source: medium.com
by Caitlin Johnstone

The agenda of the United States government to extradite WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is kind of like Israel’s nuclear arsenal: everyone knows it exists, but government officials refuse to openly confirm it. US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has admitted that Assange’s arrest is a priority, President Trump has said he’d support Sessions in taking that action, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has labeled WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service,” and the ranking Democrat in the US House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff has stated that he plans on questioning Assange “when he is in US custody.” But so far none have come right out and admitted that there is an extradition request for Assange or what the legal basis for it might be.

Unlike Israel’s nukes, however, you’ll still see empire loyalists pretending that they don’t believe there’s an agenda to extradite Assange. You’ll often see social media accounts patrolling all posts about Julian Assange any time he’s in the news, stating in remarkably uniform language that Assange is free to leave the embassy whenever he wants because there is no extradition agenda. To be clear, these people do not believe what they are saying; nobody actually believes that Assange is choosing to remain in effective solitary confinement because it’s his idea of a fun time. But there are individuals with a vested interest in reinforcing the narrative that the US isn’t the sort of government that would try to imprison a journalist for telling the truth.

It is this false narrative manipulation which makes it essential to document such events as ten Democratic Senators writing a letter to Vice President Mike Pence demanding that he confront Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno about continuing to give political asylum to Assange.

Read the rest of the story here medium.com