SECRET POWER: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, investigative journalism from the other side of the WikiLeaks issue

SECRET POWER: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies
STEFANIA MAURIZI (tr. Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli), Foreword by Ken Loach
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An uncovering of the terrifying depths of authoritarian power that hide behind the infamous story of WikiLeaks.

*Winner of the European Award for Investigative And Judicial Journalism in 2021 and Premio Alessandro Leogrande 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 organisation 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 organisation 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I dislike what I know of Julian Assange as a human being. That doesn't make what's been happening to him acceptable, still less justifiable. WikiLeaks has been a force internationally for sixteen years now; it's got a pretty spotty record, but that's not a huge surprise given its antipathy to Authority...that kind of puritanism leads the best-intentioned and most honestly passionate defenders of individual liberty down some deep, dark rabbit holes. This is not accidental, or without outside baiting. The use of agents provocateurs and disinformation is an old, effective means to hide actual, factual embarrassments in loud, distracting noise (see: the lives and work of Paul Linebarger and Edward Bernays).

The author is an established investigative journalist. She's won major European awards for her work in this often thankless, always risky role. All this as well as her undeniable personal drive to take on Power on behalf of the ordinary person's right to dictate what they will and won't tolerate from their governing institutions is what made this retelling of the events surrounding the scandals they've caused trustworthy to me. The mass media have, at best, glossed over and/or slanted their coverage uniformly negatively against Assange and WikiLeaks. Books like this are welcome correctives to that kind of Authority-supporting heavily biased coverage.

What matters in the world at large is that people like Assange and Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner are punished, not for being bad people, but for refusing to be silent and complicit in crimes committed by terrible people for vile aims and in service of reprehensible purposes. Author Maurizi makes this crystal clear, which is why the book appeared via Pluto Press not, eg, Random House. Big Business and Big Government are symbiotes.

I still think Assange, the man, is a creep. After eading this book, I am more convinced than ever that he will be made to pay and pay and pay for daring to reveal what the blandly evil rulers are really getting up to. As will, eventually, Author Maurizi and Bill Browder and Jessikka Aro the other people who hold the powerful's crimes up for the public to see clearly and judge.