Stefania Maurizi - Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies

Secret Power

First published 2022 by Pluto Press

New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press Inc.

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Copyright Stefania Maurizi 2022

The right of Stefania Maurizi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4762 2 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4761 5 Paperback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4764 6 PDF

ISBN 978 0 7453 4763 9 EPUB

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

This is a book that should make you very angry. It is the story of a journalist imprisoned and treated with unbearable cruelty for exposing war crimes, of the determination by British and American politicians to destroy him, and of the quiet connivance of the media in this monstrous injustice.

Julian Assange is now well known. WikiLeaks, in which Assange played a leading role, exposed the dirty secrets of the Iraq war, as well as much else. Thanks to Assange and the team, we saw horrific war crimes such as those depicted in the Collateral Murder video or those committed by the US contractors as happened in Nisour Square in Baghdad, where fourteen civilians were shot dead. Two children were killed and seventeen people wounded. Trump, in his final days as President, pardoned the killers. But he ensured that Assange remain in prison.

The work of WikiLeaks has been extensive. Its fundamental principles should inform all democratic societies. The people must know all that is being done in their name. When politicians hide shameful secrets, journalists have a responsibility to expose them. And it is politicians who should pay the price, with punishment by law where there is illegality. None of this has happened in the case of Julian Assange and the crimes and corruption WikiLeaks has exposed have gone unpunished.

Stefania Maurizi has followed the case from the beginning. She has unearthed documents using Freedom of Information laws that expose the attacks on Julian Assange. She has followed in detail these extraordinary events over the last decade. At the heart of this story is the terrible price paid by one man, treated with extreme cruelty, because he laid bare the reality of unaccountable power hidden by an appearance of democracy.

As I write, the challenge is for the British judicial system. Britain boasts that its courts are independent, that it respects the rule of law and that its lawyers are incorruptible. Well, we shall see. Julian Assange is a journalist whose crime was to tell the truth. For that he has lost his freedom, and spent the last two years in solitary confinement in a high security prison with the predictable devastating consequences for his mental health.

If extradited to the USA, he will be incarcerated for the rest of his life. Will a British court collude with such a horrific injustice?

In Britain there are other matters to concern us: the great expense and resources used to keep Assange isolated in the Ecuadorian Embassy; the abject cowardice of the press and broadcasters in their failure to defend journalistic freedom; and the allegation that the Crown Prosecution Service, led at the time by Keir Starmer, trapped Assange in a legal and diplomatic nightmare.

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 the book but demand that Julian Assange should be a free man.

For how much longer can we accept that the mechanism of the secret state, responsible for the most egregious crimes, continues to make a mockery of our attempts to live in a democracy?

(Spring 2021)

For over a decade now, one man has been the target of the most powerful institutions on earth. Some have planned to kill him, or to kidnap him. They have stolen the best years of his life. These institutions include the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA). They embody the heart of what President Dwight Eisenhower, one of the principal architects of the victory over the Nazis in Europe, called the United States military-industrial complex, the same complex that Eisenhower himself, though formerly a great military leader, warned his country against. The power and influence exerted by these institutions are felt in every corner of the globe; they plan wars, coup dtats, assassinations. They sway governments and elections.

That man is Julian Assange. He is the founder of WikiLeaks, an organization that has radically transformed journalism, exploiting the potential of the internet and systematically breaching state secrecy when that secrecy is used not to protect the safety and security of citizens, but to conceal state crimes, to ensure impunity for the officials in the institutions that commit those crimes, and to keep the public from discovering the truth and holding them to account.

Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks journalists have published hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon, CIA and NSA files exposing civilian massacres, torture, political scandals and political pressure on foreign governments. These revelations have unleashed the fury of the U.S. authorities, but in reality there is not a single government in the world that has warm feelings for Assange and WikiLeaks. Even those less buffeted by their publications to date regard them with a wary eye, conscious that, sooner or later, the WikiLeaks method may also take root in their own countries and expose their own dirty secrets. And it is not just governments, armies and secret services that hate them and see them as enemies; they are equally feared by powerful economic-financial institutions, often in league with diplomats and intelligence agencies, as the most profitable financial operations thrive in secrecy.

As I write, Julian Assange risks 175 years in a maximum-security prison in the United States. His physical and mental health have been devastated. Other WikiLeaks journalists presumably live in apprehension of meeting the same fate.

But this case goes far beyond Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. It is the battle for a journalism that sheds light on the highest level of power, where secret services, armies and diplomats operate. A level that the ordinary citizen in our democraciesespecially European democraciesusually does not even perceive as relevant to everyday life, seldom the focus of newscasts and talk shows. The ordinary citizen looks at the power that is visible: the politics that determine ones chances of finding a job, healthcare, a pension. And yet that invisible power, shielded behind state secrecy, conditions our lives immensely. It decides, for example, if ones country will spend twenty years waging war in Afghanistan while lacking the resources for schools and hospitals, as in the case of Italy. Or if a German citizen can be suddenly kidnapped, tortured, raped and handed over to the CIA because he is mistaken for a dangerous terrorist. Or if a man can disappear from the heart of Milan at mid-day, kidnapped by the CIA and Italian secret services.