaks resigned themselves to oppose — without much enthusiasm — his being handed over to the US authorities.

The art of destroying a colleague

This “support” was systematically accompanied by qualifications, indeed of by denigration, as in this editorial of Le Monde, 26 February 2020: “Julian Assange behaved neither as defender of human rights nor as a citizen respectful of the law. After 2011, he has flouted his commitments in publishing the American documents unredacted. He has subsequently refused to comply with a summons from Swedish police following two accusations of sexual assault. … Prompt to take on the secrets of democratic countries, Julian Assange shows himself less attentive with respect to authoritarian countries. He has worked for Russia Today, propaganda network financed by the Kremlin. In 2016, he has published documents stolen by the Russian secret services from the American Democratic Party in order to discredit its candidate, Hillary Clinton.”

In other words, this journalist did not reveal the “right” secrets and short-circuited the professionals.

Such a fault also didn’t fly with Mediapart (14 April 2019), the main independent online journal in France. In a defence of the Australian journalist published by the [self-proclaimed dissenting] news site, its founder and then director Edwy Plenel judged it opportune to insert the following passage:

“There are many legitimate reasons to be indifferent to the fate of Julian Assange, arrested on Thursday 11 April by British police in the Ecuador Embassy where he has taken refuge for nearly seven years: the accusations of sexual violence coming from Sweden; his egocentric adventurism in the management of WikiLeaks which has alienated his colleagues; his ethical slide in the diffusion of raw documents, with no attempts at verification nor of contextualisation; his shady complaisance, to say the least, with the Russian power and its geopolitical game.”

In its modest contribution to the solidarity movement, [the fading press monument] Le Canard enchaîné (15 December 2021) knew how to find the correct words to rally new support:

“Certainly, Assange is sometimes confused, ambivalent, irresponsible (as when unfiltered documents put lives in danger), disquieting (at the time of the US Presidential election, he confesses his preference for Trump).”

By way of an international media campaign to demand the abandonment of the American legal proceedings, the most notable initiative took the form of a short “A call from newspapers for Julian Assange” titled “Publishing is not a crime”, signed in November 2022 by the five former international partners. Even in this gesture of solidarity, the newspapers’ directors reproached Assange insofar as “unredacted copies of the cables were released” (Le Monde, 29 November 2022).

However, this reputation for irresponsibility in the publication of documents revealed itself to be unfounded. Some specialists in the affair, not least the Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, had clearly established that the fault was the responsibility of two contributors to the Guardian. Luke Harding and David Leigh had, in effect, published in a book the password that Assange had entrusted to Leigh to access the files as part of their partnership.

This catastrophic negligence, however, signalled at the time by WikiLeaks, was never attributed to its authors. WikiLeaks attempted to prevent dissemination and informed the US State Department of the risk. Recognising that the site Cryptome had published the raw telegrams on 1 September 2011, WikiLeaks did the same the next day, thus warning as quickly as possible the people potentially in danger.

After the publication in July 2010 of the documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon claimed that the site had put human lives in danger (US troops, Afghan collaborators, informers) and that Julian Assange perhaps even had ‘blood on his hands’ (CNN, 29 July 2010). Alas, the US has not been able to furnish a single example, including during court hearings. Fourteen years later, this accusation, endlessly repeated, lives on. On 25 June 2024, star pundit Patrick Cohen celebrated the liberation of Assange on the TV show “C à vous” (France 5) by saying that some “operatives on the ground … had paid with their life” after the revelations of WikiLeaks.

The following day, the judge of the US Federal Court of Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands) set out the lack of professionalism of the French journalist at the hearing which ratified Assange’s guilty plea: “The government has indicated that there is no personal victim here. That tells me that the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury”. In the media, the most mobilised against the circulation of fake news, this information has not generated an avalanche of corrections.

More than any other episode, the rape allegations have strongly contributed to isolate Assange. If they were complacently evoked by the press — [the French neocon satirical weekly] Charlie Hebdo ranted against this “rapist and mentally impaired Gandalf” (23 November 2022) — the journalists rarely acknowledged that it never went beyond the preliminary investigation stage. On the other hand, the investigation led by Nils Melzer, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, supported itself through “10,000 pages of reliable procedural files, correspondence and other evidence from a multitude of sources”; the jurist established that the ‘Swedish affair’ was a scheme contrived to neutralise the founder of WikiLeaks.

Maurizi has done the same in her own work, drawing on the correspondence between British and Swedish prosecution services. With very rare exceptions (Jack Dion in Marianne, Anne Crignon in Le NouvelObs), the French press had generally ignored these two books. Among the three former French partners of WikiLeaks (Le Monde, Libération and Mediapart), no-one has mentioned their publication nor signalled the release of two documentaries devoted to the affair.

Finally, often hinted at, but never backed up, links with Russia thickened the cloud of rumours that passed for information about Assange. Claimed meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy with “some Russians”, as well as with Paul Manafort, director of Donald Trump’s first Presidential campaign, were a hoax. Launched by [Russophobe] Luke Harding in the Guardian, 27 November 2018, it was immediately taken up by Libération, which has never retracted it. Some Russian hackers furnishing to WikiLeaks some compromising emails concerning Hillary Clinton and the Democrat establishment? Inspite of the assertions full of assurances from the media, it remains to be established. Nevertheless, Julian Assange will be culpable of having “animated a broadcast for Russia Today” (Franc-Tireur, 3 July 2024), for sure? … Oh well, that neither.

The struggle against fake news and “conspiracy theories”, grand civilisational cause of the liberal press, has suffered an eclipse each time that it was a question of Assange. The collaboration of the media in the persecution of the founder of WskiLeaks further discredits a profession at the end of its tether. And it further isolates the journalists of integrity.

Julian Assange had to plead guilty for having done his job.

Laurent Dauré is a journalist and founder of the French Committee of Support for Julian Assange (Comité de soutien Assange).

This article appeared in Counterpunch, 20 September 2024. It was published in the original French in the August 2024 issue of Le Monde diplomatique under the title ‘Les medias contre Julian Assange’. It has been translated (with gratuitous interpellations added) by Evan Jones, with permission of the author and of the publisher.

Evan Jones (translator)

The original article, appeared in the French edition of the August issue of Le Monde Diplomatique.

References

1. Serge Halimi, ‘The Guardian’s Fake Scoop’, Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2019.
2. Stefania Maurizi, Secret Power: WikiLeaks and its Enemies, Pluto Press, 2022; French edition, L’Affaire WikiLeaks. Médias indépendants, censure et crimes d’État, Agone, 2024.
3. ‘Guardian journalist negligently disclosed Cablegate passwords’, WikiLeaks, 1September 2011.
4. Ed Pilkington, ‘Bradley Manning leak did not result in deaths by enemy force, court hears’, The Guardian, 31 July 2013.
5. Cited by Fabien Rives, ‘Julian Assange calomnié sur France 5’ [Julian Assange defamed on France 5], Off Investigation, 4 July 2024.
6. Nils Melzer, The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution, Verso, 2022; French edition, L’Affaire Assange. Histoire d’une persécution politique, Éditions Critiques, 2022. To read also, by the same author, ‘Julian Assange, unequal before the law’, Le Monde diplomatique, August 2022.
7. C/f the documentaries by Clara López Rubio and Juan Pancorbo, Hacking Justice (2021), and Ben Lawrence, Ithaka (2022).
8. Aaron Maté, ‘CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s own report undercuts its core Russia-Meddling Claims’, RealClearInvestigations, 5 July 2019.
9. The broadcast ‘’The World Tomorrow’ has been produced independently by the organisation Quick Roll Production (created by Assange) and the British company Dartmouth Films; it has been sold to a dozen media outlets globally, including Russia Today. C/f Stefania Maurizi, op.cit.
10. Kevin Gosztola, Guilty of Journalism. The Political Case against Julian Assange, Seven Stories Press, 2023.

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