American Journalist Lee Stranahan addresses supporters of Julian Assange outside HM Prison Belmarsh in southeast London on Sunday (Photo: Patrick Henningsen@21WIRE).
Lee Stranahan
21st Century Wire
About twelve hours after Julian Assange was ripped from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, I was on plane in Washington D.C. and heading to the UK to cover the story for Radio Sputnik.
The occasion was grim, but I was glad to go. For the last two years, we’ve talked about the plight of Julian Assange and journalism on my show *Fault Lines with Nixon and Stranahan* and I’ve taken part in a number of the #Unity4J events that have taken place over the last year that Julian Assange has been silenced.
The anti-war movement was decimated during the Obama administration, but I’ve seen it live on in the #Unity4J events that have cut across traditional left/right labels and brought a clear focus on who is fighting the real battle of our era; the people vs. the warmongering elites.
Let’s define that term clearly: the elites I’m talking about are the loose affiliations of millionaires and billionaires and their organizations that are trying to maintain their grip on power and ill-begotten wealth through warfare. This warfare includes not just the “traditional” warfare pushed by the global arms industry—although that’s a big profit center for many of these elitists and their organizations—but also through economic sanctions and most importantly, information warfare.
The organizations at the center of this fight include NATO, their PR organization the Atlantic Council, the “deep state” in the US and the UK, including the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, MI6, Round Table groups including Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations, connective groups like the recently exposed Integrity Initiative in the UK, funding mechanisms like the IMF and World Bank, the big banks like HSBC who launder the money which makes black ops possible, as well as the vast-constellation of think-tanks and NGOs can pump out white papers, press releases, and opinion pieces to back the establishment, and of course the network of co-opted media organizations and tech companies that function as the arteries of that deliver the poison propaganda.
This is a conspiracy but it isn’t a theory, nor is it all theoretical how they got Assange.
Assange taken into UK custody on April 11, 2019.
The steady pressure on Ecuador to betray Assange and turn him over the British authorities culminated in the $4.2 billion dollar IMF loan deal back in February that kicked the Assange grab into gear. While the United States secret grand jury in Virginia had been no-so secret for months, the Mueller Investigation that kept President Trump on the defensive for over a year while neocon operatives like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo worked their way into positions of power, and the relentless anti-Russia media narrative had been used to demonize Assange to the point that taking him in broad daylight didn’t cause the torches and pitchforks to come out immediately.
This is a complex and well-funded information warfare operation but there’s one big hitch: it’s a pack of lies, and a growing number of people understand that, thanks in no small part to the work of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
When I went to Her Majesty’s Prison at Belmarsh on Sunday, I’d been talking about this stuff for a couple of years but to BE THERE—yards from where Julian Assange, the human being who was being held—it all hit me on a deep level. Journalism itself was behind bars.
This is a fight we can’t lose. The elites know it and so we’ve seen their desperate power grabs lately in Syria, in Ukraine, in Venezuela. However, we’ve also seen those operations exposed in near-real time.
The next few weeks are crucial. Every day, we need to be active, strategic and fearless. We need to be Julian’s voice.
Our enemies are more powerful and have more resources, but there are more of us. And we have the truth.
Let’s act like it and #FreeAssange.
***
Author Lee Stranahan is an American investigative reporter and veteran broadcaster and is currently the host of Fault Lines with Sputnik Radio, and has reported for Breitbart News, Huffington Post, Daily Kos and others.
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