6/19/20 Patrick Cockburn on the Heinous Mistreatment of Julian Assange - a podcast by Scott Horton

Patrick Cockburn joins the show for an update on Julian Assange, who continues to languish in jail as he awaits the results of his possible extradition from Britain to the U.S. on charges under the Espionage Act. Scott and Cockburn revisit the important role Assange has played in exposing government malfeasance over the last decade, including, notably, by enabling the heroic leaks by Chelsea Manning, which provided the source material for tens of thousands of news stories that the public needed to hear. Many in the mainstream media have been quick to vilify Assange, even though the supposed crimes he is in trouble for could be equally applied to them.

Discussed on the show:



War in the Age of Trump

“Julian Assange in Limbo” (London Review of Books)

“Iraq War Logs” (WikiLeaks)

“Afghan War Diary” (WikiLeaks)

“State Department Cables” (WikiLeaks)

Espionage Act of 1917

Collateral Murder

“A murderous system is being created before our very eyes” (Republik)



Patrick Cockburn is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent and the author of The Age of Jihad and Chaos & Caliphate.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

Donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.







The following is an automatically generated transcript.

Show TranscriptScott Horton 0:10

All right, y'all welcome it's Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I've recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys on the line. I've got the great Patrick Cockburn. He is the author of chaos and caliphate. And he's got a brand new book coming out can't wait for this war in the age of Trump, the defeat of ISIS, the fall of the Kurds in the conflict with Iran. All right, and here he is it The London Review of Books, Julian Assange in limbo. Welcome back to the show. Patrick. How are you, sir?



Patrick Cockburn 1:08

I'm great. Thank you.



Scott Horton 1:10

Great to have you back on the show here and great to see you sticking up for Julian Assange again, you know, I think, Well, a lot of his most important work really came out took place a decade ago. And there are a lot of people who may not really be familiar with the saga of Julian Assange, maybe they only know him as being accused of rigging the election for Trump or this kind of thing. But he is in a lot of trouble. And according to your article, he should not be so I was, you know, hoping, or Well, I was looking forward to this opportunity give you a chance to explain to the people who is Julian Assange. Why is Wikileaks so important and why is his prosecution so important, sir.



Patrick Cockburn 1:59

I think You know from us to start with trying to sum it up in a few phrases is that what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did in 2010 was really just that a weaponized freedom of expression. They had I'll go into this a little more detail in a moment. But they were given or got access to a great trove of American documents. the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Logs, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. And they gave them to the press. They were in the in the New York Times and The Guardian, the Mondale pace, you name it. And this was very revealing about American, the American government and the way it operated.

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