As a candidate, President Trump exclaimed, “I love Wikileaks!” when Julian Assange’s organization published information it had received about Hillary Clinton that proved beneficial to Trump’s campaign. Once in office and under the screws of the deep state, however, Trump showed no enthusiasm for Assange at all. Under the influence of Mike Pompeo, Trump extradited Assange from asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy from which he was moved into one of the UK’s ugliest gulags. On that policy of protecting some of America’s most egregious wrongdoings in war, Trump and Biden agree. Greenwald says the Assange persecution is the greatest threat to Western press freedoms in years and is a shining monument to the fraud of American and British self-depictions in which Western media has remained largely unconcerned as well….
by Glenn Greenwald on Substack:
The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assange was extended and escalated on Friday morning. The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the U.S.’s extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East.
This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the U.S. and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. Those performative self-glorifying spectacles are constantly deployed to justify these two countries’ interference in and attacks on other nations, and to allow their citizens to feel a sense of superiority about the nature of their governments. After all, if the U.S. and UK stand for freedom and against tyranny, who could possibly oppose their wars and interventions in the name of advancing such lofty goals and noble values?
Having reported on the Assange case for years, on countless occasions I’ve laid out the detailed background that led Assange and the U.S. to this point. There is thus no need to recount all of that again; those interested can read the granular trajectory of this persecution here or here. Suffice to say, Assange — without having been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, for which he long ago served out his fifty-week sentence — has been in effective imprisonment for more than a decade.
In 2012, Ecuador granted Assange legal asylum from political persecution. It did so after the Swedish government refused to pledge that it would not exploit the WikiLeaks founder’s travel to Sweden to answer sex assault accusations as a pretext to turn him over to the U.S. Fearing what of course ended up happening — that the U.S. was determined to do everything possible to drag Assange back to U.S. soil despite his not being a U.S. citizen and never having spent more than a few days on U.S. soil, and intending to pressure their long-time-submissive Swedish allies to turn him over once he was on Swedish soil — the government of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa concluded Assange’s core civic rights were being denied and thus gave him refuge in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy in London: the classic reason political asylum exists.
When Trump officials led by CIA Director Mike Pompeo bullied Correa’s meek successor, ex-President Lenin Moreno, to withdraw that asylum in 2019, the London Police entered the embassy, arrested Assange, and put him in the high-security Belmarsh prison (which the BBC in 2004 dubbed “the British Guantanamo”), where he has remained ever since.
After the lowest-level British court in early 2021 rejected the U.S. extradition requeston the ground that Assange’s physical and mental health could not endure the U.S. prison system, Assange has lost every subsequent appeal. Last year, he was permitted to marry his long-time girlfriend, the British human rights lawyer Stella Morris Assange, who is also the mother of their two young children. An extremely unusual unanimity among press freedom and civil liberties groups was formed in early 2021 to urge the Biden administration to cease its prosecution of Assange, but Biden officials — despite spending the Trump years masquerading as press freedom advocates — ignored them (an interview conducted last week with Stella Assange by my husband, the Brazilian Congressman David Miranda, on Brazil’s Press Freedom Day, regarding the latest developments and toll this has taken on the Assange family, can be seen here)….
[Editor’s Note: It was through Wikileaks that I was originally able to view official US documents in which Hillary Clinton’s Dept. of State made their clear recommendations to President Obama for a regime-change war in Libya, to be headquartered in the Benghazi embassy, for the stated purpose of softening Assyria’s Assad with a demonstration of how easily US power could overthrow a national leader. The second and main stage of the plan laid out was a war in Syria to overthrow Assad, which Clinton’s State Dept. assured would be fairly easy once Assad saw how the US killed Gaddafi. The State Dept. also assured Obama that Russia would not interfere in Syria on the basis that Russia did not interfere with Hillary’s husband’s wars in the Slavic Balkans. All of this, Hillary’s Dept. of State expressly recommended for the sole stated objective of getting Israel to resist attacking Iran by showing Israel some US protection from one of its enemies so that Israel would not scuttle President Obama’s ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran by blowing up its nuclear reactors. See: “HILLARY’S WARS (Pt. 2): Wikileaks Proves Syria about Iran & Israel.” Proof that the documents are authentic? The US wants Assange imprisoned for 150 years for revealing them.]
Renowned Economist issues startling prediction | America’s Future
PhD Economist: “Don’t Bet on It”
According to former Goldman Sachs executive, Nomi Prins…
Americans who are hoping for a ‘return to normal’ are going to be shocked when they see what happens next in America.
She says, “If you’re betting your job, savings, or retirement accounts on a return to ‘normal’ you’re about to be left behind by a brand-new crisis few see coming.”
Click here now to see America’s next crisis.
