In his two-decade odyssey from Australian hacker to new-age media celebrity, persecuted figure, perennial prisoner and, finally, free man, Julian Assange has always been easier to caricature than to characterize.
The lack of an agreed label for Assange: is he a heroic crusader for the truth or a reckless leaker who put lives at risk? – Makes any assessment of his legacy ambiguous at best.
Whatever history’s judgment of Assange, his appearance Wednesday in a court on a remote Pacific island, where he pleaded guilty to a single charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act, was a fitting coda to a story that has always seemed stranger than fiction.
Since founding WikiLeaks in 2006, Assange, 52, was a polarizing figure who used the Internet to request and publish government secrets. His revelations, from confidential diplomatic cables to civilian deaths in the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, made him brave for those who believed in his gospel of radical transparency. For others who feared that the information he revealed could cause people to die, it was destructive, although there was never any evidence that this was the case.
After his sensational leaks drew the ire of the White House, Assange spent 12 years in London fighting extradition, first to Sweden and then to the United States. Holed up in a South American embassy and then languishing in a British prison, he resurfaced in the headlines every time a court ruled on his latest appeal. He became less a vanguard insurgent than a ghostly throwback to another era.
“For many years, Julian Assange has sacrificed for freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Barry Pollack, a lawyer who represented Assange in his plea negotiations with US authorities, said Wednesday in Canberra, Australia. . He “has sacrificed his own freedom.”
At its best, WikiLeaks shed light on dark corners, often working with traditional media organizations to expose abuses such as extrajudicial killings in Kenya. Documents released by WikiLeaks about the excesses of Tunisia’s ruling family foreshadowed the turmoil that swept the region.
Alan Rusbridger, a former editor-in-chief of The Guardian who worked extensively with Assange, said WikiLeaks deserved credit for accelerating the political changes of the Arab Spring.
While it is indisputable that Assange changed history, it is not clear that he did so in the way he and his apostles hoped when they first rose to global prominence in 2010 by publishing a video on WikiLeaks of a US helicopter strike in Baghdad that had resulted in the death of a Reuters photographer.
“Think about Julian Assange’s motivation regarding Iraq and Afghanistan,” said PJ Crowley, who was the State Department spokesman when WikiLeaks published 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables in 2010, a project the site initially collaborated on. The New York Times and others.
“We left Iraq, we came back and we’re still there,” Crowley said. “We stayed in Afghanistan for a decade after WikiLeaks. “His legacy is collaborating with Russian intelligence, whether consciously or unconsciously, to help Russia elect Donald Trump.”
Crowley’s experience with Assange is deeply personal: He was forced to resign from his position after criticizing the Pentagon’s treatment of Chelsea Manning, the US military intelligence analyst who downloaded thousands of documents, including those cables, from a classified government network and I uploaded them to WikiLeaks.
Opinions about Assange soured after WikiLeaks, in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, published Democratic emails that had been hacked by a Russian intelligence agency. Hillary Clinton’s allies cited it as one of the many factors that contributed to her loss to Trump.
As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders for embarrassing details in cables sent by American diplomats to the State Department. In one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf nation refused to allow note-takers to meet with her, fearing their comments would be leaked.
“Some of this damage to American foreign policy was irreparable,” said Vali R. Nasr, a senior State Department official at the time, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. “You can apologize for it, but you can’t undo it.”
But Nasr said the WikiLeaks furor also revealed something the United States was later able to use to its advantage: the public relations value of intelligence. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American and British intelligence agencies selectively declassified material about Russia’s activities to warn President Vladimir V. Putin and mobilize Western support.
US officials justified prosecuting Assange on espionage charges by saying it would deter other potential whistleblowers from leaking classified material. But it also reflected a collective sense of shock that the nation’s most closely guarded secrets could be so easily compromised.
“Part of this persecution of Assange,” Nasr said, “had to do with compensating for his weakness by killing the messenger.”
The messenger proved elusive. Assange’s prolonged exile in Britain, during which he spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy and five years in London’s Belmarsh prison, turned him from a swashbuckling media entrepreneur into a tormented resistance figure, although stubborn.
His supporters camped outside the embassy, where he had been granted asylum, holding banners and chanting: “Free Assange!” His detractors saw him as an erratic publicity seeker. Claiming to be a victim of political persecution, he violated his bail conditions after losing his appeal of a Swedish arrest warrant on charges of sexual assault, charges he described as a “smear campaign” hatched by the United States. Joined.
From his cramped home in a converted embassy office, Assange gave defiant interviews to the press. Activists and celebrities came and went: actress Pamela Anderson became a regular.
Assange began a secret relationship with Stella Moris, a lawyer who represented him and later became his wife. They had two children while he was hiding in the embassy.
For British authorities, caught in the middle, it was a costly and time-consuming distraction. They had to station the police in front of the embassy, while the courts processed the extradition requests.
Sweden later dropped its case against Assange, but the United States, during the presidency of Donald J. Trump, accused him of espionage. After a change of government in Ecuador, he became an unwanted guest and was evicted from the embassy in April 2019. As Assange, a disheveled, bearded man, was dragged away by police, he shouted: “The United Kingdom resists, resist this attempt by the Trump administration. “
By that time, the Assange saga had become little more than a sideshow. “Journalists did not pay enough attention to Assange’s plight,” Rusbridger said. “People think she’s either the messiah or the devil, and there’s no middle ground.”
Sentenced to 50 weeks for breaching bail, Assange would spend five years in Belmarsh, a high-security prison that once housed convicted terrorist Abu Hamza al-Masri and is known as “Hellmarsh” because of its harsh conditions.
As Assange challenged his expulsion from Britain, his legal case sometimes seemed endless, lumbering from court to court as his lawyers lodged appeals against unfavorable rulings.
“Our procedural rules don’t really lend themselves to a quick resolution,” said Nick Vamos, a partner at British law firm Peters & Peters and former head of extradition for Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service. “If you want to take advantage of all the points, as was your right, then you can buy a lot of time.”
Assange had his share of victories. Last month, she won a bid to have a full appeal of the extradition order heard after a judge decided that US assurances did not go far enough to address concerns about protecting her rights.
While a plea deal with the United States may have started to take shape earlier, Vamos believes it was this decision “that really brought people to the table to discuss a concrete agreement.”
When the legal maneuvers came to a head, some people could see Assange in jail. Among them was Rebecca Vincent, campaigns director for Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom group that has campaigned for Assange’s release since 2019. She visited him six times between August 2023 and last month, and said that She was often worried about her health. .
“It is not an easy situation. And of course we were also concerned about his mental health,” Ms Vincent said. “But he was still Julian; he was still fighting.”
Based on his conversations with Assange and his family, Vincent said he hoped his priority now would be to spend time with them. His two children only know his father through prison visits. She sees his release as a victory, but she said she should have ended it by dropping all charges.
Press freedom advocates agree that even with Assange’s release, the plea deal set a troubling precedent.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that while the agreement avoided the “worst-case scenario for press freedom,” it also means that Assange “will have served five years in prison for activities that journalists practice every day.”
In Canberra, where an emotional Assange kissed his wife upon arriving home, lawyer Pollack said: “We hope this is the end, not only of the case against Julian Assange, but the end of the case against journalism.”