Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Joe Lauria.
He's editor-in-chief of ConsortiumNews.com.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you doing, man?
Oh, tired.
What a day, huh?
This is not the first interview I've done today.
So anyway, glad to be with you.
Glad to be with you.
All right, so the news is that the right-wing government in Ecuador has stripped Julian Assange of his asylum and kicked him out of the embassy and the U.K. police went in there and grabbed him.
And now you update me.
What is the latest or what do we know about this case here?
Yeah, he didn't walk out.
They didn't kick him out.
As you just said, they allowed the British police into their sovereign territory.
That is actually Ecuadorian territory.
So nobody from the British government or anybody could enter without their permission.
They gave that permission.
Assange was dragged out.
And they did it at 1030 a.m. in London time, broad daylight.
That camera, that roughly, the Russian RT's camera was set up since Friday night when Wikileaks first informed the world through a tweet that they had gotten an Ecuadorian government source telling them that his expulsion was imminent.
And a lot of people pooh-poohed that, and it turned out, of course, they were telling the truth once again.
So the cameras, in fact, Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, you probably had him on your show a few times, he tweeted that he thought it would happen at 4 a.m. on Monday.
Well, or out the side door, that kind of thing.
That's what I thought.
But in fact, they wanted the world to see them drag this man outside of the building, and he had not seen direct sunlight in almost seven years.
This June would be seven years he had sought asylum in that embassy when he thought he would be extradited to the U.S. on these trumped-up sexual charges against him in Sweden, which I should add have now been revived suddenly with his arrest.
We'll get to that in a second.
So here is Julian in the full view of all the cameras with a couple of dozen policemen and vehicles there.
They'd been outside the embassy for the entire weekend.
People unmarked cars.
People had covered their heads with hoods when a reporter went up there with a camera.
So they were waiting, it looks like, for the word.
They were sussing out the situation and waiting for the word to move in, and they moved in this morning.
And to see a man of 47 years pulled out there, those of you who are listeners who saw that video, and you can see it anywhere now, he looked like an 80-year-old man, and it was, he apparently said, U.K. can resist this, meaning the extradition, I suppose, and he was then bundled off and pushed into a van and driven away.
He was then brought to a holding cell and then went to a magistrate's court, I'm told, where it's prison, and they are now seeking a year maximum for skipping bail on that arrest warrant that Sweden had issued.
He was never charged.
He's never been charged until today with a crime.
And he sought asylum there, and he will now face a long, hopefully long, extradition battle, which his lawyers will try to win in the U.K. courts, extradite him to the United States.
The ongoing vigil that we have online right now, Kim.com, the German entrepreneur who was braided by the FBI for copyright violation and has been a strong supporter of Julian Assange, said that he thought that these initial charges of helping Chelsea Manning to get into a computer to get classified documents that held only a five-year maximum charge, that was what the initial indictment said, was only designed to get him to be extradited simply for a small crime, and that once he's in the U.S. custody on U.S. territory, they would add other charges.
And sure enough, just a few moments ago we learned, CNN reported, that the Justice Department here in Washington says that they will be adding other charges to Assange.
There's no way they're going to let him get out of jail ever.
And it's a very dark day, Scott, not only for Journalism and Freedom of the Press, but I think for the peoples of the world who need to be informed, and the establishment media has been singularly failing in doing that over the years.
And he stepped into that breach and provided the kind of information the press is supposed to have, that challenges and exposes wrongdoing by governments.
And for that he's paid a really big price.
Hold on just one second.
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All right, but now, you know, partisanship is partisanship.
And so there may be some people listening to this who say, yeah, but I hate this guy so much for ratting on Hillary Clinton and hurting her chances and helping Trump get elected.
So speak to them, assuming the premise that they do hate him and they're not going to stop hating him.
Why should they care about what you say?
You know, why do you say this is important, even to them?
Well, first, I would say it doesn't matter what you think of him personally.
This is larger than Julian Assange, this issue.
Secondly, if you see the movie Risk, Laura Poitras was allowed by Assange to follow him around in very crucial moments in his story.
And she filmed him in the midst of some of these, including when he gets dressed into a disguise and gets on a motorbike and goes to the Ecuador embassy.
You actually see him in the film going there seven years ago and never emerging until this morning.
But there's an interesting clip there where he's on the phone with someone before the primaries, while the primaries are still going on in these 2016 elections, and he says, we have some interesting emails from Hillary Clinton.
Unfortunately, we don't have anything on Trump yet.
That tells me he wanted something on Trump.
He was not choosing sides there.
He thought they were both horrible.
He said it was a choice between cancer and gonorrhea, this choice for president, as many Americans felt as well, that they disliked both candidates.
So he got these documents.
They were sent to him.
Is he supposed to sit on them?
You know, your source's motives are important when you are told something orally.
You have to check it out.
Why are they, this person, telling me this?
How could he back it up?
When documents are given to you and you spend the requisite time, as Wikileaks does, verifying the authenticity of these documents, and they've never been accused or found to have published one page of a bogus document in their now 13 years of existence, he had to publish those emails.
Now, the question of the timing, some Sanders supporters say, well, why didn't he put it out during the primary?
That would have, perhaps, showing that Hillary Clinton, of course, and the DNC had rigged the primaries in many ways to hurt Bernie Sanders and help her.
Why didn't he do it during the primaries?
And then the Clinton people say, well, why didn't he do it right before the convention to hurt her and to have four members, I believe four, of the DNC, including the chief, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairperson of the party, had to resign, which showed you that the documents were real as well.
Somebody, some heads had to roll because the truth was revealed, and they wanted to sweep it under the carpet.
Well, it tells me, and I don't know this for a fact, that they got the documents when they got the documents, and they did the vetting and the time it takes to do that vetting, and that's when they had it ready.
Did they wait maybe a few days for maximum impact?
Possibly.
But I don't think that's different from a lot of newspapers.
You want attention to your story.
And he published them when he could publish them, in my opinion.
And there's also this Italian journalist, Stefania Morizi, who writes for La Repubblica, and she was one of the partner newspapers with Wikileaks, and she worked closely with Assange on the Podesta emails, and she swears that she knew the date of publication was set several days in advance of those Podesta emails, just so they came out a few hours or a day after the Hollywood Access tape that hurt Trump.
Of course, everyone, including Hillary Clinton herself, accused Wikileaks of doing that to blunt that, but that wasn't true then either, apparently, according to this Italian journalist.
So why should they like him?
I know we're both really short on time here, so I want to get to the thing about people who don't care about anything that you just said.
They hate this SOB anyway.
Why should they care about whether he's prosecuted or not, Joe?
Well, I'll tell you why the people at The New York Times and The Washington Post should care about him, because if the government actually imprisons this man on charges of having possession of and disseminating classified information, that could make any journalist anywhere in the world, because the Espionage Act is a global act, a global law, after the 1961 amendment of the 1917 Espionage Act.
They're all liable to be brought to prison or brought to be prosecuted for publishing.
That's what Assange has done.
He's a publisher, and he's being charged with some small-time crime that people who know better than I do about these technical matters think they can never prove that he actually participated in the theft of the documents that Chelsea Manning took.
So it's an issue larger than Assange, whether you despise him, whether you think he's personally responsible for Donald Trump, whether you think he's a Kremlin puppet.
He's a journalist, he is certainly a publisher, and he cannot go to prison for those acts of publishing, because that changes everything.
We've already moved towards a controlling, authoritarian state with fawning corporate media, but now this would be legally, it would become dangerous to publish truthful information that exposes government wrongdoing.
And that's the primary role of the journalist.
And if you put him in jail, any journalist is liable to be put in jail for publishing.
That's why, even if you hate Assange and you love Hillary, that you have to be worried today.
Right.
Now, so here's the thing, though, too, is I wonder whether you think that maybe there's a silver lining here in the fact that their technicality, where they're trying to say, well, this isn't exactly that because it looks like Assange helped to break a passcode or something.
So somehow he was in on the theft of the documents in a way that makes him different in kind somehow from a New York Times reporter who might also cajole his source to come up with more and better stuff.
But that seems so thin.
Do you think there's a chance that maybe now the American major media will feel like they have to rally to his defense for their own sake?
I think they're in a huge quandary.
There was a number two general counsel of the New York Times that told some judges on the West Coast a few months ago that they had to oppose the arrest and prosecution of Assange, not because they liked him, but because they could be next, because they also publish classified information, albeit most of the time it's the one that the government wants them to publish and they're the ones who leak it.
Not always, though.
Not always.
Not always.
And they may want to, like, if they got classified information that nailed Trump, they would publish that, right, even if it was not leaked by somebody who wanted it leaked.
If they got it, whatever ways.
You're right.
Absolutely.
This is a principle here we're talking about, and it's the basis of the press in a Western civilization, if we've had one, and it is endangered today, unlike any time in recent memory.
All right, listen, thank you so much for your time and for all your great work on this, and we'll be back in touch soon, Joe.
Appreciate it.
All the best, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's the great Joe Lauria.
He is the editor-in-chief of ConsortiumNews.com.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com, slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at FoolsErrand.us.
