By Brandon Blanco - Political Chair.
A disturbing and a bombshell Yahoo News article released on September 26th details how CIA officials guided by former Trump CIA director and eventual U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate) plotted and schemed a strategy to kidnap and kill Wikileaks founder and political prisoner Julian Assange in 2017.
According to Yahoo:
President Trump's newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders "were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7," said a former Trump national security official. "They were seeing blood."
“Vault 7” refers to a series of documents that Wikileaks published in 2017, that set forth the CIA’s cyber warfare activities. It reported the CIA’s activities to spy on American citizens and was referred to as "the largest loss of classified documents in the agency's history and a huge embarrassment for C.I.A. officials.” In the aftermath of the leaked documents, Pompeo referred to Wikileaks as a "hostile intelligence service.”
The report also noted that Assange was not the only journalist targeted by the CIA. Additionally, it included former The Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary producer Laura Poitras. They attempted to redefine Wikileaks and other journalists as "information brokers," so the U.S. could spy on, prosecute, and imprison them.
Assange is currently incarcerated in a London jail. The Biden Administration is desperate for the British government to extradite him under charges of “espionage,” per the Espionage Act of 1917 as if he is a foreign agent. However, Assange and his lawyers argue the charges are politically motivated.
Wikileaks entered the map by U.S. authorities through the release of documents that revealed the war crimes committed by several U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and human rights abuses towards inmates locked at Guantanamo Bay. Former U.S. Army Intelligence Chelsea Manning provided the documents and published them on WikiLeaks. As a result, Manning was arrested for espionage and sentenced to 35 years, but later commuted to seven years.
The 2010 Collateral Murder video showed how U.S. Soldiers murdered 18 Iraqi civilians from an Apache helicopter, which included two Reuters Journalists, Saeed Chmagh, and Namir Noor-Eldeen.
What broke the camel’s back to WikiLeaks was the Afghan War documents leak, which consisted of over 91,000 documents regarding Afghanistan. It revealed how the U.S. and its coalition forcibly killed hundreds of Afghan citizens and neighboring Pakistan supporting the Taliban. Additionally, it revealed how the U.S. government used drone strikes in Afghanistan to kill both Afghans and Taliban members from a Nevada military base. It was described as “one of the biggest leaks in the US military history, since the 1970’s Pentagon Leaks.”
Julian Assange Arrested, April 2019 (Photo: Patrick Smith/NBC News)
Assange stayed on the run for almost eight years, with the help of the Ecuadorian government who provided Assange asylum under the former president Rafael Correa. Assange resided in the Ecuadorian embassy in London until April of 2019, where he was arrested by the British authorities in London after Ecuador’s then-president Lenin Moreno withdrew Assange’s asylum.
In early 2021, a UK Judge ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the U.S., due to his mental health and the risk of suicide in a U.S. prison. However, this ruling is currently being appealed by the Biden officials. If extradited, Assange could face 175 years in prison, which would mark the end of our first amendment liberties on press freedom.
This summer, an Icelandic newspaper detailed how the U.S.’s star witness to the Assange investigation admitted to fabricating testimony that Assange instructed him to hack into members of the Icelandic parliament and collaborated with the U.S. DOJ and FBI -- in exchange to not be prosecuted for his ongoing criminal activities.
Journalists like Assange should not be imprisoned just because they violated the cardinal rule of exposing U.S. war crimes. Regardless if Assange is an American citizen or not, his imprisonment is antithetical to our first amendment rights. The Supreme Court in both New York Times Co (1971) and Bartnicki (2001) consistently ruled that the first amendment protects journalists from scrutiny, even if it was obtained “unlawfully.”
For myself, Assange is a hero for exposing and reporting the truth. Without him, I -- and others -- may never have known of the U.S. government’s atrocious wartime crimes. Assange, on the record, even challenged Turkey's denial of the Armenian Genocide and exposed State Department cables that revealed the U.S complicity in Turkey's blatant denial of the Armenian genocide. Regardless of one’s opinion on Julian Assange, his conviction would set a dangerous precedent in which journalists (left or right) could go to jail reporting true information to the public. The Biden Administration should drop all charges to Julian Assange immediately so that he can walk as a free man once again.
The views expressed in the journal are their own and not the view of The La Raza Pre Law.
Biography:
Brandon Blanco is a UC Davis senior, majoring in Political Science and minoring in Human rights. Originally from Los Angeles and is also passionate about informing the injustices within the criminal justice system. He plans on pursuing a career as an immigration lawyer.
Comments