by Dalal Abu Diab (Y13)
Julian Assange didn’t just publish secrets. He rearranged the geopolitical nervous system. He dismantled the architecture of polite foreign relations, replacing it with something closer to an autopsy. In 2010, as WikiLeaks unloaded hundreds of thousands of cables, war logs, and cockpit videos, the West suddenly remembered it had blood under its fingernails—and no real excuse for how it got there. For once, the violence wasn’t abstracted into policy-speak or redacted into irrelevance. It was leaked. Unfiltered. On your screen. And the people who had orchestrated that violence responded the only way they knew how: by declaring war on the conduit.
Assange was never forgiven. Not because he got it wrong—but because he got it exactly right. When he released Collateral Murder—the 39-minute footage of a U.S. Apache gunship mowing down civilians in Baghdad—he forced America to watch its foreign policy in real time. The pilots laughed. A child was hit. The phrase “engage all targets” did not sound like national defence. It sounded like sport. That video was not new; it had existed in military archives for years. What changed was that a man with a server and a grudge against secrecy decided it belonged to the world.
Then came the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs, Cablegate. And finally, Vault 7—proof that the CIA had developed cyberweapons capable of turning your phone, your television, your microwave into a listening device. Not science fiction. Not speculation. A leak. The largest known publication of classified CIA materials in history. And with each document, Assange crossed another invisible red line: not against truth, but against the monopoly on it.
By 2019, the Americans wanted him bad. The indictment under the Espionage Act arrived with all the subtlety of a drone strike. They weren’t charging him with treason—he wasn’t American. They weren’t accusing him of lying—he hadn’t. They were indicting him for the only thing left: embarrassing them. The act, born in 1917 to silence dissent during World War I, now became a legal time machine, used to criminalise the 21st century’s most infamous publisher. And in a twist that would almost be funny if it weren’t so grim, the journalists who once queued up to print WikiLeaks’ content now distanced themselves from the man who made it possible.
Assange was never exonerated, only expelled. He spent seven years in a cupboard in the Ecuadorian embassy, then another five in Belmarsh—a prison built for terrorists, not Australians with flash drives. The UN called it arbitrary detention. The U.K. ignored it. Sweden dropped its investigation, but the U.S. didn’t. For over a decade, he was punished without trial, smeared without evidence, and prosecuted under laws that don’t distinguish between journalism and espionage, only between loyalty and threat.
Now, in 2025, he’s back in Australia. Not free—just freed. Exchanged, essentially, for diplomatic quiet. The terms of his release remain opaque. The trial was avoided, the charges suspended. A plea deal was struck in an American court. But the damage is done. He is thinner. Less defiant. His hair greyer, but his posture still combative. And yet even now, few of the institutions that dined off his leaks have offered restitution.
But the facts remain, stubbornly unredacted:
- The Afghan War Diaries revealed 75,000 incidents of previously undisclosed civilian casualties, friendly-fire deaths, and covert operations.
- The Iraq War Logs disclosed more than 66,000 civilian deaths.
- Cablegate exposed the petty, transactional world of diplomacy in all its cowardly glory: Gulf monarchs urging the U.S. to bomb Iran, Hillary Clinton instructing staff to spy on UN diplomats, arms deals dressed up as “security cooperation.”
Nothing he published was false. And no U.S. official has ever been prosecuted for the crimes these documents uncovered. But Assange, the messenger, was pursued as if he had committed them himself. In a legal regime where truth is no defence and public interest is not a right but a risk, he became the prototype for what happens when you make transparency non-consensual.
This wasn’t journalism, they said. But if it wasn’t, then why did the world read it? Why did it change policy? Why did it make governments panic? If this was sabotage, it was the most informative sabotage in modern history.
There was a time when they printed what he gave them. The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País — all ran front pages based on the cables, the logs, the troves of classified material handed to them by Julian Assange. For a brief moment in 2010, he was the man holding up the world’s rearview mirror, and the world was grateful. He didn’t editorialise. He just published. The rawness was the point.
But as the heat turned up, the doors closed. The very outlets that had amplified WikiLeaks began publicly disavowing him. The Guardian would later run editorials distinguishing their “responsible” journalism from Assange’s “recklessness.” The New York Times accepted the leaks but recoiled from the leaker. Professional distance was adopted like a cloak. Journalistic institutions pretended the most important leak in modern history had appeared from nowhere. Their hands were clean. Their servers innocent.
They had all reported on the Collateral Murder video — the one showing Reuters journalists and civilians shot down by U.S. forces in Baghdad. It was WikiLeaks that secured and released it. And yet, somehow, that detail was airbrushed out in later retellings. News organisations praised the courage of whistleblowers in theory, but when the government began sharpening knives, they ducked.
And here lies the central betrayal: the liberal press defended the principle of transparency — but not the person who embodied it. Assange was abrasive. He wasn’t deferential to power. He called out the journalists who begged him for access only to trash him in print. He didn’t play the club game. So when the knives came, they watched. Worse — they justified.
But what was Assange charged with? Journalism. Gathering information. Publishing it. The 17 counts under the Espionage Act accused him of obtaining and disclosing classified materials — exactly what every major newspaper has done. The difference was that he didn’t redact to protect state PR. He didn’t couch truth in diplomatic euphemism. He released the whole thing.
Let’s not be coy. The Espionage Act of 1917, under which he was indicted, is a legislative relic that criminalises the possession of state secrets — even if those secrets expose wrongdoing. It contains no public interest defence. No distinction between whistleblowing and treason. In the Cold War, it was used against communists. After 9/11, it was turned on the press. Under Obama, more leakers were prosecuted than under all previous presidents combined. Trump, predictably, took it further. But Biden didn’t stop it either.
This is where the law becomes theatre. Assange was pursued by one administration, charged by another, and ignored by a third. Each claimed commitment to press freedom, and each contributed to his collapse. At the same time, U.S. officials continued to leak classified information strategically — to spin stories, pre-empt exposés, or shape foreign policy. No indictments followed. The law was never about secrets. It was about control.
Even more perverse was the response from the United Kingdom. Assange spent 1,901 days in Belmarsh prison awaiting extradition to a country whose intelligence agencies had plotted to kidnap or poison him (as later confirmed by a 2021 Yahoo News investigation). No apology was issued. No questions asked. Britain prides itself on rule of law, but gave up due process the moment Washington snapped its fingers.
And the UN? Their Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled in 2016 and again in 2021 that Assange’s confinement was illegal. That it constituted psychological torture. That it violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These findings were, predictably, ignored by all permanent Security Council members. International law, it seems, ends where the Pentagon’s interests begin.
So when Assange finally returned to Australia in 2025, it wasn’t a victory. It was a political calculation. A plea deal was struck — 62 months served, no further punishment, no public trial. The United States didn’t want discovery. They didn’t want him in the witness box. They wanted the story buried. Australia, desperate to quiet the diplomatic fallout, took him in. Not as a hero, but as a headache.
He lives now in a kind of bureaucratic limbo. Technically free, effectively isolated. No pardon. No restitution. No state apology. He gave journalism its defining documents of the 21st century and in return was given 14 years of persecution and an exile that still isn’t over.
The press that profited from his leaks won’t touch his story anymore. It’s too messy, too indicting, too close to home. Editors would rather cover press freedom summits than the man who made press freedom mean something. They parade their credentials, while the man who exposed their complicity lives under protection orders.
By now the line between a leaker and a traitor is paper-thin and government-issued. Assange didn’t erase it—he revealed it. The real offence was never that he lied, or endangered lives, or evaded justice. It was that he told the truth at the wrong altitude. Not in a memoir. Not in testimony. But in raw data, dumped unredacted, before the state had time to control the narrative.
And that’s the central sin in liberal democracies: not violence, but unpermitted clarity. The West will bomb weddings, arm dictators, and fund torture sites—but only if the PowerPoint looks polished. Assange bypassed the narrative bureaucracy and left governments standing naked before their own archives. The crime wasn’t the content. It was the disobedience.
This is why he had to be humiliated. Not just legally. Symbolically. A man who slept in an embassy cupboard, surveilled in his bathroom, denied sunlight for years. A man journalists now describe as “difficult,” as if character was the issue. His punishment was a warning: transparency is only admirable when it doesn’t work. When it becomes effective, it becomes illegal.
Liberal democracies, especially those that shout the loudest about rule of law, have mastered the art of reputational laundering. America tortures with euphemisms. The UK defends extraditions as judicial procedure. Australia claps for whistleblowers while abandoning its most consequential one. And international bodies? They speak in passive voice. Violations “occur.” Rights “may have been infringed.” Nobody acts. Everybody observes.
Assange wasn’t just punished for revealing war crimes. He was punished for reformatting the hierarchy of information. For proving that cables and gunship feeds could outstrip speeches and policy papers. That the state’s memory is not sacred. That files can bleed.
He showed that governments don’t fear instability. They manufacture it. What they fear is informed public memory. Citizens who don’t forget. Citizens who download PDFs. That’s why his case had to be made exceptional. Because if what he did became common, government secrecy would collapse under its own weight.
And where was the press? Polishing retrospectives. Hosting panels. Publishing watered-down timelines titled “What You Need to Know.” Now that he’s out, they write as if they were never part of it. As if they didn’t beg him for access. As if they weren’t printing classified documents with one hand while distancing themselves with the other.
The only thing more dangerous than a man with secrets is a man who shares them. And in that sense, Assange was the most dangerous man of the century—not because he broke the law, but because he broke the illusion that law and justice were ever the same thing.