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The US and UK are happy to talk about political prisoners abroad, but they've created a political prisoner of their own.

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At every stage, the law has been abused in order to victimize Julian.

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He has been silenced, he has been disappeared.

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Last time, Julian was allowed to attend his own court hearing.

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It was in January 2021.

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Every time he's requested to be there in person, those requests have been denied.

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Julian did nothing wrong.

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He exposed war crimes.

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War crimes committed by known individuals, those who committed the war crimes are responsible for

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those war crimes have not been held accountable.

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Julian is in prison because WikiLeaks is a publisher that specializes in the secrets that

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states keep the most hidden.

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Julian revealed war crimes by the US government, the world's superpower, in Iraq and Afghanistan,

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and the fact that it had normalized institutionalized torture.

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And that superpower took revenge.

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The position of the UK right now is that it will extradite a publisher to the country

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that conspired to murder him.

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How can the UK government even contemplate the extraditions of the man who the US was trying to assassinate?

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This assassination plot was as revenge for what we hear it's had published.

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The story has over 30 US intelligence officials, including very senior and named,

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going on record and saying that the US government was actively plotting to assassinate Julian.

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Inside the UK, this is incredible.

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This is a country plotting to assassinate a journalist because of what he has published.

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This is precisely what the UK government criticizes in other states.

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Conspiring to murder a journalist is wrong.

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It's wrong, it's Russia does it.

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And it's wrong if the United States does it too.

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But there's a lot of the story that we still don't know how much did the UK government know.

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How far was the UK government willing to go along with the US government's plans?

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Under the CIA, the dictatorship of Mike Pompeo,

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these are questions that remain unanswered.

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The United States government is the only one that has committed crimes here.

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Julian has done nothing wrong.

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By prosecuting Julian for doing the right thing,

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they're also denying the existence and the validity of what he exposed.

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Because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court.

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The only accountability that exists is the exposure through WikiLeaks

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of the fact that these people were killed.

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So by prosecuting Julian, they're not just prosecuting Julian.

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They're putting the memory of all those people in prison too.

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There's no question that the information that WikiLeaks published about the Iraq and Afghan wars

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and when Tannamo Bay was in the public interest.

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Julian is being prosecuted under the 1917 espionage act.

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That act was enacted during the First World War.

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US constitutional lawyers have long worried that the broad wording of the espionage act

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would be repurposed in order to go after the press.

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The Trump administration decided to prosecute Julian and WikiLeaks.

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Because the agenda of the Trump administration was to target the press.

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The US First Amendment is the gold standard globally on press freedom.

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And the prosecution against Julian is the single greatest attacker has been on the First Amendment.

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And that is Trump's legacy.

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My message to Joe Biden is that you are furthering the worst legacy of the Trump administration.

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Don't let this also be your legacy.

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Drop this case.

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If you don't drop this case, this case will be used by future administrations

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in order to silence, dissent, in order to silence the press.

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This is the most serious attack on press freedom that has ever been.

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The United States government is saying that any person anywhere is bound by the US espionage act.

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This is a completely absurd and dangerous proposition.

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Julian is not a US citizen.

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He's an Australian citizen who was working as a journalist in the United Kingdom.

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He owes no allegiance to the US government.

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He received information from a source, a Chelsea Manning, and he published it.

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That's all he did.

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And now the United States is threatening Julian with a life sentence, 175 years.

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It advances the absurd motion that a country can limit press freedom beyond its borders,

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that it can crack down on foreign journalists abroad.

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Imagine if Turkey now uses the same logic that the US has used to say that a British journalist

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in France should be extradited to Turkey because that journalists exposed some state sponsored

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crime of turtis or Saudi Arabia or China.

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Every journalist should be alarmed about this because if they can do it to someone as high

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profile as Julian, then everyone else can suffer the same fate.

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The fact that people have such a poor understanding about this case is down to the media.

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It is the media's responsibility to properly report this case and it has not been properly reported.

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And that's why the public is so ignorant about it.

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Now why has the media reported so poorly about this case?

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Part of the reason is because Julian is a media critic.

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He's not just a publisher, but he has been very critical of the way that the media has reported

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for example, WikiLeaks Publications.

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WikiLeaks also poses a challenge to the legacy media because the WikiLeaks model is what

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Julian calls scientific journalism to publish original source documents alongside the analysis

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in order to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions to access the same information

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that the journalists did in order to assess the material themselves.

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And that's why WikiLeaks is such an important resource for academics and historians not just journalists.

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Because Julian's case is a political case, it's entirely up to the political circumstances,

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what is possible and what is not possible.

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The case is so outrageous that it should be thrown out.

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It is also politically dangerous and counterproductive for the United Kingdom.

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By prosecuting Julian, they lose their ability to claim the moral high ground.

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The fact that the UK is now calling out war crimes in relation to the Ukraine, it follows that the

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UK should not extradite a publisher who put evidence of war crimes into the public domain.

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Since the 11th of April 2019, Julian has been inside Belmarch High Security Prison,

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which is the harshest prison in the UK known as Britain's One Time of Mobile.

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He's been inside Belmarch Prison day after day, week after week, month after months,

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year after year, in a small prison cell on his own for most of the day.

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His interactions are with prisoners, some of which are dangerous.

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He is suffering greatly. He suffered a mini stroke in October.

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And obviously that's a sign that his health is in serious decline.

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It's also a difficult struggle for him mentally.

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Julian suffers from clinical depression.

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He has all his adult life.

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And it's obviously very difficult for him spending so much time and isolation away from his children

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and from his family and friends.

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I have two children with Julian.

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They are three and four.

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Our oldest was born when Julian was still in the embassy in 2017.

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And he would go to the embassy to visit Julian.

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We kept it secret so a friend would come in, posing as his father.

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Until a guard from the embassy approached me outside the embassy and said that I shouldn't bring

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the baby in anymore because they had been instructed to steal an appie in order to

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analyze the baby's DNA.

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Our youngest just turned three.

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He was a few weeks old when Julian was first arrested.

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And he's only ever seen his father inside Belmarsh Prison.

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For both of them, the only memories they have of Julian is inside Belmarsh Prison.

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Because I don't know how long our children will have with their father.

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If they just have a few months, maybe before Julian's taken into the United States.

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And we're most likely losing life there.

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I try to make their experience with their father as enjoyable and light as possible.

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I don't talk about the fact that we're going to a prison.

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I've just said that there are bad people that are preventing Julian from coming home,

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but that he wants to be at home.

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But obviously when they go into the prison, they experience the prison.

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They walk past the razor wire, they get sniffed by the sniffer dogs, they have to get searched,

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multiple times going into the prison inside their mouth and under their feet.

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So they experience it themselves.

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But I don't want the experience to be scary or intimidating.

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So I do my best to make an unnormal situation.

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The only thing that matters to me is to be able to reunite my family again.

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Julian has been deprived of being able to see his children grow up day to day.

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All we want is to be a normal family.

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The fact that he's being deprived from his family for no reason at all,

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to start of a spiteful, cruel sense of vengeance by the superpower

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who he exposed has to come to an end.

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No one should be treated this way.

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I ask each of you to help me fight for Julian.

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Go to don'textraditebasange.com.

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There's a top that says take action.

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Take all the actions where it says take action.

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Right to your MP.

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Come to the protests.

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There may be a way that you are especially placed to help me free Julian.

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Please contact me directly.

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Every person can contribute to help fight for his freedom,

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help bring him home.

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Help reunite Julian with our young children.

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It is incredibly important that stories that don't get enough airtime in the mainstream media are

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able to be covered elsewhere.

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I encourage each person that can afford it to support independent journalists and independent

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media like double-down news.

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So if you can, please support double-down news on Patreon.