What is the purpose of journalism? Not, as the Murdoch press might suggest, to manufacture a taste for celebrity tittle-tattle. Not, as the BBC might suggest, to act as cheerleader for Team GB in all its various incarnations. Not, as capitalist governments across the world might suggest, to trumpet the national interest which just so happens to coincide with the corporate global interest. And certainly not as the Chinese government too often insists, to promote the party line, right or wrong. No, the purpose of journalism, in the past, in the here and now, and for all time, is to hold power to account, to make bureaucracy transparent, and to expose injustice and uphold the rights of the marginalised and alienated.

In this respect Julian Assange, by his decision to publish government official documents on his WikiLeaks website has done all this and more. He has upheld the highest standards of journalism by daring to tread where most of the media fear to tread. He has squared up directly to Uncle Sam and said; do your damnedest. And by doing so, he is following in the honourable and heroic tradition of John PIlger, Michael Moore, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Tariq Ali and of course the legendary Noam Chomsky.

The arguments against Assange fall into two categories; the first relating to the sexual misconduct accusations from Sweden, the second from the US government concerning the potential security breakdown caused by the publishing of the unredacted US military emails. The first category of complaints is somewhat ludicrous and reeks of CIA dirty tricks. This whole Swedish rape accusation smells of a set up. As for Assange, I understand he has been more than willing to answer questions via a video link-up but the Swedes won’t play ball. And remember, no formal charges have been laid against Assange, just some unsubstantiated accusations of failing to use a condom. Rape is a mighty serious offence and if there is any real case to answer then Assange must face the music, but at this point in time it’s all shadows and obscurity. Let the Swedish authorities travel to London and question Assange in front of his lawyers in the safety of the Ecuadorian embassy. If they then have a concrete case that is another matter. Otherwise, all attention should shift to the real matter in hand the US government’s bloody nose.

The US Government argue that by publishing these hundreds of thousands of emails without considering the security implications, Assange has put thousands of military lives at risk and has aided the enemy at a time of war. But what is this war that the US refers to? It is the so-called war on terror, first brought into bloody being by the Bush government and now enthusiastically pursued by the Obama administration. Who authorised this war? In whose name is it being executed? What popular plebiscite, in either the US or the UK, has given the green light to a war now twice as long as the Second World War, and fast catching up with the decades long war against the Vietnamese people?

Whatever one’s opinion on the validity of military action against the Taliban and Al Qaida, creating a network of concentration camps across the globe, where suspects are secretly flown in, illegally using third party air bases, and where torture is routinely used on these suspects in contravention of all US and global law, is a crime, and one that Assange’s journalist project sought to spread light on. The horrendous toll on Afghan civilians is also brought to light by the WikiLeak disclosures. This is the role of journalism, but how many mainstream western journalists have had the courage or determination to do the leg work? None save Assange. When the first tranche of documents were released the Guardian got to work to make some sort of sense of them. Here is their summation:

The fog of war is unusually dense in Afghanistan. When it lifts, as it does today, a very different landscape is revealed from the one we have become familiar. These war logs written in the heat of engagement show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast to the tidied up and sanitised public war, as glimpsed through official communiques as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting The Guardian has spent weeks sifting through this ocean of data, which has gradually yielded the hidden texture and human horror stories inflicted day to day during an often clumsily prosecuted war.

The collective picture that emerges is a very disturbing one. We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported. P126 WikiLeaks; Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. David Leigh and Luke Harding.

As for Afghanistan so the WikiLeak disclosures lifted the lid on the brutal realities of the US and UK decidedly illegal war in Iraq.

Leigh and Harding sum up the global importance of the documents as thus: ‘They highlighted the geographical interests and preoccupations of the US superpower; nuclear proliferation; the supposed threat from Iran; the hard to control military situation in Kabul and Islamabad. But more importantly than this, they included disclosures of things citizens are entitled to know. The cables discussed human rights abuses, corruption, and dubious financial ties between G8 leaders. They spoke of corporate espionage, dirty tricks and hidden bank accounts. They give relatively frank, unmediated assessments, offering a window into the mental processes at the top of US power. The cables were, in a way, the truth.’ P212

For a detailed account of what’s in the WikiLeak disclosures, Leigh and Harding’s book is as good a place as any to start. But the overriding message from both these two authors and the Guardian’s own research, is that the disclosures are firmly in the public interest. And that, after all, is precisely what investigative journalism is meant to be about. Assange probably is a bit predatory and brash on the womanising front but he isn’t alone in that regard. He assumed pop star status and similarly attracted a posse of female admirers. He’s no more or less guilty on that front than Mick Jagger and friends. But as a journalist who is prepared to hold power to account, no matter what the personal risk, he has very few peers. He has single- handedly given journalism back some credibility after the never-ending exposure of criminality by the Murdoch empire. It is not imprisonment and censor that Julian Assange deserves, but a Pulitzer Prize for journalism of the highest quality.