Supporters of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will rally tomorrow at Parliament Square in London to try to prevent his deportation to the United States. Assange faces up to 175 years in federal prison for daring to cross Hillary Clinton.
On June 9, the UK High Court ruled that Assange had no legal grounds to challenge his extradition to the US on 18 counts of spying. Speaking at the free speech event Censorship Industrial Complex Exposed put on June 22 in London by Twitter Files journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, and comic Russell Brand, his wife Stella Assange said that “Assange is in a very precarious position right now. The High Court has made the inexplicable decision not even to allow an appeal. (Assange) made an application to appeal in Septmebrt of last year after it took the judge 10 months to issue a three-page decision.” Assange still has one final opportunity to apply to two separate High Court judges, “but the situation is now critical”, Stella Assange said.
Australian citizen Julian Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006 and released the so-called Collateral Murder video documenting 2007 US war crimes in Iraq in 2010. The video showed “a helicopter gunship moving down innocent civilians, literally pickeing them off, including two journalists, and critically injured two children, and mowed down the rescue vehicle which can to try and help them… The children only survived because their father threw his body on top of them,” Stella Assange said.
In 2010, Assange was charged with drummed-up rape charges in Sweden, where unprotected sex without a condom is considered “rape.” Wary of being deported to the United States, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in June 2012, where he stayed until 2019. The Swedish Prosecutor finally dropped the bogus rape charges in 2019.
But it wasn’t until Wikileaks got on the wrong side of Hillary Clinton that the US government really went after Assange. In 2016, Wikileaks released the Clinton E-Mails, a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State, including Goldman Sachs funding for the Clinton Foundation. In 2019, Ecuador betrayed Assange and handed him over to a UK SWAT team in the embassy, where he supposedly was granted aslyum. He has been held without charged in solitary confinement in maximum-security Belmarsh Prison ever since.
“The fact is that Julian is in prison because he exposed the truth. He exposed the criminality of the country which is trying to extradite him”, Stella Assange said on Thursday. “That country also plotted to assassinate him when (Mike) Pompeo was head of the CIA. How can this country, the UK, possible extradite him to the United States, the country that plotted his assassination? There’s been a campaign of smearing him for years in order to pave the way for his incarceration. Julian is a message to journalists to not publish the truth if it angers powerful people, because they’ll come after you. And we have to push back, and regain our rights. The other side is organized, and they’re exploiting the complacency of the public.”
“The behavior of the US media in ignoring this story, especially for the past 5 years, is totally inexcusable, and is one of the things that turned me off mainstream media,” said Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi. “Their inability to recognize not only the cruelty of what’s going on, but the significance of Julian’s case for the future of journalism, shows their total blindness. It’s horrible.”
Assange supporters will rally at Parliament Square in London against his extradition tomorrow, Saturday, at 1 pm UK time. Artist Davide Dormino will bring his statue Anything to Say? to London which features leakers Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden standing on chairs, with a four chair empty for anyone who wants to speak out.
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