Today marks the final day in what could very well be Julian Assange’s last extradition trial...
Authored by Connor O'Keeffe: Today marks the second and final day in what could very well be Julian Assange’s last extradition trial in front of the British High Court. For almost five years now, the United States government has been working to get the Wikileaks founder extradited to the US to face charges that he violated the Espionage Act.
Inspired by Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, Julian Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006. Assange’s vision was to develop an online portal where whistleblowers could submit evidence of corporate or government wrongdoing without needing to identify themselves or risk exposure. Once submitted, teams of volunteers and journalists would parse the documents to determine legitimacy. And, if it was determined to be authentic, publish the material straight to the internet so the public could see for itself.
For the last decade and a half, Wikileaks has broken a number of major stories. Many of the biggest came from the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, along with the so-called Diplomatic Cables leak, all published in 2010. The leaked documents revealed that not only had the US government committed numerous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the war on terror, but there had been official efforts to cover them up.