Welcome to or welcome back to Colonial Outcast, your friendly neighborhood anti-imperialist podcast. My name is Greg Stoker and I will be hosting solo today because we're consulting with the United Kingdom today and scheduling issues were a thing. Here we open on action. So get ready to learn about Julian Assange and his ongoing extradition trial to the United States.

So diving right in, Julian Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006.

He came to wide international intention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from U.S. Army intelligence analyst

Chelsea Manning.

Footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, which will play during this episode,

U.S. military logs from Afghanistan and the Iraq Wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables that were

all classified secret or top secret.

Essentially, the U.S. is trying to extradite him under the Espionage Act. This comes after a decade-long witch hunt, and as of today, March 26th,

London's High Court has granted him reprieve and has given the U.S. government three weeks to

provide, quote, satisfactory assurances, unquote,

Assange will receive a fair trial, have his First Amendment free speech rights protected,

and will not face the death penalty if he's extradited from the U.K. to the United States.

Assange will be allowed a full appeal hearing against his extradition in May if those assurances aren't provided in time, the court ruled.

So you could easily argue that this entire escapade poses a threat to every journalist around the world, which we'll get into.

The video I mentioned a moment ago shows ISR footage from an attack helicopter of two American pilots gunning down 12 to 18 civilian men in Iraq.

Instead of trying the pilots for war crimes, the U.S. Attorney General decided to go after Assange for violating the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917, which is a relic of World War I that states that the government is allowed to

imprison anyone who publishes, quote, any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about

the form of government of the United States, unquote. What is notable about this is that Assange is not

a U.S. citizen, nor has he ever lived in the United States.

Moreover, nothing WikiLeaks has published has been shown to be false.

So the information was truthful, not scurrilous.

And finally, WikiLeaks didn't publish this information alone.

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