Diane Sare Attends Candidate Forum on Assange Case

Jan. 22—LaRouche independent candidate for the U.S. Senate from New York Diane Sare, participated on Jan. 20 in an hour-long online discussion, themed “U.S. Candidates 4 Assange 2024,” with seven other candidates for public office who have stood up for Freedom of the Press, and who have demanded the political persecution of Julian Assange come to an end.”

In addition to Sare, the other seven participants were: Joe Sweeney (candidate for U.S. House from California’s 10th C.D.), Lisa McCormick (former candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey), Matthew P. Hoh (Associate Director, Media Eisenhower), Christina Khalil (candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey), Katrina Nguyen (candidate for U.S. House from Colorado’s 5th C.D.), Bianca Von Krieg (candidate for U.S. House from California’s 11th C.D.), and John McBride (candidate for U.S. House from California’s 9th C.D.).

Moderating the program was Kelley Lane, editor, and co-producer of Assange Countdown to Freedom, the home of the podcast and video series where political satirist, civil rights activist, and journalist Randy Credico interviews artists, activists, intellectuals, and politicians about the imprisonment and persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Assange, an Australian citizen, has been incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh in London, since his arrest on April 11, 2019. He is fighting U.S. attempts to extradite him to face charges in connection with the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as well as various diplomatic cables.

The meeting began with pre-recorded remarks from Nils Melzer, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture: “To my shame, I have to say, I am the one who ‘missed the elephant’ in this case. When Julian Assange’s lawyers first contacted me … I immediately had this visceral reaction: This is this hacker, this rapist, this spy, this traitor, I’m not going to get manipulated by this guy.…

"The deeper I got into this case, the more contradictions appeared, and I realized that there was nothing to back up this narrative about ‘the rapist,’ ‘the narcissist,’ ‘the traitor,’ and all this, but that this had been created, this narrative, intentionally, to divert attention from what this case is really about.”

Melzer continued: "This not about Julian Assange, It is really about state secrecy being exposed by an investigative journalist who has come up with a mechanism that is extremely powerful because it offers whistleblowers the possibility to transmit evidence of misconduct anonymously … and WikiLeaks would then publish the evidence for the benefit of the public….”

Diane Sare added specificity to Melzer’s summary: “Whoever becomes President of the U.S. is obviously extremely important, not only for the American people but for the world. Our Presidency has enormous executive powers. So when [former First Lady to President Bill Clinton, U.S. Senator from New York, and Secretary of State under President Barack Obama], Hillary Clinton’s emails were leaked by WikiLeaks, showing that she intended to [and did] steal the Democratic Party nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 for herself. She [Hilary] being a major warmonger, that should have raised an enormous red flag. It should have caused an outrage; it should have caused action immediately, but nothing was done to remedy this.

“The hope of all whistleblowers is that if the truth comes out, something will be done to address the problem. Now, we have another Presidential election coming up. We have war and genocide everywhere. The treatment of Assange is to instill fear. I concur with Nils Melzer that this is not about Assange and that we have to do everything in our power to remedy this. We cannot allow him to languish in prison.”

Sare later drew the essential connection between Assange’s case and that of the late statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, who was targeted, slandered, and railroaded into prison [in 1989] in the United States, in a similarly aggressive and global smear campaign as that which has been used to consign Assange to oblivion, via networks of lies which can work their effects without one even realizing it, as Mr. Melzer belatedly recognized through his own failure:

“Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark took the case of LaRouche, with whom I have been associated for 35 years, because, he said, he had never in his life seen such amazing collusion between the news media, the Dept. of Justice, and the FBI, which had a chilling effect, to the point where people would say, ‘Well, maybe this case is unjust, but the accused is a bad person anyway,’ and they didn’t look further into it.

“We now have a situation where journalists are virtually targets in every war zone. Huge numbers are being killed, in wars prosecuted by a ‘bodyguard of lies,’ which depend on continuing the lies to keep the support of the populations behind the wars. If people realized what was going on on the ground, they might withdraw their support.

“Again, this is an area where truth and journalism are extremely important, and why governments would want to suppress an individual [like Assange] to make an example of him.”

After Sare left the program, among the problems discussed by the assembled candidates was the political corruption emanating downward from the office of the Presidency; the felonious nature of applying the 1917 Espionage Act to Assange; and corruption within the party system.

For example, the Biden-run Democratic Party Establishment had made it clear that they would not allow for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to have a real chance of obtaining the Party’s nomination for President in 2024, and would hinder his candidacy, causing him to leave the Party, where his family’s name still holds powerful sway among Democrat voters.

Moderator Lane played a number of short audio and video clips, including one of Assange being interviewed by Afshin Rattansi, a former BBC journalist and now host of Going Underground. Then one of John Pilger.

Two video clips were shown of Daniel Ellsberg, who died in 2023, on the responsibility to report torture and war crimes by the military—“You can never legalize torture.”—and regarding moves against his own life by CIA assets.

In another video clip, ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner, addressed the irony of Australian national Assange being charged with violating the U.S. Espionage Act: “If Julian Assange can be extradited to the U.S. because of his being an Australian publisher, and not respecting U.S. secrecy laws, why shouldn’t a New York Times reporter be subject to extradition to Beijing, because, as a U.S. citizen, he didn’t respect China’s secrecy laws?

“This is a really serious game being played here, and would constitute a really dangerous precedent if a non-American journalist is bound by U.S. security laws.”

After more back-and-forth among the candidates, moderator Lane ended the discussion, insisting that all the participants involved use the general campaigning process as a mode for educating the public on Assange’s case and to gain his freedom.

The 1-hour video of the entire program is available here, whence it can be viewed and shared.