US steps up campaign against Julian Assange
By
Barry Grey
22 April 2017
The World Socialist Web Site condemns the reported plans of the US Justice Department to charge WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with espionage and issue an arrest warrant against him.
On Thursday, CNN reported, citing unnamed US officials, that the Trump Justice Department has prepared charges against Assange based on supposed “proof” that WikiLeaks actively assisted former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in releasing classified documents exposing the agency’s vast and illegal spying operations.
At a press conference on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions indirectly gave credence to the report, saying, “We’ve already begun stepping up our efforts [against leakers] and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail.”
There is enormous urgency to the development of the broadest possible campaign in defense of Assange. There is a real possibility that the issuing of an arrest warrant will be the prelude to the storming of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has been forced to take refuge for the past five years, or a CIA-directed operation to kidnap or assassinate him.
The sole “crime” of Assange has been to publish information about the criminal activities of the US government in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world, as well antidemocratic actions by the American political establishment within the United States itself—in other words, to carry out the mission of serious and principled journalism.
For this, the United States and allied governments around the world, with the full backing of the corporate-controlled media, have hounded and threatened him, forcing him to hole up in the Ecuadorian embassy under threat of immediate arrest if he steps…