‘Warriors’ is our lead singer Andy Worthington’s song for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, railing against the injustice of Chelsea’s seven-year ordeal as the whistleblower who passed a treasure trove of US classified documents to WikiLeaks, and the even graver injustice of the imprisonment of Julian, since April 2019, in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in south east London, where he has been challenging the US government’s efforts to extradite him to the US to face espionage charges and a life sentence for publishing the leaked documents. The release coincides with Julian’s last appeal in the UK courts against his extradition, taking place at the Royal Courts of Justice on February 20-21, 2024.

The injustices of the case are manifold: firstly, the publication of the files was in the public interest (as with the Pentagon Papers, exposing the horrors of the Vietnam War, which were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and published by the New York Times in 1971), and, secondly, their publication took place in conjunction with major newspapers around the world including the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, McClatchy, La Repubblica, L’Espresso and Aftonbladet. It ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone that Julian and Wikileaks were acting as journalists and publishers, just as their media partners were, and that it is monstrously unjust for the US government to have singled out Julian for prosecution.

Andy worked with Julian and WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release, in April 2011, of the Guantanamo files, classified military files about almost all of the 779 men held by the US military at Guantanamo. The files exposed the woefully poor nature of the US’s supposed “intelligence” regarding the prisoners, identifying how much of it was produced by a number of demonstrably unreliable witnesses amongst the prison’s population, either as a result of torture or other abuse, or through them being bribed with better living conditions.

However, before the files’ significance could be properly realized, the Obama administration abruptly shut down the narrative, miraculously “locating” and killing Osama bin Laden, and allowing a counter-narrative to emerge, which wrongly suggested that the existence of Guantanamo and the CIA “black sites”, and the use of torture, had led to bin Laden’s location being established.

For Andy’s introduction to the release of the Guantanamo files, see: www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/04/25/wikileaks-reveals-secret-guantanamo-files-exposes-detention-policy-as-a-construct-of-lies/
For the files themselves, see: wikileaks.org/gitmo/
And see here for Andy’s analysis of 422 of the files, in 34 detailed articles: www.andyworthington.co.uk/category/2002-2011-the-complete-guantanamo-files-new/