While dictators kill troublesome journalists with guns and missiles, democracies can afford to be more patient. But the end result is the same.

In most of the countries whose wars I’ve covered over the past 50 years, journalists were fair game. The first deliberate killing I remember took place during Lebanon’s civil war in May 1976, when a sniper shot Le Monde correspondent Edouard Saab. Saab, who also edited Beirut’s French language daily, L’Orient-Le Jour, had excoriated the Syrian regime for stoking Lebanon’s violence … The Syrians were not the only ones killing writers in Lebanon. In 1966, supporters of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser murdered Kamal Mrowe, the esteemed editor-publisher of the Arabic daily Al Hayat. Mossad killed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut in July 1972, two months before I moved there … That’s just the Middle East. In other regions where I’ve worked soldiers and politicians murdered journalists with impunity. There is barely a corner of the globe where reporters are not targets of the powerful forces they challenge. The United States presents itself as an exception, despite its toleration of friendly states, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, that have killed journalists. On World Press Freedom Day, May 3, last year, President Joe Biden declared, “Courageous journalists around the world have shown time and again that they will not be silenced or intimidated. The United States sees them and stands with them.”

America did not stand with the reporters and camera operators from Al Jazeera, Reuters, and Spain’s Telecino in Baghdad when US forces fired on and killed them on April 8, 2003. The case that the killings were unintentional wore thinner in July 2007, when a US Apache helicopter killed a group of unarmed civilians on the streets of Baghdad. Among the dead were Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Only WikiLeaks’ publication of the “Collateral Murder” footage, complete with the crew’s voiced glee at the killings, exposed the official lie.

HMP Belmarsh. It is 2:30 pm on Wednesday, December 13, when Julian Assange strides into the visitors’ area. He stands out in the column of 23 prisoners for his height — 6′ 2″ — and flowing white locks with trimmed beard. He squints, looking for a familiar face among the wives, sisters, sons, and fathers of the other inmates. I am waiting, as assigned, at D-3, one of about 40 sets of small coffee tables surrounded by three upholstered chairs — two blue, one red — screwed into the floor of what looks like a basketball court. We spot each other, walk forward, and embrace. It is the first time I have seen him in six years. I blurt, “You’re pale.” Through a mischievous smile I remember from past meetings, he jokes, “They call it prison pale.”

He has not been outdoors — apart from a minute when police dragged him into a paddy wagon — since he took refuge in London’s cramped Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012. The embassy’s French windows had afforded glimpses of sky. Here at Belmarsh maximum security prison in southeast London, his abode since April 11, 2019, he has not seen the sun. Warders confine him to a cell for 23 out of every 24 hours. His single hour of recreation takes place within four walls, under supervision. His paleness is best described as deathly.