He will be a free man.

According to NBC News:

Assange was charged by criminal information — which typically signifies a plea deal — with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, the court documents say. A letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie to U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona of the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands said that Assange would appear in court at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday (or, 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday) to plead guilty and said that DOJ expects Assange will return to Australia, his country of citizenship, after the proceedings.

U.S. charges against Assange stem from one of the largest publications of classified information in American history, which took place during the first term of Barack Obama’s presidency. Starting in late 2009, according to the government, Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, to disclose tens of thousands of activity reports about the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of reports about the war in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and assessment briefs of Guantanamo Bay detainees using his WikiLeaks website.

Court documents revealing Assange’s plea deal were filed Monday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean. Assange was expected to make an appearance in that court and to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in British prison, meaning he would be free to return to Australia, where he was born.

Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh Prison on the outskirts of London for five years and previously spent seven years in self-exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London — where he reportedly fathered two children — until his asylum was withdrawn and he was forcibly carried out of the embassy and arrested in April 2019. A superseding indictment was returned against Assange more than five years ago, in May 2019, and a second superseding indictment was returned in June 2020.

This has been a long battle for Assange and his supporters. He has tenaciously fought extradition with fears that if he were ever to be jailed in America, the Deep State would torture and possibly kill him.

Support for Assange has grown over the years with more information about military and intelligence operations conducted by the United States and other western nations coming to light. He is a journalist but has not been able to enjoy the rights and privileges as such after embarrassing powerful government entities.

Leave your thoughts at The Liberty Daily Substack.

Currently, Assange is awaiting a final ruling from the UK high court over his possible extradition to the US, coming at the end of a lengthy appeals process. But the following exchange with President Biden and reporters just happened:

When asked about the request by reporters at the White House on Wednesday, President Joe Biden said “we’re considering it” – comments described as “encouraging” by Mr Assange’s lawyer.

Biden issued the response in a press briefing while hosting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for an official White House visit, where the two leaders are expended to deepen defense ties.

It is widely perceived this was all set in motion when in February Assange’s native Australia saw its parliament vote to issue formal request that charges against Julian Assange be dropped by the US. The motion adopted by parliament emphasized “the importance of the UK and USA bringing the matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia.”

The country’s prime minister Anthony Albanese immediately backed the motion calling for his return to Australia.

Amnesty International also recently renewed its call to drop the charges against Assange. “The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the U.S. and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too,” a statement said.

We detailed in March that the Biden administration might be looking for a way to bring the 14-year long legal drama to an end. A WSJ report at the time said, “The U.S. Justice Department is considering whether to allow Julian Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information, according to people familiar with the matter, opening the possibility of a deal that would end a lengthy legal saga triggered by one of the biggest classified intelligence leaks in American history.”

A plea deal means the whole crisis for him and his family could finally come to an acceptable and peaceful end after all of these years. But Assange’s legal team never gave any level of confirmation to the prior WSJ reporting.

Julian Assange's freedom has been powerfully supported by press freedom organizations, but many organizations with a wider remit recognize the threats the US prosecution poses to our rights everywhere

Quick thread summarizing some of the support for the work of Julian Assange: pic.twitter.com/RqWBkJPcYi

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 10, 2024

However, this fresh Biden statement seems to confirm the reporting that a plea deal could be on the table.

A May 20 hearing which has been scheduled by the UK High Court and is expected to take up whether the US ‘assurances’ that Assange would not face either the death penalty or torture if transferred to US custody are satisfactory. His lawyers have long argued that confinement in a US federal ‘Supermax’ facility would indeed be torturous and would also severely degrade his mental health.

The court ruled that the WikiLeaks founder will be not be extradited immediately and said the US still has opportunity to provide “satisfactory assurances” related to his grounds of appeal. What has happened Tuesday is tantamount to Assange’s ability to challenge the extradition request being slightly extended, and is a temporary reprieve, extending the whole process yet further.

But this is the part that is not looking good for Assange, as explained by WikiLeaks: “The court has given US Gov 3 weeks to give satisfactory assurances: That Mr. Assange is permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the US constitution; not prejudiced at trial by reason of his nationality; and that the death penalty is not imposed.”

A May 20 hearing which has been scheduled is expected to take up whether the US ‘assurances’ are satisfactory. An Al Jazeera correspondent has explained the decision as follows:

It was a highly nuanced decision in the end. The judges haven’t thrown out the grounds for an appeal hearing, they have essentially upheld them.

They basically said, “Yes, we understand that there is a basis here for an appeal – however, we are going to defer a decision on that until May 20”, when they called for a second hearing.

According to the judge’s statement, “We had an explicit statutory obligation not to order the applicant’s extradition if he could be sentenced to death for the offense concerned or if he could be charged with an extradition offense disclosed by the same facts in respect of which a sentence of death could be imposed.”

The statement reads further, “If assurances are given, then we will give the parties an opportunity to make further submissions before we make a final decision on the application for leave to appeal.”

Stella Assange, his wife, has warned that if the court rules against Assange, he could be on a plane to US soil days following. He would be removed from the high security Belmarsh prison for a trial in the US on espionage-related charges and publishing state secrets, where a 175 year jail sentence would await him, likely at a federal ‘supermax’ prison.

WikiLeaks has been urging all Americans to put pressure on the Biden administration to drop its case against Assange by calling House representatives and telling them to support H.Res.934. The bill, introduced by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) requests that the Biden White House halt the proceedings against Assange.

The bill reads: “This resolution expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that regular journalistic activities, including the obtainment and publication of information, are protected under the First Amendment and that the federal government should drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.”

BREAKING: Julian Assange may still be extradited to the US in three weeks if US Gov provides "assurances" – previously deemed by Amnesty as "inherently unreliable" – including that he will not be prejudiced at trial by reason of his nationality and not receive the death penalty… pic.twitter.com/H90vu00oV8

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 26, 2024

Editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson has commented on what Assange’s prosecution and possible extradition means for the future of press freedoms.”It cannot be underestimated, the effect that it will have,” he said. “If an Australian citizen publishing in Europe can face prison time in the United States, that means no journalists anywhere are safe in the future.”

However, as we detailed last week, the Biden administration might be looking for a way to bring the 14-year long legal drama to an end. A last Wednesday WSJ report said, “The U.S. Justice Department is considering whether to allow Julian Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information, according to people familiar with the matter, opening the possibility of a deal that would end a lengthy legal saga triggered by one of the biggest classified intelligence leaks in American history.”

A plea deal means the whole crisis for him and his family could finally come to an acceptable and peaceful end after all of these years. But Assange’s legal team has not given any level of confirmation to the WSJ reporting.

In other words, inconvenient truths.

Now, while this nation used to celebrate the revelation of inconvenient truths, one of the 21st century’s biggest spreaders of inconvenient truths, Julian Assange, may be headed to prison for the rest of his life.

Extradition hearings for the WikiLeaks founder wrapped up on February 21, though a decision by British judges is not expected till mid-March. If extradition is granted, this Australian publisher and journalist will be taken to the United States, where he will stand trial on espionage charges.

How does an Australian journalist, who has scarcely spent any time on American soil, get charged under American espionage laws? How does someone, whose only criminal conviction so far has been bail-jumping, spend nearly five years in “Britain’s Guantanamo” on top of seven years in near-isolation in an embassy?

What did Julian Assange do?

Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks was designed to facilitate whistleblowing by providing an anonymous platform for whistleblowers to post material. In 2010, WikiLeaks published almost half a million documents from US intelligence analyst Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Despite the fact that most of this information was already in the public domain, then-President Obama condemned Assange as a national security threat, and Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, though the sentence was later commuted

Citizens older than 40 may remember Obama campaigning on creating the most transparent administration ever, in his desire to distance himself from the Bush administration and its War on Terror. However, Obama went on to charge more people under the Espionage Act than any other president in history.

None of this stopped Assange. Later, in 2010, WikiLeaks published about 250,000 American diplomatic cables. At the end of the year, while Assange was living in Britain, two Swedish women made sexual assault allegations against him.

Assange did not want to go to Sweden to face trial; he believed the Swedes would turn him over to the American government. So, in 2012, he sought refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy. The Ecuadorans granted him asylum after the Swedish government would not guarantee keeping him out of American custody.

Seven years later, in 2019, the Ecuadorians turned him over to the British police after complaining about his increasingly bizarre behavior and violating their conditions of hosting him.

Since Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy rather than go to court, the British government charged him with bail-jumping and granted him the maximum sentence for this, fifty weeks. When the fifty weeks were up, the US charged him with espionage. As lawyer-turned-journalist Glenn Greenwald noted at the end of 2020, espionage charges are so complex that this guaranteed Assange would spend years in prison as British courts deliberated.

Indeed, Assange has been in Belmarsh for more than four years now, where he suffered a minor stroke in 2021, at the age of 50. Again, this is all without being convicted of any crimes more serious than bail-jumping.

How are authorities defending this?

In his data dumps, Assange revealed the names of collaborators within Iraq and Afghanistan. American lawmakers say that revealing these names, as well as the actions of American soldiers in those wars, puts American lives at risk. They believe, therefore, that Assange does not deserve any of the protections journalists would normally enjoy.

There would be a logic to this, if it could be proven true that Assange cost American lives. However, it cannot. No soldiers have ever been proven to have died as a result of Julian Assange’s actions. And as far as the welfare of our foreign collaborators, where was our concern for them when we fled from Afghanistan, handing over more than $80 billion worth of weaponry to the Taliban?

Furthermore, what about the more recent dump of classified information regarding American intervention in Ukraine?

The double standard is nauseating.

Assange’s persecution has far less to do with concern for American soldiers, or their overseas friends, than it does with the fact that Julian Assange embarrassed the Washington establishment in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular.

Documents posted on WikiLeaks showed that the 2016 Democratic primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. Naturally, Hillary’s team did not find this flattering, and so her campaign blamed WikiLeaks in part for her 2016 loss.

Hillary does not have a reputation for letting offenses slide. In 2016, she said, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” regarding Assange After being confronted about this, like a good politician, she said she doesn’t remember saying that, but if she did, it was just a joke.

Though Trump seemed generally sympathetic toward Assange, his appointees hated him, particularly CIA director Mike Pompeo. In 2017, CIA officials were so mad about Vault 7 leaks they discussed assassinating Assange.

The Vault 7 leaks revealed vulnerabilities within different operating systems. While federal agencies were upset about the information itself being leaked, what was even worse was that no one at the agencies noticed the data was missing until WikiLeaks posted it.

In response, Mike Pompeo designated WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” Intelligence officials tried to find leaks between WikiLeaks and the Russian government, though they were never able to do so. Even a former national security official under Trump admitted that the actions taken toward Assange were out of embarrassment, not in response to any kind of tangible threat.

The real problem with Julian Assange is that he destroys narratives.

I don’t know the man personally; I don’t know if he does what he does out of a sincere, disinterested love of truth or if he simply hates the US and wants to humiliate us on the world stage. Maybe he’s just a provocateur who wants to take down the biggest guy in the room.

Either way, our political class can’t tolerate it. They believe that the narrative is more important than the truth and that without a uniting narrative, the American public will collapse.

Who remembers 1984, when Winston gets a copy of The Book? He reads about the Inner Party, about how those most fanatical about the war effort are precisely those who are most aware of how cynically war is used to keep the standard of living low.

This is a real phenomenon, and it’s how Julian Assange described the war in Afghanistan back in 2011, “. . . because the goal is not to completely subjugate Afghanistan. The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the United States, out of the tax bases of European countries, through Afghanistan, back into the hands of the transnational security elite. . . The goal is to have an endless war, not a successful war.”

Assange made this prediction ten years before our humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, and several years after the Americans could have won the war, had they not gotten distracted in Iraq. All introspection regarding Iraq and Afghanistan proves his points.

Assange continually called bullsh*t on a political elite that thinks Americans are too stupid to keep track of our own overseas interventions.

The US was never supposed to be an unaccountable political establishment.

This country was created with a system of checks and balances, precisely to keep the branches of the government restrained by each other, and the entire apparatus accountable to the people.

A free press facilitates this. Yes, it’s ugly sometimes. I had friends in Iraq. I was furious when the Abu Ghraib photos leaked. But, after years of ruminating on situations like these, I believe it is better for the American public to know what war consists of. I think the press should make it clear that our adversaries in various entanglements are not particularly humane, either. War is ugly. People do horrible things to each other. And that is why it is so important to have a diplomatic class that sees war as an option of last resort.

What happened to Assange should scare everyone who loves freedom.

Assange isn’t killing people. He just reveals information in times and places that the political class dislikes. The Washington establishment wants to push the same narrative that’s been pushed since WWII, that of the Americans being the permanent good guy, no matter what. Assange hasn’t been lying. He’s spreading malinformation, the information that is technically true but inconvenient to the prevailing narrative.

The Legacy Media loved Assange fifteen years ago when the liberal establishment was in favor of anything making George W. look bad. Today, as Assange’s revelations continue to drive the public’s general distrust of the political elite, they want him to disappear. If extradition is granted, they may get their wish.

Julian Assange is guilty of malinformation. That’s it. His decades-long harassment should concern anyone who truly believes in the First Amendment, a free press, and the United States as the Founding Fathers envisioned it.

What do you think?

Do you think that Assange has been unfairly persecuted? Do you think his leaks were important information or stuff that should’ve remained secret? Do you think he’ll be extradited to the United States? What then?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

Because of this, the American government, now headed by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, wants to destroy him. In what follows, I’ll explain the facts of the case and why they are important and detail the persecution of Assange.

Chris Hedges outlines what is at stake:

“The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.

Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.

Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.

Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized.” See here.

It’s important that we understand in detail what was in the WikiLeaks documents. In an article published in March, 2020, the 10^th anniversary of their publication, Arjun Walla gives us some of the highlights:

“Last month marked the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks’ publication of the Collateral Murder video. The video shows how two Apache helicopters murdered 11 Iraqi people including two Reuters journalists. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.  This is one of the publications Julian Assange is being indicted for espionage. He faces 175 years in a US jail if extradited from the UK.  WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. They analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material and spoke to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work

After the video was released, one of the soldiers involved in the incident, Ethan McCord, said the following:

“If you feel threatened in any way, you’re able to engage that person. Many soldiers felt threatened just by the fact that you were looking at them, so they fired their weapons on anybody that was looking at them because they (I) felt threatened. We were told if we were to fire on anybody, and if it were to be investigated, that ‘officers will take care of you.’ ”

“We were told by our battalion commander to kill every m***** f****** on the street.  Many soldiers would not do that, we decided we were going to shoot into the rooftops of buildings because, if you didn’t fire, the NCOs in your platoon would make your life hell.”

“This happens on a daily basis, destroying vans full of children, the destruction of the Iraqi people happens on a daily basis.” See here.

The WikiLeaks documents also showed how the US military and the CIA manipulate the banking and financial system. Arjun Walia is again on top of this:

“I recently came across an article published on MintPress News. It was written by Whitney Webb, who is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

In her article, she references a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” that was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks. The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”

The rest of her article is posted below:

The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”

WikiLeaks’ recent tweets on the subject drew attention to a single section of the 248-page-long document, titled “Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare.” This section in particular notes that the U.S. government applies “unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors,” and specifically names the World Bank, IMF and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as “U.S. diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” such goals.

The manual also touts the “state manipulation of tax and interest rates” along with other “legal and bureaucratic measures” to “open, modify or close financial flows” and further states that the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – which oversees U.S. sanctions on other nations, like Venezuela — “has a long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”

This section of the manual goes on to note that these financial weapons can be used by the U.S. military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels” and that such unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”

The role of these “independent” international financial institutions as extensions of U.S. imperial power is elaborated elsewhere in the manual and several of these institutions are described in detail in an appendix to the manual titled “The Financial Instrument of National Power.” Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of U.S. National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”

Furthermore, the manual states that the U.S. military “understand[s] that properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW,” meaning that these weapons are a regular feature of unconventional warfare campaigns waged by the United States.” See here.

I mentioned that the US seeks global hegemony, and its closest ally in this futile and deadly quest is Britain. The WikiLeaks document showed how close their on-going collaboration really is, as Mark Curtis reveals:

“Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.

Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government “would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and UK.” The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”

A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.” See here.

The CIA was so angered by Wikileaks that its director, Mike Pompeo, plotted to kill him. Philip Giraldi gives us the inside story:

“In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.

At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.

CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him.” See here.

Fortunately, the plot failed. But now it looks like Assange will be shipped to the US, where this ill man, who suffered a stroke in a British jail, faces a dire fate. Let’s do everything we can to prevent this and to honor this true American hero.

About the Author

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Stella Assange, his wife, has warned that if the judges rule against Assange, he could be on a plane to US soil in a matter of days. He would be removed from the high security Belmarsh prison for a trial in the US on espionage-related charges and publishing state secrets, where a 175 year jail sentence would await him.

His wife told a Thursday press briefing, “It is the final hearing if it does not go Julian’s way, there is no possibility to appeal to the supreme court or anywhere else in this jurisdiction.”

She said further that situation is “extremely grave” given his health continues to be “in decline”. She warned: “If he is extradited, he will die.”

The Guardian has meanwhile commented on US authorities’ attempts to bully journalists who worked with Assange to turn against him:

At least four well-known journalists have been approached by the Metropolitan police on behalf of the FBI: James Ball, his ex-WikiLeaks colleague, who is now with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism; David Leigh, the former Guardian and Observer journalist; Heather Brooke, a freedom of information campaigner; and Andrew O’Hagan, who had been commissioned to ghost Assange’s autobiography.

All of them have declined to cooperate with the FBI. In an article for Rolling Stone last year, Ball said that he had first been approached in 2021 and subjected to pressure, including the threat of being prosecuted himself.

O’Hagan said that although he had his differences with Assange, he would happily go to jail rather than assist the FBI. “I would only add that the attempt to punish Assange for exposing the truth is an attack on journalism itself. I notice that none of those mainstream collaborators who published his material – the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel – are being pursued, which demonstrates that a generational bias against internet-based journalism is at the heart of the case … If Julian goes to the US, Britain will have failed to protect one of the first principles of democracy.”

Editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson has commented on what Assange’s prosecution and possible extradition means for the future of press freedoms.”It cannot be underestimated, the effect that it will have,” he said. “If an Australian citizen publishing in Europe can face prison time in the United States, that means no journalists anywhere are safe in the future.”

As for Assange’s native Australia, its parliament has just voted to issue formal request that charges against Julian Assange be dropped. The motion adopted by parliament emphasized “the importance of the UK and USA bringing the matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia.”

The clock is ticking! My friend @MearsheimerJ on #FreeAssange #FreeAssangeNOW #FreeAssange2024

PLEASE repost. Use Hashtags. Together, we will get this message to the #HighCourt to #SETHIMFREE pic.twitter.com/mMMqUUURhY

— Judge Napolitano (@Judgenap) February 17, 2024

Days ago, Amnesty International also renewed its call to drop the charges against Assange. “The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the U.S. and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too,” a statement said.

“People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power, that’s true democracy” — Julian Assange

Free Julian Assange.

"People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power, that's true democracy"
—Julian Assange https://t.co/rZi43IMMkG

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) July 3, 2023

Wikileaks founder and current political prisoner Julian Assange is one of the most polarizing persons in the world. Some claim he’s an information terrorist and a danger to western nations, including the United States. Others see him as a persecuted hero who exposed the “wrong” governments and is now having to pay the price for telling the truth.

Wherever one stands on the Assange opinion spectrum, it’s undeniable that he has changed the world as well as the state of journalism. Unfortunately, his opening of the floodgates of whistleblowers and leakers has also forced countermeasures by most government. They have tightened information control and engaged in full-blown censorship, laughably in the name of “preserving freedom.”

Happy Birthday, Mr. Assange. Thank you, Kari Lake, for taking a bold position on this polarizing figure.

He even mentioned other imprisoned or otherwise persecuted political dissidents.

Instead of championing free speech, the U.S. actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers. I’ll pardon brave truth-tellers like Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes they exposed. This isn’t the Soviet Union. The America I love doesn’t imprison dissidents.

Other brave truth-tellers include John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, and Edward Snowden. They were trying to return America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals.

Other brave truth-tellers include John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, and Edward Snowden. They were trying to return America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals.

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) May 2, 2023

Between his pushes against the Covid jabs, arming Ukraine, and the trans-supremacy agenda, RFK Jr is sounding like someone patriots will consider. Promising to pardon Julian Assange is just another feather in his liberty cap.