Free speech icon Julian Assange is back and has spoken up publicly for the first time since his release from a British prison after more than a decade of persecution by the US government. Assange talked about how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) not only plotted to kidnap and murder him but also stalked his family in a vicious scheme to silence him.
On Tuesday (October 1), WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. It was his first public address since his release in June this year when he pled guilty to one count of conspiracy in exchange for the US Department of Justice to agree to pursuing no more charges while Assange was sentenced to time served. Reporting on the event, Spanish news agency EFE highlighted Assange’s statement on being punished for practicing journalism:
“I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pleaded guilty to journalism.”
SBS News of Australia posted the full video of Assange’s address to the Council of Europe.
In his statement, Assange shared the intimidation scheme of the CIA, something Tucker Carlson and other independent journalists have talked about over the past few years. He said that then CIA Director Mike Pompeo explicitly directed the agency to kidnap and assassinate him while he was staying as an asylum-seeker at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange said that his wife and infant son were also targeted by the CIA, including instructions by the agency to collect his six-month-old’s DNA.
The video clip of Assange talking about Pompeo’s campaign of retribution targeting him and his family was widely shared on social media.
Assange became the target of the US federal government, notably the intelligence agencies, in 2010 after his publishing platform WikiLeaks released some shocking facts about the war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush and Obama administrations – the infamous Chelsea Manning leaks. The US government accused Assange to illegally obtaining the information and thus amounting to espionage.
However, the hunt for Assange goes beyond the war crimes scandals emerging out of the records published by WikiLeaks. During the 2016 presidential cycle, WikiLeaks published leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showing how the Democrats worked to rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders and in favor of Hillary Clinton to make her the Democrat nominee to run against Trump. The publication of these messages from the DNC led to the resignation of the Democratic National Committee’s chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Sometime in 2022, people started reporting accessibility issues with the WikiLeaks pages of the DNC documents. The issue did not make headlines but after the release of Assange under the plea deal this year, many conservatives tried again to access the published DNC records on WikiLeaks and could not find them. This resulted in the speculation that WikiLeaks had likely removed the messages as some undisclosed part of the plea deal. The fact-checkers rejected this speculation and concluded that it is a problem of technical errors. The issue remains a mystery.
Following last week’s testimony by Assange in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) voted to formally recognize Assange as a political prisoner. As reported in JURISTnews (October 3), PACE called on the Biden administration to investigate the war crimes and other human rights violations that were revealed via WikiLeaks. It also criticized the British government for failing to protect Assange’s rights.