The Walkley Foundation awarded its highest distinction -- for "Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism" -- to WikiLeaks, whose leader, Julian Assange, is an Australian citizen. What makes this award so notable is that the United States -- for exactly the same reasons the Foundation cited in honoring WikiLeaks' journalism achievements -- has spent the last year trying to criminalize and destroy the group.

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The Walkley Awards are the Australian equivalent of the Pulitzers: that nation's most prestigious award for excellence in journalism. Last night, the Walkley Foundation awarded its highest distinction -- for "Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism" -- to WikiLeaks, whose leader, Julian Assange, is an Australian citizen. The panel cited the group's "courageous and controversial commitment to the finest traditions of journalism: justice through transparency," and hailed it for having "applied new technology to penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup."

As I've noted before, WikiLeaks easily produced more newsworthy scoops over the last year than every other media outlet combined, and the Foundation observed: "so many eagerly took advantage of the secret cables to create more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime." In sum: "by designing and constructing a means to encourage whistleblowers, WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange took a brave, determined and independent stand for freedom of speech and transparency that has empowered people all over the world."

What makes this award so notable is that the United States -- for exactly the same reasons the Foundation cited in honoring WikiLeaks' journalism achievements -- has spent the last year trying to criminalize and destroy the group, with some success. Showing the true colors of America's political class, U.S. politicians like Dianne Feinstein plotted to prosecute WikiLeaks for its journalism and Joe Lieberman thuggishly demanded that private corporations cut off all funds to the group (most of which complied), while others, like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, branded them Enemy Combatants and called for them to be treated like Terrorists. Meanwhile, the Obama administration -- while parading around the world as defenders of Internet freedom and a free press -- harassed its supporters with laptop seizures at airports and Twitter subpoenas. Recall that the Pentagon, all the way back in a top secret 2008 report, declared WikiLeaks -- which also received the 2009 award from Amnesty International for excellence in New Media -- an enemy of the state and plotted how to destroy it.

It is telling indeed that the U.S. -- with the backing of its subservient allied governments -- has devoted itself to the destruction of the world's most effective journalistic outlet. It is equally telling that the Obama administration has subjected Bradley Manning -- who is accused of (more accurately: credited with) having exposed to WikiLeaks and then the world endless amounts of illegality and corruption -- to pre-trial detention conditions so harsh and inhumane that its own State Department spokesman vehemently denounced that treatment and ultimately resigned over it.

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Authors Bio:

[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning.

For his 2013 NSA reporting, working with his source Edward Snowden, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win); and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was also awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A film about the work Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras did with Snowden to report the NSA archive, "CitizenFour," directed by Poitras, was awarded the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

In 2019, he received the Special Prize from the Vladimir Herzog Institute for his reporting on the Bolsonaro government and pervasive corruption inside the prosecutorial task force that led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The award is named after the Jewish immigrant journalist who was murdered during an interrogation by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1977. Several months after the reporting began, Lula was ordered released by the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the former President credited the expose's for his liberty. In early 2020, Brazilian prosecutors sought to prosecute Greenwald in connection with the reporting, but the charges were dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling, based on the Constitutional right of a free press, that barred the Bolsonaro government from making good on its threats to retaliate against Greenwald.

After working as a journalist at Salon and The Guardian, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2013 along with Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill, and co-founded The Intercept Brasil in 2016. He resigned fromThe Intercept in October, 2020, to return to independent journalism.

Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with his husband, Congressman David Miranda, their two children, and 26 rescue dogs. In 2017, Greenwald and Miranda created an animal shelter in Brazil supported in part through public donations designed to employ and help exit the streets homeless people who live on the streets with their pets.