Deafening Silence: The Cowards Who Refuse to Say Julian Assange’s Name
As top media outlets call for Assange’s release, most of Washington continues to pretend that the Wikileaks founder doesn’t exist
On November 28, a handful of major publications released a letter urging the Biden administration to stop the extradition process for Julian Assange and drop the 18 charges pending against him.
The call to action from the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País came on the 12th anniversary of “Cable gate”, the 251,000 confidential US State Department cables released by these five outlets in coordination with Wikileaks.
In the joint open letter, the publishers condemned the US government’s pursuit of Assange, writing that “obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists.”
Independent journalists and activists have been screaming this for a long time.
The Guardian spent years smearing Assange and has fabricated numerous stories about him; Luke Harding’s laughable and patently false 2018 story about meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy in London between Assange and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is a prime example. The New York Times has largely ignored the case for years.
Why these newspapers chose to publish this letter now is unclear. Because freeing Assange is so important, just the fact that they’ve done it is much more important.
It is also crucial to note how many people in positions of power are still choosing to remain silent.
The letter is a development that, rather predictably, many media outlets and all members of Congress ignored. Given how rarely they’ve mentioned Assange’s name throughout the more than three agonizing years he’s spent at UK’s Belmarsh prison, it’s not a surprise. This is a deliberate, calculated silence that has contributed to and enabled Washington’s cruel and relentless persecution of the Wikileaks founder and it should not be overlooked.
This is nothing new. Rather than rehash what I’ve covered in the past, I am pasting my June 22 story detailing the establishment’s reaction to the news that the US Department of Justice’s extradition of Assange had been approved by the British government.
This previously published article follows below:
Once again, the most consequential press freedom case in a generation is being ignored in the US, with news of the British government’s approval of an extradition order for Julian Assange going mostly unnoticed on the American side of the pond.
“We’re not at the end of the road here,” said Stella Assange. The human rights lawyer and now his wife, Stella added that she plans to "spend every waking hour fighting for Julian," to prevent the Wikileaks founder from being sent to the US, where he faces as much as 175 years in prison for exposing war crimes the most powerful governments on earth hoped would remain hidden forever.
There was no collective response from the Squad, the unofficial caucus of pseudo-progressive social media celebrities elected to challenge the Democratic Party they now so faithfully serve; silence from self-styled “anti-war” lawmakers like Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy; crickets from Republican and Democratic leadership; and barely a whimper from the media.
It can easily be argued that Wikileaks has revealed more corruption and wrongdoing than all of its competitors in the mainstream, combined.
In 2010, the organization published a classified US military video entitled Collateral Murder, which depicted US forces indiscriminately killing more than a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Alongside three of its media partners – The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel – it published the Afghan War Logs, thousands of classified military documents covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009, which offered a picture of the war far different from the rosier one offered publicly by US officials. A few months later, Wikileaks published an additional 391,832 classified documents about the war in Iraq. The following year, The New York Times published the Guantanamo Bay files, a trove of 759 “detainee assessment” dossiers written between 2002 and 2009, one for all but 20 of the military base’s prisoners, which were first obtained by Wikileaks. The documents detailed guidelines for interrogating prisoners as well as justification for keeping certain inmates at the base, while releasing others.
Scores of other significant scoops would be published in the years that followed.
For years, Julian Assange did what the leader of any real news organization is supposed to do: he produced journalism that threatened power. Unsurprisingly, the natural reflex of the authoritarian governments he targeted was to silence him forever. It’s an impulse the West has continued to pursue because nobody with any power has bothered to try to stop them.
The narrative managers in Congress and the media are working overtime to keep the nation’s attention locked on the January 6th hearings and the “sanctity of our democracy,” while allowing the federal government to disappear a journalist for revealing its crimes.
An examination of this disgusting hypocrisy by the most powerful institutions in the country follows below.
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On Friday, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel signed the extradition order to send Assange to the US to stand trial on 17 charges under the wildly repressive 1917 Espionage Act, engineered by President Woodrow Wilson to criminalize opposition to his push to involve the US in World War I. His legal team will appeal the ruling in the High Court of Justice.
Multiple human rights organizations condemned the development, as they have every step of the way throughout Assange’s legal ordeal, which has now lasted more than a decade.
“Allowing Julian Assange to be extradited to the US would put him at great risk and sends a chilling message to journalists the world over,” read a press release from Amnesty International.
"The UK’s decision to extradite Julian Assange to the nation that plotted to assassinate him – the nation that wants to imprison him for 175 years for publishing truthful information in the public interest – is an abomination," Assange Defense Committee co-chairs Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, and Alice Walker said in a statement.
They’re absolutely correct.
On December 26, 2006, Wikileaks published its first piece of content – an order signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a leader of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union, to assassinate other government officials. Millions of pages of documents would follow. Not a single one was ever retracted or proven inauthentic. As the years rolled on, Wikileaks pulled back the curtain on dozens of scandals, revealing war crimes, corruption, and lies of governments all over the world. [The full scope of what Assange exposed is detailed here.]
For the “crime” of embarrassing a power structure that had long operated with impunity – and was under the impression that it always would – Assange would become a target.
In 2012, Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador following the Swedish government’s refusal to guarantee that they would not turn him over to the US if he traveled to Sweden to answer questions about sexual assault allegations. The dubious accusations were never proven and were eventually dropped.
Assange would end up spending approximately seven years in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. During his time in the cramped apartment, he was spied on by the US government with the help of Undercover Global (UG), the Spain-based defense and private security company that had been charged with protecting the embassy. According to reports by Spanish newspaper El Pais, UG owner David Morales handed over audio and video of the Wikileaks publisher meeting with his lawyers, among others, to the CIA. The company retrieved that data by installing cameras and hidden microphones all over the embassy, including in a women’s bathroom where Assange would sometimes takes meetings in an effort to avoid potential surveillance.
Last September, Yahoo News reported that during this time period, there were also discussions “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration to possibly kidnap Assange from the embassy, or even to assassinate him.
Michael Kopelman, a professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London who’d visited Assange at Belmarsh on approximately 20 occasions, has testified that Assange is likely to attempt suicide if he is extradited to the US. After more than three years trapped inside the maximum-security prison, it’s been reported that Assange had been observed banging his head against the wall and pacing in his cell until collapsing. The publisher even suffered a stroke during a hearing in October as a result of the intense stress and suffering he’s experienced.
This is all happening because of the Biden administration’s tireless push to get Assange behind the walls of a US prison. The Australian publisher isn’t an American citizen. Nevertheless, the American government is hauling him to a country he’s never lived in to answer to the “crime” of publishing things it wishes were never published. Because the Espionage Act prohibits defendants from arguing to a jury of their peers the justifications for their actions, Assange’s conviction in a Virginia courtroom would be all but guaranteed. Assange’s fate would be sealed before such a trial even began. It’s as egregious an act of authoritarian overreach as one could imagine, and it’s being executed to virtual silence in the US.
According to ProPublica‘s database of congressional press releases, not a single member of Congress has issued a statement about Assange since Friday’s ruling. GovTrack.us, which maintains a list on Twitter of 523 congressional accounts, reveals that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of only a few federal lawmakers to have commented on the matter.
Greene is absolutely the dumbest member of the United States Congress. There are certainly plenty of other contenders, but one would be hard-pressed to make a credible case for anyone else. Given her public embrace of absurd conspiracy theories – she’s voiced support for the idea that Democrats were running a global child trafficking ring out of a DC-based pizzeria, as well as the sickening accusation that the shootings in Parkland and Sandy Hook were government-orchestrated false flags – it would also be difficult to find someone more despicable. It’s also important to note that her social media accounts and official website have never mentioned Assange before. Nor does this partisan hack – who claimed on Friday to care so much about press freedom and the First Amendment – have anything to say about the fact that it was Donald Trump who indicted Assange in the first place.
Greene had little company in condemning the news.
“The prosecution of Assange is still indefensible!” Congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted. There are those who’d argue that this is better than nothing, but is performative virtue-signaling really better than not saying anything at all?
Tweets like this one are nothing more than a performance because there’s nothing behind them. Omar’s been in power for more than three years and you can count on one hand the number of times she’s mentioned Assange. After whistleblower Daniel Hale received a 45-month sentence last July for leaking documents about the US government’s barbaric drone program to The Intercept, Omar wrote a letter to the White House to “urge” the president to pardon him. Biden and the media ignored the letter and Omar never mentioned Hale again.
Congressman Ro Khanna offered an even weaker platitude and hasn’t mentioned Assange since.
To have nearly every lawmaker in the country ignore such an important issue is very troubling, but it is also very crucial to note that merely acknowledging something is just a first step. Writing something on Twitter a couple of times a year is utterly meaningless if it’s not paired with continuous, substantive action that puts pressure on party leadership to actually do something. With that being said, most members didn’t even do the bare minimum. Nearly everyone else ignored the news.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Chris Murphy, and so many others, remained silent. Senator Bernie Sanders, who never hesitates to volunteer his outrage over how President Vladimir Putin has treated Alexei Navalny, continued to ignore Assange, just as he has for years.
In recent years, getting lawmakers to acknowledge the persecution of Julian Assange has been like pulling teeth. In fact, when they do mention him, it is almost always to discuss the urgency of bringing him to “justice.”
If that’s not embarrassing enough, oftentimes the exceptions to this phenomenon come from the right side of the aisle, not the left.
Faux progressives never pass up a good Twitter battle with Ted Cruz, but can never be counted on to do the heavy lifting of challenging party leadership on an issue like the Assange case.
Their counterparts in the mainstream media are just as cowardly.
Apart from some obligatory 10-second news bulletins, Friday’s development was largely ignored by all of the major networks.
CNN anchor Ana Cabrera spent less than 30 seconds on the Wikileaks founder but packed quite a bit of propaganda into her very brief update.
For starters, Cabrera told her viewers simply that Assange faces up to 175 years in prison for “publishing thousands of classified files and diplomatic cables,” an intentionally generic statement which leaves out what those files contained and the criminality that they exposed. Moments later, she stated that the US government accuses Assange of putting lives at risk via his publication of documents given to Wikileaks by Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. This is indeed the accusation that the government has made but journalists are required to question government claims, not parrot them.
In 2013, Brigadier general Robert Carr, the senior counterintelligence officer tasked with leading the Pentagon’s review into the consequences of the Wikileaks disclosures, told the Chelsea Manning sentencing hearing that the investigation was unable to find a single instance of someone being killed as a result of the documents leaked by Manning. The investigation was conducted by the Information Review Task Force on behalf of the Defense Department. There is no evidence that Assange’s work put lives at risk and it’s important to note that the government making the claim is responsible for the deaths of several million civilians over the past century as well as offensive wars that have killed more than 7,000 US soldiers since 9/11.
Is CNN prepared to make the accusation that publications like the New York Times endangered lives as well? Should Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times when the paper collaborated with Wikileaks to publish the Afghan War Logs, also be indicted under the Espionage Act?
Cabrera ends the clip by noting that “his supporters say the case undermines freedom of the press,” a sneaky copout which allows her to attribute the claim to others without having to comment on the veracity of the statement herself.
Earlier that day, her colleague Poppy Harlow used the same trick after finishing up a conversation about Ukraine with Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the pro-war neocon think tank. Pivoting to a quick hit on the Assange news, Harlow said that Wikileaks called the extradition “a dark day for press freedom” but she too didn’t bother to comment on whether she agreed with the statement.
Shortly after midnight the following morning, Nic Robertson provided CNN viewers with another similar update. And… that’s it. This was the full extent of the coverage on Assange’s extradition by the major networks since the announcement of Patel’s decision.
There were no panel debates to dissect the development, no UK correspondents to call because none had been assigned to track the case. The networks spent a combined three minutes on the news and other than the aforementioned obligatory updates, all but ignored the development. That is, of course, if you don’t count MSNBC‘s Ayman Mohyeldin.
To his credit, Mohyeldin was the only mainstream anchor that actually covered the extradition in any meaningful way. He invited Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, onto his program, providing him with the opportunity to remind [or perhaps inform] liberal viewers that the CIA spent years spying on Assange while he was in the embassy in London, a fact that would undoubtedly result in any other case being immediately thrown out. As Shipton noted, Assange’s legal team plans to introduce this to the High Court.
Mohyeldin took the time to respond to the ludicrous statement from the UK Home Office, which stated: “Nor have they found that extradition would be incompatible with his human rights, including his right to a fair trial and to freedom of expression, and that whilst in the US he will be treated appropriately, including in relation to his health.”
“I’m shocked by that statement given how much politicians in America have gone after Julian Assange,” Mohyeldin noted.
This gave Shipton a chance to share with viewers that other similar cases show that the US cannot be taken at its word, and that defendants “like Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower who’s currently in a communications management unit” are treated very poorly by the US government.
These units, or CMUs as they’re called, isolate certain prisoners from the general population and severely restrict their contact with the outside world. Hale is currently imprisoned in a CMU in Marion, Illinois.
As of this writing, this was the only substantive discussion about the Assange case on US network news over the last few days. These channels could have invited someone like Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, or Noam Chomsky on to analyze the matter, and give viewers a complete picture of the case, but they didn’t. And the procedural bulletins they did provide reinforced the government-preferred narrative that the extradition is something that is supposed to be happening, that it is the correct default position.
Their “coverage” also fulfilled a box-checking exercise that mainstream outlets prefer to engage in with stories like this. Nobody can accuse the networks of not covering the Assange news because they did.
Poppy Harlow covered it between 9:27 and 9:28 EST that morning. If you happened to be watching at that precise moment, then you heard about it. If you weren’t, then you missed it. Viewers interested in hearing Harlow’s fleeting and empty announcement are free to try to hunt it down within CNN’s archive but they’re not inundated with Assange coverage like they are with developments about January 6th. That’s the difference between information narrative managers hope you’ll quickly move on from and viewpoints they hope you won’t be able to forget.
This is what CNN‘s homepage looked like at 9:48am on Friday, with Assange’s extradition featured above the fold.
Shortly after 12:30pm that day, it was moved down below last-minute Father’s Day gift ideas and advice on how to clean your washing machine.
By the following morning, the link had found a home at the very bottom of CNN’s website, below the promotional content.
Not too long after, it was gone.
Legacy print media wasn’t any better.
There were no op-eds about Assange’s case, no features to detail the specifics of his detention. Just like their pals on TV, writers at the largest newspapers in the country exhibited the same uniformity in their coverage of the extradition.
“Mr. Assange, who has been held at the U.K.’s high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019, has repeatedly defended his work and the wider WikiLeaks project as public-interest journalism that exposed wrongdoing by the U.S. and other governments,” The Wall Street Journal wrote, insinuating that the notion that Wikileaks exposed wrongdoing by the US is merely Assange’s opinion, as opposed to verified fact.
NPR repeated the talking point that Assange “placed into the public domain classified data and information that risked the lives of US informants around the world” without a shred of evidence to support that this was ever the case.
The station could’ve cited the January 2011 Reuters article about the US government’s internal review of the impact of the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, which challenged this allegation, but chose not to. According to Reuters, what government officials told the public was intentionally misleading in an effort to help strengthen legal efforts to shut down the Wikileaks website.
“We were told [the impact of WikiLeaks revelations] was embarrassing but not damaging,” a congressional official briefed on this review was quoted as saying. The article goes on to cite two US intelligence officials who said the opposite: that they were aware of specific cases where damage caused by Wikileaks had been assessed as being rather serious. They were, however, unable to offer any evidence for these claims and did not say what these cases relate to. It’s been nearly 12 years since this article was published. Nothing to substantiate these anonymous claims has come to light. This implies that the US government has had the ability to publicize a specific, airtight case against the most consequential whistleblower in the world and has simply opted not to.
The only examples of “serious damage” mentioned in this article “occurred in countries where WikiLeaks’ revelations have publicized closer ties with Washington than local officials publicly admit.”
More specifically, the piece mentioned “a cable released by WikiLeaks [which] quoted Yemen’s president [as] saying he would allow U.S. personnel to engage in counter-terrorism operations on Yemeni territory even as he said publicly that the operations were being handled by domestic security forces.” In other words, information that the American public absolutely has a right to know.
“The release of the information, officials have alleged, put lives in danger,” The Washington Post regurgitated, adding that “Assange says he was within his rights as a journalist and publisher in seeking out and disseminating information on controversial US activities.”
Julian Assange does in fact say this because this is what every major news organization – including The Washington Post – does every day, or pretends to do most of the time.
On its website, NBC stated that “supporters and lawyers for him argue that he was acting as a journalist and that he cannot get a fair trial in the US,” without offering any explanation for how Assange could ever possibly get one [given that he’s been charged under the Espionage Act, which prohibits him from justifying his actions in court].
Then there is, of course, The New York Times. The paper of record – long viewed by millions as the epitome of journalistic excellence – published just a single article on Assange on Friday. In it, the paper wrote that Assange’s case “is seen by rights groups as a potential challenge to press freedom.”
It’s astounding that a publication that collaborated with Wikileaks on numerous occasions could have the nerve to offer its readers such a weak assessment.
The closest mainstream print media came over the weekend to a decent take on Assange came in the form of a Washington Post op-ed by University of Cambridge’s Daniel Larsen. The piece, entitled “The Espionage Act has become dangerous because we forgot its intention,” analyzes how the original definition of “national security” has broadened since World War I [it was originally associated almost exclusively with military secrets] but doesn’t go any deeper. By reading the piece, one can infer that Larsen most likely disagrees with the legal rationale behind Assange’s arrest and pending charges. Yet, he never explicitly condemns it, and doesn’t go into any detail on Assange’s case.
If the White House wanted it to happen, Julian Assange would walk out of Belmarsh prison by the end of the day. President Biden could end Assange’s suffering at literally any moment, but he won’t because he doesn’t have to, since nobody is putting any pressure on him to do so.
If prosecuting Julian Assange was becoming a political liability for the people in power, the establishment would feel the urge to try to make that problem go away.
Because Congress and the media don’t have the courage and/or the willingness to apply this type of pressure, the White House has a green light to do as it pleases.