Assange Unbound

An ancient primer on the modern threat to journalism

You’ve probably heard of Prometheus, how he stole fire from the gods. Maybe you know about his punishment, that Zeus chained him up to a boulder and a bird of prey descended upon him each day to gnaw at his liver only for the organ to regenerate overnight. The torment rivals anything Dante invented.

But did you know that Prometheus used to be Zeus’s BFF, even if that last F proved cynical? Or that Zeus enlisted him and his brother to create humans? The monotheists who wrote Genesis omitted the inconvenient truth that Prometheus fashioned us humans out of the earth. It’s true. Without him we might have all still been sad, dried-up, little clumps of clay on the Thessalonian coast. The least we can do as living, breathing, (semi) conscious beings is take a minute to learn about our forefather. Not to mention that the tale of Prometheus sheds a fiery light on our time. As the Faulkner quote goes (and which true to form never seems to die), The past is never dead. It’s not even past. 

I write today, on U.S. Independence Day, of Prometheus’ enduring relevance because last week Julian Assange was freed after a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice. It’s not the first time I’ve written about Prometheus and Assange:

But back to this 4th of July post. Let’s start from the beginning.

The one-minute lowdown on Prometheus

José Clemente Orozco, “Prometheus,” 1930, mural

Prometheus was one of the Titans, the older pre-Olympian Greek Gods. His name means “forethought” in Greek. A cunning, Odyssean¹ trickster, he shrewdly broke ranks and sided with the Olympians in the Titanomachy, the epic ten-year Freudian struggle between father (Cronus and Titans) and son (Zeus and his siblings). Once the Olympians won the war, Prometheus and Zeus became besties. They were so tight, in fact, that Zeus put Prometheus in charge of creating humans (unlike Prometheus’ brother Atlas, who fought on the wrong side and was consequently saddled with forever holding up the world on his shoulders and having tomes of maps named after him).

There was one condition to Prometheus’ creation: no fire allowed. Fire would make humans too powerful and self-sufficient, and Zeus needed man slavish and dependent and in perpetual awe and worship of his supremacy. But Prometheus wanted to set the serfs free. The rest of the story, you probably know: Prometheus steals fire and Zeus punishes him by chaining him up for eternity to have his guts eaten daily.

A tough fate, no doubt, but Prometheus has endured for Romantics and anti-authoritarians² as the godfather of individualism and human potential, the arch-rebel in defiance of unjust rule. Milton surely had Prometheus in mind when conceiving Satan for Paradise Lost. You’ll even see echoes of Prometheus in the opening of this summer’s Olympic Games. The carrying of the torch represents the sacred fire stolen from the heavens.

What most don’t know, though, is that there’s a happy ending to Prometheus’ macabre fate, at least by Hesiod’s account. After Hercules completed his eleventh labor, he sought out Prometheus for advice on his twelfth challenge – to obtain the golden apples of the Hesperides. Upon finding Prometheus being rather indecorously eaten alive, Hercules killed the eagle by shooting it with arrows dipped in the poisonous blood of the Hydra, then freed him from his chains. In return, Prometheus offered Hercules the strategic intel that he needed. Give, and it shall be given unto you.

Now let’s skip ahead through generations of gods and mortals to the present time. Despite all the usual media distortion that needs debullshitting, I won’t descend too deeply into the procedural weeds on the Assange timeline (although I’m happy to in the comments, so fire away). But here’s a brief on the latest development:

The one-minute(ish) lowdown on Assange’s release

Mr. Fish, “Free as a Bird,” 2024

Julian Assange is at last free after a dozen years of confinement, first in an Ecuadorian Embassy and then, despite not having been convicted of a crime, in the UK’s high security Belmarsh prison, in return for pleading guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose national security information. The justification given for this trumped up charge (Trumped up too, as I’ll explain shortly) is that he helped Chelsea Manning avoid detection in 2010 when leaking government secrets regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and asked Manning if there was any more material.

This may sound terribly conspiratorial and criminal, but it’s what any journalist does: you ensure your source is protected and gather as much info as you can. Since they can’t prosecute Assange for publishing the secrets – after all, major media outlets, including the New York Times, which constantly leaks classified info, might also then be guilty (which is why the Obama administration decided against prosecuting him) – they’ve tried to build a case that he conspired with and encouraged Chelsea Manning to leak info, which again is the same thing as publishing it, just dressed up in legalese.

This isn’t a court ruling so it can’t be used to prosecute other Promethean journalists who defy Zeus’s authority, but it will serve to intimidate them. It’s hard to say if the prosecution against Assange would have held up in the U.S., even in a kangaroo court. The people who run things for Biden also would not have wanted the appearance of a political prisoner on trial in an election year, especially when the administration’s pitch is that they are the guardians of democracy and press freedom (remember that at the last Press Correspondent’s Dinner, the imprisonment of Assange tellingly never came up amidst all the outrage over Navalny and amidst all the self-congratulatory American exceptionalism.) Instead, after mounting public pressure, they released Assange, but only upon demanding his guilty plea on an Espionage Act felony. In doing so, they sent an icy message to journalists: if you’re an adversarial journalist instead of a court stenographer, you face the threat of prosecution.

Of course, the irony is that Assange is despised by Democratic Party loyalists not because of the charge – conspiracy with Chelsea Manning – but due to his Wikileaking of the Hillary Clinton emails and the role this may have played in Trump’s victory. That’s the moment Zeusy Democrats turned on Assange, whom they tolerated and even lauded as a BFF back when he was exposing Bush administration malfeasance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But lest you think I place all blame on the Biden cabal, let me add that it was Trump, the gatecrasher who campaigned on “draining the swamp,” whose quintessential bog-creature appointee for head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, coerced Ecuador to allow the London police to enter their embassy and arrest Assange. It’s under Trump in 2019, thanks to Pompeo and his zeal to destroy Assange and Wikileaks, that this bogus espionage indictment was concocted to keep him in prison. Trump may have praised Assange and Wikileaks in rhetoric, but his administration proved the most damaging to Assange and, in at least regarding this instance of cooked-up prosecution, to journalism more broadly. Not that Biden and co. weren’t happy to keep up the charade for three more years, ensuring Assange remained in a 2-by-3-meter cell in isolation for 23 hours a day, and releasing him only after they had exacted their pound of espionage flesh.

There you have it. I’ll leave you to draw the connections between past and present, myth and fact. I did descend more deeply into the procedural weeds than I intended, but when there are no flowers, sometimes you just have to stop and smell the turds.

Prometheus and Zeus. Assange and the security state. Fire and chains.

1. To be fair, it’s Odysseus who should be referred to as Promethean. We know here which chicken hatched which egg.

2. And for me, too. This Substack was almost titled Fire and Chains. In fact, punch in fireandchains.com into your address bar and it redirects you to this Substack. I would have gone with it had it not sounded a little too much like Game of Thrones fan fiction or a bondage site (then again, maybe that’s a good thing).