Law & Disorder Radio Appearance - In Defense of Julian Assange

On the February 3, 2020 episode of WBAI's Law and Disorder program, Deborah Hrbek appeared with Nathan Fuller, Exec. Dir. of the Courage Foundation, to discuss the legal issues and political reality surrounding the UK extradition proceedings of WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange.

As many of you know, we have been supporters of WikiLeaks since before the online publisher first gained international name recognition and notoriety as a result of its publication of the Manning leaks in 2010, which exposed horrific war crimes by the US government in the middle east.

Matters are coming to a head now, as Julian Assange faces a jail sentence of 175 years if he is extradicted from the UK and convicted under the criminal indictment now pending in Alexandria, Virginia. The extradition hearing begins February 24 in London, and we urge you to pay close attention and do everything you can to help prevent this. A conviction of Julian Assange for the publication of leaked materials (that he was under no legal obligation to keep secret) would not only be a tragedy for this one man. It would sound the death knell for investigative journalism worldwide.

Nathan Fuller, Exec. Dir. of the Courage Foundation and I were interviewed by Michael Smith and Heidi Boghosian on the subject for their weekly radio broadcast, Law and Disorder. The show aired on Pacifica’s WBAI radio.

For those of you who are skeptical about the importance of speaking up on Assange’s behalf, please read this recent interview of Nils Meltzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Meltzer tackles the “rape” allegations head on, and lays out the systematic character assassination of Assange that has been carried out by the “democratic” countries of the US, UK, Sweden and Ecuador in order to suppress government accountability and gain public support for the criminalization of investigative journalism:

READ MELTZER INTERVIEW HERE.