Detained in London’s Belmarsh prison under the threat of extradition to the US for 1,502 days now, Julian Assange’s national security case has transcended the trials of a garden-variety nightmare for politically inconvenient whistleblowers.
‘Urgent’ seems like an overused refrain after more than a decade of being pursued by the state, but agitating for political action to drop the trumped-up charges against Assange has proven more difficult than winning over the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens.
Speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra, Stella Moris, the wife of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, described his current situation as dire.
“We are now in the endgame. Julian needs his freedom urgently and Australia plays a crucial role in securing his release.
“The reality is that to regain his freedom, Julian needs the support of his home country. This is a political case, and it needs a political solution,” Moris said.
In 2019 Assange was charged under the Espionage Act for his role in what the US Department of Justice has described as “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.
The charges alleged Assange’s hand, 10 years earlier, in helping former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified information intended to “injure” US interests or advantage of foreign nations.
The charges went further, accusing WikiLeaks and Assange of actively soliciting US classified information, and conspiracy to commit “computer intrusion” for agreeing to crack a password hash stored on Department of Defense computers.
Stella, who first met Assange as a member of his legal team, stepped into the spotlight a few years ago and effectively outed herself as the mother of his two children to the public to take on a more leading role in advocating for his freedom. She is currently visiting Australia from the UK for the next week to rouse more support for his release.
Assange recently suffered a mini-stroke in October 2021, later marrying Stella from his high-security prison last March.
“Today Julian’s feet only ever feel the hard, dull, even cement on the prison floor. When he goes to the yard for exercise, there is no grass, no sand. Just the bitumen pavement surrounded by cameras and layers of razor wire overhead,” Moris said, contrasting Assange’s confinement over the past few years with a vivid image of life growing up in Australia’s wide open spaces.
“Julian’s cell is about three by two metres. He uses some of his books to block out the unpleasant draft coming from the window in the cold winter nights.
“He reads to keep his mind busy, to fight the crushing sense of isolation and time wasting away.
“[There is] no end in sight, and no way of knowing how many days to count to release. Julian will be in that cell indefinitely unless he is released,” she said.
Anybody who experienced Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns would have some sense of the strange, oppressive effects being denied your freedom can have on your psyche or the edges of your soul. Being locked up for years on end in one of the UK’s grim prisons, with letters of complaint about your arbitrary detention from the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights and one of the world’s superpowers breathing down your neck, is something else altogether.
“A 175-year sentence is a living death sentence. A prospect so desperate that the English court found that it would drive him to take his own life rather than live forever in hell,” Moris said.
“We must do everything we can to ensure that Julian never, ever, sets food in a US prison. Extradition in this case is a matter of life and death.”
The personal torment of Assange’s immediate and extended family is documented in the film Ithaka, offering a glimpse into the bizarre and distressing journey his wife and father in particular have endured over the years.
The two-part documentary makes for compelling but uncomfortable viewing, as the audience witnesses the vicarious suffering of Julian Assange through phone calls with loved ones, and the passage of time and life as court proceedings drag on.
It also underscores a disturbing aspect of the strategy WikiLeaks supporters have been forced to adopt to keep the wider public engaged in Assange’s cause: by sacrificing their private lives to a certain level of voyeurism to ensure momentum calling for his release carries on.
The public relations blitz is clearly a deliberate effort to counteract a state-sanctioned narrative out of the US, which has set out to demonise Assange’s eccentricities and blemish his image as an oppressed martyr for freedom of speech.
But according to Assange’s legal team, things have changed and diplomatic challenges are continuing to thaw in a post-Trump America.
Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, has represented Assange for more than 12 years. She joined Moris at the NPC on Monday.
“I certainly think that there has been a change in D.C. and the United States. We have mainstream media organisations calling for this to be dropped; unanimous support from free speech and human rights organisations from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the committee to protect journalists, and so on,” Robinson said.
“The momentum has completely changed here [in Australia], we’ve got our government raising the question, our prime minister raising the question, the leader of the opposition raising the question, our parliamentary group ‘Friends of Assange’ raising it across the board, and we have huge numbers now in parliament calling for this to be dropped.
“We feel a new momentum around resolving the case, and we certainly hope it will happen sooner rather than later, and we need the government to get that done,” she said.
What is often lost in the fascination with Assange’s case and the circus-like intrigue of how the US has deftly used legal process and politics to keep a publisher turned ‘enemy of the state’ (there are reports the CIA has considered kidnapping Assange during his time living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and killing him) to supersede the story of what WikiLeaks has exposed.
Spoiler: a lot of it casts the US in an unfavourable light. Classified, secret information or otherwise — the truth can be ugly.
When you quantify the publications US officials claim breached national security, the volume of WikiLeaks output has been impressive. In the case involving Manning and Assange the release of databases containing approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables are alleged.
“We did [sic] try to raise the importance of the nature of the publications and what they revealed in talking about the free speech protections that should and do apply in the context of the extradition case,” Robinson said of the tack Assange’s legal team adopted in his defence.
“It’s important to remind the Australian public what these publications were about – whether we talk about collateral murder, which was Americans killing civilians and members of the news media, Reuters journalists; whether we talk about the fact those publications showed there was significantly high numbers of civilian deaths in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan than the US government was ever publicly acknowledging,” she said.
As the world watches on in frustration and disdain at how Julian Assange is being treated — with a side dish of public debate on press freedom — few revisit some of the horrible details that Manning and WikiLeaks helped to expose. Some of the cables have also been used as evidence to bring some justice to bear in international cases.
“I cited the WikiLeaks cables in the International Court of Justice in the [2017] Chagos proceedings, which actually found that the Chagos Islands were unlawfully occupied by the United States and the United Kingdom,” Robinson said.
“These are important publications that get lost in the conversation about Julian, and it’s really important that we continue to raise them.”
Responding to a question from The Mandarin about whether WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents could have been handled in another way, which might have not exposed Assange to so much fallout, Moris reflected that the climate of 2023 was more challenging than it was when the files were released.
“I think we need to recognise that we are in a much worse situation in terms of press freedom, the public’s right to know, citizens’ rights, than we were in 2010 when WikiLeaks published about the Iraq and Afghan Wars — the publications that Julian is now being prosecuted for,” Moris said.
“Those publications, that moment in time, represented probably press freedom at its strongest, internet freedom at its strongest. And since then, we’ve seen a series of legislative moves across the Five Eyes but elsewhere as well, to stop that kind of thing in different ways.”
The lawyer reflected that her husband’s national security case was in fact an opportunity to halt the gradual erosion of rights to freedom of expression and transparency over the past two decades. The divergence from protecting important freedoms must be corrected, and state power, which had grown enormously, must be brought back into line, she said.
“The publication was right for the time and Julian wasn’t indicted until 2017, so we’re in a much worse position now than we used to be and that’s why it’s so important to reverse course — because it’s not just Julian. The implications of this case mean that we’re diverging from these protections that used to exist, far removed from where we used to be — when press freedom was at its strongest,” she said.
The address attracted the who’s who of freedom of speech and whistleblower advocacy in Australia: Bernard Collaery, and David McBride. A coalition of political champions also attended including Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, and the Greens’ David Shoebridge, Peter Whish-Wilson and Janet Rice.
Among the supporters at the NPC were Assange’s father and brother, John and Gabriel Shipton.
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