Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Julian Assange is a Hero

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April 11, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

16:51

Julian Assange is a Hero

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	So Julian Assange has finally after almost seven years of being there been kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy where he was given asylum in the face of extradition charges to Sweden to face charges of rape or alleged molestation dating back to something like 2012.
	So why exactly is Julian Assange important?
	Well if you don't know for whatever reason Julian Assange founded Wikileaks.
	Wikileaks is an organization that claims to unlock governments basically leaking government secrets primarily from the United States and they've done a hell of a job over the years.
	I mean this is just some of the work that they've done going back to 2007.
	They've done a lot of good work showing us the inner workings of what I suppose we could call the deep state in the United States and as far as I'm aware they have never had to retract a story.
	So what this means is that they have been correct and that's had some serious ramifications for the US government.
	I mean for example Wikileaks released the Iraq war logs which showed that the US had routinely, the military in the US routinely turned a blind eye to torture and abuse committed by its Iraqi allies.
	Then you had the Afghanistan war logs which was 90,000 declassified classified documents released by Wikileaks that again showed quite a degree of malfeasance.
	And then you had the leaked State Department cables which gave us a very, very good look into the minds of people like Hillary Clinton and the Saudi king.
	Now this has all made Julian Assange the public enemy of the United States.
	They have obviously had it out for him for many many years and understandably so.
	Apparently on a charge of treason in previous years but doesn't really make sense given how Julian Assange isn't American.
	He's Australian.
	So why he would be accused of treason is kind of silly.
	He was granted asylum by Ecuador because they feared that he would be persecuted by the United States after being extradited there for these charges.
	They say there are serious indications of retaliation from the country or countries that produce the information published by Mr. Assange.
	Retaliation that could endanger his safety, integrity and even his life, said then Foreign Affairs Minister Ricardo Petino.
	The evidence shows that if he is extradited to the United States, he would not have a fair trial.
	It is not at all improbable that he could be subjected to cruel and degrading treatment and sentenced to life imprisonment or even capital punishment, because treason is still a capital offence in the United States, which is understandable.
	But Julian Assange can't actually commit treason because he's not a US citizen.
	So this is why Julian Assange was in the embassy of Ecuador.
	And in 2017, the charges that we got, the reason that he was concerned about this is not because the US was actually trying to get him from London.
	It was that Sweden was trying to extradite him to face charges of sexual assault and rape.
	These charges were dropped in 2017, and really they should never have actually been brought against him at all.
	Because the girls, sorry, the ladies who had gone to the police over this were not actually going to the police with a complaint of rape.
	They were going to the police because they'd both contracted STDs from him through consensual sex.
	And at the time, they wanted to have him persuaded by the authorities to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
	And the claim of rape is kind of the expanded vision of what rape is because he had sex with one of the girls with a condom and then the next day without a condom.
	And she was aware of this, and then suspected that she had caught an STD from him and found herself in contact with another woman who essentially had the same, where she thought she had an STD from him.
	And this was parlayed by the Swedish government into charges of rape and molestation.
	It's all quite murky, frankly, but these were dropped in 2017.
	So they could not actually be the thing that Julian Assange was fearing to leave.
	He was afraid that they would transport him to Sweden, and then the United States would force the Swedish to extradite him to the US so he could be charged with treason.
	After seven years of solitude in the Ecuadorian embassy, he was arrested by the British police because he had broken the terms of his bail after being charged in something like 2010 by the British state.
	And he was supposed to stay in a particular location, pay a certain amount of money, and wear a tag.
	He apparently didn't do this.
	And so then he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.
	He was apparently convicted of skipping bail.
	Fast forward to today, and Julian Assange has been charged by the US with conspiracy to hack a government computer in conjunction with Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, when he leaked the documents to Wikileaks from the US government.
	Now she, obviously.
	But either way, at the time, Bradley Manning/slash Chelsea Manning did the right thing, in my opinion, even if it was something that was illegal.
	I think it is important that the public is aware of what their governments do, because really the question against Julian Assange isn't a partisan question in favour of the left and right, which is why when I was young and the Iraq war was going on, I was against the Iraq war and a fan of Julian Assange.
	I supported him and I considered myself a man of the left.
	Now I do not consider myself a man of the left and I still support Julian Assange, whereas the left has broadly turned on him.
	Why this is the case?
	Well, presumably it's to do with the apparent sexual assault.
	But I think that's honestly just a cover.
	Either way, he has been charged with interfering and conspiracy to hack a government computer.
	The single charge conspiracy to commit computer intrusion was filed a year earlier in March 2018 and stems from what prosecutors said was his agreement to break a password to a classified US government computer.
	It carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and is significant in that it is not an espionage charge, a detail that will come as a relief to press freedom advocates.
	And I think probably a very specific way of getting him.
	Much in the same way they did with mob bosses.
	They get them, they understood they ran a mob empire, an illegal mob empire, but they couldn't get them on that, so they got them on tax evasion and things like this.
	He does have the right to contest his extradition to the United States.
	I imagine that we're not going to grant that.
	I don't exactly have high hopes for British courts at the moment.
	And so it's entirely likely that he will be, in my opinion, extradited to the US, charged with whatever it is they wish to charge him with, and then he will languish in a jail, which, frankly, sounds like what's happened in the Ecuadorian embassy, because, I mean, he likened it to living on a spaceship.
	And I can see why.
	You just, if you can't leave a very small area, it must have been very isolating.
	And it must have made him a bit strange.
	Because the reason the Ecuadorians kicked him out of the embassy is to do with his personality and behavior.
	Not because any of the things that any of the concerns that he had raised have become illegitimate, or that the US government wasn't going to try and charge him, and the concern is still for his human rights.
	Because at the end of the day, it really is the question not of partisanship, but of the people versus the state.
	Do you have a right to know what your government is doing?
	Should you be able to see it?
	Well, if you can, a great number of people become implicated in war crimes, a great number of people become highly embarrassed by their private communications being made public, and you become the enemy of very, very, very powerful people who have every interest in making you suffer.
	But anyway, Assange was kicked out of the Ecuadorian embassy for this.
	Ecuador is a country generosity of our government respective of the principal of the international rights between the institutions of Brazil.
	He considered the retiring sovereignty of the state of Catorian.
	Today, announcement that the conducting respect and aggressive respect of declarations of cortes and organizations in contradiction of Ecuador and sobre, the transgression of international situation in which the science is insustible and enviable.
	Ecuador sober finalized and diplomatic authority in 2002.
	For years, and the Caturalian guaranteed, and their decisions in the institutions of their state.
	When the presidency of Ecuador of this situation and a protocol of conviction, which is the minimum that receives their case, Ecuador with their obligations in the market of international rights.
	The Mr. Assange violates, reiteradamente, disposiciones expresas of the Convenciones sobre Asilo Diplomático of La Habana and Caracas.
	Although he solicited, in several occasions, that respect and comply with these norms, violates particularly the norm of not intervene in other states.
	The most recent when Wikileaks filters from the Vatican, this organization visits a second visit and other publications that have the world of science if included with Wikileaks and the organization in other states.
	So the passive of Ecuador suddenly.
	What is campaign of the mission of Ecuador in the mission?
	Agreed and diplomatic accident allows us to embrace two communicated and reached the condition of the Internet condition, proportional to the bajada, pose a normal concealment within.
	My interest in Ecuador, respectable, with the conditions of condition, the science demanding three distances, distinctions, the protocols of convivial protocols.
	So the authorities correspond to the Ecuador.
	In the line of our respective human rights and the right international rights, solidarity guarantees that we don't integrate in this traditional country in the public torturous purpose.
	The government government confirmed by their normal project.
	For the last Wikileaks, the organization of Science of Ecuador.
	My government doesn't have it.
	No, you are.
	Ecuador seguía por los principios del derecho, cumple las normas internacionales y cuida los intereses de los ecuatorianos.
	Muchas gracias.
	Because I think it's important to remember that great men are rarely good men.
	Most people who do the things that Julian Assange has done for the good of the public at large are rarely people who are shy and retiring and not enchanted with a sense of their own greatness.
	This was the opinion of Christopher Hitchens back in December 2010, and it seems to have been corroborated by the statements that we have had from the Ecuadorian embassy.
	It seems that Julian Assange does have, I guess, what we would call a difficult personality.
	Now, I'm not condemning the man for being this way.
	I think actually the world is more interesting for these kind of interesting people in it.
	It would be very terrible if we had a dull and conformist world, in my opinion.
	But it seems that he has been his own worst enemy here because I don't see any other reason that Ecuador would want to kick him out now.
	Although maybe there's something behind the scenes of which I'm not aware that will come to light after this video has been recorded.
	But I mean, according to CNN, apparently Ecuador says that Assange put feces on the embassy walls and abused the guards and things like this.
	And maybe he did.
	Maybe seven years trapped inside an embassy is enough to drive someone stir crazy.
	Again, I don't consider this to be necessarily a condemnation of Julian Assange.
	Obviously, this behavior is unacceptable, and the Ecuadorian embassy has decided that they're going to withdraw their offer of asylum to him, which apparently they've done in regard to international law.
	But the fact that he has a few instances of uncouth behavior do not erase the decades-long service that he did to the public at large in releasing information that we needed to know.
	This is why, even in light of any of the character attacks against Julian, which may or may not be true, the fact that he has put himself on the line this way and suffered in this way to provide all of this information to us, in my opinion, still ranks Julian Assange as a hero.
	And I do hope that he is considered to have served his time in the Ecuadorian embassy and that the president pardons him because apparently he does love WikiLeaks.
	This just came out.
	This just came out.
	WikiLeaks!
	I love Wikileaks.
	And I said, write a couple of them down.
	Let's see.
	During a speech, crooked Hillary Clinton, oh, she's crooked, folks.
	She's crooked as a $3 bill.
	I have never seen anything like it.
	I have never ever seen anything like it.
	You have never seen anything like it.
	33,000 emails, 33,000.
	She deletes them.
	She bleaches them that nobody does because it's such an expensive process.
	She gets a subpoena from the United States Congress.
	And after she gets the subpoena, she does that.
	But we'll talk about that in a minute.
	We have to go back to Wikileaks.
	Oh, WikiLeaks.
	And considers what he did to be a service to the American people and the people of the world at large.
	Because at the end of the day, the people who were committing the crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan needed to be held to account.
	We cannot simply allow these people to operate above the law.
	And it requires people like Julian Assange to make that happen.
	So whatever the United States does, I hope they are lenient with him on the understanding that he was doing something that was necessary.
	And I do hope that everything works out well for him.
	Because there, but for the grace of God, that could have been any of us, frankly.
	Any of us who stumbled on something as big as Julian Assange was handed, well, who knows what we'd do in those circumstances.
	But Assange took action that we might know what was going on at the expense of his own liberty.
	And I think that very few people could say that they would actually do the same thing in his position, which is why it takes men of remarkable character, and often unpleasant character, to do such things.

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