(London, U.K.) Julian Assange, a son and a brother, as well as a husband and a father, turned 52 on Monday. It was the fifth year running that the WikiLeaks founder celebrated his birthday in a maximum-security prison. His only crime is journalism.
Assange only aspired to bring transparency to our government institutions — er, you know, the folks that are supposed to work for us. In doing so however, he ran into a government that — despite its so-called commitments to democracy and free speech — had totally normalised a secret tier of officials whose work must remain hidden from the populace.
While the architecture of this secret government long predates Assange, it no doubt turned for the worse after the September 11 attacks of 2001 — a world that saw an America prepared to be completely unencumbered by international law, as long as it was a matter of “national security.”
In 2001, the US launched its Global War on Terror, starting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while rolling out the notorious PATRIOT Act at home, passed a mere 45 days after the collapse of the Twin Towers.
In Orwellian double-speak, the PATRIOT Act had little to do with patriotism and actually stood for “Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” — giving sweeping authority to intelligence agencies and the FBI to spy on American citizens. And as is documented in Dana Priest and William Arkin’s Top Secret America, this, combined with the Global War on Terror, resulted in a gargantuan growth of the intelligence state.
They write: “As a result of his predecessor’s response to 9/11, the government Barack Obama was about to inherit had really become two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open; the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre — and its entirety, as Pentagon intelligence chief James Clapper admitted, visible only to God.”
Through the creation of WikiLeaks, no individual has done more to inform the world of how that sprawling universe operates than Assange — including its use of extraordinary rendition, torture and extrajudicial killing — yet no individual has been punished more severely.
The U.S. saw that Assange’s disclosure of these facts alone was a threat to its national security, and as a result, the last time he was a free man was December 2010. Since then, he has either been subject to house arrest, arbitrary detention and, most recently, imprisonment — held at the maximum security H.M.P. Belmarsh in London since April 11, 2019. If found guilty on U.S. charges he’s wanted on, he’ll spend at least decades, if not the remainder of his life in prison.
On Monday, as Assange turned 52, activists supporting the publisher launched a new campaign, one that renewed calls for the U.S. Department of Justice to drop its prosecution. Alongside that message, activists unfurled banners in dozens of cities and towns across the world, each bearing the statement: “Free Assange. Journalism is not a crime.”
In the meantime, the British High Court is yet to announce a date for an oral hearing into whether Assange can appeal. Nonetheless, it’s expected shortly and the case continues.