It began in early 2010 when US soldier Chelsea Manning, horrified by what she saw being done in Iraq by her comrades, decided to leak classified documents to expose the brutality that was taking place in the name of peacekeeping in the Iraq war. The website she leaked these documents to was the relatively new ‘Wikileaks’, run by Julian Assange.
Wikileaks would go on to leak 391,832 documents from anonymous informants on the Iraq war alone. Revelations included complicity in torture, civilian murder and a general degree of incompetence in military operations, but the most famous leaked material was the video titled ‘Collateral Murder’ in which a US army helicopter gunned down a group of civilians and journalists while the pilots laughed in the background.
The treatment of Assange in the years since the leaks were published is perhaps the most important issue for the future of independent journalism in recent history. It is also one of the most poorly reported stories in mainstream media.
It is important to understand that although the US is relentlessly making efforts to extradite Assange in foreign detainment, he is guilty of nothing more than the legitimate journalistic practice of publishing documents and files which have been leaked to him in confidence.
The treatment of Assange in the years since the leaks were published is perhaps the most important issue for the future of independent journalism in recent history.
The manner with which Assange has been treated by the UK and US governments for the past 10 years is incredibly concerning, with Assange being forced to hide in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years to avoid detainment before finally being put under maximum security in HMP Belmarsh in 2019 where he remains today. This is despite never having had a trial, intended purely to serve as a warning sign to those that would think to expose the crimes of powerful western governments.
If Assange is to be extradited for nothing more than exposing the embarrassing reality of the US’s crimes in the Iraq war, this presents a troubling threat to independent journalism that deserves our attention.
What makes this all the more important is the broad decline in real investigative journalism over the past decade, with very few recent examples of newspapers exposing hidden information aside from the Panama Papers in 2016. Papers such as the Guardian and the New York Times have shied away from investigative journalism much more than they had before the WikiLeaks scandal, preferring to focus on the minute details of parliamentary politics.
It suggests that the treatment of Assange by the US government has had its desired effect - to silence journalistic curiosity about its actions overseas and to create a media environment where the actions of Western governments are not held accountable.