Australian Julian Assange, who revealed the secrets of Washington diplomacy, has been under pressure from the American authorities for more than ten years. On Friday, December 10, a London court allowed him to be extradited to the United States. There, the 50-year-old founder of the WikiLeaks platform wants to be tried for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret military documents about US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Julian Assange remains a controversial figure. He is considered by many to be a whistleblower of war crimes and corruption, and the father of modern investigative journalism. For others, he is a traitor, an enemy of the state, an accomplice of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and even the culprit in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.
Afghan War Diaries and Iraqi Papers
Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006, but the Internet platform made a breakthrough only four years later.
Wikileaks website with the publication of US diplomatic correspondence
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted a video “Collateral Murder” that showed civilians killed in a 2007 attack by two US Army helicopters in Baghdad. Two of the dead turned out to be Reuters journalists.
The Afghan War Diaries and the Iraqi Dossier, prepared in collaboration with the world’s media, also exposed an unattractive reality to the public that goes beyond the well-oiled PR machine of the State Department and the Pentagon. And since the fall of 2011, as a result of information leakage and its publication on Wikileaks, all US diplomatic cables have become available to the public.
Rape charges
Assange’s reputation suffered for the first time when he was at the height of his popularity. In 2012, Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, fearing arrest under a European warrant issued by Sweden. The WikiLeaks founder believed Sweden could extradite him to the United States.
London protest against Assange’s extradition, February 2020
The basis for the order was a rape case initiated by one of the WikiLeaks activists, a Swedish citizen who had sexual intercourse with Assange in 2010. She claimed that she almost fell asleep when he decided to have sex with her without a condom, and according to Swedish law, unprotected sex without mutual consent is considered rape.
In the fall of 2019, however, the Swedish justice authorities closed the case against Assange, considering the collected evidence insufficiently convincing for a formal charge.
Assange’s collaboration with Russia Today
The fact of Assange’s cooperation with the pro-Kremlin media was also controversial. First under house arrest at the request of the Swedish prosecutor’s office, and then at the Ecuadorian embassy, the founder of WikiLeaks continued his journalistic activities.
In 2012, he became the producer of the political talk show The World Tomorrow for the Russian TV channel RT (formerly Russia Today). The first guest on his show was the leader of the Lebanese radical Shiite movement Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, whom Assange interviewed via video link.
Julian Assange leaves one of the court sessions in London, January 2020
Observers of many Western media – for example, the German weekly Der Spiegel, the British newspaper The Guardian and the American The New York Times criticized Assange’s interviews. The main reproach addressed to him was that he treated the Lebanese leader too uncritically. And the British journalist and specialist on Russia, Luke Harding, called Assange a “useful idiot” of Russian propaganda.
In total, Russia Today aired 12 episodes of Assange’s program. A wide variety of people took part in them, including the current Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj ižek, and the American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky.
Has WikiLeaks Platform Lead Trump To Victory?
Julian Assange is also accused by some of facilitating the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. At the height of the country’s 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks posted nearly 20,000 emails related to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The documents were obtained as a result of hacking the website of the National Committee of the Democratic Party of the United States. It became clear from the letters that Clinton had conspired with many party representatives to bypass her internal party rival Bernie Sanders.
This not only cost her a race victory against the Kremlin favorite, Republican Trump, but also damaged the reputation of Julian Assange, who was again accused of having ties to Russia. The United States intelligence services believe that Russian hackers are behind the cyberattack.
WikiLeaks is called a terrorist organization in the US
Be that as it may, one fact remains indisputable: over the past ten years, WikiLeaks and, first of all, Assange personally have been under enormous pressure. The whistleblower was declared an enemy of the American state and called upon to kill; WikiLeaks Was Denied Hosting On Amazon; Paypal, Mastercard and Visa stopped sending donations to WikiLeaks; the WikiLeaks site was tried on several occasions; American politicians called WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization.”
After seven years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange was held in a British maximum security prison in connection with a US extradition request. There, the creator of the Internet platform faces up to 175 years in prison.
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