Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame is now back in the country of his birth, having endured conditions of captivity ranging from cramped digs in London’s Ecuadorian embassy to the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh Prison. His return to Australia after striking a plea deal with the US Department of Justice sees him in a state with some of the most onerous secrecy provisions of any in the Western world.
As of January 2023, according to the Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Commonwealth had 11 general secrecy offences in Part 5.6 of the Criminal Code, 542 specific secrecy offences across 178 Commonwealth laws and 296 non-disclosure duties spanning 107 Commonwealth laws criminalising unauthorised disclosure of information by current and former employees of the Commonwealth.
In November 2023, the Albanese Government agreed to 11 recommendations advanced by the final report of the review of secrecy provisions. While aspiring to thin back the excessive overgrowth of secrecy, old habits die hard. Suggested protections regarding press freedom and individuals providing information to Royal Commissions will hardly instil confidence.
With that background, it is unsurprising that Assange’s return, while delighting his family, supporters and free press advocates, has stirred the seething resentment of the national security establishment, Fourth Estate crawlers, and any number of journalistic sellouts. Damn it all, such attitudes seem to say: he transformed journalism, stole away our self-censorship, exposed readers to the original classified text, and let the public decide for itself how to react to disclosures revealing the abuse of power. Minimal editorialising; maximum textual interpretation through the eyes of the universal citizenry, a terrifying prospect for those in government.
Given that the Australian press establishment is distastefully comfortable with politicians – the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for instance, has a central reporting bureau in Canberra’s Parliament House – Assange’s return has brought much agitation. The Canberra press corps earn their crust in a perversely symbiotic, and often uncritical relationship, with the political establishment that furnishes them with rationed morsels of information. The last thing they want is an active Assange scuppering such a neat understanding, a radical transparency warrior keenly upsetting conventions of hypocrisy long respected.
Let’s wade through the venom. Press gallery scribbler Phillip Coorey of the Australian Financial Review proved provincially ignorant, his mind ill-temperedly confused about WikiLeaks. “I have never been able to make up my mind about Assange.” Given that his profession benefits from leaks, whistleblowing and the exposure of abuses, one wonders what he is doing in it. Assange has, after all, been convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917 for engaging in that very activity, a matter that should give Coorey pause for outrage.
For the veteran journalist, another parallel was more appropriate, something rather distant from any notions of public interest journalism that had effectively been criminalised by the US Republic. “The release of Julian Assange has closer parallels to that of David Hicks 17 years ago, who like Assange, was deemed to have broken American law while not in that country, and which eventually involved a US president cutting a favour for an Australian prime minister.”
The case of Hicks remains a ghastly reminder of Australian diplomatic and legal cowardice. Coorey is only right to assume that both cases feature tormented flights of fancy by the US imperium keen on breaking a few skulls in their quest to make the world safe for Washington. The military commissions, of which Hicks was a victim, were created during the madly named Global War on Terror pursuant to presidential military order. Intended to try non-US citizens suspected of terrorism held at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, they were farcical exercises of executive power, a fact pointed out by the US Supreme Court in 2006. It took Congressional authorisation via the Military Commissions Actin 2009 to spare them.
Coorey’s colleague and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Peter Hartcher, was similarly uninterested in what Assange exposed, babbling (paywalled) about the publisher’s return as the moment “Assangeism came into plain view”. He had no stomach for “the cult” which seemed to have infected Canberra’s cold weather. He also wondered whether Assange could constructively “use his global celebrity status to campaign for public interest journalism and human rights.” To do so – and here, teacher’s pet of the political establishment, beater of the war drum for the United States – Assange would have to “fundamentally” alter “his ways to advance the cause”.
All this was a prelude for Hartcher to take the hatchet to the journalistic exploits of a man more decorated with journalism awards that many in the Canberra gallery combined. The claim that he is “a journalist is hotly contested by actual journalists.” Despite the US government conceding that the disclosures by WikiLeaks had not resulted in harm to US sources, “there were many other victims of Assange’s project.” The returned publisher was only in Australia “on probation”, a signal reminder that the media establishment will be attempting to badger him into treacherous conformity.
Even this language was too mild for another Australian hack, Michael Ware, who had previously worked for Time Magazine and CNN. With pathological inventiveness, he thought Assange “a traitor in the sense that, during a time of war, when we had American, British and Australian troops in the field, under fire, Julian Assange published troves of unredacted documents.” Never mind truth to power; in Ware’s world, veracity is subordinate to it, even in an illegal war. What he calls “methods” and “methodology” cannot be exposed.
Such gutter journalism has its necessary cognate in gutter politics. All regard information was threatening unless appropriately handled, its more potent effects for change stilled. Leader of the opposition in the Senate, Simon Birmingham (paywalled), found it “completely unnecessary and totally inappropriate for Julian Assange to be greeted like some homecoming hero by the Australian Prime Minister.”Chorusing with hacks Coorey, Hartcher and Ware, Birmingham bleated about the publication by Assange of half a million documents “without having read them, curated them, checked to see if there was anything that could be damaging or risking the lives of others there.” Keep the distortions flying, Senator.
Dennis Richardson, former domestic intelligence chief and revolving door specialist (public servant becomes private profiteer with ease in Canberra), similarly found it inexplicable that the PM contacted Assange with a note of congratulation, or even showed any public interest in his release from a system that was killing him. “I can think of no other reason why a prime minister would ring Assange on his return to Australia except for purposes relating to politics,” moaned Richardson to the Guardian Australia.
For Richardson, Assange had been legitimately convicted, even if it was achieved via that most notorious of mechanisms, the plea deal. The inconvenient aside that Assange had been spied upon by CIA sponsored operatives, considered a possible object of abduction, rendition or assassination never clouds his uncluttered mind.
Sharp eyes will be trained on Assange in Australia, however long he wishes to say. He is in the bosom of the Five Eyes Alliance, permanently threatened by the prospect of recall and renewed interest by Washington. And there are dozens of journalists, indifferent to the dangers the entire effort against the publisher augurs for their own craft, wishing that to be the case.
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The local media bedpan is brimming with brownies overflowing, in the tradition of aggressive nontruthtelling. Hartcher, lower than a nematode’s nuts, cleverly circles and dodges, but ensures that the paymaster’s will is served. The Merde dog menagerie of maggoty misfits have every distortion covered, and can float Patterson or whoever in a coat of some apparent respectability. A worldview emenating from the ageng duncey boss, a putrid foreigner, is a poor guide to behaviour, belief, self respect. As always through time, executive murderers and thieves give orders, support policies, make decisions, control situations, all to make life far more rotten than it should be for ordinary folk who suffer…and media magnates are getting more horrible.
There’s some gems in here;
“upsetting conventions of hypocrisy long respected.”
“make the world safe for Washington.”
The Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism are presented annually in Australia to recognise and reward the best in the craft. Finalists are selected by eminent journalists and photographers…
No Walkley for Binoy this year!
This essay brings to mind an image: a wounded Assange, lying on the ground on his return from years of exile & imprisonment, mentally and physically drained, but now surrounded by these men of the media and politics; a circle of them, each stepping forward and sinking the boot into the body of this wounded & fallen champion of transparency and exposure of malfeasance; kicking, kicking, taking grim satisfaction for reasons they fail to have sufficiently pondered and lacking the insight that perhaps what he had endured might well have been their fate if they’d had a commitment towards exposing venality, criminality, wrong-doings. The bathos is somewhat sickening.
Other sources have commented that the Australian scribblers who paraphrase reality with their nightmare scenarios are jealous of the man who was jailed for practicing journalism and holding to the principles of the Fourth Estate as the balance against the rogues of capitalism (and their lap-dog propagandists).
@ Canguro: I think you have it correct ….. the Australian main stream media are far too comfortable in bed with the bosses.
The lot of them would well know that their bias and hypocrisy is transparent to all who bother to do their own research and ask appropriate questions before joining the dots. But they don’t care, as long as they keep getting paid to push their barrow full of manure. Quite obviously they fail to acknowledge that theirs is the sin of omission and misdirection, for then they can continue, holier than thou, to blindside the average punter.
Oh the infamy and false pride of the amanuenses with opinion and a by-line.
As you say Steve: “No Walkley for Binoy this year!”
I suppose I should be accustomed to the duplicity and subterfuge of powerful nations, especially that of our “great and powerful friend”; and of course the same is true of individuals, and more particularly those who hold “official” positions. In fact much of our history and our literature is replete with examples of individual and governmental malfeasance of one sort or another.
Therefore it comes as no surprise when those in Australia, (on both sides of politics), assert that Mr. Assange should presently be in prison and remain there, BUT neglect at any point to mention the criminal enterprise (renditions, assassinations &c.) in which the US has for a considerable time been engaged – many aspects of which Wikileaks uncovered.
Binoy mentions a few exponents of this process of avoidance, and you have to ask: why, why persist with this horseshit? In the quoted example of Mr. Ware, there’s a different approach, in that secrecy is paramount it seems – whatever might be alleged or exposed. When this approach is taken to its logical conclusion: the empire can do no wrong.
For much of this process (of the avoidance of reality) there is of course an explanation by way of Upton Sinclair’s original quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” But in this case, surely there has to be more to it?
It was Binoy’s mention of “secrecy” and the security industry’s pervasive influence that reminded me of the long-standing and essentially unquestioning dedication of many Australians to the US alliance – even now, and in the face of US tactical, economic and political support of Israel’s policy of extermination and/or relocation in the remaining 20 and a bit percent of what remains of Palestine; particularly when you consider the UN allocated 56% only of Palestine to the new state of Israel – but of course, like American malfeasance, we don’t talk about that.
In a 2017 (pre-AUKUS) article on Pearls & Irritations, Professor Mark Beeson contemplated the ANZUS alliance and noted that: “Sensible and serious observers agree that not only is the ANZUS alliance the indispensable bedrock of national security, but Australian policymakers would be irresponsible to do anything that might jeopardize its status.”
In the face of a then increasingly dangerous international situation Professor Beeson asks:
“So what should an independently minded middle power do in such circumstances? In Australia’s case the simple answer is, we don’t know. The overarching strategic reality is that by cleaving so tenaciously to the alliance, generations of Australian policymakers have essentially given up even the pretense of independence of action…
…Why would a notionally sovereign independent state want to give up its freedom of action in this manner? In part, I think, it’s because there has been a similar loss of the ability to think independently. So engrained is the conventional wisdom that it is quite literally unthinkable for many of our prominent commentators to consider any alternative to the status quo.” https://johnmenadue.com/mark-beeson-the-unconventional-wisdom/
And so, I’m guessing, defence of the status quo becomes increasingly necessary, and that’s why Mr. Assange was initially thrown under a bus and why our Mil/Sec/Intel industry would prefer he stay there and out of sight.