{"id":184218,"date":"2021-05-03T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2021-05-03T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=184218"},"modified":"2021-05-06T10:56:03","modified_gmt":"2021-05-06T09:56:03","slug":"ten-years-since-wikileaks-and-assange-published-the-guantanamo-files","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/05\/ten-years-since-wikileaks-and-assange-published-the-guantanamo-files\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Years Since WikiLeaks and Assange Published the Guant\u00e1namo Files"},"content":{"rendered":"

1 May 2021 – <\/em>Last week marked a decade since WikiLeaks published a tranche of 779 secret files from the US government\u2019s Guant\u00e1namo Bay military prison, revealing in greater detail than ever before the global dragnet of illegal detention associated with the fraudulent \u201cwar on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

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US Army Military Police escort a detainee to his cell at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay [Credit: Shane T. McCoy\/US Marshals Service]<\/p><\/div>In the words of US state operatives themselves, the files demonstrated that the American authorities were imprisoning hundreds of people from Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere, whom they knew were not guilty of terrorist offences or any other crimes.<\/p>\n

Instead the prisoners were victims of a new lawless frontier, in which people were bundled into detention, often sold to the CIA by local authorities, secretly held in \u201cblack site\u201d prisons, and transported to the other side of the world where they were indefinitely detained in the Guant\u00e1namo Bay facility, which by 2011 had already become synonymous with state torture.<\/p>\n

The files are not only significant because of their content.<\/p>\n

They are the last among four major releases for which the US government has charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act\u2014the first time the draconian legislation has been deployed against a publisher. According to US prosecutors, who are seeking Assange\u2019s extradition from Britain, the \u201ccrime\u201d of exposing their government\u2019s illegal detention regime should be punished by up to 40 years in prison, in a Supermax facility whose conditions would resemble those of Guant\u00e1namo itself.<\/p>\n

WikiLeaks\u2019 publication of the Guant\u00e1namo Files followed its earlier releases of the US army\u2019s Iraq and Afghan war logs, which exposed thousands of illegal killings and violations of international law, and some 250,000 US diplomatic cables, revealing coups, illegal surveillance operations and other human rights abuses.<\/p>\n

The files were provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, the courageous US army whistleblower. She would be imprisoned for nearly seven years in conditions deemed by the United Nations to be torturous under Obama, before being detained again by the Trump administration in a failed bid to coerce her to give false testimony against Assange.<\/p>\n

The Obama administration, in which Joe Biden served as vice president, was as hostile to the publication of the Guant\u00e1namo Files as the earlier WikiLeaks releases. It issued a statement, published by its virtual house organ the New York Times<\/em>, declaring that the documents had been \u201cillegally obtained\u201d and remained \u201cclassified.\u201d The government took the Orwellian step of informing the lawyers of Guant\u00e1namo Bay detainees that they were forbidden from clicking on any of the files, even after they had been published on the internet.<\/p>\n