by Dr Matin Baraki
Julian Assange’s great sin was that he told the truth, says Ken Loach in a foreword to a book that traces the history of WikiLeaks and at the same time documents a US foreign policy based on military strength and warfare. Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi spent around fifteen years researching the background. She worked with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for their respective newspapers from 2009 and is the only journalist in international journalism to have worked on the entire WikiLeaks documents. The book “Secret Power” is the story of a courageous journalist who was imprisoned for a long time and mercilessly persecuted for daring to publicise the crimes of a world power.
The author describes Julian Assange’s working methods and struggle in detail, which should actually be a model and lesson for investigative journalism. However, Assange had to spend five years and two months in detention in the Belmarsh high-security prison, also known as the “British Guantánamo”, precisely for this. Including his time in embassy asylum, he was only finally released “after 14 years of arbitrary detention”. The author compares this detention centre with the US prison Guantánamo Bay. By way of comparison, while the British Home Secretary Jack Straw of the Labour Party once refused to extradite the Chilean dictator and mass murderer Augusto Pinochet for alleged medical reasons, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher later gave him free passage. Pinochet left London in a wheelchair, from which he rose at the airport in Santiago de Chile. In contrast, Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the British police (Scotland Yard) on 11 April 2019 and booked under adverse conditions. He was threatened with extradition to the USA and up to 175 years behind bars.
Obama’s Vice President Joseph Biden called Assange a “high-tech terrorist”. In the USA, some politicians were even of the opinion, as reported by the “Huffington Post” (7 December 2010), that “the son of a bitch should be illegally [...] shot”. The former governor of Alaska, the ultra-conservative Republican Sarah Palin, had suggested that Assange should be “hunted down like an al-Qaeda leader”, and her party colleague Newt Gingrich had also urged that he should be “treated like bin Laden”. These calls were serious. The CIA seriously toyed with the plan to “kidnap or even kill” Assange. The whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden, whose revelations in the summer of 2013 provided an insight into the extent of the global surveillance and espionage practices of the secret services of the USA, Great Britain and Germany and who has received several awards from non-governmental organisations – such as the Alternative Nobel Prize – was also mercilessly persecuted. Former CIA chief James Woolsey wanted Snowden “hanged until he was dead”. Stefania Maurizi summarises that the plans to have these journalists killed were “not a hollow phrase”, but were “meant to be deadly serious”.
For Bradley Manning, a member of the US army and intelligence analyst, the brutal interrogation methods used by US soldiers on Iraqi prisoners were so intolerable that he decided to send WikiLeaks copies of top secret videos and documents from the website. The documents, which major media outlets around the world were keen to obtain at the time, revealed the rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guantánamo camp instructions and CIA videos of interrogations. What the media barely registered, however, was “Afghanistan First”: this was preceded by the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq and the establishment of comparable camps, for example at Bagram airport north of Kabul. The detention conditions there, including the interrogation and torture methods used, were a model for Guantánamo. The fact that the torture methods here and there clearly violated basic human rights and led to harsh international criticism did not affect the USA. “We found out and published the truth about tens of thousands of hidden war victims and other unseen horrors, about programmes of murder, rendition, torture and mass surveillance. We have revealed not only when and where these things happened, but often the policies, agreements and structures behind them,” said Julian Assange in a speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on 1 October 2024. In principle, the USA had behaved like a rogue state and should have been brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. For the German edition of the book, which has been translated into several languages, Maurizi wrote longer supplements that trace the path to Assange’s release – recognised as the success of an international solidarity campaign.
The extensive work can hardly be adequately reviewed, as no sentence in it seems superfluous. One would be inclined to reproduce the entire text. To learn about the full extent of the US crimes in the Afghan prison Bagram and in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib as well as in Guantánamo, it is recommended as a must-read, especially for all friends and critics of a state that defines itself as “democratic” and whose history is riddled with wars, invasions and regime changes. •
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