It is not just the future of Julian Assange that is at stake if he ends up extradited to the United States for allegedly violating the Espionage Act of 1917. It is much more, it is freedom of the press, according to the editors of the newspapers that in 2010 They published the revelations about American foreign policy in cooperation with WikiLeaks, the organization Assange founded.
The revelations could cost Assange extradition and possible conviction for obtaining and disseminating secret information from the US Government. But the cost could go beyond his personal case, according to those who headed Der Spiegel's editorial staff 14 years ago
.
,
Le Monde
,
The Guardian
,
The New York Times
and EL PAÍS, newspapers that studied, verified and contextualized the 251,000 diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks had obtained.
“Sometimes we do not primarily defend a person or his actions, but a principle,” says Georg Mascolo, who was editor of the German weekly
Der Spiegel
.
“If this [the extradition and conviction of Assange in the United States] is successful, I do not see why myself or my colleagues from EL PAÍS,
Le Monde
,
The Guardian
or
The New York Times
would not be charged.”
EL PAÍS has interviewed Mascolo and his colleagues after the hearings this week before the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, where it will be decided whether or not Assange can continue appealing his extradition to the United States in the United Kingdom. The five agree on the effects that the extradition of the co-founder of Wikileaks would have and a sentence that could reach 175 years in prison, according to his lawyers, for the 18 infractions attributed to him.
“A terrible idea,” summarizes Bill Keller, who in 2010 edited
The New York Times
.
“The relationship between Julian and the directors who worked together to publish the information we obtained from WikiLeaks was delicate,” he admits.
“He was not easy to deal with, but this does not justify criminalizing journalism, which is what using the Espionage Act against Assange means.”
The Espionage Act was adopted in the United States during World War I.
It was intended for spies and traitors.
It has never been used before to charge a newspaper editor.
Although Assange is not one, nor a journalist in the traditional sense, the revelations for which he is accused were published in traditional and prestigious media, and were subjected to a rigorous editing and selection process.
“I think that his extradition and, obviously, the sentence that would follow, would be serious for press freedom,” says Sylvie Kauffmann, editor of the French newspaper
Le Monde
for 14 years and at the forefront of the effort to publish the news taken from WikiLeaks documents.
Javier Moreno, director of EL PAÍS at the time, points out: “The precedent it opens is brutal.
The message that is sent to citizens is: 'Be prepared, because we are heading towards a world in which things that we have taken for granted or guaranteed will no longer be so.'
“Whatever you think of Assange, the precedent is dangerous,” agrees Alan Rusbridger, from the British
The Guardian
.
“[Extradition] would have the effect of intimidating people who wanted to publish this type of news.”
More than a decade without freedom
The English journey of Assange, a 52-year-old Australian citizen, began when he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to escape the extradition demand from Sweden, where he was facing an investigation for rape, filed in 2019. He spent seven years there, until he was expelled.
He was later sentenced to almost a year in prison for violating his parole obligations in the Swedish case.
And he has spent the last five years in the Belmarsh maximum security prison, also in London, waiting for the extradition demand to the United States to be resolved.
In 2019, with Donald Trump in the White House, the US justice system accused Assange of participating in the theft of diplomatic cables and other secret documents in 2010. The accusation was later expanded to include, among the charges, the publication of this documents.
The expanded accusation—not only for stealing secret documents, but for publishing them—is what worries media directors and investigative journalists.
In the future, the Espionage Act could apply to traditional media and affect their daily work.
After the 2010 revelations, Wikileaks continued to publish private and secret documents on its own, without the cooperation of the aforementioned reference media.
In 2016, he released emails about the then candidate for the 2016 US presidential election, Democrat Hillary Clinton, supposedly obtained by people linked to the Russian intelligence services.
In the midst of the electoral campaign, they were a help to the Republican Trump.
The discussion about the true nature of the person responsible for WikiLeaks appears in conversations with former newspaper editors.
Hacker?
Activist?
Journalist?
Press entrepreneur and editor of
WikiLeaks
?
Whistleblower or
whistleblower
, in English?
Simple source of information?
Or even an agent (voluntary or involuntary) of Vladimir Putin's Russia?
“I can't speak for all directors, but I don't think any of us saw him as a colleague,” Keller says.
“It was a fountain.
“A delicate source that had to be treated with care.”
At the same time, he points out: “I try to be a little humble when deciding who is a journalist.
Is Tucker Carlson [the pro-Trump TV host who recently interviewed Putin]?
She traffics in misinformation.
He is a propagandist, recently for Putin.”
“[Assange] defies classification, he is like an actor: sometimes editor, sometimes journalist, sometimes activist, sometimes businessman,” Rusbridger maintains.
“But he is being prosecuted for being an editor [of a media outlet] and there is no doubt that, when the five newspapers worked with him, he behaved like a journalist.”
Moreno points out: “It is true that Assange is an uncomfortable character, an uncomfortable victim who is not easy to defend, a complicated character with his edges.”
And, adds the former director of EL PAÍS, there is “a degree of separation” between the work that Assange and his colleagues do, and that of the journalists of the newspapers they directed.
But he clarifies: “This degree of separation does not seem reassuring to me (...).
We are not the same, but there is an immense ocean between us, between him and the journalists who, with the papers that he passed, wrote.
They are different things, of course.
But are they so different that we can stay calm if something happens to him?
I would say not;
neither us, nor democracy in general.”
The five, leading their newsrooms and teams of specialists, had to decide 14 years ago which, among the tens of thousands of documents, could be newsworthy and how to publish them.
They had to evaluate if they put the security of their countries or people at risk, and contrast them.
Mascolo recalls that, in 2010, he and his fellow directors had many discussions with Assange about how far they could go in publishing the cables “and, without a doubt, there were disagreements.”
“But the accusation is simply a mistake, and very dangerous,” he concludes.
“Julian Assange is a symbol, an imperfect symbol,” describes Kauffman, who remembers an atypical character from that time, but also that the relationship was correct.
Then there were what she calls “strange drifts.”
“Russian drift is one of them,” she says.
“It was a mistake on his part: he would not have had to collaborate with RT [the Russian public broadcaster].”
But the French journalist insists on the importance of the 2010 revelations. “The US Administration was furious, which is understandable, but it was a work of public utility,” she says.
“It did not put the national security of the United States at stake.
Instead, it provided an extraordinary amount of very instructive information about how American diplomacy and relations with other countries worked.”
The Wikileaks papers: the nightmare of any diplomat
The list of revelations of 2010, ranging from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the kitchen of diplomacy, is long.
Eleven years before the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, WikiLeaks dispatches reported rampant corruption in the Western-backed Afghan government.
They showed how Saudi Arabia's money financed terrorist groups, or how the US Administration ordered spying on the UN Secretary General himself.
The WikiLeaks papers, Moreno wrote then, “exhaustively reveal, as has surely never happened before, the extent to which the political classes in the advanced democracies of the West have been deceiving their citizens.”
In
The Guardian
, historian Timothy Garton Ash described them this way: “Every historian's dream.
Every diplomat's nightmare.
And he asked himself: “How can diplomacy be done under these conditions?”
That is, knowing that at any time private communications could become public.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information,” the White House reacted in 2010. The president was Barack Obama, whose Administration, however, avoided denouncing Assange.
He explained that, if they had done so, they would have had to denounce journalists from the media that published the news.
“His position placed great importance on press freedom despite the unpleasant consequences,” read an open letter published by the five in 2022. The Trump Administration changed its mind.
That information, above all, shed light—sometimes embarrassing;
others, fascinating—about the internal mechanics of the world.
It may have seemed that a new era of transparency driven by the digital revolution was being announced, but two years later, in an article, Keller warned: “In fact (...), quite the opposite is happening.”
Yes, after Assange and Wikileaks came Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency in 2013. But the 2010 action had its reaction, in the form of a setback in transparency or a heavy hand against the leakers or against Assange.
Rusbridger argues that after Assange, and after Snowden, “governments are trying to stop [journalism about national security secrets] and make it impossible through harsh sanctions and using legislation that was not designed to prevent the press from working.” .
Keller, faced with the hypothesis that Assange will be extradited and convicted, states: “This is not the end of journalism but, without a doubt, it will make one type of journalism more difficult.
And this, at a time when we need investigative journalism more than ever.”
The former director of
The New York Times
adds : “These are tough times for journalism.
The business model is complicated.
The market is flooded by entertainment news, propaganda and misinformation.
And in several countries there are authoritarian regimes that persecute the press.
“Adding the Espionage Act to the arsenal to attack the press is a big mistake that will have consequences.”
Fourteen years later, none of the
Five journalists are still in charge of the newspapers that published the Wikileaks exclusive.
Keller, after founding the nonprofit outlet
The Marshall Project
, is retired, writing books and teaching classes in prisons.
Moreno directs the UAM-EL PAÍS School of Journalism.
Mascolo continues to work as a journalist, like Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of
Le Monde
.
Rusbridger runs Prospect
magazine
.
And Assange awaits the judges' decision.
Either she will be able to file a new appeal in the United Kingdom or she will be extradited to the United States, although she will still have the option of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
“This man,” Moreno observes, “has already been locked up for 12 years in one way or another.
If he is now extradited and ends up with a 175-year sentence, everything will have been so that the readers of this newspaper, and others, could have read the articles they read.
You have to think about that.”
Follow all the international information on
and
X
, or in
our weekly newsletter
.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_