«I want to live in a society where war criminals go to jail, not those who have the conscience and the courage to report them and the journalists who reveal their crime,» wrote Stefania Maurizi in her book The Secret power. The book, published by a Milanese publishing house Chiarelettere in summer this year, was almost immediately sold out. Now it is available in reprint and also as an e-book. But will this book, the interest and engagement of the public be enough to prevent #Julian Assange#, the founder of #WikiLeaks who exposed the secret powers that govern our democracies, from being punished for this and put in jail for life?
Bitter truths
Maurizi brought to light many bitter truths but probably the most bitter is the fact that today, such a democratic society does not exist and, ever since the first WikiLeaks revelations, Assange has not been free. No wonder that British film director #Ken Loach#, in his brief and pungent preface to the book, wrote that «this is a book that will make you very angry». It will. Especially because this book does not leave space for doubt.
Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist who has been working with Assange and WikiLeaks ever since they contacted her in 2009 because they needed a journalist to verify the authenticity and public interest for the documents they had about Italy. At that time she was working for L’Espresso and La Repubblica, now she writes for Il Fatto Quotidiano. She has always been one of the journalists closest to Julian Assange: in Italy, she was the person who disseminated the WikiLeaks documents. Now she participates as a witness in the London trial for Assange’s extradition to the #United States#. She, too, was a victim of #espionage, presumably on behalf of the American secret services inside the Ecuadorian embassy that hosted Assange for years, accepting his request for political asylum.
Maurizi brought to light many bitter truths but probably the most bitter is the fact that today, such a democratic society does not exist and, ever since the first WikiLeaks revelations, Assange has not been free.
175 years
For those of you who don’t remember, in April 2010, WikiLeaks released a video showing an American Apache helicopter indiscriminately shooting at a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two journalists. The video became known as Collateral Murder. Together with the documents that WikiLeaks published about the wars in #Afghanistan and #Iraq, it showed the reality of these wars beyond what was served to the public by the propaganda machinery. The American diplomatic cables revealed secrets of most of the world governments and remain exceptionally important to this day. These documents exposed what Maurizi calls «the secret power» – secrets of the states, hidden behind the «state secret,» a label that, however, does not protect the security of the citizens but serves to hide the crimes committed by the state at the highest levels and to guarantee that the people in the institutions that committed these crimes remain unpunished. This is the reason why Assange is risking 175 years in prison.
This is also the reason why, ever since the first WikiLeaks publications, the credibility of the documents, WikiLeaks, and Assange as the founder has been challenged in every possible way. Maurizi is well aware of this, and every sentence of her book shows her endeavour to avoid the doubts and reveals that the doubts were created on purpose. To this, she dedicated more than 13 years of #investigative journalism#, studying the secret WikiLeaks documents on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. As part of this, she was for six years engaged in legal battles on the Freedom of Information Act in four different jurisdictions (England, United States, Australia, and Sweden) to obtain documents about the case and do what no other journalist in the world ever tried to do – to ask for the documents and reconstruct what actually happened.
In this way, for example, she reconstructed step by step the circumstances in which the accusations of rape that eventually led Assange to voluntary confinement to a 20 square meter room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London were constructed. Here, in particular, Maurizi demonstrated how credible and reliable journalism looks like. Her reconstruction is based on thorough research of various sources, including official archives of public authorities and private companies. One of them is Stratfor, a private USA based intelligence company selling and buying information for rich and powerful clients such as multinationals, government agencies and media, with close contacts with USA government, FBI, and intelligence agencies. She strictly avoids adding comments, yet she does include her own memories of the events, for example, how after being accused of rape, arrested and released, as chief prosecutor of Stockholm dropped charges of rape because the investigation «revealed no crime,» Assange came to meet with her and other journalists in Berlin, and his luggage was lost on the flight.
…ever since the first WikiLeaks publications, the credibility of the documents, WikiLeaks, and Assange as the founder has been challenged in every possible way.
Not only freedom
The main point? Assange has against himself a leviathan. From April 11, 2019, he has been imprisoned in Belmarsh prison in London. If the USA wins the legal battle, he will be sent over the ocean and closed forever, in isolation, in a maximum-security prison, just like the most despicable criminals. Other WikiLeaks journalists will be condemned too. But what is at stake here is not only the freedom of the founder and other journalists from Wikileaks. This is a fight for journalism that can expose the highest levels of power, diplomacies, the army and secret services—a fight for democracy.
