Dyer: U.S. pursuit of Julian Assange will scare potential whistle blowers

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Why are there so few whistle-blowers precisely when we need them most? Just look what happens to them.

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Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is a free man at last after spending almost all of the past 14 years in jail or other forms of confinement.

He has just arrived home in Australia to be greeted by his family, including two young sons who have never seen him except in Belmarsh Prison in London. But it is the bad guys who won.

They have won because Assange’s ordeal will prevent a dozen or a hundred or a thousand potential whistle-blowers who have information the public needs to know from blowing their whistles. Indeed, that’s why Assange had to be put through all that misery. He did no harm, but the example he set was a huge threat to the secret state.

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The secret state is not the imaginary one that excites populists like Donald Trump. It’s the intelligence services that hide their actions, lie to and spy on the public, and sometimes murder people, like the CIA in the United States, the DGSE in France, the SVR in Russia and RAW in India.

They are enormous bureaucracies with a greatly inflated sense of their own importance. Their stock in trade is secrets, so by definition (although not necessarily in fact) those secrets are important. Hunting down and punishing people who reveal those secrets is a vital part of protecting the brand.

Julian Assange’s enormous dump of documents in 2010 concentrated on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the piece that got the most attention was a video and audio clip from an Apache gunship flying low over Baghdad in 2007.

The crew is debating whether there are armed men among the civilians on the street below, and one says impatiently “light ‘em all up.” So they spray the street with machine-gun fire, saying things like “It’s their fault for bringing their kids into battle” and “Look at those dead bastards.” They even shoot up an ambulance that comes to help the wounded.

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Assange didn’t hack any government computers, nor was anybody killed or injured because of his revelations although the U.S .government falsely claimed both things. He spent fourteen years in custody or in hiding simply because he deeply embarrassed American officialdom.

First, the U.S. government tried to get the British government to extradite him, but failed.

Then, Washington got the Swedish courts to demand Assange’s extradition from the United Kingdom on two deeply implausible rape charges, apparently believing Sweden would then send him to the U.S. At this point, he was arrested in Britain, but Sweden never carried through, and eventually dropped the charges.

And so on and so forth for fourteen years until finally, just before he is sent to the U.S. and is facing life in jail for no crime at all, President Joe Biden offers him a plea bargain in which he pleads guilt to one of the 18 false charges, and the United States accepts that his last five years in a British jail count as enough jail time served for that single non-crime. A happy ending, of sorts.

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Happier, at least, than Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who confirmed the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons in 1986 and was jailed for 18 years (11 years in solitary). He’s still not allowed to leave Israel or speak to foreigners.

Happier than Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who revealed huge amounts of data about the U.S. National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs in 2013. He is still stuck in Russia, where he was changing planes when the State Department cynically canceled his passport.

Why are there so few whistle-blowers precisely when we need them most?

Just look what happens to them.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England and author of a new book about climate change, Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.

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