The Whistleblower a Free, Informed World Needs Most — MercoPress

The whistleblower a free, informed world needs most

Julian Assange leaked a trove of documents in 2010, mostly about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

By Gwynne Dyer – After spending nearly 14 years in prison or some other form of incarceration, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is finally free. He has just returned to Australia to be greeted by his family, including his two young sons, who have never seen him except in Belmarsh Prison in London. But the bad guys have won.

They win because what happens to Assange will deter a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand would-be whistleblowers who have information the public needs to know. In fact, that’s why Assange had to go through all this pain. He didn’t cause any harm, but the example he set is a huge threat to the secret state.

You can call it the “deep state,” but it’s not the government that populists like Donald Trump imagine it to be. The deep state is the “BroadCast Unitedligence” agencies that hide their operations, deceive and spy on the public, and sometimes even murder people, such as the CIA in the United States, the DGS in France, the SVR in Russia, and the ISI in India.

They have huge bureaucracies and an extremely inflated sense of their own importance.

Their business is secrecy, so by definition (even though it’s not) these secrets are important. Going after and punishing those who reveal these secrets is an important part of protecting the brand.

To take a not-entirely-random example: the trove of documents leaked by Julian Assange in 2010 focused on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the most notable being video and audio footage of an Apache helicopter gunship flying low over Baghdad in 2007.

The crew was arguing about whether there were any armed civilians in the streets below, and one of them said impatiently, “Shoot them all.” So they sprayed the streets with machine guns, saying “It’s their fault for bringing kids to war” and “Look at those dead bastards.” They even shot at ambulances that came to help the wounded.

Assange did not hack into any government computers, and no one was killed or hurt as a result of his revelations. He was very discreet about this, even though the US government lied about both of these things. He was detained or in hiding for 14 years simply because he brought shame upon US officialdom.

First, the U.S. government tried unsuccessfully to have the British government extradite him so he could stand trial in an American court.

Washington then asked a Swedish court to extradite Assange from the UK on two highly unfounded rape charges, apparently assuming Sweden would send him to the US. By then he had been arrested in the UK – but Sweden did nothing and eventually dropped the charges.

When it looked as though Britain would send him to the United States, he jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the new sympathetic president of Ecuador sympathized with him, where he lived in a single room for seven years.

The Ecuadorian presidency subsequently changed hands, Assange was expelled from the embassy, ​​and spent five years in a British prison for jumping bail (on Swedish charges that had been dropped several years earlier).

Finally, just before he was sent to the United States to face life in prison for an innocent charge, President Biden offered him a plea deal where he would only have to plead guilty to one of the 18 false charges, and the United States agreed that the last five years he served in a British prison would be enough to make up for the sentence for the one innocent charge. It was a happy ending.

At least he is happier than Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli who was sentenced to 18 years in prison (11 of them in solitary confinement) for proving in 1986 that Israel had nuclear weapons. He is still not allowed to leave Israel or talk to foreigners.

Happier than Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who in 2013 revealed troves of data about the US National Security Agency’s global surveillance programmes. Snowden is still stuck in Russia after the US State Department rudely revoked his passport while he was in transit.

Why are there so few whistleblowers when we need them most?

Look what happened to them.