Julian Assange is Free at Last
Julian Assange is free at last, ending a strange and harrowing prison sentence for his crime: exposing the illegal activities of the west through WikiLeaks.
Assange has arrived in Canberra, Australia, after being released from prison in the UK on Monday, and then pleading guilty to violating US espionage law at a court in the US Pacific island territory of Saipan on Wednesday morning. The deal left him free to return home to Australia and brought an end to an extraordinary 14-year legal saga.
As Yanis Varoufakis puts it “resistance is never futile”:
In this passionate speech, @yanisvaroufakis celebrates Julian Assange’s release and fiercely condemns those who sought to keep him imprisoned for the ‘crime’ of telling the truth as a journalist. pic.twitter.com/cYm8ASHQYS
— DiEM25 (@DiEM_25) June 26, 2024
This offer – a plea bargain to accept and admit a lesser charge of ‘Espionage’ in return for a sentence of five years, which would be offset by his time in Belmarsh, has been on the table for several months. But this is a major victory for everyone who has been campaigning for his release and for the truth against western imperialism, lies and violence.
Aside from the political questions about authoritarianism, state power and repression of free speech there is the more human question of a man who has been abused due to the complicity of the British with US authorities.
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A White Knight in the struggle against ‘Western imperialism, lies and violence’ ? See section three of this Byline Times article for Assange’s links to Farage, Russia, and offering a helping hand to Donald Trump’s first presidential bid.: https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/nigel-farage-from-russia-with-love?r=p681n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
Specifically: ‘Question Three: What Did Farage Know of the Russian Hacking of the Clinton Campaign?
In spring 2016, according to FBI indictments, 12 Russian GRU officials used spear phishing techniques to hack the emails of John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and subsequently exfiltrate material from both the Democratic National Committee and its Congressional Campaign Committee, which they begin to leak online.
At the same time, a Trump foreign policy aide, George Papadopolous, was approached by Professor Joseph Mifsud who told him the Russian Ambassador (both pictured below) could provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”. Soon after, Julian Assange told ITV’s Robert Peston WikiLeaks also had emails “pending publication” and Russian intelligence created a Twitter account, Guccifer 2.0, to spread the hacks.
Apart from Donald Trump, who openly called for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, his long-time aide Roger Stone actively reached out to Guccifer 2.0 for more information and, according to Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, Stone called the presidential hopeful.
“Mr Stone told Mr Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange,” Cohen wrote in his congressional testimony, “and that Mr Assange told Mr Stone that, within a couple of days, there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
A few days later, the Republican National Convention took place in Cleveland, Ohio, and Farage attended as an observer.
Sometime between 18-21 July, as reported by Observer journalist Cadwalladr, Farage had a secret dinner with Roger Stone and the Infowars host Alex Jones. Soon Stone was telling a Florida Republican group. that he had been in touch with Assange and warned that there would be a WikiLeaks “October surprise” about “the Clinton Foundation”. A few days later he tweeted: “Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
A federal indictment against Stone records: “On or about October 3, 2016, Stone wrote to a supporter involved with the Trump Campaign, ‘spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.’”
Stone was found guilty of obstructing a federal investigation and five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. But he was pardoned by Trump during his last days in office.
Farage snapped leaving the Ecuadorean Embassy 9 March 2017. Photo: Buzzfeed/ITV
Though Farage had denied being an intermediary between Assange, Russia, and the Trump campaign, he was spotted coming out of a meeting with Assange in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy the following year for reasons he immediately “couldn’t remember”.
Meanwhile, Stone’s “friend in London” has never been identified and no journalist has asked Farage whether he knew about this plot by Russia to subvert the 2016 US Presidential Election.
‘
Funny this: is no one else interested in the ‘free at last’ Julian Assange post? Just asking …
Exposing American war crimes. Tut tut.
Oh! Bella knows who Assange is? That’s a surprise.
Excuse me?
The guy’s been in a UK jail for years and has hardly had a mention on this platform.
@Wul, and not only this platform. There are a few places, like MediaLens and Declassified UK which have been reporting on the case. Here is Jonathan Cook’s assessment:
“Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world.
“No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.”
https://www.declassifieduk.org/julian-assange-freedom-this-time-no-thanks-to-the-media/
Sorry, but for all his Wikipedia work in the early 2000s, I have never raised him to level of hero (Chelsea Manning was the brave one), and after his connections with Farage and the Russians were revealed, he is definitely not a hero, and facilitated the election of Donald Trump as US President, a complete, and continuing disaster – so thanks Julian. for nothing …..