Julian Assange’s lawyer said that Assange is too sick to carry on a normal conversation, that his health has deteriorated since his arrest, and that he has been transferred to the health ward of Belmarsh prison.
His health had reportedly been failing even before his arrest, as a result of being cooped up in a windowless room for seven years and not being able to get medical care he needed.
There is now no good reason why he shouldn’t receive all the care he needs, and it is possible that he is receiving such care. I hope my suspicions are groundless, and maybe they are.
But the events of the past 15 or 20 years have left me unable to say, “Such and such is impossible because the British (or U.S.) government would never do such a thing.”
It would be much more convenient from the U.S. and British governments if he were to die before being put on trial. And treating Assange as some sort of super-villain terrorist who requires extra isolation from human contact is one way to accomplish that.
The U.S. Department of Justice has indicated Julian Assange on new charges—violation of the Espionage Act of 1917—which carry a maximum penalty of 175 years in prison.
What he is accused of is publishing confidential information disclosing American war crimes in Iraq in 2010.
The previous indictment accused him only of aiding and abetting unauthorized access to computer files, which would have meant a maximum penalty of five years.
Violations of some sections of the Espionage Act carry a maximum penalty of death, but these involve giving military secrets to an enemy in time of war, which Assange is not accused of.
He would most likely wind up in the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, and conceivably could spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement.
If he can be sent to prison for that, it means that the U.S. government has the power to commit crimes, up to and including murder, classify the evidence of those crimes as secret and send anybody who discloses those crimes to prison.
If he is sent to prison for that, it means that such freedom of the press as exists in the United States exists at the whim of whoever is in charge of the government.
So far as I know, the only prominent politician who has come to the defense of Julian Assange is Tulsi Gabbard.
In other news, Chelsea Manning is back in prison for refusing to testify against Assange.
And the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has rejected a resolution demanding that the President ask permission from Congress before attacking Iran.
Consortium News is publishing a series called “The Revelations of Wikileaks,” a reminder of the the vital Wikileaks disclosures. They’re valuable reading both for their content and as a reminder of the world’s debt to Julian Assange.
This post consists of links to these articles. I will add links to additional articles as they are published.
The ultimate threat to Wikileaks is not that Julian Assange may be executed or imprisoned for life. The ultimate threat is that the NSA, GCHQ, FSB or some other intelligence agency will crack the Wikileaks code.
If a government can commit crimes in secret, and can make it a crime to reveal that secret, there is no barrier to dictatorship and tyranny.
The greatness of Julian Assange was to create a program whereby whistleblowers could divulge secrets without revealing their identity, even to Wikileaks itself.
Assange is the founder and public face of Wikileaks, but there are other members who help keep it up and running, and who will continue even if Assange is put away. If Wikileaks is shut down, the architecture of the system is available to anyone who wants to use it. Most important news organizations have a Wikileaks-like system for receiving confidential information.
But this is not an achievement that will stand for once and for all.
I have no doubt that governments and corporations are working night and day to find ways to hack the Wikileaks system, and unmask the leakers and truth-tellers. If and when they do, they will not announce it.
In 2010, Pvt Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was caught sending unauthorized information to Wikileaks because she unwisely talked to an informer. But now prosecutors have actual transcripts showing Manning conversed with Assange.
I wonder whether the authorities had these transcripts all along, or whether Assange and Manning used a secure communication system that the government only recently was able to crack.
I hope that the people who believe in disclosure are working just as hard to strengthen and protect the system as the government is to crack it. This is a race that will not end until either all dissent is crushed or the veil of secrecy is removed from the crimes of governments—I say “governments” plural because it is not just the U.S. government that Wikileaks threatens.
John Helmer, an independent reporter who mostly writes about Russia, said that Julian Assange’s British lawyers will defend him by putting American justice on trial.
British courts have refused Russian requests to extradite Russians on corruption charges, on the grounds that the Russians would not get a fair trial. They almost certainly would not extradite a Russian on charges of revealing state secrets.
Assange’s lawyers will argue that Assange cannot get a fair trial in the United States any more than an anti-government Russian could get a fair trial in Russia.
The U.S. government has charged Assange with conspiring with then-Pvt. Bradley Manning to gain unauthorized access to a government computer, a charge that carries a maximum five-year sentence.
Ecuador released Assange on the understanding that he would not be tried in a country with the death penalty. The United States of course has the death penalty, just not on that particular charge.
Assange’s lawyers will argue that there is no guarantee that, once Assange is in U.S. custody, additional charges will not be added, including violation of the Espionage Act, which carries a possible penalty of death.
The computer tampering that Assange is accused of helping occurred in March, 2010.
Assange’s lawyers will argue that, if he was in London at that time, he should be tried on this charge in a British court, not an American one.
Overall, their strategy will be to try to put the United States government on trial rather than Assange.
The Defense Department’s Cyber Counterintelligence Assessment Branch in 2008 called on the U.S. government to build a campaign to destroy Assange’s reputation and eradicate the feeling of trust the public had in Wikileaks. It’s safe to say that his reputation now is not what it was then.
Caitlin Johnstone and her followers have compiled a comprehensive rebuttal to all the accusations against Julian Assange that have been spread over the past seven years.
If you care about Assange, truth-telling or freedom of the press, I recommend you bookmark her article so you’ll have it for reference. You ought to be able to use a search function to go directly to the item you want to see refuted.
The U.S. Department of Justice cleverly Julian Assange is conspiracy to commit computer hacking—not violation of the Espionage Act.
This means that he would not face the possibility of execution or life imprisonment, as would have been possible under the Espionage Act. The maximum penalty he faces is five years in prison. Also, he would get a trial in a civil court and not before a secret military tribunal.
But it also makes his extradition more certain. UK prosecutors promised President Moreno of Ecuador that Assange wouldn’t be extradited to a country with the death penalty. The United States has the death penalty, but extraditing him to be tried for computer hacking rather than espionage could be seen as a way to keep this promise.
It also means Assange’s lawyers wouldn’t be able to raise the issue of abuse of the Espionage Act as a vehicle for censorship..
I say all this conditionally because there is a strong possibilitythat additional charges will be added later.
The conventional wisdom is that Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno booted Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy because of pressure from Washington.
President Moreno agreed to Washington’s demands that he deny asylum to Assange and dropping claims against Chevron for environmental damage to Ecuador’s rain forest.
He then received $10.2 billion in rescue loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, both headquartered in Washington and dominated by the United States.
CNNand Vox reported claims of strange behavior by Assange—behavior characteristic of a prisoner in solitary confinement who has had a mental breakdown. If true, Assange is in need of psychiatric help.
Now people who defy the powers-that-be are always targets of character assassination. All this could well be a smear. It should be noted that neither CNN nor Vox quotes embassy staff or anyone else who personally observed Assange’s behavior, nor shows any effort to get Assange’s side of the story.
But Assange’s friends say he has suffered a deterioration in physical and mental health and has been denied access to care. I hope he gets whatever care he needs.
The CNN report said that the Ecuadorian government’s main complaint against Assange was that he interfered in Ecuador’s internal affairs and tried to destabilize the country.
Vox also wrote that Moreno’s main complaint against Assange is that he refused to cease political activity, even when embarrassing to his host country. He wrote that Moreno blames him for a leak of documents to an anonymous web site showing that he and his family may have profited from offshore bank accounts in Panama.
Julian Assange removed from Ecuadorian embassy. Source: Ruptly
British police have arrested Julian Assange and taken him from the Ecuadorian embassy, where he was given political asylum nearly seven years ago.
He’ll stand trial on charges of breaking the agreement that allowed him to be released on bail while he was fighting extradition to Sweden to answer questions in regard to alleged rape. That case was dropped several years ago.
But his case was never treated as a routine extradition case. The U.S. government regards him as a one-man hostile foreign power because his WikiLeaks organization published secret documents and videos documenting U.S. crimes, notably in the Collateral Murder video.
The issue is not whether he is guilty of jumping bail. The issue is whether someone can be sentenced to prison for publishing information that a government wants to keep secret.
The practice until now is that whistleblowers are charged as criminals, just like spies, but newspapers and broadcasters have not been charged for publishing the information they get from whistleblowers.
Admittedly this is not logical, but it has made possible a rough balance between government’s need to keep certain information confidential and the public’s right to know what government is doing behind its back.
If Assange is extradited to the United States and convicted of espionage, it will create a precedent by which the editors of the New York Times can be prosecuted for publishing leaked information. In fact, in theory, the editors of The Guardian in London could be prosecuted by the U.S. government.
Assange is an Australian citizen and has never been based in the United States. If he falls within U.S. jurisdiction, so does anyone on the planet.
He has a reputation for being a difficult person. I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t think anybody’s disposition would be improved by being cooped up in a couple of rooms and never going outside for nearly seven years.
He is a hero. He has defied the world’s biggest superpower to make known the truth. It will be a sad day if he goes to prison for revealing the truth.
Chelsea Manning went to prison for seven years for leaking true information about U.S. atrocities in Iraq to WikiLeaks. Now she has been imprisoned again for refusing to testify before a Grand Jury that is considering indictment WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange for publishing that information.
She is a hero. Julian Assange is a hero. Caitlin Johnstone sums up the situation well.
The United States government has just re-imprisoned one of the nation’s greatest whistleblowers to coerce her into helping to destroy the world’s greatest leak publisher, both of whom exposed undeniably true facts about war crimes committed by that same United States government. Truth tellers are being actively persecuted by this same power structure which claims it has the moral authority to topple governments and interfere in international affairs around the world, exactly because they told the truth.
Please take a moment to make sure you’re really appreciating this. Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt power can be fought with the light of truth, and corrupt power has responded by smearing, silencing, and persecuting him and doing everything it can to stomp out the light of truth, up to and including re-imprisoning an already viciously brutalized American hero like Chelsea Manning.
Self-described liberals such as Rachel Maddow have turned on Julian Assange because he published information unfavorable to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign. They say he was in cahoots with Donald Trump. Then why is the Trump administration going all-out to put Assange in prison?
The case for Julian Assange in a nutshell is that it should not be a crime to expose abuse of power by government.
The I Am WikiLeaks web site, established by the Courage Foundation, gives a more detailed account of Julian Assange’s life and work, and the various charges against him. Courage has prepared infographics that give the essence of Assange’s case.
The rule of law is a fundamental principle, at least as basic or maybe more basic than voting rights and freedom of the press.
This is part of our British heritage, going back to Magna Carta—the idea that nobody, not even the King, is above the law, and nobody, not even the humblest cottager, is below the protection of the law.
For us Americans, the rule of law was part of our Constitution even before we had a specific Bill of Rights.
The Constitution from the beginning has guaranteed the right of habeas corpus, which means the right of arrested persons to be told what law they are accused of breaking, and forbid ex post facto laws, which declared things illegal after they were done, and bills of attainder, which declared certain persons outside the protection of the law.
I was shocked and disillusioned by how easily, after the 9/11 attacks, these fundamental principles were forgotten.
The Bush administration, the Obama administration and now the Trump administration claim the right to order the killing of anyone they deem a threat to the state, based on secret criteria and without accountability to anyone.
George W. Bush had a kill list. Barack Obama called has a “disposition matrix”. I don’t know what Trump calls it. Most of us middle-class white Americans of have come to regard it as normal, possibly because we think only people with dark skins and Arab names will ever be on it.
I read a chilling article by Matt Taibbi about a journalist who figured out he is on the kill list, and is trying to get off it. He doesn’t know what he is accused of nor how to appeal.
Julian Assange is in a situation in some ways similar to this journalist. A grand jury has been meeting in Alexandria, Va., since 2010 to consider his case. James Comey, when he was FBI director, and Attorney-General Jeff Sessions have said they intend to apprehend Assange.
Suppose a government claimed the right to commit crimes, make those crimes state secrets and prosecute anyone who revealed them to the public.
Could you call such a government democratic? Could you say its people enjoyed freedom of the press?
Yet that is what the U.S. government wants to do to Julian Assange.
Assange is the founder of Wikileaks, which makes it possible for whistle-blowers to reveal secret documents without their identity being traced. Wikileaks publications revealed, among other things, the secret bibles of Scientology, censored videos of protests in Tibet, secret neo-Nazi passwords, offshore tax scams by Barclay’s bank, the inside story of the crashing of Iceland’s economy and texts of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
What got him into trouble was publication of information of crimes committed by the U.S. government, notably the killing of civilians in Iraq, and secret surveillance of the public by U.S. intelligence agencies. That is why the U.S. government is determined to capture and imprison him.
The espionage laws are intended to punish those who give military secrets to a hostile foreign power. In the case of Julian Assange, it is we, the people, who were given the secrets. We are the supposed enemy.
A U.S. grand jury investigation of Assange has been ongoing since 2010. It is widely believed that it has made sealed indictments against Assange.
He sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 to avoid extradition to the United States. Since March, the Ecuadorian government has cut him off from communicating with the outside world, except for his lawyers and Australian consular officials.
Reportedly the government is planning to expel him from the embassy, leaving him subject to arrest by British police and extradition to the USA. There his likely fate will be imprisonment, probably for life, or execution.
What can be done to Assange can be done to anyone who reveals information the U.S. government wants kept secret. Anyone who cares about freedom of the press, or their own freedom, should stand with Julian Assange.
The Guardian reported that Ecuador has spent more than $5 million on closed-circuit TV cameras, 24-hour monitoring and other surveillance of Julian Assange, who took refuge in their London embassy in 2012.
Every communication by Assange with the outside world was monitored and recorded. Guardian reporters were given access to this information. I imagine British and U.S. intelligence services also have access to it.
The thrust of the articles is what a nuisance Assange has become to the Ecuadorian government and how understandable it is that they want to get rid of their unwelcome guest. I am sure this is true. If I were president of a small, vulnerable country such as Ecuador, I would not wish to antagonize the United States and other great powers.
What the articles also show is Assange’s uncompromising loyalty to his self-appointed mission. The government of Ecuador expected him to refrain from “interfering” with other countries’ politics. Assange’s publication of confidential e-mails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton was regarded as a violation of that, as washis protest against the arrest of a Catalan independen
Then Assange went on to destroy any hope of a pardon from the Trump administration by publishing more confidential CIA information. He published new information about Russian intelligence surveillance. Like him or not, you can’t reasonably say Wikileaks is a tool of any government or political faction.
All of this shows that the campaign against Assange is political. It is not about criminal justice. No routine bail bond case would ever result in the huge and expensive effort mounted by the British and Ecuadorian governments to bring Assange under control. Only the naive would think that his only risk is punishment for bail bond violations.
He is a lone individual, standing up to the world’s most powerful governments and calling them to account. He is hated and feared for telling inconvenient truths. How can anyone who cares about political freedom not defend him? It is Assange’s enemies, not him, who have to justify themselves.
These may be the last days of Julian Assange. He is under virtual solitary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, cut off from contact with the outside world, while the Ecuadorian government is reportedly discussing handing him over to the British government.
He faces arrest jumping bail in a case in which no criminal charges were ever brought, but his real offense has been to publish information embarrassing to U.S. military and intelligence services.
You would think that liberals, progressives and war protestors would rally to the support of Assange, but, for the most part, they don’t.
I know people who in their youth protested the Vietnam War and supported the release of the Pentagon Papers, but can’t forgive Assange for publishing inconvenient truths about Hillary Clinton—as if Clinton were an advocate of peace!
It is not as if the Trump administration considers Assange a friend. Attorney-General Jeff Sessions said arresting Assange is “a priority.” Mike Pompeo, former CIA director and now Secretary of State, called Wikileaks a “hostile intelligence service”, as if it were equivalent to a foreign government.
Assange is not a perfect person. Who is? He is a lone wolf who is not aligned with any of the established political parties or movements. He sometimes expresses himself in offensive ways. He hangs out with doubtful people. A relentless propaganda campaign has uncovered everything he has even done that might seem to be wrong.
Grant for the sake of argument that everything said against him is true (which I don’t believe). Weigh that against the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives taken in the wars of the Bush and Obama administrations, and in the wars we can expect to be waged in the Trump administration.
In Wikileaks, he has created a technology by which whistle-blowers can expose crimes and abuses without being hunted down and jailed. This technology will live on when Assange the individual has vanished from the scene.
Assange’s possible fate is to be turned over to U.S. authorities, followed by execution or life imprisonment. But that hasn’t happened yet. If you care about peace, or if you care about freedom of the press, demand freedom for Julian Assange.
LINKS
Being Julian Assange by Suzie Dawson. This is a review and rebuttal of most or all the accusations that have been made against Assange.
The Australian journalist John Pilger wrote a good article about Hillary Clinton’s book tour of Australia and her vicious attacks on Julian Assange.
Clinton has made herself rich and powerful by serving the interests of militarists and plutocrats. Assange has effectively lost his freedom, and may well end his life in prison, for revealing the secrets of militarists and plutocrats.
Yet Clinton has been able to persuade journalists that she is a victim and that Assange is her persecutor.
I find it amazing that Assange has never yet been shown to have published any material that turned out to be bogus. That is more than the New York Times and Washington Post can claim.
Power corrupts, the saying goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If a government has the power to commit crimes in secret, and to punish people for revealing its crimes, what limit is there on its absolute power.
That is why Julian Assange, the founder and leader of Wikileaks, is a hero. He has sacrificed his freedom and risked his life to make known crimes and abuses by the U.S. and other governments.
Here’s what he said about his aims back in 2006—
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are non-linearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.
Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.
Of course this is inherently dangerous. Making powerful immoral people paranoid about having their crimes revealed will reduce the effectiveness of those powerful immoral people, either by damaging their reputations or making them afraid to communicate with each other or both. But it’s a given that if you keep it up, these powerful people will use their power against you.
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CIA Director Mike Pompeo said in a recent speech that Assange’s Wikileaks should be suppressed because it is a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” In other words, Wikileaks gathers information that governments don’t want it to know, and publishes it—just like any other muckraking news organization.
The difference is that Wikileaks, like other publishers, gathers intelligence on behalf of the public and not a foreign government. If you say the distinction doesn’t matter, then freedom of the press does not include the right to tell the truth; it means nothing except the right to express mere opinion.
Five days ago Julian Assange stated on Twitter that he would agree to be extradited to the United States if President Obama freed Chelsea Manning. Today President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, effective May 17.
Manning is the former U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning who provided information to Wikileaks about military coverups. He has served nearly seven years of a 35-year sentence, the longest term any American has served for leaking information to the public.
Among the information that he revealed were reports that civilian casualties in Iraq were higher than reported. He also gave Wikileaks the video footage used below..
I don’t have any way of knowing whether President Obama’s decision to commute Manning’s sentence was done out of humanitarian feeling, or whether it was result of negotiations with Assange.
If it was Obama’s unconditional decision, he deserves credit for doing the right thing.
If it is part of an agreement to trade Assange for Manning, then all I can say is that Assange is a brave and honorable man, and Obama is not.
We’ll see what happens in May. If Assange does surrender, we’ll see what President Trump does.
Julian Assange, in addition to his great service in bringing secret facts to light, is an interesting thinker. The video shows fellow Australian John Pilger, a noted investigative journalist, interviewing Assange on the coming U.S. election and his current status.
Here are some highlights of the interview:
Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable.
The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist it. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.
We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State. [snip]
Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing. [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations.
∞∞∞
Julian Assange: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
Russian intelligence services are accused of waging cyber-warfare by releasing embarrassing Hillary Clinton e-mails through Wikileaks.
There is no direct evidence of where Wikileaks got the Clinton e-mails, but the Russians have the capability and the motive to hack her system.
Would this be an act of war? I for one would welcome war by means of weaponized truth.
If revealing accurate information about your geopolitical enemy is a form of warfare, I think escalation of this kind of warfare would be a good thing and not a bad thing.
I think the NSA and the CIA should retaliate by arranging the release of damaging secret information about Vladimir Putin—maybe through Wikileaks as a form of poetic justice.
In fact, there are those who think they already have done so, through the Panama Papers leak
I haven’t seen anything in the news accounts of the Democratic National Committee e-mails that is either new or shocking.
We the public knew before the DNC hacks that the committee members and staff were supporters of Hillary Clinton. That’s what smart and successful politicians do—put their supporters in positions of influence.
The e-mails reveal how much the DNC people disliked Sanders and favored Clinton, but I haven’t seen anything that shows the e-mails showed they actually did—as distinguished from talking about—anything unethical.
What wrongdoing I do know about comes from publicly available information, not e-mail hacks. The Hillary Victory Fund, for example, raised money ostensibly for state Democratic Party organizations, but then funneled the money back to Clinton. That’s dishonest and probably illegal, but those facts had already been revealed.
As to the source of the information, intelligence agencies of various governments have a long history of revealing information that is embarrassing to their adversaries.
What’s new about the publishing of confidential Democratic National Committee e-mails is that it was done through Wikileaks, which provides a platform by which whistle-blowers and hackers of any affiliation can reveal secret documents without being traced. is not affiliated with any government and for that very reason provides a perfect cover. This is ideal cover for secret intelligence agencies.
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, says his only responsibility is to verify the authenticity of the information, not to judge the motives of those providing it. The problem is that the CIA, FSB and their counterparts in other countries are probably much more expert in faking the source of information than Assange and his friends are in detecting forgeries.
There’s a moral here. The moral is that secret information is not necessarily more significant than public information that has been overlooked.
Maybe there are innocent explanations tof Donald Trump’s business connections with known Mafia bosses in New York City and Atlantic City. If such exist, we the voting public deserve to hear them.
Black homeowners and business owners lost the most in Hurricane Katrina. Black professionals such as physicians and lawyers have moved on. And black school teachers are losing their jobs to supposed school “reform.”
The United States was the first country in which a majority of the people were taught to think of themselves as middle class. In Victorian English novels, the middle class are the doctors, lawyers and other professionals who aren’t working class, but not truly upper class.
Life-size heroic bronze statues of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning were unveiled in May in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz Square.
“They have lost their freedom for the truth, said Italian sculptor Davide Domino, creator of the artwork. “They mind us how important it is to know the truth.’
Domino depicted the three whistle-blowers standing on chairs and he added an empty fourth chair for anybody who wants to take a stand and speak (as shown above).
We Americans like to see the world as a battle between the good guys and the bad guys. It is hard to accept that so much of the world sees us as the bad guys.
Subject to a 24-hour police siege, confined to a single windowless room, he continues to fight, and fight effectively, for truth and justice.
WikiLeaks continues to provide a means by which whistle-blowers can reveal how governments, corporations and other organizations conspire against the public. Most of what the American public knows about the toxic Trans Pacific Partnership, for example, has been made known by WikiLeaks.
John Pilger wrote an excellent article, updated on Counterpunch, about the how the U.S. government, abetted by the governments of the United Kingdom and Sweden, are bending international law and their own laws to deprive Assange of his freedom.
He is wanted for extradition to Sweden for questioning in a sexual misconduct case. He has not been charged with any crime, and the alleged victims in the case do not accuse him of any crime. He has offered to testify in London, or to go to Sweden to testify if he can be assured that he won’t be extradited to the United States.
A grand jury has been meeting in secret in Alexandria, Va., for five years trying to figure out ways to define Assange’s truth-telling as a crime. The details of the ongoing investigation of Assange have been defined themselves as a state secret. One of the crimes the grand jury is pondering is violation of the U.S. Espionage Act, which carries a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment.
Assange might be in a U.S. prison today, or worse, if not for the courage of the Ecuadorian government, which despite all pressure and threats offered him refuge in its London embassy.
The U.S. government treats Assange as it might treat a terrorist. And in fact, to a government whose policies are based on secrecy and lies, truth-tellers and whistle-blowers are more terrifying than killers or suicide bombers.
I think a good litmus test for whether an individual believes in freedom and democracy is the person’s attitude toward Julian Assange. President Obama most certainly fails that test. I think Assange will be remembered when Obama is forgotten.
His health had reportedly been failing even before his arrest, as a result of being cooped up in a windowless room for seven years and not being able to get medical care he needed.
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