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April 17, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:22:58

SPECIAL EPISODE: 4-Year Anniversary of Julian Assange's Imprisonment: The Real Story and Latest Developments

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	Good evening, it's Friday, April 14th.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Exactly four years ago this week, British law enforcement agents marched into the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrested the publisher, journalist, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
	The person who has quite possibly published more major scoops than any journalist of his generation.
	Ever since, Assange has been imprisoned in the high-security prison called His Majesty's Prison Belmarsh, a facility so repressive and grim that it has been used for dangerous terrorist suspects, and the BBC in 2004 called it Britain's Guantanamo Bay.
	Assange's imprisonment continues to this very day, despite his never having been convicted of any crime other than a bail-jumping misdemeanor, for which he long ago served his 11-month sentence.
	Instead, he is now being held in that prison solely because the Biden administration is demanding that he be extradited to stand trial in the United States.
	A country of which he is not a citizen and which he has barely visited on espionage charges in connection with the 2010 reporting that WikiLeaks did on US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	Despite the fact that Assange is a famous and deeply polarizing figure, the real and full story of Assange's imprisonment How we came to be in prison and why is rarely told.
	It's a complex story and one that unfolds over almost 13 years now.
	So we decided to devote tonight's episode to telling and documenting that story, in part because of its four year anniversary, in part because there is now growing momentum to secure his release, In part because the way in which he has been treated and maligned and abused shed significant light on the leaker whom the New York Times and Washington Post this week helped the FBI capture and arrest.
	21-year-old Massachusetts National Guardman Jack Teixeira who's accused of disclosing a wide range of classified documents that shed considerable light on the reality of what the United States is doing in the war in Ukraine.
	Now, there are obvious and important differences between the two cases, but what they both have in common is that unlike what appears almost daily in mainstream corporate outlets, namely the CIA and the FBI giving authorized propagandized leaks to those media outlets, they are both responsible for highly illuminating namely the CIA and the FBI giving authorized propagandized leaks to those media outlets, they are both responsible for highly illuminating but Meaning information that embarrass the U.S.
	security state while informing the American people about their lies, deceit, and corrupt conduct.
	So understanding what happened in Assange's case is very important unto itself, but it also has added significance in light of this week's event, and we will go through and connect the dots and tell you exactly what it is that has happened in the Assange case and what is now happening with the latest developments.
	As a reminder, System Update, each episode of it, is available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform.
	Simply follow us on those platforms, System Update, on Rumble, and you can rate and review us to help spread the word, or follow and listen to us there.
	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	Julian Assange has spent four full years now, as of this week, in a high-security prison in the United Kingdom called Belmarsh, which in 2004, the BBC dubbed in a high-security prison in the United Kingdom called Belmarsh, which in 2004, the BBC It is a prison known for being notoriously harsh.
	It houses the worst violent criminals as well as terror suspects.
	And Assange, for no good reason whatsoever, has been kept in that prison for four straight years, even though the only crime of which he has ever been convicted is a misdemeanor bail jumping charge stemming from his seeking asylum from Ecuador back in 2012.
	And yet, it was on April 12th, 2019, so four years ago and two days to this day, that Assange was arrested by British law enforcement agents who went into the Ecuadorian embassy and dragged him out.
	There you see the video on the screen.
	Brought him to Belmarsh Prison, where he has been held ever since.
	The humanitarian aspect of the story is well known.
	He married his longtime girlfriend while in prison and had two young children with her who he has not been able to raise with her.
	And doctors, both for his mental health and his physical health, have warned that his health has been gravely degraded over the past four years.
	And there is a good likelihood that if he continues to be in prison, he will break and possibly even die.
	Prior to the four years that Assange has spent in this British prison, he has basically been detained for seven years prior to that, going all the way back to 2012 when he sought asylum from Ecuador and went to the Ecuadorian embassy where he was granted asylum because Sweden was trying to force him To travel to that country where two women had claimed that he had sexually assaulted them.
	Two women whom he had dated for several months who never made those allegations and then suddenly united and both claimed that he had been sexually assaulted.
	Sweden was seeking his extradition back to Sweden and he was willing to go except for the concern that Sweden would turn him over to the United States as we're about to show you.
	Had Sweden simply agreed, as both Ecuador and Assange's lawyers requested, not to use his presence on Swedish soil as a pretext to then turn him over to the United States to stand trial for national security crimes, had Sweden simply agreed, if you come to Sweden and face these charges, we will not use your presence here to turn you over to the US, Assange would have gotten on the next plane to Sweden in order to face those charges.
	It was when the Swedish government refused to give those assurances that the Ecuadorian stepped in and said he's clearly in danger in terms of his political rights and his human rights from being turned over to the United States and sent to prison for the rest of his life for the crime of having reported on the United States government.
	Now, there's, I think, a very good, strong case to make that Julian Assange is definitely one of the most consequential and intrepid journalists of the last, say, 50 years, if not the single most important pioneering journalist of his generation.
	He has almost certainly broken more major stories than almost every single employee of the mainstream media outlets combined.
	They don't hate Julian Assange despite the fact that he's broken so many stories.
	They hate him precisely because of that.
	In part, it's because he holds up a mirror showing what they really are.
	He is what they pretend to be.
	While the mainstream media constantly publishes stories that they dress up as leaks, but in fact are nothing more than propaganda messaging tasks given to them by the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security, which pick up the phone and pick their favorite reporter and tell them what to go plant in the newspaper to disseminate propaganda to the American people, Assange never does that and never has and never would.
	He shows the American people and the world the secrets the CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon and Homeland Security don't want you to see.
	And that's why those agencies hate him and that's why the employees in the media outlets that serve those agencies also hate him.
	That is the reason that he's in prison.
	Almost every single employee of the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, on a daily basis, you can pick up those newspapers, or if you have the misfortune to listen to those networks, you will hear or read them saying, anonymous officials told us X, Y, and Z. They publish classified information all the time.
	But they don't end up like Julian Assange or like Jack Tessera, the 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts National Guard who was hunted this week by the New York Times and the Washington Post and then arrested yesterday by the FBI because he is accused of having leaked classified documents.
	The difference between the mainstream media, on the one hand, And people like Edward Snowden on the other, is that the mainstream media publishes leaks that are authorized, that the U.S.
	security state wants you to see, because they're forms of propaganda.
	And that's why they're never punished, that's why they don't end up in prison.
	They get book deals, they get put on television, and they're applauded by the U.S.
	government.
	The people who end up in prison are those who show you the secrets they want to hide.
	That's the main difference.
	It's the difference between being a propagandist and being a journalist.
	Julian Assange is a journalist and that's the reason he's in prison.
	Now, one of the things that really struck me this week about this new leaker, this 21-year-old, is that it follows the same pattern that is always used whenever we have an unauthorized leak, meaning a leak the U.S.
	security state did not plant themselves.
	You can go down and look at how Edward Snowden was treated, how Julian Assange is being treated, even how Daniel Ellsberg was treated, or Chelsea Manning.
	You see exactly the same pattern in the way their media servants behave.
	So one of the things that is being done, arguably the leading tactic that's being used to malign and demean this newest leaker, Is to try to do everything possible to distract your attention away from the substance of the documents that he allegedly enabled us to see.
	And while there are some documents that made their way onto the internet that I myself would not have published because they don't seem to be in the public interest, many of them are clearly in the public interest.
	We devoted our show on Monday and again last night to examining some of those documents, including the fact that Joe Biden ordered American special forces to be deployed on the ground to Ukraine.
	So whether you're in favor of this war in Ukraine or not, whether you're in favor of the U.S.
	proxy war in Ukraine or not, the government and the media has hidden from you the rather important fact that the United States actually has troops or special forces on the ground participating in a hot war with Russia.
	Those documents reveal that the United States and Zelensky both believe and have the position that there will be no negotiating, let alone a diplomatic resolution into 2023, which means they expect and want the war to extend at least through 2024.
	That's tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars more that you're going to be told you have to send to Kiev and to Zelensky.
	Of course, that's something we ought to know.
	There are documents that say that as a result of spying on Zelensky, the U.S.
	government knows that he intends to use the weapons he's obtained from NATO and from the U.S.
	to strike deep into Russian territory, even though we were told repeatedly that U.S.
	weapons would never be used to strike Russian territory, only to defend Ukraine, given the very serious risk that that can spiral into escalation.
	And if you want to see all the other things these documents revealed in the public interest that we as Americans ought to know because they reveal things that our government is doing in secret or reveal lies that they told about what they're doing.
	You can watch our show on Monday, you can watch our show last night, or you can, for those of you who are local subscribers to our locals community, look at the article we published.
	It's actually available.
	We made it available to everyone.
	It's not behind any paywall, so anyone can look at it, where we've been compiling the documents that were leaked that we ourselves are reporting on.
	We want you to be able to see those documents that we don't believe that we get to see them and you don't.
	CNN, when they show these documents, they blur them.
	The New York Times and Washington Post will talk about them, but won't show them.
	We believe you have every right to see what your government is doing in the dark, and the reason we got to see these is because this 21-year-old decided that they should be seen.
	But instead of focusing on these critically important revelations, There's instead an attempt to focus on his personality.
	To distract your attention away from the substance of the revelations and instead get you to hate him or dislike him or think poorly of him so that you have a negative view of the things that he revealed and so that your focus is on him as a person and not on the revelations themselves.
	So here, for example, is a Fortune Magazine article.
	There are countless of these doing the same thing.
	There you see the headline, quote, Alleged Pentagon Leaker Was a Conspiracy Theorist Who Shared Racist Memes and Anti-Semitic Ideas.
	I suppose that is relevant if you are trying to decide whether you like Jack Teixeira or not.
	I personally have a hard time believing it's uncommon that teenage forums, which is what this was, it was mostly 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds.
	He was the oldest one.
	I have a hard time believing it's uncommon that people in these kind of underground gaming communities don't say transgressive things.
	Oftentimes, teenagers or young adults in their early 20s say things not out of malice but out of transgression.
	But be that as it may, assume if you want that he's racist and anti-Semitic, what does that have to do at all with the revelations that he enabled us to see?
	Nothing.
	As a journalist, I'm not interested in whether he's a pure person or a nice person with good political views.
	It doesn't interest me at all.
	Why would it?
	What interests me are the documents.
	And yet, what the media is doing over and over and over is trying to get you to focus on his personality traits.
	This is exactly the same thing that was done when we first did the reporting in 2013 based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden that revealed the American government was spying on the American people en masse in violation of the Constitution and the law.
	It was unconstitutional and illegal infringement of millions of Americans' privacy rights.
	And a court ultimately ruled that the program we revealed, the NSA Indiscriminate Domestic Spying Program, violated the Fourth Amendment and violated the law.
	And yet, instantly, we waited about a week, we did stories for a week, and then at Snowden's insistence, we put him on camera, we interviewed him so that he could step forward and say, you don't have to find me, I'm not hiding, I don't believe I did anything wrong, I believe I owe it to the American people to explain why I've done this.
	And he went on camera and he said, I began as thinking the same things most people are taught to believe about the US government.
	He tried to enlist in the army to fight in the Iraq war.
	But along the way, he became disillusioned when he saw that our government frequently lies to the American people.
	He explained that he saw that these systems were not being used against foreign threats like Al Qaeda or ISIS, but instead had been turned on the American people indiscriminately.
	And then he explained the final straw was when he heard James Clapper, the senior National Security Advisor for the Obama Administration, went before the United States Senate and falsely denied, falsely denied, That the NSA was spying en masse on millions of American citizens.
	He had the evidence in his hand proving that James Clapper lied.
	The government was doing exactly that which he falsely said it wasn't.
	And so he came to myself and Laura Poitras and handed us this full archive of documents so that we could do the reporting.
	And yet, as soon as we unveiled him, and we knew this was going to happen, The focus immediately switched to away from what the NSA was doing to, oh, Edward Snowden is a narcissist.
	He thinks he has the right to decide what should and shouldn't be revealed.
	Digging into his past blog posts in order, again, to get you to distract your attention away from what the substantive revelations were onto Edward Snowden as a person.
	And I think people have forgotten how aggressively that was the strategy invoked with Julian Assange to create a climate in which Americans would come to regard him as someone who is untoward, somebody who provoked feelings of discomfort, all in order to personalize the leaks onto Assange and get you to dislike him and therefore not want to pay attention to the leaks.
	Now, just to show you how far this went, Here's an article that was published in 2011, just a few months after WikiLeaks concluded its first real major scoop, the one for which Assange is now being prosecuted, showing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the diplomatic cables that revealed U.S.
	allies around the world are deeply corrupt in the Arab world and elsewhere.
	We'll show you exactly what WikiLeaks revealed in 2010, how important those revelations were.
	But here's what the editor-in-chief, the executive editor of the New York Times at the time, Bill Keller, just months after WikiLeaks did this reporting, and remember, the New York Times participated in some of this reporting.
	They worked with Assange.
	Look at this paragraph that Bill Keller published that he claims he got from one of his reporters right after he had met with Assange.
	Quote, he, meaning Assange, was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady Walking in off the street, wearing a dingy light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers, and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles, he smelled as if he hadn't bathed in days.
	Do you see that attempt to get you to think Julian Assange is such a dirty person in every sense of the word that you should forget about everything that WikiLeaks just revealed about what your government did, all the lies that it told you, just like they're doing with Jack DeSharon now?
	Here's another similar headline published in Vox in 2019 on the day that Julian Assange was arrested.
	This is Vox, a website filled with writers who have never broken a major story of any kind, let alone one that requires courage or that consists of standing up to powerful institutions.
	They should revere Julian Assange, but instead they're ashamed by when they think about him because he shows what they really are.
	And so this is the kind of headline that they published on the day Assange was Arrested in order to get you to focus on Assange the person.
	Quote, why Ecuador released Julian Assange?
	Rudeness, spying, and poop.
	He was the worst house guest.
	Seriously, the worst.
	I mean, that is really what they said.
	It's not just what they said, but the tone.
	It's like an adolescent.
	He was seriously the worst house guest.
	Seriously the worst.
	This is Alex's word.
	I've never heard of this person.
	I know for a fact, by virtue of the fact that he works for Vox, that he's never broken a significant story.
	And yet, he's using the tactic, utilizing the tactic that the establishment uses against anyone who brings incriminating and illuminating evidence to light about what the U.S.
	security state does.
	And that is exactly what they did all the time with Assange.
	No, I think it's really worth recalling how WikiLeaks came into public prominence even before that 2010 major series of stories that they did about Iraq and Afghanistan.
	Because I think this has been somewhat forgotten.
	I remember very well the day, the first day that I ever heard of Julian Assange.
	I was when I saw this article in the New York Times on March 17, 2010.
	I was at the time I was a journalist for Salon.
	And this is the first time I had really focused on WikiLeaks.
	I believe I had heard of them before because they had done some minor leaks.
	But this is the time I really focused on them.
	So this is an article entitled Pentagon Sees a Threat from Online Muckrakers.
	And it's an article describing how the U.S.
	Army had prepared a report declaring WikiLeaks to be an enemy of the state and plotting ways to destroy them.
	Here's what the New York Times reported, quote, to the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.
	The Pentagon has since assessed the danger Wikileaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked, quote, unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.
	It concluded that, quote, Wikileaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, opsec, and infosec threat to the U.S.
	Army, or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.
	Wikileaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon Report about itself on Monday.
	So in other words, the US Army published a secret report declaring Wikileaks an enemy of the state and plotting ways to destroy it.
	Including by submitting fabricated or fake documents to WikiLeaks in the hope that they would publish it and destroy their own credibility.
	WikiLeaks got a hold of that US Army report and published it on their own website.
	And then the New York Times did this write-up.
	The New York Times went on, quote, Wikileaks, a nonprofit organization, has rankled governments and companies around the world with its publication of materials intended to be kept secret.
	For instance, the Army's report says that in 2008, access to the website in the United States was cut off by court order after bank Julius Baer, a Swiss financial institution, sued WikiLeaks for publishing documents implicating Baer in money laundering, grand larceny, and tax evasion.
	Access was restored after two weeks when the bank dropped its case.
	Governments, including those of North Korea and Thailand, also have tried to prevent access to the WikiLeaks site and complained about its release of materials critical of their governments and policies.
	The Army's interest in WikiLeaks appears to have been spurred by, among other things, its publication and analysis of classified and unclassified Army documents containing information about military equipment, units, operation, and quote, nearly the entire order of battle for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in April nearly the entire order of battle for American forces in Iraq Seven.
	So before WikiLeaks did its major story, the one based on the archive provided by Chelsea Manning, it had been going around the world exposing corporate corruption, toxic waste dumping in Kenya, money laundering in a Swiss bank, and the Swiss banker actually sued WikiLeaks and got their website shut down for two weeks.
	As well as other acts that the United States government was doing in both Iraq and Afghanistan to the point where even before those major leaks, before WikiLeaks came on the radar of everybody, the army had declared them to be an enemy of the state and plotted ways to destroy their reputation.
	Now, one of the things that here...
	One of the things that WikiLeaks did after all of that was in 2010, they did get this archive from Chelsea Manning.
	That was the thing that really put them on the map, that made the entire U.S.
	security state devoted to their destruction.
	Here is, for example, an article that I wrote in March of 2010.
	So this is actually...
	Just to correct this timing, this is an article that I wrote after the New York Times published that article about the U.S.
	Army report, when the U.S.
	Army was already planning to destroy WikiLeaks.
	And I wrote about it just based on that.
	I actually called Julian Assange the day I saw that New York Times article.
	I interviewed him for Salon.
	Because I knew that the model he had created all the way back then was going to be pioneering in journalism.
	The model that he created was designed to allow sources around the world to furnish large amounts of digital information that institutions of power wanted to keep secret.
	This was the genius of Julian Assange.
	This is why he became so dangerous.
	Julian Assange realized before anyone else did That the future of journalism in the digital age was going to be large-scale digital leaks.
	And in order to facilitate that, he needed to provide a way for sources, people inside these institutions, to provide these leaks securely and safely.
	And so what he did, using his skills as a computer programmer, was create a submission program that guaranteed anonymity to those providing this information.
	That's what made him so threatening.
	When Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which was tens of thousands of top-secret documents that showed that the United States government was systematically lying to the American people about the war in Vietnam, one of the main problems Ellsberg faced back in 1971 was a logistical problem.
	If you want to leak tens of thousands of pages to a newspaper, how do you even copy it?
	Do you go to the local drugstore and carry a huge suitcase of dimes and just one after the next at the Xerox machine in the pharmacy, copy page after page after page after page?
	That is similar to what Ellsberg ended up doing.
	But in the digital age, everything changed.
	It became extremely easy.
	For someone inside of an institution like an Edward Snowden or a Chelsea Manning or Jack Teixeira to take information very quickly by downloading it and then sending it to journalists in order to publish it, in order to curate it, in order to report on it.
	And Assange's genius, his pioneering prescient anticipation and recognition was that all that you needed to do was to create a safe way for sources to do that and they would come to you.
	And that's what he created.
	He was able to hold all kinds of corporate and state institutions accountable before that big leak even happened.
	And that's what caused me to interview him and write about him in 2010.
	And the headline that I used at Salon when I first wrote about WikiLeaks the first time was, quote, the war on WikiLeaks and why it matters.
	And there you see the sub-headline, the U.S.
	government escalates its campaign to harass and destroy a key whistleblowing site.
	So this war between Assange and the U.S.
	government has been long in the making, well before people even had heard of WikiLeaks.
	Now, the first leak that I ever wrote about back then is a really fascinating one.
	It's been lost to memory and it's been lost to history.
	This was, again, before the collateral murder video and all of the things that he ended up showing.
	It was a CIA red cell letter that was in March of 2010.
	And a CIA red cell letter is a way that the CIA recognizes a certain problem in the world that's emerging and thinks about how they can try and solve it.
	And the problem that this CIA red letter was, or red cell letter, was anticipating and discussing, and it's one that WikiLeaks obtained and leaked, is really fascinating.
	They were very worried that the war in Afghanistan was becoming increasingly unpopular.
	Listen to this.
	People in Western Europe started to wonder, why are we fighting a war in Afghanistan for nine years now Why are we sending our sons and daughters to go fight and die in Afghanistan against the Taliban?
	How does this make any sense?
	Why are we spending billions of dollars on a war in Afghanistan when our standard of living is plummeting at home?
	And there had been two governments, one in the Netherlands and another one, that had collapsed, had fallen in parliamentary elections, largely due to the populace's anger, popular anger, that those governments wanted to keep fighting in the war in Afghanistan.
	And the CIA was petrified that if this continued, If anti-war sentiment about the war in Afghanistan continued to spread throughout Western Europe, every government that was for the war would lose or they would be forced to pull troops out.
	In other words, they would be forced to adhere to the wishes of the population, and you can't have that.
	So this CIA letter was to say, how are we going to fix this problem?
	And here you see this fascinating title of the CIA memo.
	And again, the only reason we know about this is because WikiLeaks published it.
	Where they say, Afghanistan, sustaining Western European support for the NATO-led mission, why counting on apathy might not be enough?
	That's an incredibly revealing phrase.
	The CIA knows that nobody was waking up in Western Europe or in the United States in 2010 and wanting the government to send people to die and spend resources on the war in Afghanistan.
	What they count on instead is apathy.
	They go and they fight their wars in Syria, and Libya, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Ukraine.
	And they know it doesn't improve your life.
	They know that that's not what you want.
	But what they count on is your apathy.
	That at some point, you just kind of give up.
	You say, I can't do anything about it.
	This war is going to go on for as long as they want it to.
	And there's not much I can do.
	That's apathy.
	And the CIA is saying, usually we count on apathy.
	That's how we get our way.
	That's how we're able to do things against the will of the population.
	But in this case, apathy may not be enough because anti-war sentiment is spreading throughout Western Europe.
	And so their solution was to make Barack Obama the face of the war in Afghanistan.
	Because they knew that Western Europeans adored Barack Obama.
	They saw that Barack Obama was a tool of theirs, a marketing tool.
	To take this war that was started by George Bush, whom Western Europeans looked at with Disapproval, he was a swaggering American, an evangelical, religious Christian, something not popular among Western Europe, and they replaced that face with a much more cosmopolitan, progressive face of Barack Obama.
	And the CIA knew that if they could make Barack Obama the face of that war and give it a progressive rationale, They would stem the tide of anti-war sentiment in Western Europe and enable that war to continue, and that's exactly what happened.
	So here in this memo, the CIA says, appeals by President Obama and Afghan women may gain traction.
	That's the, let me bring that up, that's the headline there of what the CIA is saying.
	So they knew that appeals by President Obama and using Afghan women Would make Western Europeans agree to have this war continue.
	Quote, the confidence of the French and German publics in President Obama's ability to handle foreign affairs in general, and Afghanistan in particular, suggests that they would be receptive to his direct affirmation of their importance to the ISAF mission, and sensitive to direct expressions of disappointment in allies who do not help.
	Isn't that fascinating?
	The CIA knew that Obama was a marketing tool for their wars, and that's what he became, and that worked.
	Western Europe stayed with the United States until the United States left in Afghanistan.
	Now, that is the kind of thing that WikiLeaks is publishing, and that's why the U.S.
	security state decided they had to destroy Julian Assange with things like having Bill Keller go and say his socks were filthy, he didn't take a bath.
	But then the big leak was the one that Chelsea Manning enabled in 2010.
	That no matter what your views on those wars were, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the war on terror, unquestionably we ought to have seen these things that WikiLeaks enabled us to see.
	This is the reporting in 2010.
	Not what Julian Assange did in 2016 in the election, but this war, this reporting, is what he's being prosecuted for.
	So I could spend all night showing you what that reporting revealed, but just to give you a couple of samples, here from November of 2010, there are documents that Hillary Clinton ordered American diplomats to spy on UN officials.
	You think Hillary Clinton, who at the time was the Secretary of State, was appreciative that she got caught spying on UN officials?
	Here from The Guardian, you see the Iraq War Logs, secret order that led the US to ignore abuse.
	There was an order in place.
	Where the United States government knew that Iraqi security forces, which we were arming and training, were using torture and murder against dissidents to the regime we installed.
	And there was an order in place telling American troops they were to ignore that and overlook it and not doing anything about it.
	And then, of course, there was the most famous part of all, which was the video that WikiLeaks published showing American troops gunning down 12 innocent people, including two Reuters journalists.
	Killing them all as they tried to crawl away and then shooting on the people who came and rescued them.
	Ambulance workers and the like as well.
	Let's take just a look at just a small portion of that video to remind you how Julian Assange became an enemy of the state to the point where he's in prison 13 years later.
	Firing.
	Let me know when you get them.
	Light them all up.
	Come on, fire.
	Roger.
	Keep shootin'.
	Keep shootin'.
	Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.
	And we've got two emergency.
	We're still firing.
	Roger.
	Oh, fuck's alright.
	We'll always be done.
	Bushmaster, two things.
	We need to move time now.
	All right, we just engaged all eight individuals.
	Oh, yeah, we got two birds.
	We're still firing.
	We got him.
	Two six.
	It's a two six.
	We'll move.
	Oh, fuck, sorry.
	I'll hold you.
	Bypass.
	God damn it, Kyle.
	All right.
	Where's that man at?
	Right down there by the body.
	Okay, yeah.
	Bushmaster, crazy horse.
	We have individuals going to the scene.
	Looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.
	No, I don't think people are particularly surprised that wars entail the killing of innocent civilians.
	Even sometimes what seemed to be deliberate, and you hear the troops kind of celebrating it. - Okay.
	But images are very powerful and we should know what our government is doing in our name.
	We constantly see the victims in Ukraine so that our emotions are worked up to hate Russia and to be disgusted by the Russian war.
	But all the reporting that WikiLeaks did in 2010, as part of that reporting on Hillary Clinton, on the Clinton State Department, on the Obama administration, on what we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, what our allies around the world were doing, were all incredibly newsworthy.
	As I said, they were more significant and huge scoops than the work of almost every employee of media outlets combined.
	And it was at that point that our government decided that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks had to be destroyed at any cost because he was too dangerous.
	And the reason he was too dangerous is that unlike the people who are working in the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC and CNN, who do the U.S.
	security state's bidding, who are little more than glorified messengers for the U.S.
	security state, Julian Assange was doing real journalism.
	And that is what we can't have.
	You can have all the guarantees in the Constitution that you want about a free press, but it's just words on parchment paper if We get, if we allow the government to then go and imprison those who do real reporting, and it's always with the aid of media outlets who destroy his reputation with the kind of stuff that I showed you.
	Now, that is basically part one of the first half of what really happened with Julian Assange.
	That is what led to the determination of the United States government to destroy him.
	I think that part of the story is extremely significant.
	We're gonna show you part two, which is what led to Assange's arrest and how that was effectuated, the reason why it's so morally grotesque, and the most recent events that are giving some hope that he could be released.
	But before we get to that, we have a new part of our show, which I'm about to explain in this clip I'm about to show you, about ways that as independent journalists and independent media, which is what we here on this show are, We are now going to look for different ways that we can support our journalism.
	So we just prepared a very quick video explaining how we're going to do that and we'll be back in just a couple minutes.
	I hope you'll watch what it is that we taped.
	As most of you know, this show, System Update, is independent journalism.
	We are part of independent media.
	And what that means is we have no corporate management, no corporate structure to which we report that supervises or controls our show in any way.
	And because of that, being independent media, We need ways to fund the show to ensure that we can present to you a professionalized show here in a professionalized studio with a fairly large team that helps me and works with me to put the show together.
	And that in turn means that there are two ways we can do that.
	One is we rely on viewer and reader support, which used to mean Substack subscriptions, and now it means people who join our community on Locals.
	And the other important means is we have sponsors for our show.
	That's something we decided to do when we launched it.
	That's something necessary to do that.
	But what I made clear to everybody when that was proposed is that I would never, ever look into the camera and talk about a product that didn't completely align with my values and that I didn't feel my full integrity in order to talk about.
	And we have already rejected a whole variety of proposed sponsors, things like my recommending to you investment vehicles or different places to put your money.
	or different companies that I didn't know much about and don't feel comfortable recommending because the trust that I've built up over the years with my viewers and my readers is something that is invaluable and I would never trade away.
	So we are really excited to have our first sponsor which is Field of Greens that completely aligns with everything I believe in with my life the way in which I live my life and I feel not just willing but excited to recommend it.
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	As some of you might know, I am a vegan.
	I stopped eating factory food meat many years ago, and in part it's because I love animals so much and didn't want to support their industrialized torture.
	But also it's just for health reasons, because factory farming food is just a vector of infection and disease, and it's incredibly unhealthy.
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	As part of becoming our first sponsor, what they have done is they've created a way to help you get started, which is that you can get 15% off of your first order and another 10% off when you subscribe for recurring orders.
	You just visit FieldOfGreens.com and you use the promo code Glenn, G-L-E-N-N.
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	That will help you and your health.
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	So when we left off we had just explained the huge bombshell that was Wikileaks' reporting certainly even before the major scoops of 2010 but then through 2010.
	And I don't think it's difficult to understand why the government and its servants in the media were so enraged with what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange had done.
	The problem became, how is it, how could the government possibly destroy WikiLeaks and Assange for reporting?
	Even in the United States, under Obama, it was a bridge too far to be explicit about the fact that they wanted to go and arrest somebody and put them in prison for the reporting that they just did of the kind that I just showed you.
	So lo and behold, in 2010, that was when there appeared, materialized, two women who claimed that Assange had Sexually assaulted them that they began having sex with him consensually at some point requested He's a condom.
	He didn't use a condom and under Swedish law that's considered sexual assault or even rape and Assange was more than willing to go to Sweden to face those charges as long as Sweden agreed Not to use his presence on their soil as an excuse to turn him over to the United States as Sweden as a close American ally had done in the past when Sweden refused that was when he sought asylum in the embassy now The so-called rape investigation in Sweden was dropped in 2019.
	They couldn't get the evidence that they needed to do that.
	They claimed it was because he had waited long enough, but the reality was he was more than willing to be interviewed in the British embassy, in the Ecuadorian embassy.
	The Swedish investigators kept saying they couldn't do that because they wanted to lure him to Sweden.
	It was so obvious what they were doing.
	They wanted to get him to Sweden to give him to the US, whereas the British had a slightly more independent court system.
	And then when they couldn't, they finally went and interviewed him, and then they dropped the case.
	So there's no more sexual assault or rape investigation that has been closed.
	He was never charged with that, let alone convicted of that.
	So that has nothing to do with why he's now in prison.
	When they went in to arrest him, they charged him with bail jumping, meaning back in 2012, he was scheduled for a court date and instead of going to the court, he got asylum from Ecuador.
	Every sovereign state grants asylum.
	The United States grants asylum all the time to people who are wanted back home for crimes.
	It's a recognized right.
	He was convicted of bail jumping.
	He got the maximum 50-week sentence, and he's long ago served that.
	He served that from 2019 to 2020.
	So there are no more pending charges against him in the UK.
	He is not serving any kind of sentence for jail time.
	The only reason he's in prison is because the Biden administration is pursuing this indictment and demanding he be extradited to the United States, and pending that extradition, the British refused to let him out of prison.
	They're basically holding him without bond.
	Now, even though he was a victim, he was a victim.
	Even though, as I said before, even under Obama, who prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined under the Espionage Act, he was incredibly aggressive when it came to prosecuting journalists and their sources.
	Even under the Obama administration, as I said, they couldn't prosecute Assange for doing reporting, but they did try.
	They convened a grand jury.
	They investigated WikiLeaks for two or three years.
	They made clear they wanted to find a way to prosecute him.
	They wanted to prove that he conspired with Chelsea Manning to get those documents, that he didn't just passively receive them.
	They couldn't find any evidence.
	And so in 2013, there you see from the Washington Post, the Obama administration acknowledged that they were unlikely to prosecute Julian Assange.
	The article reads, quote, Julian Assange unlikely to face US charges over publishing classified documents.
	Quote, the Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.
	The Obama administration has charged government employees and contractors who leak such information, such as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, with violations of the Espionage Act.
	But officials said that although Assange published classified documents, he did not leak them.
	In other words, he published them but did not leak them.
	Something they said significantly affects their legal analysis.
	Quote, the problem the department has, as always had, investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists, said former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
	And if you're not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, there is no way to prosecute Assange.
	That is a really important point there, which is that it wasn't just Julian Assange that published those documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the diplomatic cables.
	News outlets like the New York Times and The Guardian also published them.
	And so the question was, how can you possibly prosecute Julian Assange but not prosecute the media outlets that publish the same documents?
	And so the Obama Justice Department, though they tried, Concluded there was no way to do it.
	But the pressure continued to build because the establishment was adamant that Julian Assange be convicted.
	Here you see from the Wall Street Journal a I'm sorry, from The Economist, rather.
	A editorial entitled, Why Julian Assange Should Be Extradited.
	The Wikileaks co-founder is accused of hacking, not leaking, and that is a serious crime.
	So that's The Economist in 2019.
	Do we have the 2010 Wall Street Journal article?
	Diane Feinstein, the Democratic senator from California, published an article, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, urging, quote, prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act.
	The California Democrat wrote, quote, just as the First Amendment is not a license to yell fire in a crowded theater, it is also not a license to jeopardize national security.
	So the economist, Dianne Feinstein, were demanding Assange be prosecuted, notwithstanding the difficulty of how do you prosecute Assange for doing the same thing journalists do.
	Okay.
	And I'm sure most of you don't remember this, or maybe you never saw it, but back in 2010 or 2011, Joe Biden, the then Vice President under President Obama, went on Meet the Press, and he called Julian Assange a, quote, high-tech terrorist.
	Look at this video.
	Here is classified material.
	Mitch McConnell says he's a high-tech terrorist.
	Others say this is akin to the Pentagon Papers.
	What do you come to?
	I would argue that it's closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.
	Do you see what the media does?
	Julian Assange is doing their job.
	And in turn, they turn around and are laying the foundation for the government to prosecute him for doing what they pretend to do.
	As a reminder, I went to meet the press shortly after I began publishing the Snowden materials, and there that host, David Gregory, asked me twice whether I should be also imprisoned along with Edward Snowden for the work that I was doing.
	He then convened a panel with Chuck Todd and others, people again who have never broken a story of any kind, and they all sat around talking about how I'm not a real journalist.
	Hell, I probably could and should be prosecuted.
	The next day, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times went on a CNBC show and he urged that I be imprisoned alongside Snowden.
	He eventually apologized, but that is what these media outlets do.
	They are vicious agents for the U.S.
	security state.
	They don't do journalism.
	They're propagandists for the U.S.
	security state and they despise anybody who does real journalism like Julian Assange.
	So that was the climate at the time and this was, what's that?
	So that was what was going on in the air.
	You have establishment voices demanding Assange be prosecuted even though the Obama Justice Department is saying we want to but we can't.
	And so we kind of just stayed in the Ecuadorian embassy from 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16, through the Obama administration.
	And what changed, and some of you may not want to hear this, but it is nonetheless true, is the person most singularly responsible for the fact that Julian Assange ended up being indicted in 2019, not under the Obama administration or the Biden administration, but under the Trump administration, was Mike Pompeo.
	The person I regard as Donald Trump's biggest mistake.
	There were several neocons who exploited Trump's worst character flaw, which is that he's easily manipulated by anybody who flatters him.
	He was just on an interview with Tucker Carlson talking about how he refuses to criticize Gavin Newsom because Gavin Newsom, the California Democratic governor, says good things about Trump and said good things about Trump.
	If you say good things about Trump and flatter him, he will keep you in his good graces.
	And Mike Pompeo was very clever and very smart and knew how to do that and wiggled his way in.
	To being Trump's CIA director first, CIA director, he was the head of the CIA under Trump, and then his State Department, his Secretary of State.
	And Mike Pompeo, when he was at the CIA, gave a speech where he stood up and he vowed to the CIA that he would do everything in his power to destroy WikiLeaks and ensure that Julian Assange would never be free again.
	I reported on that speech at the time.
	I was at the Intercept.
	There you see the headline in 2017.
	The headline is, Trump's CIA director, Mike Pompeo, targeting WikiLeaks, explicitly threatens speech and press freedoms.
	Why is the US press corps so silent about an actual threat to press freedom?
	This is when the media was whining every day about mean things Trump was saying about Jim Acosta or Wolf Blitzer or Chuck Todd.
	And what I was writing to say was I had listened to that speech and I had never heard a more direct assault on press freedom than Mike Pompeo at the CIA, while the CIA director, vowing to do everything in his power to destroy Julian Assange.
	Here's the article.
	In February, after Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S.
	media were the enemy of the people, the targets of his insult exploded with indignation, devoting wall-to-wall media coverage to what they depicted as a grave assault on press freedom more befitting of a tyranny.
	By stark and disturbing contrast, the media reaction yesterday was far more muted, even welcoming, When Trump's CIA Director Mike Pompeo actually and explicitly vowed to target freedom of speech and press in a blistering, threatening speech he delivered to the D.C.
	think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.
	What made Pompeo's overt threats of oppression so palatable to many was that they were not directed at CNN, the New York Times, or other beloved in D.C.
	outlets, but rather at WikiLeaks.
	Pompeo stood up in public and explicitly threatened to target free speech rights and press freedoms, and it was almost impossible to find even a single U.S.
	mainstream journalist expressing objections or alarm because the targets Pompeo chose in this instance are ones they dislike, much the way that many are willing to overlook or even sanction free speech oppression, as long as the targeted ideas or speakers are sufficiently unpopular.
	Decreeing with no evidence that WikiLeaks is a, quote, non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia, that was Mike Pompeo's quote, a belief that has become gospel in establishment Democratic Party circles, Pompeo proclaimed that, quote, we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange, we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.
	We can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.
	Pompeo also argued that while WikiLeaks, quote, pretended that America's First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice, but, quote, they may have believed that, but they are wrong.
	Pompeo then issued this remarkable threat, quote, to give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for.
	It ends now.
	At no point did Pompeo specify what steps the CIA intended to take to ensure that this, quote, space to publish secrets, quote, ends now.
	So that was really the event that turned the tide against Julian Assange.
	He was still forced to stay in the Ecuadorian embassy, which certainly was not very good.
	But it was Mike Pompeo who insisted That the Trump Justice Department devoted itself to turning him into a felon and prosecuting him.
	And that's where the current criminal investigation that the Biden administration is now pursuing and demanding Assange be extradited to stand trial for, that's where it begins.
	With Mike Pompeo and to CIA.
	Here's the New York Times article that reported on how that happened.
	The headline is, How the Trump Administration Stepped Up Pursuit of WikiLeaks as Assange.
	And there you see the article.
	Soon after he took over as CI director, Mike Pompeo privately told lawmakers about a new target for American spies, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
	Mr. Pompeo and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions unleashed an aggressive campaign against Mr. Assange, reversing an Obama-era view of WikiLeaks as a journalistic entity.
	For more than a year, the nation's spies and investigators sought to learn about Mr. Assange and his ties to Russia, as senior administration officials claimed to believe he was in league with Moscow.
	And then that is when the indictment came.
	There you see it.
	It's in 2019.
	It's from the U.S.
	Attorney's Office in Northern Virginia.
	And it says, in Eastern Virginia rather, and there's the press release.
	WikiLeaks founder charged in computer hacking conspiracy.
	Now, the problem with this case here is twofold.
	Number one, they're charging him under the Espionage Act of 1917.
	That is an archaic law that was implemented by Woodrow Wilson in order to criminalize Americans who dissented from Woodrow Wilson's desire to evolve America in that first World War in Europe.
	And the law is written to basically be impossible to defend yourself against.
	It makes it an absolute crime to publish classified information.
	This is the law that they're using to charge Edward Snowden with as well.
	And under this law, it is not a defense to say, yes, I publish classified information, but I was justified in doing so because the U.S.
	government was abusing the classification powers and secrecy powers to hide its own crimes.
	When Edward Snowden sought asylum in Russia, people like Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton kept saying, oh, if he's such a brave whistleblower, let him come back and convince the jury.
	Let him man up, they would say, and convince the jury.
	They would never be able to say that now.
	But in 2016, they could say, let him man up and convince the jury that what he did was justified.
	It was a total lie.
	Under this law, you're prohibited from even raising that as a defense.
	That was Daniel Alsberg's plan, too, to go into court and say, yes, I leaked the Pentagon Papers, but I was justified.
	And that was when the court ruled, under the Espionage Act, you're not allowed to even raise that as defense.
	It's almost impossible to win.
	The only reason Daniel Alsberg's not in prison for the rest of his life is because the Nixon administration, the CIA, the FBI, broke into the office of his psychoanalyst office.
	Remember earlier I was saying that the tactic used against whistleblowers is to focus you on their personal character to distract attention from the revelation.
	So when Daniel Alsberg proved that the U.S.
	government was lying about the Vietnam War, knowing internally they couldn't win by telling the public they could win, their tactic was to go to his psychoanalyst office and break in and discover his psychosexual secrets.
	They got caught and only for that reason did the court dismiss the criminal indictment against Daniel Alsberg.
	That's the only reason he didn't go to prison for the rest of his life.
	This espionage act is written to make it impossible for anyone to defend themselves and that's what they want to charge Julian Assange with and Edward Snowden.
	And secondly, they're doing it on purpose in Eastern Virginia, which is notorious for having very pro-national security state judges and especially a community in which CIA agents and FBI agents and operatives of the U.S.
	security state, this is where they all live.
	So the jury is gonna be composed of U.S.
	security state operatives or people who support the security state.
	Everything about this is making it impossible to win.
	Now, I think it's really important to note that while a huge amount of establishment support is in favor of Julian Assange being in prison from the media, from The Economist, from Dianne Feinstein, from Joe Biden, there's also a very significant, and I would even say growing, opposition.
	Mostly people who are anti-establishment on either the left or the right.
	During the Trump era, one of the leading voices in the country crusading for a pardon for Julian Assange, which Donald Trump by all reports almost gave, and I was involved in those efforts to get a pardon for Snowden and Assange, and I know it's true that Trump did almost do it, I think one of the worst things Trump did was left office without giving either of them a pardon.
	I once did a video report explaining why that happened.
	The impeachment was hanging over his head, the second impeachment.
	Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio said to him, if you pardon either of them or if you declassify CIA documents on your way out, we will vote to impeach you.
	I'm not excusing Trump.
	I'm just saying why he didn't do it.
	But there were a lot of people crusading for Assange.
	One of them was Tucker Carlson, the most watched cable news host in the country.
	He went on at least 20 or 25 times, both during Trump and since, and urged the public to support a pardon for Julian Assange, insisting that Assange, far from being a criminal, is actually a hero.
	Let's just look at one of the many times he did that.
	Julian Assange has been in jail for an awfully long time.
	He's now in jail in the UK.
	He was under house arrest in a foreign embassy in London.
	The US has now accused Julian Assange of violating the Espionage Act.
	This has been going on for a long time and it shows how dumb we are.
	It took us a very long time, years, to ask the obvious question.
	What exactly did Julian Assange do wrong?
	Everyone, all good people hate Julian Assange.
	What was his crime exactly?
	Was he hacking into other people's computers?
	Was he stealing secrets from the U.S.
	government?
	No, actually, he was publishing things other people sent to him.
	He was a journalist.
	He was an editor.
	That's literally true.
	Should you throw editors in jail because they embarrass you?
	Probably shouldn't.
	Not a good precedent to set, even if you don't like the person's politics.
	You should be against that.
	Now here's to me the most repellent part of this entire monstrosity of keeping Julian Assange in a high security prison for four years and trying to imprison him for life.
	Back in 2010, when the reporting that was done based on the archive about Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a lot of support among American liberals on the left for Julian Assange.
	Back then when I was writing constantly in support of Assange and I was doing reporting on WikiLeaks, I was getting a lot of support from liberals and leftists and even mainstream Democrats who recognized in Assange the attributes of a journalist.
	A lot of them were against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and they were therefore happy that he had exposed the crimes being conducted by our government in the name of that war.
	Now though, it is almost impossible to find any liberal or leftist or democrat to say anything positive about Julian Assange.
	And the only thing that changed from 2010 to now that made that true is that in 2016, Julian Assange enabled reporting that was harmful to Hillary Clinton's candidacy.
	Because it shed incriminating light on how the Democratic National Committee was cheating on behalf of Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders.
	You may recall that the top five officials of the Democratic National Committee in the middle of the 2016 campaign had to resign in the wake of the revelations that Julian Assange reported, including the party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
	It was a major scandal for Democrats.
	And there were other incriminating documents about Hillary Clinton's secret speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, where she was paid $500,000 or $750,000 that she refused to release.
	And she would go to Goldman Sachs and say, I'm on your side.
	Your people are the job creators.
	All the things that she would never say in public.
	There was all kinds of reporting about corruption in the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party that Julian Assange disclosed as part of the 2016 election, doing the job of a reporter.
	Now, nothing that he's being charged with, nothing that he's been indicted for, is based on anything he did in the 2016 campaign.
	He's not charged with being a Russian agent or anything like that.
	But the reason Democrats are now so supportive of the attempt to indict and prosecute him and extradite him, the reason the Biden administration is so committed to putting him in prison, is because he did reporting that was That's why they want to put him in prison, because he reported truthful information that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton.
	It is bad enough, it is completely despotic and tyrannical to want to put a reporter in prison for reporting unclassified information, but it's infinitely worse To want to put them in prison because they did political reporting that undermined a Democratic Party politician.
	And that is the real reason they want to put him in prison.
	In that sense, he really is a political prisoner.
	On the surface, on the face of the indictment, he's being indicted for what he did in 2010.
	The reality, though, is they want to see him rot in jail because of what he did in 2016.
	Now, just to give you an indication of how bad things were for Julian Assange, even before he went into prison, while he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy, the CIA had hired contractors to spy on everything that he was doing inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.
	Here is, for example, a 2019 article from the Spanish daily newspaper El Pais that has headlined, Russia and U.S.
	Visitors, Targets for the Spanish Firm that Spied on Julian Assange.
	Quote, the CIA had access to the server where the company stored the profiles of hundreds of people who visited the WikiLeaks founder during his stay in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
	The CIA was spying on everything Assange was doing in that embassy and on every one of his meetings.
	In late 2017, I went to London with my husband, David Miranda, who at the time was a member of the Brazilian Congress.
	And I went as a journalist, and we visited Julian Assange.
	We spent several days with him in the embassy in London.
	And once I read this Al-Pais article that actually indicated that I was one of the people on whom the CIA spied, so my government was spying on me when I was, as a journalist, going to visit Julian Assange, this surveillance footage that the CIA contractor took Of me and my husband Dave Miranda, who again was a Brazilian congressman at the time, visiting Julian Assange surfaced on the internet.
	Let's take a look at that.
	Thank you.
	Now, when you talk about attacks on press freedom and assaults on a free press, there This is what one means.
	Putting Julian Assange, forcing him into a tiny little room for seven years where he sought asylum because he knew if he were forced to go to Sweden they would turn him over to the U.S.
	And then the proof that he was right all along, that that wasn't paranoia, is the fact that the U.S.
	is now trying to get their hands on him and he spent four years in a high security supermax or maximum security prison With no one in sight, the Biden administration wants to ship him here in order to convict him of espionage charges that would probably send him to prison for decades, likely the rest of his life, given the very fragile state that he's in.
	He couldn't even go outside one time for all of those seven years.
	Even prisoners get sunshine.
	When he was in the Ecuadorian embassy, it was basically a one-bedroom apartment inside.
	He was constantly being spied on.
	And he has had his freedom and his liberty deprived for more than a decade now because he believed it was important to hold the U.S.
	security state and the U.S.
	government accountable.
	And what sickens me to my core is that the whiny propagandists in the corporate media during the Trump years constantly pretended that they were in danger because Trump would say mean things about them.
	Let's remember that Jim Acosta, that blown-dried, pedicured hack.
	Who has never broken a single story of any significance in his life, who tells his viewers whatever the CIA and the FBI tell him to, wrote a best-selling book that liberals ate up called The Enemy of the People, A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America.
	He depicted himself, Jim Acosta did, as some sort of martyr to press freedom.
	Because Trump would occasionally ridicule him, justifiably so, point out that CNN is an outlet of fake news, which they are, and occasionally tweet about him.
	To these coddled people, that is persecution.
	Real persecution is what's happening to Julian Assange.
	And what is about to happen now to this new leaker as well.
	Now, let me just conclude by saying here that the reason this case matters so much goes far beyond Julian Assange.
	I think it is important to demand Assange's freedom because of the travesty of this case.
	That this father of two young children, this husband, this son, this brother, is in prison, wasting away, one of the most talented journalists of his generation, because the US government hates what he did.
	But the theory they're using to prosecute him is what is so dangerous.
	The argument they're making is that Julian Assange didn't just passively receive information from Chelsea Manning, but he actively conspired with her in order to get it.
	Remember, when the Obama administration wanted to prosecute Julian Assange, they knew that they had to prove that Assange actually conspired with Manning, that he somehow helped her get that information, because if not, They were going to be criminalizing journalism itself.
	If all Assange did was get the information from Manning, he's like every other journalist.
	That's what I did in the Snowden case.
	It's what I did in the Brazil case.
	It's what the Pentagon Papers reporters did.
	You get information from a source and you publish it.
	And if you criminalize that, you're criminalizing journalism itself.
	So the Obama administration knew they had to find something extra Assange did.
	And they looked everywhere and they couldn't find it.
	And that was why they didn't prosecute him.
	What Mike Pompeo did was concoct a theory, along with the Justice Department, that what Assange did was he joined Chelsea Manning's conspiracy for two reasons.
	Number one, he tried to help her evade detection by helping her get into the system using a different password.
	It didn't work.
	She had already given him the documents by the time that he attempted that.
	And that is what journalists do all the time.
	Of course you're supposed to help your source evade detection.
	If a source calls you on the phone, on an open phone line and says, hey, let me tell you about government secrets that I've learned about, you're going to interject and say, no, don't do that.
	Don't use an open phone line to call me.
	Call me on some encrypted channel like Signal or something safer.
	If you go to the New York Times and the Washington Post, you will find a guide that they publish for their sources on how to communicate with them safely so they don't get caught.
	If it is now a crime for a journalist to give instructions or information to a source on how not to get caught, investigative journalism itself will be criminalized.
	Every good journalist, by definition, does that.
	Journalists don't only have the right but the obligation to help their sources avoid detection and getting caught.
	Which is one of the things that is so repulsive about what the New York Times and the Washington Post did this week in helping the FBI find this leaker, even though it wasn't technically their source because he didn't give the documents to them, which is why he was angry about it, which is why they're so angry about it.
	He put it on Discord.
	They did use the materials.
	They reported on the materials.
	They recognized it as being newsworthy.
	And then they turned around and helped the FBI find the source of this information that they implicitly recognized as newsworthy.
	Embedded in the journalistic ethos is that you protect sources.
	You regard as heroic the people who provide transparency to these powerful institutions.
	You don't try and work with the FBI to find them and hunt them down and deliver them to be arrested.
	It's completely unjournalistic to do that.
	And that's what makes the indictment of Assange so dangerous is it uses a theory that says, if you give advice to your source on how not to get caught, you become a criminal.
	The second theory they're using is that he never hacked into any government databases.
	He never himself stole information.
	Instead, they say, once Chelsea Manning gave him those documents, he encouraged her to go back and get more.
	I cannot put into words how common that is for every journalist to do.
	If a source comes to you and says, here is a bunch of information to enable you to break a huge story, of course you're going to say to that person, wow, this is fantastic.
	Thank you for providing that.
	Are you able to get something showing X or showing Y or showing Z as well?
	Every good journalist would do that.
	And just to illustrate how dangerous this precedent is that they're trying to set if they prosecute him, when the Brazilian government tried to prosecute me for the reporting I did here in Brazil that proved that the top judges and prosecutors were corrupt, they actually brought charges against me and they copied the theory of the indictment that the US is using against Assange.
	By trying to say that there was a certain point when I told my source, you don't need to keep copies of our chat, because if you do, that will enable you to get caught.
	Instead, I have copies of the chats, and we will keep them all, so there's no reason for you to keep them all.
	They tried to convert that into my giving advice to my source as to how not to get caught, and then said I became part of the conspiracy when I did that.
	That's how dangerous that theory is.
	Now, in my case, the court stepped in and said, freedom of the press and the Brazilian constitution protects me from being prosecuted for that.
	But unfortunately, in the US, the climate is such, a climate created by the media, that has produced so much contempt for Assange, primarily due to what he did in the 2016 election, But also, all these legal tools that have been developed over the years, the Obama administration using the Espionage Act of 1917, over and over and over again, that it's almost impossible for anyone charged with these crimes to escape.
	And for all the talk about how Trump endangered press freedom, by calling Wolf Blitzer stupid, and by making fun of Jim Acosta, the real assault on press freedom, by far the gravest one that we face, Is what is being done right now by the Biden administration to Julian Assange.
	There are people on the right wing of the Republican Party like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz who are agitating on behalf of Assange and urging that he be pardoned, that the prosecution be dropped.
	Just this week, finally, there are a few members of the squad and on the left wing of the Democratic Party like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush There's international pressure.
	even AOC signed the letter, who are urging that Assange be, that the prosecution be dropped as well.
	There's international pressure.
	A lot of world leaders believe that Julian Assange is a hero.
	All major press freedom groups in the West, including the ACLU, have banded together to urge that the prosecution be dropped.
	The problem is that the media has done such a good job demonizing Julian Assange, just like they're now in the process of doing with this new leaker, that it's very, very difficult to argue that Julian Assange should be freed and that what he did is journalism.
	And that's primarily because the corporate media has inverted the idea of what journalism is.
	They do publish leaks of classified information all the time.
	But those are the leaks that the CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon want you to see.
	Those are the leaks to propagandize and deceive you.
	You know that every day you read the New York Times and the Washington Post and it says, intelligence officials tell us X, Y, and Z and they give them anonymity to make it seem like it's some edgy, unauthorized leak when in fact it's official, officially sanctioned leaks.
	That's what these journalists are.
	They're officially sanctioned tools of propaganda.
	The only people who are real journalists or real transparency agents, you can recognize them easily because those are the people the government tries to destroy, the media tries to destroy, including people like Julian Assange who is now in prison.
	Now there's a website that you can go to where you can lend your name to what I think is the vital cause To drop the prosecution of Julian Assange.
	It's called DontExtraditeAssange.com.
	Is that correct?
	Is that the one?
	That's a website that is a website that has been constructed by the people who are coordinating his defense.
	I really encourage you to do so.
	I'm not pretending here to be neutral.
	As a journalist, I think it is extraordinarily dangerous to create a precedent that allows the U.S.
	government to imprison Julian Assange.
	I'm in favor of transparency.
	Not indiscriminate transparency.
	When I do journalism, like with the Snowden story, or with the WikiLeaks story, or with the Brazil story, I don't just dump everything onto the internet.
	I believe in curating it carefully so that the information that's published is what you need to see in order to know the truth of what your government is doing.
	But when there's reporting that exposes the lies that the government is telling you, especially about matters as fundamental as war, or how your government is spying on you, The people who enable that are not criminals, they're heroes.
	And that most definitely includes Julian Assange.
	So on the fourth anniversary of his imprisonment in a high security, maximum security prison in the UK, For the crime of doing real journalism, something unrecognizable these days, given the dominance of media corporations, I want to do everything I can to illuminate the reality of what has happened, which is why we devoted this show to it tonight.
	It also sheds a lot of light on what's occurring with this new leaker as well, but I also really want to encourage you not just to listen to what I say in terms of the reporting, not just to be informed, not just to be angry, not just to be outraged, but to do everything that you can to agitate for his liberation as well, because ultimately journalism is about serving the citizenry.
	It's about ensuring that you know what the most powerful institutions are doing in reality, not the lies and the propaganda that they feed you using our nation's largest media corporations.
	So that concludes our show for this evening.
	Because we did not do our live local show last night and we are out of time, we went over tonight for reasons I think it's important.
	We will be back next week with our live local show that follows this show on both Tuesday and Thursday where we take your questions, respond to your feedback, and listen to your suggestions about things we should cover or guests we should interview.
	Remember, we are available on podcast forum.

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