Celebrate for Assange, Mourn for Journalism

Journalist Julian Assange may soon be free in a move meant to further constrain journalistic freedom

Long jailed publisher and journalist Julian Assange has reportedly struck a plea bargain deal with federal United States prosecutors which, if and when signed off on by a judge, will set him free for time already served. To be released from prison Assange will have to agree to plead guilty to a count of espionage, which the US government charged the Australian with for revealing a host of their spying and war crimes on his WikiLeaks website.

Assange’s wife Stella has told reporters she still doesn’t feel like this is real, after the journalist has been on the run and effectively imprisoned for about a decade. When it does become real and Julian (52) is free to live with his wife and children I will rejoice with millions of others for him and them.

I am thrilled for Assange, personally. The man has been jailed in a maximum security prison and tortured there for years under conditions and stuck in a process the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, called a “slow-motion execution” .

Assange has a wife. He has children.

Now, perhaps, he will once again be able to breathe free air for the first time in over a decade since the United States and their allied governments began targeting Assange for reporting on American crimes of war and spying. Assange can now soon be with family and other loved ones, and hopefully heal both physically and psychologically.

This is wonderful news for him as an individual and I’m so happy he was offered a deal and that he took it so that he could have his torture ended and freedom regained.

Amidst the justified celebration we must still recognize the blow against press freedom this conviction represents. We should applaud Assange’s courage and congratulate him on his long-delayed release and at the same time mourn the perhaps permanent damage this plea deal and conviction will cause to journalism and freedom, writ-large.

To be clear, Assange was right and justified to take the plea deal offered to him, even if it means he admits to the absurdity that he is “guilty” of any crime against the law or humanity for doing the public service of revealing the United State’s crimes ranging from the slaughter of civilians, the imprisonment of children without trial at its Guantanamo Bay black site, and of its spying on American citizens. Assange, along with other brave journalists and sources, laid bare the extreme profanity and criminality of the US empire and has been persecuted for it.

Assange doesn’t owe us anything else. Him being imprisoned and tortured longer wouldn’t advance the cause which he’s done so much for already - freedom of knowledge, which is to say freedom itself.

With that said over and again, he must still gird ourselves for a future where the following is true - The United States government has won. They have succeeded in ending national security journalism as we know it, as it may have any remaining strength and utility to the public.

Assange’s conviction will do, as Chris Hedges predicted it would, irreparable harm on journalists’ ability to report on government.

This conviction will be a death knell for national security reporting. Assange’s conviction on the so-called espionage charge will establish that a non-American, publishing news outside of America, can somehow be convicted of espionage against a nation they do not belong to. This conviction will establish for as long as there are nations that it is a crime for journalists to reveal to the public what atrocities governments are committing, but not for the nations to commit said atrocities.

This conviction is a concession forced through torture by the US government against a journalist that revealing war crimes is itself a crime. This is a successful signal by the US government wrought from the flesh of Assange that journalists can and will be kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and then convicted of felonies when they publish crucial news in the public’s interest.

The United States has won. Assange may soon be free, but journalism has just been shackled with new and terrifying constraints.