Julian Assange Says He ‘Pleaded Guilty’ to Journalism So He Could Finally Go Free

Katherine Da Silva / shutterstock.com
Katherine Da Silva / shutterstock.com

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has spoken out in public for the first time after all his years of incarceration for the crime of embarrassing powerful people in the Washington, DC, establishment. Assange delivered testimony to the human rights commission at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France in front of delegates from 46 nations.

“I am not free today because the system worked,” Assange said. “I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.”

Assange did not do anything that any other newspaper publisher hadn’t done in the past. He sought and obtained information from a source and published that information for the public to see.

That information happened to be war logs and diplomatic cables that revealed wrongdoing by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The information that WikiLeaks published was all true. Assange simply published documents that had been written by officials in the Bush and Obama administrations—the people who were the real criminals in this story.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was so angry and embarrassed by the WikiLeaks files that she was willing to commit an act of war against the UK and Ecuador just to kill him. She wanted to destroy the Ecuadoran embassy in London in a drone strike, where Assange lived in exile for seven years. President Trump’s former CIA Director Mike Pompeo also tried to have Assange murdered (without Trump’s knowledge).

Assange then spent five years in a maximum-security prison in the UK, before he was finally released in June. The human rights commission in Europe now says that Assange qualifies as a political prisoner because of his time behind bars for the crime of “journalism.” The commission has issued a draft resolution expressing deep concern about his harsh treatment by the US and British governments.