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2024-06-27 -Great Cultural Revolution
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The main political case of the 21st century: Biden saved Assange, saving himself
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Pavel Volkov
[REGNUM] The founder of the legendary Wikileaks, Julian Assange, signed a deal with the US Department of Justice on a partial plea of guilty to one of the counts of violating the confidentiality of personal data, received 5 years and was officially released based on the time already served. One of the terms of the deal is the destruction of information collected by Wikileaks.
Continued from Page 4
FATEFUL DISPATCHES
Accusations of a journalist in an anti-American conspiracy under the article of espionage for the publication of socially important documents in itself became a precedent.
After all, the famous First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits any infringement of freedom of speech.
To get out of the situation, the CIA even suggested that the White House change the status of Wikileaks employees from journalists to “information intermediaries,” but the Barack Obama administration did not dare to take such a step, fearing political consequences.
However, in 2020, under Donald Trump, the amendment was nevertheless bypassed - the US Supreme Court decided that “ foreign citizens outside the territory of the United States do not have the rights provided for by the US Constitution.” The decision, of course, concerned Australian citizen Assange, who was being held in a London prison at the time.
Games with the First Amendment turned out to be what made it possible to keep the journalist for 5 years in a British prison, but still not extradite him to the United States.
The persecution of Julian Assange began in 2010 after he published a video of the shooting of civilians by the US military in Iraq, as well as diplomatic cables from US embassies (cablegate).
Both events shook the world.
The cables contained a lot of unflattering information about the US attitude towards various countries, world leaders, nuclear disarmament issues, the war on terrorism, the problems of the Guantanamo prison, etc. Many of them were immediately published by newspapers such as El País, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and The New York Times. In Russia, under an agreement with WikiLeaks, the magazine Russian Reporter analyzed the cables.
It is important to note that the published data cast a shadow not only on the United States; it contained a lot of unsightly data, including about Russia, which, in principle, neutralized the version that Assange worked for the Russian special services. However, this did not help.
Although Obama refused to open a criminal case against Assange, the journalist “arrived” from the other side. In Sweden he was accused of rape.
It later turned out that there was no rape, the alleged victims were Wikileaks supporters and did not even file any complaints, but Assange was briefly held in a Swedish pretrial detention center, then released on bail with the right to leave the country, and when he flew to London, he was put on the Interpol wanted list.
So, fearing extradition to Sweden, Julian ended up in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012, from where he continued his work and even briefly hosted a program on the Russia Today channel.
TRUMP IS IN TROUBLE
And in 2016, Donald Trump won the US elections. Everyone thought that this “friend of Russia” would have no time for Assange, but circumstances turned out differently.
Trump was accused of conspiring with Wikileaks and anonymous Russian hackers to interfere in the election. The case concerned the hacking of the Democratic National Committee servers during the primaries, as a result of which the reputation of candidate Hillary Clinton was damaged, which was supposed to allow Trump to become president.
The case was bogus from the start.
No evidence of interference by Russian hackers was ever found. Moreover, technical expertise directly stated that the servers were hacked and data was pumped out not remotely, but directly from the office of the Democratic Party. Former British diplomat and then Wikileaks employee Craig Murray stated that he received the data for publication on a flash drive from hand to hand in one of the parks in Washington. Assange himself hinted in one of his interviews that the source was in Washington, but naturally refused to name the name.
At the same time, a strange murder occurs in the American capital.
The victim is one of the employees of the National Committee of the Democratic Party, Seth Rich. He was killed while jogging. The robbery version was not confirmed, since nothing was stolen, and for some reason the case materials were seized from the police and transferred to the FBI. The culprits have not yet been found.
But it is known that Rich was a leftist and a supporter of the leader of the left faction of the US Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, who opposed Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Naturally, journalists immediately came up with an alternative version to the mainstream that it was Seth Rich who pumped the data out of the servers and handed it over to Wikileaks.
We will probably know the truth when the Kennedy assassination case is solved.
Be that as it may, Trump then found himself in a difficult position.
Even if it wasn’t about prison, it was certainly about reputation. And his reputation as a “Kremlin agent” greatly hampered him throughout his presidency. All Trump needed from Assange was the disclosure of the source, which would remove all suspicion from the president.
To do this, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher went to negotiate with the journalist at the Ecuadorian embassy. But Assange could not reveal his sources. This also concerned issues of journalistic ethics and the safety of people transmitting information to Wikileaks.
The refusal was unpleasant for Trump, but the subsequent publication of the Vault 7 database by Wikileaks - the largest leak of CIA documents in the history of illegal electronic surveillance around the world - added fuel to the fire of future disaster.
Former CIA technical worker Joshua Schulte, who handed over the documents, received 40 years in prison. They arrested him, however, on charges of possession of child pornography, since evidence of his involvement in the leak was not immediately found. But that is another story.
The release of Vault 7 infuriated the CIA. Then-chief Mike Pompeo declared Wikileaks a “ hostile intelligence service ” and tried to get Trump to authorize the kidnapping and even liquidation of Assange. This became known from three sources at once.
175 YEARS
Despite all Pompeo’s attempts, Trump decided that everything would be legal and that Assange would have an open trial.
To do this, instead of one count of accusation, the journalist is given as many as eighteen, for a total of 175 years in prison. Moreover, the charge of anti-American conspiracy is under an article of espionage, which has never been brought against journalists before.
Briefly, the essence of the accusation is this:
1. Assange, through speeches at various conferences with stories about the activities of WikiLeaks, encouraged individuals and organizations to steal classified data and share with him.
2. US soldier Chelsea Manning stole classified information on behalf of Assange. Manning logged into a computer for which she did not have a password, which means Assange gave it to her (only logical conclusion, no documentary evidence).
3. The correspondence between Assange and Manning about the importance of publishing documents is called a conspiracy.
4. Assange published State Department cables that included the names of Afghans and Iraqis who collaborated with American occupation forces, without redacting those names.
Therefore, “journalists, religious leaders, human rights activists, and political dissidents who lived under repressive regimes and reported abuses in their countries to the United States are at great risk. By releasing these documents without redacting names, Assange created a serious and imminent risk that innocent people would be physically harmed or detained."
5. The published data on Guantanamo Bay detainees was accused of disclosing classified information of national importance, that is, internal information from a closed facility.
Interestingly, during the British hearings, all these accusations were refuted by the testimony of witnesses and experts.
It turned out that Cablegate’s publications were coordinated with the US State Department, the documents were edited (“dangerous” names were removed from them), and 15 thousand documents were not published at all for the sake of people’s safety. In order to keep the names of informants secret, Assange ordered a program from IBC that removed all non-English words from the documents, and therefore all Arabic names.
The leak of the names was not the fault of Assange, but the fault of Guardian journalist David Lee, who in 2011, without permission, published in his book the password to an encrypted cache of unredacted documents. No one pressed charges against Lee. The entire cache was then made available via torrents and on the Cryptome website. There are no questions to the site management either.
Assange's lawyers said that their client's non-involvement in the publication of unredacted files can be proven by having access to the journalist's computers, phones and paper letters, which were seized during Assange's arrest at the Ecuadorian embassy and have not yet been returned.
As for Chelsea Manning, at her 2013 trial, US counterintelligence did not find a single injured agent in Iraq and Afghanistan due to the WikiLeaks revelations.
There are none even now. In addition, the investigation does not know with whom Manning corresponded; her chat interlocutor was a certain Nathaniel Frank, and this Frank’s connection with Assange has not been established.
In the case of Guantanamo, the publication allowed lawyers to free many innocent people from prison who had been wrongly detained as a result of false reports, as the United States was offering substantial rewards to its allies for the surrender of suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban members. The documents also contained evidence of the use of torture against prisoners. Based on this, the information disclosed by Assange was of public importance, and this cannot be considered a criminal offense.
BIDEN THE LIBERATOR
All this was said in the British court, but the court was not considering the merits of the case, but the issue of Assange's extradition.
As a matter of fact, the journalist fell into the hands of British law enforcement in 2019, when the Americans were able to put pressure on the new president of Ecuador, and he...
And what that one is, by the way, is unclear.
Neither the document that would deprive Assange of political asylum, nor the document giving the right to British law enforcement officers to enter the embassy - the territory of a sovereign state - was presented to the public.
The journalist was locked in solitary confinement in London's Belmarsh prison and hearings began regarding his extradition to the United States. It is interesting that it was at that moment that Sweden for some reason stopped demanding extradition.
Section 81 of the UK Extradition Act 2003 prohibits the transfer of persons in cases of politically motivated persecution. It was enough for the court to refer to this article, and Assange would have been released back in 2019. But the court did not do this, prohibiting extradition only because of the serious mental state of the journalist and the danger of committing suicide. Naturally, this was challenged on appeal.
The slight chance that the outgoing Trump would pardon Assange (he had the right to do so) did not materialize. Trump naturally pardoned his supporters who were accused of organizing the storming of the Capitol.
President Joe Biden, who replaced him, did not respond to requests from Assange’s relatives. After all, he was the vice president during Cablegate.
By 2024, the decision to send Assange to the United States was made.
But the unexpected happened again - the next presidential election in the United States, which will take place in a certain international context. Against the background of events in Ukraine, Palestine, as well as the corruption and drug scandal surrounding the president’s son Hunter, Trump began to gain political points, and Biden, on the contrary, began to lose them.
Experts associated with WikiLeaks began to say that it would not be beneficial for Biden to have Assange in an American prison on the eve of the elections.
This would lead to a new scandal, the loss of votes from the left and left-liberal supporters of the Democratic Party, who traditionally have sympathy for Assange, and also to the fact that unpleasant evidence of the illegal activities of the CIA could emerge at the trial. Yes, this did not happen under Biden, but during his presidency he did not solve this problem in any way, although people turned to him.
Another important question is who the supporters of the third candidate, Robert Kennedy Jr., will vote for, and they are definitely not on the side of Assange’s persecutors.
All this led to the fact that in May the High Court of London suspended the extradition, giving the journalist's lawyers the opportunity to file a new appeal. And negotiations began.
The positive decision was probably spurred on by political events in Great Britain itself. The high probability of Labor winning the elections makes it a non-zero possibility that Assange will be recognized as a political prisoner, and no one needs this either.
A partial plea deal eliminates all pre-election risks for Biden, and for Assange the risk that if Trump wins, he will most likely be extradited and receive the full 175 years of imprisonment.
The stars have aligned.
Political cynicism and the alignments in the election race turned out to be stronger than all ideologies combined. Assange’s admission of guilt does not in any way nullify what he did for those seeking the truth, and the Wikileaks documents will forever remain a material monument to the crimes of American imperialism in the 21st century.
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Posted by badanov 2024-06-27 00:00||
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2024-06-27 09:58||
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