Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, has been released from prison. Assange, who had been imprisoned in the United Kingdom for the last five years after spending seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy, reached a plea deal with the Biden DOJ that will allow him to return to his native Australia. All details of the plea deal have not been released at this point in time.
However, under the terms of the deal, Assange will plead guilty to a single felony charge of conspiring to illegally acquire and reveal classified national defense information. The agreement guarantees that Assange will not face any further imprisonment beyond the 62 months he has already served in the United Kingdom.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions and inactions. As editor-in-chief, Julian Assange paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.
Assange’s incarceration evolved from the publication of information provided by Chelsea Manning, a US Armed Forces member, who provided Assange with information that was compromising to “US interests.”
However, those US interests had to include protecting the fraudulent Trump-Russia and Russian interference claims. There was no Russian election interference; there was no Russian hacking of the DNC; it was all a fraud created by the intelligence community (IC), FBI and Main Justice to support Hillary Clinton’s lies and then cover their own targeting tracks on PDJT. Over the years Assange has hinted strongly that Seth Rich was the source for the hack of the DNC. This raises the question of just who killed Seth Rich.
In a highly unusual twist to this whole saga, Assange will plead guilty in the US District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands. The unusual venue reflects Assange’s unwillingness to return voluntarily to the continental U.S. Assange harbors a deep distrust of the corrupt U.S. government.
Dr. Tom Woods has a good take on this whole shameful episode.
The campaign against Assange by various governments was intended simply to break him, not bring him to trial. “Sweden did not intend to prosecute Assange because it never had a case,” wrote Jonathan Cook. “The aim was to trap him in an interminable process of non-prosecution while confining him in ever-worse conditions while the public was turned against him.”
Glenn Greenwald was correct years ago when he likewise wrote, “These governments never wanted to put him on trial. You think Biden DOJ wants the spectacle of bringing him onto US soil, trying him for espionage? The goal was to neutralize and break him by keeping him locked up with no trial.”
Back in 2012, Greenwald noted what made Western journalists so irrationally hostile to Assange:
Many journalists (and liberals) like to wear the costume of outsider-insurgent, but are, at their core, devoted institutionalists, faithful believers in the goodness of their society’s power centers, and thus resent those (like Assange) who actually and deliberately place themselves outside of it.
By putting his own liberty and security at risk to oppose the world’s most powerful factions, Assange has clearly demonstrated what happens to real adversarial dissidents and insurgents – they’re persecuted, demonized, and threatened, not befriended by and invited to parties within the halls of imperial power – and he thus causes many journalists to stand revealed as posers, servants to power, and courtiers.
Mike Pence, the erstwhile Presidential candidate, will reliably transmit the regime’s perspective on things.
Nathan J. Robinson took that one down:Despite absolutely exhaustive efforts to prove that harm had been done by the disclosures [relating to Iraq and Afghanistan], the government has never been able to tie a single death to the WikiLeaks documents, in part because they were not disclosures of top secret national security information.
According to [Patrick] Cockburn, a “team of 120 counterintelligence officers” wasn’t “able to find a single person, among the thousands of American agents and secret sources in Afghanistan and Iraq, who could be shown to have died because of the disclosures.” Government officials even admitted privately that the leaks were less damaging than their public statements suggested. The only thing the WikiLeaks disclosures damaged was vague “U.S. interests,” which in practice means the country’s preference not to have embarrassing information about its wrongdoing exposed, which might cause people to dislike us.
Vivek Ramaswamy had a better take on the whole thing:
What was done to Assange would have killed lesser men. He endured it and survived, and is a genuine hero in a world run by liars and sociopaths. It is great that he is now headed home to his family.