Julian Assange Has Been Released, But Why Did the Government Want to Lock Him Up?
Roughly one month ago, whistleblower Julian Assange was released from his over one decade of imprisonment: seven years being unable to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London and five years of official time in Belmarsh Prison (also in London). A plea deal was worked out between the British government, his lawyers, and the United States Department of Justice, which was seeking to imprison him for many years to life on seventeen accounts of violating the Espionage Act and another undisclosed charge, where he would not have to be extradited to the United States for an unfair trial or face additional jail time (the five years in the British prison would count as his time served) if he pleaded guilty to one charge of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information.” This agreement was only possible in an American overseas territory, so the Northern Mariana Islands’ capital city of Saipan, which contained an American federal courthouse, was chosen as a way to quickly send the whistleblower and hero back to Australia without having to step foot within any of the fifty states.
Yes, for publishing classified documents so that the public could see the atrocities committed by the United States government, Assange had become a political prisoner. You would think that in a supposedly free country, the federal government would honor the First Amendment and free speech and welcome whistleblowers who were holding federal agencies accountable, but in reality, the United States government is nothing more than an authoritarian force bent on silencing dissent, building an empire, and granting profits from blood loss overseas. It does not want anyone getting in the way of continuing the status quo.
What secrets did Julian Assange reveal that made the Obama through Biden administrations want to lock him up in a cage for the rest of his life? Well, his WikiLeaks website started releasing information critical of the government as early as 2006, but the real controversy came in 2010 and 2011 when he published 750,000 classified documents procured by Army intelligence analyst Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning (Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison starting in 2010, but President Barack Obama was nice enough to commute the sentence in 2017).
The historically iconic revelation of 2010 was that of the video showing an Apache helicopter open firing on civilians in 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq; and in it, the soldiers seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to live out a real-world video game without being concerned for the human life down below. The murder by the United States military resulted in the deaths of eleven to eighteen people (depending on the source), including two Reuters journalists, a father taking his two children to school in a van, and others in a three-family residential building that was destroyed by three separate Hellfire missiles; so is it any wonder that the Obama administration and the federal government at large were embarrassed by the leak? Still, embarrassment does not give one the right to imprison someone for distributing such information to the public, and if anything, this incident should have encouraged the government to behave better in war zones abroad. Instead, it did the opposite.
In addition to this, he released 90,000 documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan and 400,000 documents for the Iraq War, and in those, there were more revelations about the United States military slaughtering civilians, as well as details in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and Iran’s support of Iraqi militias. Yes, the Obama administration, as well as the Bush and Trump ones, have been responsible for a high number of civilian deaths, and we pretend that since it was on the battlefield, those deaths mean nothing. However, in reality, those wars never should have been fought in the first place, and the real reason for engaging in them had to do with geopolitical power, profits for the military-industrial complex, and the ability to restrict individual rights at home (think the Patriot Act).
There was the 2010 and 2011 so-called “State Department cables” leak or “Cablegate,” which exposed 250,000 diplomatic messages between embassies and consulates and the United States homeland. Any kind of leak that makes former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton upset is probably a good thing for the public, but what WikiLeaks revealed was several damning policies of the United States government in the geopolitical realm. These included: “verification that the U.S. had conducted secret drone strikes in Yemen, details of U.S. efforts to get information on United Nations representatives, a push by Saudi Arabia's royal family to have the U.S. strike Iran and a description of Russia under Vladimir Putin as a ‘virtual mafia state.’” Yes, the United States government was killing civilians in Yemen, spying on UN officials, being pressured by Saudi Arabia to attack Iran, and setting up a disinformation campaign to make Putin seem like an evil dictator. You can see now why the United States government would want to eliminate such a rascally figure. Governments do not like scrutiny.
Before WikiLeaks became a household name, it published (in 2007) documents showing that the U.S. Army was isolating prisoners of war at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in order to cause them to become docile ahead of torture by interrogators, and it was hiding the prisoners from Red Cross inspectors so that the procedures could not be detected and condemned. Assange then in 2009 released messages exchanged between the Department of Defense (DoD), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the New York Police Department (NYPD) showing that they were all eager to see the benefits and opportunities that the September 11, 2001 attack could provide (including endless wars).
Of course, WikiLeaks later found itself in the public sphere during the 2016 presidential election season, but this time, it was while Assange was seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In 2016, the website leaked, via hackers that were claimed to be from Russia, 22,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, and because of this, it was shown that the Democratic Party rigged its primary against Bernie Sanders and in favor of Clinton (Clinton was even given the debate questions beforehand so that she could prepare). This information was embarrassing for the deep state’s golden child, so of course, the elites and intelligence community had to tie this all to Russian collusion because the DNC did not want to admit any wrongdoing or manipulation of a democratic election (the DNC is still trying to rig elections to this day).
Even though Donald Trump did not pardon Julian Assange during his previous term as president, likely due to pressure from the deep state, he did promise to look into the possibility of doing it the next time around if reelected. President Joe Biden beat him to the chase and released Assange from prison ahead of the 2024 election, most likely as a political stunt (Assange was not pardoned, though, as he was still forced to plead guilty to a count of espionage). Anyone who is not part of the corrupt establishment or a war hawk should be grateful to the sacrifices that Assange made on behalf of the American people, and really the entire planet. He is a hero and should be remembered as such, even if the powers that be try to blemish his character and paint him as a danger to national security and an enemy of the state. Those who want him locked up are the real threats to our country and enemies to free speech and transparent government.
Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.