JULIAN ASSANGE
On April 11, Julian Assange was arrested at the Equadorian embassy in London, where he has been living in a small office for about 7 years. He is someone who has made enormous personal sacrifices in an effort to bring the truth to the public. Wikileaks, the organization that he founded, has published a huge amount of information revealing injustices and corruption in many contexts all around the world. He should be hailed as a hero, but instead he is being persecuted, called a terrorist and a traitor and faces a lifetime in prison or possible execution by U.S. authorities who are pressuring the U.K. to extradite him into U.S. custody.
In my opinion, this is an opportunity for the public to get very vocal in a non-partisan, non-political way. We need to give the authorities clear messages:
- that we cannot tolerate the ongoing attack on human rights, like freedom of the press.
- that we demand the truth and are tired of the lies and manipulation of propaganda media
- that we will not tolerate injustice and corruption
- that we will support courageous whistle-blowers who risk so much to bring us the truth
- that we the public are WAKING UP.
If we sit idly by and complacently allow this persecution to happen, then we deserve a police state.
If you're not familiar with the Assange story and the contributions of WikiLeaks, here is a brief bio taken mostly from Wikipedia.
Julian Assange is an Australian journalist, computer programmer, and the founder and director of WikiLeaks. Assange describes himself as an advocate of information transparency and market liberalism. Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006, an international publishing organisation known for revealing war crimes, human rights abuses, and corruption. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. These leaks brought to public attention some war crimes by the U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq, including the bombing of innocent civilians and the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Grabe prison in Iraq. After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance.
In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange, after questioning him months earlier about allegations of sexual assault and rape.Assange denied the allegations, and said that they were just a pretext for him to be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his role in publishing secret American documents. Swedish prosecutors later suspended their investigation and applied to revoke the European arrest warrant in May 2017. Assange surrendered to UK police on 7 December 2010 but was released on bail within 10 days. Having been unsuccessful in his challenge to the extradition proceedings, he breached his bail in June 2012 to seek asylum from Ecuador. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 and remained in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for almost seven years.In 2017, the London Metropolitan Police indicated that an arrest warrant was in force for Assange's failure to surrender himself to his bail, even though the original Swedish allegations had been dropped.
During the 2016 U.S. Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted emails sent or received by candidate Hillary Clinton from her private email server when she was Secretary of States. The U.S. Intelligence Community, as well as a Special Counsel investigation, concluded that the Russian government carried out a hacking campaign as part of broader efforts of interference in the 2016 United States elections...working with WikiLeaks and other organisations to spread the stolen documents.Assange consistently denied any connection to or co-operation with Russia in relation to the leaks, and accused the Clinton campaign of stoking "a neo-McCarthy hysteria".
On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn by Equador .... The police were invited into the embassy, and he was arrested.
The Wikipedia article is very informative and does not seem to have an anti-Assange/American propaganda bias. Here's the link - WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE
Here are clips from trusted sources:
