by Harley Schlanger, LaRouche Organization:
One can’t help feeling happy for Julian Assange, who was freed on June 26 after five years spent mostly in solitary confinement, in Belmarsh Prison near London, a venue known as Britain’s Guantanamo. His time there was preceded by seven years spent in asylum in uncomfortable quarters in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. On June 27, he was reunited with his family in Australia, freed at last from a Kafkaesque ordeal. The last five years were spent fighting extradition to the U.S., where he was facing 17 new charges from a May 2019 indictment under the U.S. Espionage Act, which carried a maximum sentence of 170 years (1). With his guilty plea, he was given a 62 month sentence, but released for time already served in prison.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Yet, the “happy end” is not the real story here. Assange was released only after agreeing to plead guilty to one felony count under the Espionage Act, of “Conspiracy to Obtain and Disclose National Defense Information.” In front of the judge who ultimately freed him, he pleaded guilty, then defended his actions, saying he acted as a journalist, seeking information from sources, which he said he viewed as both legal and protected by the U.S. Constitution. (2)
Since the terms of his release included acceptance of a guilty plea, his decision to take it after five years of torture, cannot be held against him. Instead, the larger concern is that those U.S. government officials whose crimes he exposed, by publishing classified documents on his Wikileaks website, have yet to be held accountable for repeated violations of international law and human rights. What Assange published was truthful, and damaging to the image of the United States, as the self-proclaimed defender of the “Rules-Based Order.” It also provides an example of why the Founding Fathers included among proscribed constitutional rights the freedom of the press.
The persecution he faced as a result of what he published in Wikileaks makes a mockery of the U.S. boasts about “transparency” and “democracy.” And that is why his case, and the brutal treatment of him by authorities acting on behalf of the U.S. government, was an issue of concern for citizens worldwide, many of whom have participated in demonstrations demanding his release.
WHAT ASSANGE DID
The documents published by Assange documented war crimes committed by officials in the executive branch’s national security team, intelligence and military during the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. There were more than 90,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan; 400,000 from the Iraq war; files exposing violations of the Geneva Convention in treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, including evidence that many of those held and tortured had committed no crimes; files related to spying by the National Security Agency, on both American citizens and foreign officials, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel; diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies, which provided glimpses of the role played by officials in interfering in the affairs of the countries where they were stationed; and the release of the 2016 Clinton campaign docs, which Assange was falsely accused of receiving from Russian hackers, as part of a Putin conspiracy to smear Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump. This false charge, along with the equally fraudulent allegations contained in the Christopher Steele dossier, were the basis for the still-ongoing Russiagate fiction of “Russian interference” in the 2016 presidential election.
Assange did not steal these documents, and Wikileaks did not hack them. His “crime” was publishing them.
Among the documents which drew the most attention were those describing the systemic torture of prisoners in Iraq and in Guantanamo. The U.S. government and military authorities denied they were using torture to extract confessions and “obtain information.” The documents released told a different story, exposing both the torture which was employed, and the cover-up of violations of international law, which had become routine.
“INCONVENIENT TRUTHS”
An example of the “inconvenient truths” published by Wikileaks is that of the famous “Nyet means Nyet” cable sent by then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns on February 1, 2008. Anticipating that NATO might offer Ukraine membership at its upcoming summit in Bucharest in April 2008, Burns warned in his memo that there would be a vehement rejection from Russian officials to that proposal. His memo was titled “Nyet Means Nyet (No Means No): Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” a theme reiterated in a subhead, “NATO Enlargement: Potential Military Threat to Russia.” To amplify this point, Burns wrote,
Read More @ LaRoucheOrganization.com
