What I Got Wrong About Assange
By Dean Yates posted on January 11, 2022
I wrote a piece for Australian online publisher Crikey just before Julian Assange’s extradition hearings resumed in September 2020 in which I regurgitated a slur that has done enormous harm to his reputation.
Australian journalists should stop using the WikiLeaks treasure trove in their stories if they wouldn’t speak up for Assange, I’d written. Journalists like to think they’d go to jail to protect a source. Well, their source was suffering in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison, I said.
The problem was I also wrote that Assange dumped the Iraq and Afghan war logs on the internet without redacting names. I was wrong and lazy in repeating that slur which appeared whenever you Googled Assange’s name. That must make it true, right? Two of Assange’s well-known Australian supporters tried to correct me. To my shame, I brushed them off.
Their overtures nagging at the back of my mind, I recently did what I should have done at the time: read the submissions Assange’s legal team made at his extradition hearings and transcripts of witness testimony. I soon realized how mistaken I was.
Why should anyone listen to me?
In Baghdad
I was bureau chief for the Reuters news service in Baghdad when an Apache gunship with the call-sign Crazy Horse 1-8 killed 12 people including two of my staff, photographer Namir Noor Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh, on July 12, 2007. Namir and Saeed would have been forgotten statistics of that illegal war if not for Assange’s publication of footage he famously called Collateral Murder on April 2010. Thanks to Assange and Chelsea Manning, Namir and Saeed’s names will never be forgotten.
Wikileaks had hundreds of thousands of documents it had gotten from Manning – the war logs and State Department cables — for a considerable period in 2010 and went to “extraordinary lengths to publish them in a responsible and redacted manner,” the submissions to a lower U.K. court said. WikiLeaks held back information while it formed media partnerships with news organizations such as The Guardian, The New York Times and DER SPIEGEL to manage the release of the material. Assange’s legal team cited named witnesses, various journalists who worked with Assange on the process. Those witnesses testified to the rigor of the redaction effort.
The media partners’ work on the Afghan war logs included approaching the White House before releasing them. In July 2010, Wikileaks also entered dialogue with the White House about redacting names. On July 25, 2010, WikiLeaks held back publication of 15,000 documents on Afghanistan to safeguard its “harm minimization process” even after its media partners published stories.
Redaction of the Iraq War diaries was likewise “painstakingly approached” and involved the development of special redaction software. Publication was delayed in August 2010 despite this annoying some media partners because Assange didn’t want to rush.
Un-redacted publication of the State Department cables in September 2011 was undertaken by parties unconnected to WikiLeaks, and despite WikiLeaks’ efforts to prevent it, the legal submissions state. Those who revealed un-redacted cables have never been prosecuted nor requested to remove them from the internet.
More:
https://www.laprogressive.com/wrong-about-assange/