A Call To Free Julian Assange On The 10th Anniversary Of WikiLeaks’ Release Of The Guantnamo Files OpEd – Eurasia Review

Ten years ago today, I was working with WikiLeaks asa media partner working with theWashington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, theDaily Telegraph,Der Spiegel,Le Monde,El Pais,Aftonbladet,La RepubblicaandLEspresso on the release of The Guantnamo Files, classified military documents from Guantnamo that were the last of the major leaks of classified US government documents by Chelsea Manning, following the releases in 2010 of the Collateral Murder video, theAfghanandIraq war logs, and theCablegatereleases.

All the journalists and publishers involved are at liberty to continue their work and even Chelsea Manning, given a 35-year sentence after a trial in 2013, was freed after President Obamacommuted her sentencejust before leaving office and yet Julian Assange remains imprisoned in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, even though, in January, Judge Vanessa Baraitser, the British judge presiding over hearings regarding his proposed extradition to the US,prevented his extraditionon the basis that, given the state of his mental health, and the oppressive brutality of US supermax prisons, the US would be unable to prevent him committing suicide if he were to be extradited.

That ought to have been the end of the story, but instead of being freed to be reunited with his partner Stella Moris, and his two young sons, Judge Baraitserrefused to grant him bail, and the US refused to drop their extradition request, announcing that they would appeal, and continuing to do so despite Joe Biden being inaugurated as president. This is a black mark against Biden, whose administration should have concluded, as the Obama administration did (when he was Vice President), that it was impossible to prosecute Assange without fatally undermining press freedom. As Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundationstated in April 2019, Despite Barack Obamas extremely disappointing record on press freedom, his justice department ultimately ended up making the right call when they decided that it was too dangerous to prosecute WikiLeaks without putting news organizations such as theNew York Timesand theGuardianat risk.

All of the documents leaked by Chelsea Manning and released by Wikileaks in 2010 and 2011 were a revelation. The Collateral Murder video, with its footage of the crew of a US Apache helicopter killing eleven unarmed civilians in Iraq in July 2007, including two people working for Reuters, provided clear evidence of war crimes, as did the Afghan and Iraq war logs, as the journalist Patrick Cockburnexplained in a statementhe made during Assanges extradition hearings last September, and asnumerousother sourceshave confirmed. The diplomatic cables were also full ofastonishing revelationsabout the conduct of US foreign policy, while The Guantnamo Files, as I explained at the time of their release, provide the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the US government on 779 prisoners who, for the most part, are not and never have been the terrorists the government would like us to believe they are.

Publication of the files, which had originally been intended to be sometime in May 2011, had suddenly been brought forward because WikiLeaks had heard that theGuardianand theNew York Times, previous media partners of WikiLeaks, who had fallen out with Assange, and who had obtained the files by other means, were planning to publish them, and so, over the course of several hours on the evening of April 24, 2011, I wrote an introduction to the files that accompanied the launch of their publication.

With hindsight, that article,WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantnamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies, was one of the most significant articles Ive ever written, as it summed up why the files covering 759 of the 779 men held by the US military since the prison opened on January 11, 2002 were so important, most significantly because they provided the names of those who made false or dubious allegations against their fellow prisoners, revealing the extent to which unreliable witnesses were relied upon by the US to justify holding men at Guantnamo who were either innocent, and were seized by mistake, or were simply foot soldiers, with no command responsibility whatsoever.

The files also revealed threat assessments, which were fundamentally exaggerated. Because no one in the US military or the intelligence services wanted to admit to mistakes having been made, prisoners who posed no risk whatsoever were described as low risk, and, by extension, low risk prisoners were labeled medium risk, while medium risk prisoners and the handful of prisoners who could perhaps genuinely be described as high risk were all lumped together as high risk.

The files also provided risk assessments based on prisoners behavior since their arrival at Guantnamo, establishing that many men were held (and some still are) not because of anything they did before they were seized, but because of their resistance to their brutal and unjust treatment in Guantnamo. Also included were health assessments, establishing that even the US authorities acknowledged that, as theGuardiandescribed it, [a]lmost 100 Guantnamo prisoners were classified as having psychiatric illnesses including severe depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Unfortunately, within a week of the release of The Guantnamo Files, the Obama administration decided that it was imperative tokill Osama bin Ladenin a Wild West raid on the compound where he had been living in Pakistan, a move whose timing was, to put it mildly, suspicious, especially as, immediately afterwards, dark forces within the US started promotingthe completely untrue notionthat it was torture in the CIAs black site program and the existence of Guantnamo that had led to the US locating bin Laden.

Following the release of The Guantnamo Files, I spent the rest of 2011 largely engaged in a detailed analysis of the files, writing422 prisoner profiles in 34 articles, in which I dissected the information in those prisoners files, demonstrating why, in most cases, it was so fundamentally unreliable. It was a process similar to what I had done in 2006, when I had been the only person to conduct a detailed analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon after losing a Freedom of Information lawsuit, for my bookThe Guantnamo Files and much of my subsequent work and I remain very proud of my analysis of the files released by WikiLeaks, and am only disappointed that, through a combination of exhaustion and a lack of funding, I was unable to complete my analysis.

I hope, however, that what I completed helps not only to expose the colossal injustice of Guantnamo, but also more than justifies the leak of the documents, for which, shamefully, Julian Assange is still being persecuted.

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A Call To Free Julian Assange On The 10th Anniversary Of WikiLeaks' Release Of The Guantnamo Files OpEd - Eurasia Review