I remember a momentous day back in April of 2010, when The Vancouver Sun’s front page featured grainy stills from a leaked military video from Iraq, courtesy Wikleaks. The images, from Apache helicopter gun cameras, made front pages of newspapers across the world, and the ghastly videos they originated from were viewable on the recently-minted portal Youtube.
The “collateral murder” video involved a July 12, 2007 US airstrike on Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, which also killed two war correspondents from Reuters. Like many others in the news business at the time, I recognized the leak of a possible war crime as a media game changer.
Since the Vietnam debacle, the conduct of war has become increasingly occult - as in hidden from journalists and the general public.
Yet in offering a safe, secure means for whistleblowers to share information, the publishing organization Wikileaks had drawn back the curtain a bit, as they had done previously in exposing high-level criminality and corruption everywhere from Australia to Kazakhstan.
The Iraq war video, which was eventually traced back to Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, represented the moment when Wikileaks went from being a minor plumbing issue for repressive regimes to an exploding septic tank to the US-UK war machine. In other words, a seriously shitty public relations problem for the occulters. Officials began to focus on the organization’s editor-in-chief, the Australian-born activist, programmer and publisher Julian Assange.
In July 2010 WikiLeaks released 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009 to Der Spiegel, The Guardian and The New York Times. The documents revealed troubling information on "friendly fire" and civilian casualties.
In October of the same year Wikileaks published the Iraq War Logs, and followed a month later with the State Department Cables, both of which amounted to a treasure trove of material for global media. In partnering with major media outlets, Assange and his team curated an astounding number of newsworthy revelations, making for the greatest tranche of leaked material since Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers in the sixties.
It took a while for the powers that bleed to get their act together in decapitating the organization, partly through cooked-up charges against the leader. Assange applied for political asylum and took refuge in June 2012 at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. For seven years he kept at his whistleblowing efforts in a confined space (with his fate possibly sealed with Wikipedia’s Vault 7 release in 2017), until police frogmarched him off to high-security Belmarsh prison in southeast London.
In the interim between safe harbour and state bondage, publications that benefited greatly from the organization’s leaks - including The New York Times and the Guardian - turned on its leader with ad hominem attacks and weaponized comments, in cowardly fealty to state power.
Assange’s fate now lies in the balance, with his threatened extradition from Belmarsh into the bowels of the US gulag. Even the legacy media that took to demonizing him has recognized the threat his extradition presents to journalists worldwide, and have offered opposition to such an outcome.
Chris Hedges sums up the current farcical situation with Assange’s extradition hearing:
(Hedges’ Thursday update here.)
Given the situation with the UK’s startlingly Kafkaesque National Security Act, things don’t look good for any British journalists trying to tiptoe in Assange’s footsteps, to say nothing of the man himself.
There’s a direct line from the Assange case to the present censorship-industrial complex spreading its tentacles across the US and Europe. I wasn’t aware of the full scale of this transatlantic monster until I watched this extraordinary recent interview online with insider Mike Benz. (For those chronically allergic to the host, just grit your teeth and listen to the details on what his guest calls “weapons of mass deletion”.)
The war on truth is long in the making, with its Orwellian architects aiming to sweep online freedoms into a digital Potemkin Village of manufactured consent. Julian Assange shed leaked light into officially dark places; hence his demonization and imprisonment. By making an example of him to free thinkers, activists, and journalists worldwide, Globocop aims to ensure its worldwide games of command and control remain occulted.
Thanks for this insightful and cogent summary. Your offerings are already quite broadly appealing, but please write more posts of this type of commentary.
This story always makes my blood freeze, my heart race and my mind go blank. Whatever the outcome, the West has already lost its soul. The darkness is very dark at the moment. I just hope it's not forever...