Julian Assange has no prayer against the ‘Empire of Lies’ — Analysis

Julian Assange is now on the run after years in hiding from different governments. Now, he appears to be headed to the United States where a show trial for election-year will take place based upon an array of lies supported by media.

The UK Home Office declared this week with a great deal of irony that Assange would be expelled to the United States. Assange is being sought for his involvement in the leakage of thousands of government documents. “right to a fair trial and … freedom of expression.”

That is fresh, considering that it is precisely the question of ‘freedom of expression’ that made the Australian-born editor and activist the world’s most wanted man in the first place. It is hard to calculate what effect Assange’s extradition, should it occur, will have on press freedoms around the world. The word ‘chilling’ comes to mind. 

Julian Assange’s grand foray onto the world stage occurred in 2010, when WikiLeaks published close to 750,000 classified military and diplomatic documents provided by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

The Iraqi War Logs is easily the worst batch, and it represents the greatest military leakage in US history. These records proved that the British and American officials deceived everyone when they said there wasn’t an official count of civilian deaths during the war in Iraq. Wikileaks made it easy for millions of users to search the dashboard and locate 66 081 civilian deaths from a total 109,000 dead during the period of January 1, 2004, to December 1, 2009. This is transparency that few militaries can appreciate.

Even though the news of civilian deaths in Iraq was shocking, it wasn’t surprising. The American public was already familiar with sexy places such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo bay, which were humanitarian no-go areas where inmates suffered torture and other abuse. 

A dark and sinister side of the military mind is what few people could imagine. The United States was unable to sugar-coat these accusations, as they were clearly visible for everyone to see.

What is it, then, that has really made Julian Assange America’s most wanted man, who faces up to 175 years in prison merely for playing messenger? Let’s not forget that other news media, including The Guardian, New York Times, and Der Spiegel, among many others, also published the damning information, yet it is Assange who faces espionage charges in the United States.

After Sweden had issued a warrant to arrest Julian Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct, what was the true reason for Assange being forced to take refuge at the Ecuadorian embassies in London? Maybe it is more about his revelation of unlegitimate activity in the Democratic Party, than atrocities that were committed on the battlefields.

In the run up to the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, WikiLeaks released a devastating trove of emails either hacked or leaked from Clinton’s campaign email account. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) attempted to conceal the damage by promoting the tale that ‘Russian hackers’ had infiltrated the organization’s computers. Meanwhile, the more ‘conspiratorial’ explanation is that they were delivered to WikiLeaks via a staff member inside the DNC. You’ll find out more about that in the next section.

One consequence of the leaky plumbing, aside from severely damaging Clinton’s presidential bid, was that it forced DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. The emails revealed that Democrats were trying to harm Bernie Sanders’ campaign, another Democratic nominee in an attempt to support Clinton.

The Democrats’ story is worse.

WikiLeaks published another set of DNC emails less than one week prior to elections. This time, it showed that Donna Brazile, the interim DNC Chairwoman (a CNN contributor) had sent questions to Clinton camp, which would then be used during a CNN debate against Trump. As far as ‘endangering US democracy’ goes, the Russians had nothing on that one. Many furious voters demanded that Clinton be stripped of the presidency and Trump elected before elections could take place.

This story has a significant footnote about how Julian Assange (and WikiLeaks) obtained the DNC email messages in the first instance. On the one side is the story that ‘Russian hackers’ had cracked the DNC computers; on the other side, that an internal source within the DNC passed off the material. Concerning the second possibility: just days before the DNC emails scandal, Seth Rich, DNC’s manager, was killed in a shooting on Washington streets. Conspiracy theorists speculated that Rich was the one who leaked the information. Rich died on July 10th, while WikiLeaks published the first DNC material July 22nd.

Assange declined to identify the source of DNC emails. However, WikiLeaks advertised a $20,000 reward to anyone who can help to arrest the killer or murderers of Mr. Rich.

It is a great coincidence, in my opinion, that Julian Assange was paraded along Pennsylvania Avenue with chains in the middle of an election year. This comes at a crucial time for the Democrats, who desperately need to distract from all the bad news, mainly on the economic front.

As everyone knows and as no one is better than Donald J. Trump himself, there’s nobody more excited about host show trials than The Democratic Party. Should Assange’s appeal process fail and he be extradited to the US, nobody should be surprised when the mainstream media, loyal to the Democratic Party, forgets that the prisoner before them is a fellow journalist with a duty to call out government malfeasance, seeing him rather as the individual who may have cost Hillary Clinton the throne in 2016 against the loathsome Orange Man.

Julian Assange cannot expect justice or sympathy in America, and that is why London shouldn’t have allowed him to be extradited to the Empire of Lies.