As Julian Assange is Granted the Right to Appeal his Case to the UK Supreme Court, a Look Back at Some of the Publisher’s Most Consequential Revelations
The Wikileaks founder secures a legal victory in his fight to avoid extradition to the United States
On December 10, the UK High Court ruled that Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, overturning a ruling made in January 2021 by British District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. This morning, the Court permitted Assange to appeal this decision to the UK Supreme Court.
The Wikileaks founder’s defense team had asked the court to certify three points of law of general public importance in order to move forward with the appeal.
In the decision announced earlier today, the High Court certified just one point of law.
According to the pronouncement released by the court, this is centered on determining under “what circumstances can an appellate court receive assurances from a requesting state [the US] which were not before the court of first instance in extradition proceedings.”
The decision was handed down by LCJ Ian Burnett and LJ Timothy Holroyde, the judges who’d overturned Judge Baraitser’s decision not to extradite Assange to the US.
Stella Moris, Assange’s fiancé, delivered a statement outside of the courtroom shortly after the decision was handed down.
“The situation now is that the Supreme Court has to decide whether it will hear the appeal but make no mistake, we won today in court,” Moris said. “But let’s not forget that every time we win, as long as this case isn’t dropped, as long as Julian isn’t freed, Julian continues to suffer. For almost three years he’s been in Belmarsh prison and he is suffering profoundly, day after day, week after week, year after year.”
Today’s ruling was indeed a victory for Assange but the US Department of Justice (DoJ) remains committed to its goal of getting Assange where they’ve wanted him for years – on American soil.
US officials have offered assurances to their British counterparts that, once in US custody, the DoJ would not imprison Assange at the ADX Florence supermax facility in Colorado or impose the brutal special administrative measures (SAMs) which isolate inmates almost entirely.
But as Richard Medhurst illustrated in his long, but highly informative November piece, these “diplomatic assurances” are not worth the paper they’re written on. Just as the US government went against its word in its case against David Mendoza Herrarte, the DoJ has already carved out the wiggle room it needs to do the same with Assange.
In the documentation it provided to this effect, the US government noted that it would not subject Assange to the aforementioned conditions unless “after entry of this assurance, he was to commit any future act that met the test for the imposition of a SAM pursuant to 28 C.F.R. §501.2 or §501.3.”
In May 2019, the DoJ indicted Assange on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing classified information through Wikileaks. The charges include one count of conspiracy to receive national defense information, seven counts of obtaining national defense information, and nine counts of disclosing national defense information. Assange faces a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison if convicted.
The US will stop at nothing to ensure that Julian Assange takes his last breath inside of a US prison. Contrary to the propaganda and misinformation its narrative managers in the mainstream media have spent the last decade disseminating, this has absolutely nothing to do with US national security or the safety of the American people.
In January 2011, an internal government review of the impact the publication of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables had on national security revealed that what government officials told the public was intentionally misleading.
Reuters, citing a congressional official briefed on the review, said that the Obama administration’s public statements to the contrary were made in the hopes of strengthening legal efforts to shut down the Wikileaks website. “We were told [the impact of WikiLeaks revelations] was embarrassing but not damaging,” the official is quoted as saying. The article goes on to cite two US intelligence officials who say the opposite: that they’re aware of specific cases where damage caused by Wikileaks had been assessed as being rather serious. They are, however, unable to offer any evidence for these claims and do not say what these cases relate to.
Two years later, Brigadier general Robert Carr, the senior counterintelligence officer tasked with leading the Pentagon’s review into the consequences of the Wikileaks disclosures, told the Chelsea Manning sentencing hearing that an investigation was unable to find a single instance of someone being killed as a result of the documents leaked by Manning. The investigation was conducted by the Information Review Task Force on behalf of the Defense Department.
In 2013, Manning was convicted on six counts of violating the Espionage Act, five counts of stealing government property, as well as a single count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, for providing classified documents to Wikileaks. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Obama commuted her sentence days prior to leaving office in January 2017.
Back in 2013, Obama’s Justice Department cited what it referred to as its “New York Times problem” when it decided not to bring charges against Assange. It absolutely wanted to… but the administration’s lawyers concluded that it would be impossible to charge the Wikileaks founder for publishing classified documents without also charging major US newspapers, who’d all done the same. This was a brand of hypocrisy the Trump administration was willing to overlook.
In March 2017, Wikileaks began publishing what it called “Vault 7,” a massive trove of CIA documents detailing the full scope of the agency’s hacking arsenal. Included in the disclosure was the agency’s range of spying powers against products such as Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows, as well as Samsung’s televisions, which the CIA was capable of turning into covert microphones. According to the documents, by the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division essentially functioned as the agency’s own NSA, creating more than 1,000 hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. The leak also revealed that the CIA had been using the US consulate in Frankfurt as a covert hacking base covering Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
According to a September 2021 Yahoo News piece detailing the Trump administration’s escalated war against Wikileaks, the Vault 7 disclosures left CIA Director Mike Pompeo as well as other senior officials “seeing blood” and seeking revenge against the publisher. According to the article, this was the anger that led the administration to conceive its unhinged plot to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London or to assassinate him.
When Joe Biden entered the White House, he had a choice to make for how to proceed with the Assange case. He could side with the man he’d spent eight years serving as vice president, or with the reality TV star he swore would bring down our republic if he were reelected.
Joe Biden chose the latter, with his administration immediately appealing Judge Baraitser’s January 2021 ruling that “the mental condition of Mr Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”
Earlier this morning, Assange’s defense team secured a victory but the publisher’s battle is far from over. He’ll wake up tomorrow morning in the same place he woke up today, inside his cell at Belmarsh prison, known as “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.” It’s where he’ll remain while he awaits to see if the UK Supreme Court will hear his case, without his children, in near isolation, enduring conditions that have reportedly led him to pace his cell for hours until collapsing, to consider suicide hundreds of time a day.
In light of the Biden administration’s pursuit of Assange – a process that’s as cruel and sadistic as Trump’s – it’s useful to review just why the US chose to pursue its barbaric and unprecedented assault on journalism and truth, aimed at Wikileaks and Assange.
The following excerpts, pulled from the timeline published by this page earlier this month, highlight just some of the highly consequential journalism that Julian Assange is responsible for:
November 7, 2007 – Wikileaks publishes the Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) standard operating procedures (SOP), the military’s manual for running the Guantanamo Bay prison.
February 7, 2009 – Wikileaks publishes 6,780 previously unreleased Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. Although the reports – analysis of legislative policy issues – are not classified, their public release is essentially made at the discretion of congressional members. According to Wikileaks, the documents were captured by a source via the congressional intranet.
October 4, 2009 – Wikileaks publishes Joint Services Publication 440, a 2,389-page document serving as the UK military’s instruction manual for, among other things, “dealing with leaks, investigative journalists.”
March 15, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes a 32-page US counterintelligence investigation detailing the various ways the Pentagon had planned to deal with the publisher. According to the report, because Wikileaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers,” one of those tactics recommended “the identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site.”
April 5, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes a classified US military video entitled Collateral Murder, which depicts US forces indiscriminately killing more than a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had filed Freedom of Information Act requests and had been attempting to obtain the video since the July 12, 2007 incident occurred. The US government had previously investigated the attack, before concluding that the military had acted in accordance with the Pentagon’s "Rules of Engagement". The video Wikileaks publishes shows that the carnage of that day was also coupled with casual commentary like:
“Look at those dead bastards.”
“Nice.”
And:
“Good shoot’n.”
“Thank you.”
In the video, Chmagh is fired on by US forces once again after attempting to rise to his feet for about three minutes.
October 22, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes 391,832 classified documents covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. The mass disclosure becomes known as the Iraq War Logs. Some of the key findings from this latest batch of documents follow below:
The official tally of civilian fatalities was undercounted by approximately 15,000 people.
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and murder by Iraq’s military and police.
US forces were given a video showing a dozen Iraqi soldiers executing a prisoner with his hands bound.
According to one of the logs, a US medical officer discovered “bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck” on the body of a man Iraqi officials had claimed died by suicide.
In another incident, a US Apache helicopter gunship executed two men on the ground who had been trying to surrender.
November 28, 2010 – Wikileaks publishes 251,287 US State Department cables, dating back to 1966. The disclosures shed light on countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and Bahrain pressuring the US to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, as well as US spying on numerous officials at the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, among many other noteworthy revelations.
April 24, 2011 – The New York Times publishes the Guantanamo Bay files, a trove of 759 “detainee assessment” dossiers written between 2002 and 2009, one for all but 20 of the military base’s prisoners, which were first obtained by Wikileaks. The documents detail guidelines for interrogating prisoners as well as justification for keeping certain inmates at the base, while releasing others. Some of the most notable findings revealed by these documents follow below.
The documents reveal information about the many inmates caught up in the US military’s expansive post-9/11 dragnet. Among them is Mohammed Sadiq, an 89-year-old Afghan suffering from dementia, major depressive disorder, and osteoarthritis, who was taken to Guantanamo after “suspicious documents” were found in his home. Within weeks US investigators determined that Sadiq had no affiliation with al-Qaeda, or any other terror organization, and returned the man to Afghanistan several months later.
According to the documents, 14-year-old Naqib Ullah spent a year locked up at Guantanamo Bay and was released after US officials admitted that he’d been “a kidnap victim and a forced conscript” for the Taliban.
The US government had designated the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence service, as a terrorist organization.
Nearly 100 Guantanamo inmates were listed as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses, with many going on hunger strikes or attempting suicide.
US authorities held a number of British nationals at the prison, even though they knew these individuals had no connection to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or any other terror organization.
A significant amount of “intelligence” extracted from some of the inmates was the result of torture. The files detail how some of the prisoners have been so badly tortured that they could never be successfully tried in the US court system.
The documents detail completely arbitrary reasons for the detention of many Guantanamo prisoners. According to one of the files, one individual was captured "because he was a mullah, who led prayers at Manu mosque in Kandahar province, Afghanistan … which placed him in a position to have special knowledge of the Taliban."
The documents detail how many countries – including China, Russia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria, and Tunisia – sent intelligence officials to question Guantanamo inmates.
December 1, 2011 – Wikileaks publishes The Spy Files, 287 documents detailing the internal operations of some 160 intelligence contractors all over the world. The documents shine a light on intrusive and illegal mass surveillance capabilities now being deployed by dozens of countries without the knowledge of their citizens.
July 5, 2012 – Wikileaks publishes the Syria Files, consisting of more than 2.4 million emails from more than 680 Syrian politicians, ministries, and companies. The emails date back to August 2006. "It helps us not merely to criticize one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it," Julian Assange notes in a statement released by Wikileaks. The emails are published in coordination with the following seven publications: Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), The Associated Press (United States), L'Espresso (Italy), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain).
April 11, 2013 – Wikileaks publishes “The Kissinger Cables,” a trove of more than 1.7 million US State Department cables dating from 1973 to 1976. One of the cables includes a conversation in which Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, says “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” On its website, Wikileaks provides its readers with a search engine for the documents, which had all been previously declassified and released.
July 29, 2014 – Wikileaks publishes a sweeping gagging order issued by the criminal division of the Supreme Court of Victoria in Australia to block the media from reporting about the bribery scandal concerning the Australian central bank’s subsidiaries. The order is a superinjunction, which calls for the order itself to be secret. "With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public," Julian Assange notes in a statement accompanying publication of the leak. "This is not simply a question of the Australian government failing to give this international corruption case the public scrutiny it is due. Foreign minister Julie Bishop must explain why she is threatening every Australian with imprisonment in an attempt to cover up an embarrassing corruption scandal involving the Australian government. The concept of 'national security' is not meant to serve as a blanket phrase to cover up serious corruption allegations involving government officials, in Australia or elsewhere. It is in the public interest for the press to be able to report on this case."
March 25, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes the Investment Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
April 16, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes a trove of emails and documents stolen from Sony Pictures Entertainment by hackers the prior year. When the hack occurred, it damaged computers at Sony, causing the movie studio to temporarily shut down. The files had already been made public but are now available via a searchable archive on Wikileaks’s website. The Obama administration had previously stated that North Korea was behind the attack. Wikileaks notes in a press release accompanying the publication of the database that the cache reveals “ties to the White House (there are almost 100 US government e-mail addresses in the archive), an ability to impact laws and policies, and connections to the US military-industrial complex.”
May 17, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes an 18-page report compiled by Navy whistleblower William McNeilly, who warns about the "shockingly extreme conditions that our [Britain’s] nuclear weapons system is in" claiming that the UK's "nuclear weapons are a target that's wide open to attack." Among the allegations McNeilly makes in his report is that he was able to access secure areas without proper security checks, and that the HMS Vanguard, one of Britain’s nuclear submarines, is in extremely poor condition. The whistleblower also writes about a conversation in which a senior officer alerted him to the fact that the submarine had been involved in a covered-up collision with a French submarine.
October 9, 2015 – Wikileaks publishes the full intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the international trade deal currently in the works between 12 countries representing more than 40% of global GDP. According to the published text, the treaty appears to grant nations the power to curtail legal proceedings if the theft of information is “detrimental to a party’s economic interests, international relations, or national defense or national security,” among several other key provisions.
July 22, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes a trove of 19,252 emails from the DNC, providing insight into the party’s internal tactics to ensure that Secretary Hillary Clinton locked up the Democratic nomination, and not Senator Bernie Sanders. Some of the key findings from the data dump follow below:
One party official wrote an email to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda on May 5 wondering if it might prove useful to look at Sanders’ faith (or lack thereof, as this official saw it). "It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief," DNC CFO Brad Marshall stated. "Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist." Marshall later writes to The Intercept to deny that this quote was about Senator Sanders, although it is unclear who else the message could have possibly been about.
In a May 21 email, Mark Paustenbach, a committee communications official, writes to a colleague about potentially urging their friends in the media to write that the senator’s campaign is “a mess”.
An email exchange pondering whether or not to reach out to CNN to correct a story which features Sanders saying that, as president, he would remove Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as the committee’s chairwoman, is met with ridicule from the congresswoman. “This is a silly story,” Wasserman-Schultz wrote. “He isn’t going to be president.”
Personal information, including for instance, the Social Security of Tom Steyer, the billionaire founder of the Next Gen Climate Action Committee Super PAC, is disclosed.
Off-the-record correspondence with a number of mainstream outlets, including the Washington Post, Politico, NBC and the Wall Street Journal, featuring private complaints about unfavorable coverage, is published.
CNN’s Maria Cardona cleared a draft of her May 18 op-ed, “Why Sanders must take the high road,” with the DNC prior to publication. According to correspondence made public by Wikileaks, Cardona sent the committee an email that morning with the subject line “URGENT – DRAFT CNN OPED ON NV,” which contained the line “I want to make sure it is not to heavy handed. Please let me know asap! Thanks!!”
Wasserman-Schultz resigns as DNC chairwoman two days after the emails are published. Almost immediately, the Clinton camp announces that the congresswoman will serve as honorary chair of the campaign’s 50-state program to help elect Democrats around the country.
October 7, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes thousands of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Included in the trove are the transcripts of closed-door speeches Clinton gave to various Wall Street firms after leaving the State Department. The Clinton campaign initially declines to confirm the authenticity of the emails and Podesta accuses Russia of being the source of the hack. The emails shine a light on numerous Clinton inconsistencies, including her stances on trade, and banking regulation, among other issues. According to the emails, Clinton – who opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership on the campaign trail, reversing her earlier position – told an audience in 2013 that her “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” In another speech in 2013, Clinton told members of the National Multi-Housing Council that it’s important to have “both a public and a private position” in politics. “I mean, politics is like sausage being made,” Clinton said, according to the transcript. “It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” The trove also reveals that in an April 2013 speech to Morgan Stanley, Clinton expressed her support for the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which would reduce corporate tax rates while raising the Social Security age. The former secretary of state also noted that the pressure on public officials to divest assets in order to serve has become “very onerous and unnecessary.” In a speech made at a Goldman Sachs event in 2013, Clinton acknowledged that a no-fly zone in Syria, which she still publicly supports, would have killed “a lot of Syrians.”
October 28, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes an email thread in which Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is shown to have been advised by the campaign’s IT staffers on March 19 to change his email password in response to what turned out to have been a phishing email targeting his account. According to this thread, a campaign staffer categorized the request sent to Podesta to change his email password as “legitimate” and advised him to go through Google’s procedures to change it. A security expert tells CNN that 108 emails affiliated with the Clinton campaign were targeted and that 20 of the links that were sent were clicked. Numerous mainstream outlets report, without evidence, that the email sent to Podesta is linked to a group of Russian hackers known as “fancy bear.” This is then somehow cited as evidence that the Russian government was behind the attack.
November 25, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes the Yemen Files, a collection of more than 500 documents from the US embassy in Yemen. The files, covering the period from the start of the war in 2009 to March 2015, paint an explicit picture of a US-led conflict rarely reported on by Western media. According to Wikileaks, the files offer “offer documentary evidence of the US arming, training and funding of Yemeni forces in the years building up to the war. The documents reveal, among other things, procurement of many different weapon types: aircraft, vessels, vehicles, proposals for maritime border security control and Yemeni procurement of US biometric systems.”
November 28, 2016 – Wikileaks publishes more than 500,000 diplomatic cables sent in 1979, during the administration of Jimmy Carter. “If any year could be said to be the ‘year zero’ of our modern era, 1979 is it," Julian Assange notes in a statement. “In 1979 it seemed as if the blood would never stop. Dozens of countries saw assassinations, coups, revolts, bombings, political kidnappings and wars of liberation.” The documents had been previously declassified and made public but were made available in a more accessible format on the Wikileaks website.
February 16, 2017 – Wikileaks publishes documents which show that in the seven months leading up to France’s 2012 presidential election, all of the country’s political parties were targeted by infiltration by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) human (“HUMINT”) and (“SIGINT”) spies. According to Wikileaks, the disclosure is being published as context for the website’s forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series.
September 17, 2017 – Wikileaks publishes “Spy Files Russia,” documents detailing how the Kremlin spies on internet and cellphone users. According to the documents, a St. Petersburg-based technology firm called Peter-Service helped the government with its System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM).
October 23, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes a previously leaked engineering assessment of the alleged April 7, 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, that was omitted from the final Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report. The assessment does not support the findings of the final report, an analysis constructed to fit the West’s desired narrative, that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attacked his own people with chemical weapons. Wikileaks also publishes a statement made by a panel that listened to testimony and reviewed evidence from an OPCW whistleblower. WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson, who took part in the panel, noted the following: “The panel was presented with evidence that casts doubt on the integrity of the OPCW. Although the whistleblower was not ready to step forward and/or present documents to the public, WikiLeaks believes it is now of utmost interest for the public to see everything that was collected by the Fact Finding Mission on Douma and all scientific reports written in relation to the investigation.”
November 23, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes an email a member of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) fact-finding mission to Syria sent to his superiors. According to Wikileaks, “The author of the e-mail was a member of that team and claims the redacted preliminary version of the report, misrepresents the facts he and his colleagues discovered on the ground. The e-mail is dated 22nd of June. It is addressed to Robert Fairweather, Chief of Cabinet, and forwarded to his deputy Aamir Shouket and members of the fact-finding mission to Douma. He says this misrepresentation was achieved by selective omission, introducing a bias which undermines the credibility of the report.” According to the email, the report’s conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to determine the presence of “chlorine, or another reactive chlorine-containing chemical” is misleading due to the fact that the substance detected could have been due to any number of chemicals – even chemicals as simple as a household chlorine-based bleach – containing a reactive chlorine atom. Singling out chlorine gas is therefore, according to the email, disingenuous. The redacted report also distorts the original’s report writing about the likelihood of the gas having emanated from cylinders dropped from aircraft. According to the author of the email, the original version emphasized that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that this had happened. The redacted report also omitted the fact that the OPCW’s members had discussed the fact that symptoms displayed by individuals in the aftermath of the attack, in the videos broadcast around the world, were inconsistent with what witnesses reporting seeing that day. Finally, according to Wikileaks, “yet another point of contention is the placement and condition of the cylinders reported to have contained the chemical agent. It has been alleged that their condition may not be consistent with having been dropped from the air, compared to damage in the immediate surrounding area. This was discussed in an unreleased engineering report from OPCW that was leaked and Wikileaks published in October 2019 and indicates it is unlikely the cylinders were air-dropped.”
December 14, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes a memorandum written by one of the scientists sent to investigate the alleged April 2018 Douma attack. Sent two weeks following the publication of the OPCW’s final report, the memo notes that around 20 inspectors have expressed concerns regarding the group’s publicly stated conclusions, alleging that these conclusions are inconsistent with data gathered by the fact-finding mission. According to the author of this correspondence, only a single member of this team had contributed to the final version of the report. Wikileaks notes that it is “also releasing the original preliminary report for the first time along with the redacted version (that was released by the OPCW) for comparison. Additionally, we are publishing a detailed comparison of the original interim report with the redacted interim report and the final report along with relevant comments from a member of the original fact finding mission.”
December 27, 2019 – Wikileaks publishes an email Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW, sent in February to members of the fact-finding mission, in which he requests for an engineering report from Ian Henderson to be removed from the OPCW’s secure registry: “Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]... And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.” Wikileaks writes that: “The main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma and two cylinders that were found on the site of the alleged attack, was that they were more likely manually placed there than dropped from a plane or helicopter from considerable heights. His findings were omitted from the official final OPCW report on the Douma incident.” According to another document released today by Wikileaks, minutes from a June 6, 2018 meeting between OPCW members and a group of toxicology experts reveals that the meeting’s key “take-away message” was that symptoms observed among the individuals that day in Douma were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine. Also published is an email exchange from July 2018 in which it is recommended that the eight OPCW inspectors sent to Douma as part of the fact-finding mission (except for one individual, a paramedic) should be excluded from contributing to the report.
This is, of course, but a tiny sliver of the millions of pages of files published by Wikileaks. These documents were ostensibly classified to protect national security, but have nothing to do with keeping Americans safe.
The Biden administration is at war with journalism, and will stop at nothing to make an example of Assange.
This is a case with severe consequences, not just for a publisher who possessed the courage to expose the truth about the most powerful people on earth, but with consequences for us all.