Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies Paperback – November 1, 2022

The toxic hypocrisy of American foreign policy and repression of the First Amendment is laid bare in Stefania Maurizi's investigative book Secret Power.To tell the story of WikiLeaks and the prosecution of its founder Julian Assange, Maurizi filed numerous Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain government documents. Secret Power was published before Assange's 2024 release from prison.Maurizi is uniquely qualified to write this book because she vetted documents leaked to WikiLeaks for authenticity before their publication.When police seized Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019 where he had been seeking asylum, Assange was holding Gore Vidal's book History of the National Security State, a gift from Maurizi.Secret Power explores topics deserving serious discussion such as encryption as a means of freedom, civilian casualties, mass surveillance, extraordinary rendition (government kidnapping), and abuses of The Espionage Act which treats whistleblowers the same as spies.The book reveals that from 2009 to 2019 more than 35,000 Afghan civilians were killed in war. America's State Department is highly critical of American adversaries that kill civilians, but looks the other way when America and its allies such as Israel do the same.If I could make one suggestion, it would be that Maurizi provide her FOIA requests and FOIA responses to WikiLeaks for publication. Perhaps other journalists can study such a document collection and learn how to conduct their own investigations of state power.

As someone who has followed the whole Wikileaks/Julian Assange situation closely for years, this book added so much more context and behind-the-scenes information that was desperately sought after.If you value free speech in any form you must read this. It's imperative that more people understand what is occurring under the current political climate and the war on journalists. Stefania does a wonderful job of outlining exactly what has led to this dire situation in a chronological order that makes understanding the context extremely easy. I was able to breeze through the book in a week and take notes the entire time. I cannot express my gratitude for the amount of work that has gone into such an important piece of literature. Immense amounts of time has gone into the publication of this book and it is not lost on a single thing.Highly recommend.

Secret Power is a testament to Stefania Maurizi's investigative and journalistic prowess and tenacity. Her research and attention to detail gives a history and insights not readily available anywhere else. I applaud her, not only for her considerable skill, but for her devotion to truth and justice. This book should be required reading.

An intriguing and shocking story that reads so smoothly in English, you wouldn't know it was a translation. Kudos to Ms. Maurizi and her translator, Ms. Cavanaugh-Bardelli, for bringing so many significant details to our attention in such a readable way.

The author, a journalist, has worked excessively hard to obtain the information she relays in this very significant and truth revealing book. Anyone interested in first amendment rights will find this book indispensable.

This great book arrived in good shape and in good time.

This is an extremely timely and urgent book, given the looming extradition and prosecution of Wikileaks publisher, Julian Assange. The campaign against Wikileaks has gone on for so long, and involves so many smears, distortions, and complicated backstories that it can be difficult to keep one's mind focused on the core of what's actually at stake. 'Secret Power' is a page turner, so even as someone who has followed closely this history and has had some expertise and proximity to these events, it never dragged, and even I learned things I hadn't known, or in some cases had forgotten over time. Stefania's investigative journalism has been a critical and worthwhile story of its own.This is not a comprehensive history of Wikileaks, per se, but that is not its scope; rather, it is the definitive account so far of the campaign to *silence* Wikileaks. 'Secret Power' pairs well with other important books over the last few years, especially 'The Trial of Julian Assange' by Nils Melzer, 'Readme.txt' by Chelsea Manning, and 'A Century of Repression: The Espionage Act and Freedom of the Press' by Ralph Engelman and Carey Shenkman.

After two seconds youll find things that are left out or flat out wrong, or give false credit to WikiLeaks for things they didn't originally release like the Hacking Team emails. Save your money and inject a Free Assange gif into your veins, its basically the same.

I would be classed as conservative This book is an eye opener. We put too much faith in our government . Where are all the true journalists

This review by Helen Mercer says it all for me: The “secret power” that Stefania Maurizi refers to in this book is the “highest level of power, where secret services, armies and diplomats operate.”Maurizi does not view “secret power” as a conspiracy, but as a description of the way that powerful groups pursue their interests through the various corridors of power.She is not specific what those interests are, but they emerge as the military-industrial complex along with financial interests, global corporations and data firms like Palantir.The “secret power” jealously guards its privacy. It follows that journalists who challenge the secrecy also challenge powerful interests. And it follows again that the same “secret power” will seek to silence those journalists.Maurizi’s story follows the secrets that Wikileaks exposed, the fury of people like Hillary Clinton and Mike Pompeo and the pursuit and torture of Julian Assange.As a committed investigative journalist, she was a participant in that story and gives a comprehensive account of it from the moment her interest was first sparked in 2007.That year Wikileaks published the infamous manual Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, detailing what amounted to methods of psychological torture in use at the Guantanamo base.Maurizi systematically covers clearly the various Wikileaks releases from then on: the files containing the collateral murder video, the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the 281,287 cables from and to US diplomats — known as Cablegate and Vault 7.“It takes a thick skin to read the Iraq war logs with their endlessly described horrors,” she comments.While Assange was under house arrest in December 2010, Maurizi was invited to “a cottage in the English countryside” and given access to the 4,189 cables on Italy and the Vatican in order to verify and publish articles exposing the details.She writes that “the Italy unveiled by the by the cables was a democracy on a very short leash,” and subjected between 2001 and 2010 to enormous pressure by the US to become, for instance, a launching pad for US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Maurizi’s unique and outstanding contribution to the Assange story is the dogged pursuit from 2015 to the present day of freedom of information files across US, British, Swedish and Ecuadorean authorities to explain why the Swedish investigation into the rape allegations against Assange had stalled and Assange seemingly endlessly arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorean embassy.She had to sue the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for the few documents she has and found that a tranche of emails was destroyed, apparently against the CPS guidelines on record retention.Nevertheless, based on Swedish files, she confidently concludes that “it was the British authorities with the CPS who had advised the Swedes against the only legal strategy that could have brought the case to a rapid conclusion, namely questioning Julian Assange in London, rather than insisting on his extradition.”The CPS was headed by Keir Starmer from November 1 2008 to October 31 2013 during the crucial years that Assange’s case could have been brought to a speedy conclusion.Each time that the Swedish authorities might have dropped the case the CPS lawyer involved, Paul Close, warned them not to get “cold feet.”In refusing permission for Assange to leave the Ecuadorean embassy for medical treatment, the CPS wrote to the Swedish prosecutor about Assange’s weight loss and said: “There are many people of my acquaintance (obviously not just women) who would always welcome this.”The “humour” is that of a concentration camp guard. That a senior British civil servant should express such sentiments in official correspondence raises serious questions about the dominant culture in Keir Starmer’s CPS.The actions of the CPS in this period lead inexorably in 2019 to Assange’s arrest and imprisonment in Belmarsh.As a powerful account this book is vital reading. I could have wished for more detail about the FOI queries for there is enough material in that story alone for a separate book.Maurizi writes with a journalist’s verve and a campaigner’s passion and this book is a major contribution to the campaign to free Julian Assange.I bought 10 copies to give to friends.

Stefania Maurizi is not just a witness of Wikileak's development from its early years but experienced many events on her own. In other terms, she knows what she's writing about. The book not just points out the most important work of the publisher but also sheds a light of the events that accured while she was working as an investigative journalist with them. Therefore, the information is first hand.I think it's a very important piece of history, just like Nils Melzer's deep investigation of Assange's case. While he focused mainly on the case itself, Maurizi writes about her experiences from the past and her frustrating attempts to receive information from the gouvernments under the FOIA (Freedom of information Act), which gives the right to ask any public sector organisation for information.The facts that she found out (and also didn't!!) are showing that there are literally "secret powers" within the gouvernment, that try to undermine not just a free press, the first amendment of the US and democracy, but our freedom to know the truth too. We only can have a real democracy, if it is based on truth.The enemies of Wikileaks tried to create a huge fog of smear campaigns and persecute its founder for "publishing" the truth. 175 years prison for publishing war crimes, while the people in charge didn't get any punishment at all? There were even plans to kidnap and assasinate Mr. Assange while he was in the embassy and extraditing a person to a foreign country that planned such horrible things is completely irresponsible. This man should be as free as the truth, that he had published, just like other journalists at the time.Conclusion:The more you read the book, the more you understand that there must be a cooperation between secret powers, with the only intention not just to take revenge but especially to intimidate future Whistleblowers, Journalists and Publishers to not dare to share an inconvenient truth with the public. The world only can grow in a positive way, if the public gets educated through the truth and facts. As long as we get lied into wars or manipulated to believe in lies, we can't be a real democracy. As long as we persecute people for telling the truth, we're far away from becoming a healthy society. Maurizi's book is a very important work and summary of the last 15 years and the actual proceedings. Thanks for this amazing piece of history. Therefore, 5 Stars out of five!

I read the italian version and then the English version, because it contains new revelations from Maurizi's FOIA. This book is a must-read. It is intriguing, highly readable and rigorously documented. Ken Loach is right: this case is a monstrous injustice.

I thought Stefania was a very convincing advocate, and totally worthy of her recognition.