US Intel Will Bring Assange to US in Chains
November 14, 2018
It appears increasingly likely Wikileaks founder and publisher Julian
Assange will wind up in the clutches of the U.S. government, says Ann
Garrison.
United States Will Bring
Assange to US in Chains
By Ann Garrison
Special to Consortium News
It appears increasingly likely Wikileaks founder and publisher Julian
Assange will wind up in the clutches of the U.S. government.
It's hardly surprising, given that in ten years' time, Wikileaks published
more classified information than all other media combined. It exposed human
rights abuses, government spying, torture, and war crimes on an
unprecedented scale.
WikiLeaks put government, corporations and even the Pentagon, the FBI, the
CIA and other intel agencies on notice that they could no longer count on
operating in secret.
It created a trove of primary source material that serious journalists and
researchers will mine for years to come. Its publications are accessible to
readers who prefer primary sources to mostly mediated news.
Wikileaks so infuriates the USA's most violent, corrupt, and criminal
institutions that Hillary Clinton half-jokingly suggested drone-bombing
Assange. Other U.S. politicians called for his execution by other means.
California's 28th District Congressman Adam Schiff, who became the chair of
the House Intelligence Committee when Democrats reclaimed the House, said he
would speak to Assange "when he is in U.S. custody, not before."
Schiff is a vociferous and supremely self-righteous leader of the Democratic
Party's "Resistance," which sullies the name of the underground movement
formed in France during World War II to fight Nazi Germany's occupying
forces and the collaborationist Vichy government.
The "Resistance" tolerates only one truth and one loyalty: Russia is the
enemy, interfering in Syria, the Ukraine and even U.S. elections. Russia
elected Trump with Wikileaks' help, it says. Russia dares to position
missiles on its own borders, it says, to respond to NATO's missiles on the
other side. The U.S. must build more missiles, more drones, more nuclear
weapons, and every other sort of weapon to defend the European world against
Russia and its ally China.
Moral and Racial Superiority
Moral and racial superiority entitles the U.S. to occupy the world with
military bases, ringing any nation that challenges its hegemony with
military aircraft, battleships, assault vehicles, and military surveillance.
Moral and racial superiority entitles its spy state agencies to shut down
access to information deviating from its narratives and therefore to arrest
and extradite Julian Assange.
The Republican Party shares the same supremely intolerant nature as the
Democrats, but differentiates itself by insisting that, although Russia is
the enemy, Donald Trump did not collude with Russia to steal the 2016
presidential election.
The Republicans also want to silence the founder of Wikileaks and find a way
to shut the organization down. Trump's former CIA director, and now
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has called Wikileaks a "non-state hostile
intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia" and vowed to
hunt Assange down.
Has Time Run Out?
Assange has been an asylee in Ecuador's London Embassy for more than six
years-since August 2012. Ecuador and the UK, however, are no closer to an
agreement that would allow him safe passage out of the embassy. In a recent
video conference, #Unity4J organizer Suzie Dawson said she fears Assange
and those working to free him are running out of time:
"Right now time is not on our side. And I had someone today complaining
because they want us to do a big, big action day march. When you do those
types of actions it takes two or three months to organize. You need to have
an organizing committee, you need to wallpaper the town, you need to have
one date that you do it on, you need to do a ton of advertising. You need to
get all the unions and various other organizations to sign on board, and
then you have this one action day.
"Well, there's a couple of problems with that. First of all, I don't think
we have three months right now. If we schedule a February giant march in
support of Julian, I honestly don't think we have until February. I hope I'm
wrong. I hope that the actions we take in the short term, in the next days
and weeks, will buy us that much time for Julian, but I don't see it."
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who spent two years in prison for exposing
the agency's official use of torture, said if Assange walks out of the
embassy without a guarantee of safe passage, he will be extradited to the
U.S. in chains:
"We all know why the British have that embassy ringed. It's to snatch him
and to turn him over to the United States. If that happens, the CIA and the
FBI are both going to be on that plane and they're both going to be at least
attempting to interrogate him all the way back home. They will bring him
back to the United States in chains because that's what they do."
Dawson feels the FBI and CIA will interrogate and torture Assange to try to
obtain information that would allow them to bring Wikileaks down. She has no
doubt he's been preparing for this eventuality for years. She believes he
will have made sure the organization has adopted security codes and measures
he himself doesn't know and therefore can't reveal-even if he's tortured.
"They want to know about security files for example. They want to know about
the inner processes and workings of Wikileaks. They want access to the
knowledge that's inside Julian's brain. And they will torture him. And they
will interrogate him in order to attempt to get that.
"Now I trust Julian to be smart enough to have made sure that even he
doesn't possess a lot of that knowledge. In my personal opinion, Julian has
spent years planning for these various eventualities, but it won't stop them
from trying."
Dawson aded intelligence agencies are eager to punish him: "At the end of
the day they want to punish him for outing their corruption and their
crimes. They've been waiting eight years to do it, and they will be rubbing
their hands together with glee at the prospect of the UK detaining him and
extraditing him to the USA."
Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay
Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and
Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region.
She can be reached at ann@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
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