Secret Power

Stefania Maurizi, Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli

Description

*Winner of the European Award for Investigative And Judicial Journalism 2021*

*Winner of the Premio Alessandro Leogrande Award for Investigative Journalism 2022*

*Winner of the Premio Angelo Vassallo Award 2022*

'I want to live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.'

It is 2008, and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organization WikiLeaks. Through hushed meetings, encrypted files, and explosive documents, what she discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of secret power.

Working closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organization for her newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks.

With complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi’s tireless journalism exposes atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and cover-ups.

At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and truthtellers.

Foreword by Ken Loach
Introduction: The Man Who Stood Up to Secret Power
1. The Wikileaks Revolution
2. The Exceptional Courage of Chelsea Manning
3. Afghanistan: The Faraway War
4. The Cypherpunk
5. A Database from Hell: the Iraq War Logs
6. Rattling Power at the Highest Levels: Cablegate
7. Guantanamo: The Black Hole of Civilisation
8. "The Huffington Post gang is driving me nuts"
9. From Sweden to Ecuador
10. No Place for Protection
11. My Trench Warfare to Unearth the Truth
12. Arbitrarily Detained
13. A Russian Connection?
14. The Fury of the CIA
15. Under Siege
16. The Final Attempts
17. In the Would-be Guantanamo
18. 175 Years for the Crime of Journalism
19. Only Kafka
20. A Monstrous Injustice
21. Secret Power
Acknowledgments

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Human Rights
• Civil Rights
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Droit et juridique
• Afghan War documents leak
• July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike
• Censorship
• Free Press
• Civil and political rights
• Whistleblower
• Journalism
• LAW
• Democracy
• Secret Service

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745347639
• Langue: English

Extrait

Secret Power

First published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press Inc.
1930 Village Center Circle, Ste. 3-384, Las Vegas, NV 89134
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Stefania Maurizi 2022
The right of Stefania Maurizi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4762 2 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4761 5 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4764 6 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4763 9 EPUB
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
To my mother, with love and gratitude
To those who have the moral courage to risk life, freedom and economic security to bring out the truth
Contents
Foreword by Ken Loach
Introduction: The Man Who Stood Up to Secret Power
1. The WikiLeaks Revolution
My Source at Risk
Saying No to the Pentagon
Publishing What No One Dared to Publish
A Phone Call in the Night
Like a Band of Rebels
Destroy WikiLeaks
2. The Exceptional Courage of Chelsea Manning
Collateral Murder
A Lesson
She Could Have Looked the Other Way
I Want People to See the Truth
3. Afghanistan: The Faraway War
Forever War
An Extraordinary Window on the War
The Pentagon s Poison
The Fog of War
Meeting Confirmed
Alexanderplatz
Our Boys
4. The Cypherpunk
A Highly Intelligent Individual
Visionaries and Libertarians
5. A Database from Hell: The Iraq War Logs
The Word Democracy Only Eight Times
Like an Acid that Corrodes
6. Cablegate: Rattling Power at the Highest Levels
Crimes, Scandals and Political Pressure
Surrounded
A Cottage in the English Countryside
A Democracy on a Short Leash
Like in Chile under Pinochet
7. Guantanamo: The Black Hole of Civilization
The Worst of the Worst?
Guantanamo s Barbarity Persists and Risks Setting a Precedent
8. The Huffington Post Gang Is Driving Me Nuts
Ellingham Hall
Whose Fault Was It?
Isolated
Divide, Discredit, Sabotage
9. From Sweden to Ecuador
He Needs His Head Dunked in a Full Toilet Bowl at Gitmo
An Investigation Opened, Closed and Reopened
When Ecuador Said: Colonial Times Are Over
Confined to 20 Square Meters
10. No Place for Protection
NSA: The No Such Agency
The Exceptional Courage of Edward Snowden
A Brutal Law from World War I: The Espionage Act
The Cruel and Inhumane Treatment of Chelsea Manning
Exile
In Prison, in Exile or Confined
The Blood on Their Hands that Never Was 175
11. My Trench Warfare to Unearth the Truth
When Google Handed Over WikiLeaks Data
A Suspicious Impasse in Sweden
To Look Out the Window
Not Just Another Extradition Request
How Keir Starmer s Crown Prosecution Service
Helped Create the Quagmire
When Marianne Ny Finally Changed Her Mind 196
12. Arbitrarily Detained
One International Law for Us and One for Them:
How Sweden and the UK Ignored the United
Nations Working Group
Justice for No One
13. A Russian Connection?
Useful Idiots
The Information Trumps All
14. The Fury of the CIA
A Robbery in Rome
The Invisible Arsenal: Vault 7
A Spine-chilling Speech
15. Under Siege
From Protection under Correa to Oppression under Moreno
Why Did the UK Crown Prosecution Service Destroy Key Documents?
The Lives of Others
A Love Born in Hell
The American Friends
16. The Final Attempts
The Diplomatic Route
The Legal Route
The Poison
The Last Meeting
17. In the Would-be Guantanamo
A Brutal Arrest
The State within the State
Fifty Weeks
The Law as a Sword
18. 175 Years for the Crime of Journalism
The First Time in United States History
The Full Force of the State
The Espionage Act for Whistleblowers: Prison, Cruelty, Bankruptcy
The Espionage Act for Generals and Spymasters: Impunity
Something is Rotten in the State of Sweden
A Special Rapporteur
19. Only Kafka
The Trial
He Remained in Belmarsh
Changing the Game
The Witnesses
20. A Monstrous Injustice
The Cruelty of American and British Justice
Killing Julian
Piercing the Wall of Darkness
21. Secret Power
Acknowledgments
Index
Foreword
Ken Loach
This is a book that should make you very angry. It is the story of a journalist imprisoned and treated with unbearable cruelty for exposing war crimes, of the determination by British and American politicians to destroy him, and of the quiet connivance of the media in this monstrous injustice.
Julian Assange is now well known. WikiLeaks, in which Assange played a leading role, exposed the dirty secrets of the Iraq war, as well as much else. Thanks to Assange and the team, we saw horrific war crimes such as those depicted in the Collateral Murder video or those committed by the US contractors as happened in Nisour Square in Baghdad, where fourteen civilians were shot dead. Two children were killed and seventeen people wounded. Trump, in his final days as President, pardoned the killers. But he ensured that Assange remain in prison.
The work of WikiLeaks has been extensive. Its fundamental principles should inform all democratic societies. The people must know all that is being done in their name. When politicians hide shameful secrets, journalists have a responsibility to expose them. And it is politicians who should pay the price, with punishment by law where there is illegality. None of this has happened in the case of Julian Assange and the crimes and corruption WikiLeaks has exposed have gone unpunished.
Stefania Maurizi has followed the case from the beginning. She has unearthed documents using Freedom of Information laws that expose the attacks on Julian Assange. She has followed in detail these extraordinary events over the last decade. At the heart of this story is the terrible price paid by one man, treated with extreme cruelty, because he laid bare the reality of unaccountable power hidden by an appearance of democracy.
As I write, the challenge is for the British judicial system. Britain boasts that its courts are independent, that it respects the rule of law and that its lawyers are incorruptible. Well, we shall see. Julian Assange is a journalist whose crime was to tell the truth. For that he has lost his freedom, and spent the last two years in solitary confinement in a high security prison with the predictable devastating consequences for his mental health.
If extradited to the USA, he will be incarcerated for the rest of his life. Will a British court collude with such a horrific injustice?
In Britain there are other matters to concern us: the great expense and resources used to keep Assange isolated in the Ecuadorian Embassy; the abject cowardice of the press and broadcasters in their failure to defend journalistic freedom; and the allegation that the Crown Prosecution Service, led at the time by Keir Starmer, trapped Assange in a legal and diplomatic nightmare.
If we think we live in a democracy, we should read this book. If we care about truth and honest politics, we should read this book. And if we believe that the law should protect the innocent, we should not only read the book but demand that Julian Assange should be a free man.
For how much longer can we accept that the mechanism of the secret state, responsible for the most egregious crimes, continues to make a mockery of our attempts to live in a democracy?
(Spring 2021)
Introduction: The Man Who Stood Up to Secret Power
For over a decade now, one man has been the target of the most powerful institutions on earth. Some have planned to kill him, or to kidnap him. They have stolen the best years of his life. These institutions include the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA). They embody the heart of what President Dwight Eisenhower, one of the principal architects of the victory over the Nazis in Europe, called the United States military-industrial complex, the same complex that Eisenhower himself, though formerly a great military leader, warned his country against. The power and influence exerted by these institutions are felt in every corner of the globe; they plan wars, coup d tats, assassinations. They sway governments and elections.
That man is Julian Assange. He is the founder of WikiLeaks, an organization that has radically transformed journalism, exploiting the potential of the internet and systematically breaching state secrecy when that secrecy is used not to protect the safety and security of citizens, but to conceal state crimes, to ensure impunity for the officials in the institutions that commit those crimes, and to keep the public from discovering the truth and holding them to account.
Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks journalists have published hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon, CIA and NSA files exposing civilian massacres, torture, political scandals and political pressure on foreign governments. These revelations have unleashed the fury of the U.S. authorities, but in reality there is not a single government in the world that has warm feelings for Assange and WikiLeaks. Even those less buffeted by their publications to date regard them with a wary eye, conscious that, sooner or later, the WikiLeaks method may also take root in their own countries and expose their own dirty secrets. And it is not just governments, armies and secret services that hate them and see them as enemies; they are equally feared by powerful economic-financial institutions, often in league with diplomats and intelligence agencies, as the most profitable financial operations thrive in secrecy.
As I write, J