2024-04-27 05:11:39
There are books that are worth it because of the topic they address and the need to inform about it. There are books that are successful because of the above and, also, because of the quality of the work done by the author. And then there are the books that deal with a timely topic, they are written with precision and knowledge, and that topic has the characteristic that it is necessary and fair, for journalism and for the entire society, that we tell it with the degree of detail and commitment necessary.
This is one of those books. The secret power tours the history of WikiLeaks, his contribution to ensuring that citizens of the entire world could learn fundamental information about the war against terrorism, finances and geopolitics, and the absurdity and judicial perversion of the persecution of its founder, Julian Assange. It recounts the injustice promoted by power against the “crime” of telling the truth and presents us with all the people who, from one side, have carried out the crime of that persecution and, from the other, have accompanied and defended reason and justice. Assange fight.
The author is Italian Stefania Maurizi, who, more than the journalist who is the author of the book, is a witness and protagonist of all these events as a media partner, that is, a journalist who works for her newspaper with the WikiLeaks files and uses them for her investigations and publications, and who has followed the Assange’s struggle over ten years. When you read this book, you will understand how lucky we readers and editors are to be able to count on her testimony and work.
Maurizi will explain to us the great leap in journalism and press freedom that the invention of WikiLeaks represented, fusing technology, globalization and the values of transparency and denunciation. A transparency that even makes the original information they obtain available to all citizens, something that not even the large traditional media dares to do. I myself confirmed the principles and values of WikiLeaks when I interviewed Kristinn Hrafnsson, the organization’s second in command, in 2011 in a remote part of Brazil. Then he admitted to me that it was a mistake to broadcast the State Department cables exclusively to a major media cartel, “because they hid stories that they should have reported.”
WikiLeaks and the persecution that Julian Assange is suffering have served to expose many: “democratic” governments that have shown their complicity in horrendous crimes – including the plan to kidnap and murder Assange; to financial institutions that applied bank blocks without judicial mediation; to large media outlets that abandoned their decency and professionalism to side with those who repressed freedom of the press by lying to discredit Assange, and to officials of judicial apparatuses who have placed themselves closer to repressors and torturers in dictatorships than to members of justice in democracies. Maurizi reveals all of them with his detailed knowledge of the facts and his courage to tell it. In the same way that he also reviews the cases of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, among others.
Why He secret power, as Maurizi says, goes far beyond Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. It is about journalism, the necessary control of power, the truth as a principle and value, the injustice against those who help reveal the truth, and the impunity of those who govern the world by committing crimes. And so, by reading it, we come to the conclusion that there is not so much difference between a cruel dictatorship and our “democracies” when we observe the price a journalist pays for exposing the crimes of the highest level of power.
As our author says, «secret power acts in democracies with the same impunity as in dictatorships. In authoritarian countries he uses an iron fist, committing many of his crimes and abuses in broad daylight, in part to intimidate and subdue the population. In democracies, on the other hand, the iron fist of secret power is often hidden inside a thick velvet glove.. A dictatorship would have sent thugs and hitmen to get rid of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks journalists after the first publications. The American military and intelligence complex and its allies, by contrast, have used, and continue to use, less blatantly brutal methods. Under the direction of Mike Pompeo, the CIA planned to kill or kidnap Assange and others, but ultimately decided against it. […]. The velvet glove makes Assange’s treatment seem much less evil than what an authoritarian country would expect him to do, but it must be said that, in essence, it is just as abhorrent. For publishing documents on war crimes, torture, extrajudicial executions using drones and mistreatment of Guantánamo detainees, the founder of WikiLeaks has been accused of crimes that would carry a sentence of 175 years in prison. “State criminals have not spent a single day in jail.”
At the time of writing these lines, Julian Assange has been imprisoned for fourteen years and is awaiting the decision of the British courts and rulers on the request for extradition to the United States, where that accusation of 175 years in prison awaits him. Some of us remember the Spanish extradition request to the same British authorities for the dictator Augusto Pinochet, under whose cruel government three thousand opponents were murdered or “disappeared”, in addition to plundering Chile’s finances. The British Government then did not accept the extradition and Pinochet left London with impunity and insult. If Assange were now sent to a US prison for exposing crimes and torture by the US military, he would be shown the most shameful example of injustice and double standards in the Western world.
The same double standard that leads our democracies to accuse dictatorships when they are denounced by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, but end up ignoring it when that same institution accuses the governments of Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ecuador and United States for the illegal detention of Julian Assange.
For this reason, Maurizi is convinced that the WikiLeaks and Assange case “will decide the future of journalism in our democracies, and to a certain extent also in dictatorships, since all governments will feel even more capable of repressing freedom of information if the “Western free world” can imprison in perpetuity a journalist who has revealed the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians, a journalist who has exposed torture and brutal transgressions of human rights.
Throughout his work with WikiLeaks and preparation of The secret power, Stefania Maurizi has bravely and determinedly faced the judicial and intelligence institutions of several countries; They have assaulted her in Rome to steal important documentation from her case; The Spanish company in charge of the security of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange was taking refuge, seized his electronic devices and “gutted” his cell phone supposedly to hack it (the matter is in the National Court), but none of this has intimidated
The collection A Fondo, from the Akal publishing house, could not stay away from the cause of justice for Julian Assange, from the denunciation of the crimes of the governments involved in his persecution and from the immense work of Stefania Maurizi to bring all this to light. the light.
I want to share these words from Julian Assange when he was asked why he created WikiLeaks and could, with his talent, be a Silicon Valley millionaire: “We all live only once. That is why we are obliged to put the time we have to good use, and to do something meaningful and satisfying. This is what seems meaningful and satisfying to me. That’s my temperament. I enjoy creating large-scale systems, I enjoy helping vulnerable people. And I enjoy crushing scoundrels. So it’s a good job.”
And I end with those of the film director Ken Loach in his preface: «If we think we live in a democracy, we should read this book. If we care about truth and honest politics, we should read this book. And if we believe that the law should protect the innocent, we should not only read this book, but also demand that Julian Assange become a free man. To them I would add the following: “In addition to reading this book, we have the obligation to tell the world what is revealed in it and the injustice it denounces.”
Taken from Don’t close your eyes
#Pascual #Serrano #presents #Secret #Power