Independent U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare, running in New York, participated in “U.S. Candidates 4 Assange 2024,” on Jan. 20, “an online discussion of candidates who are running for office … who have stood up for Freedom of the Press and who have demanded the political persecution of Julian Assange come to an end,” which was hosted by Kelley Lane, editor and co-producer of Assange Countdown to Freedom.
The meeting began with recorded remarks from Nils Melzer, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. He began, “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, you know, I’m not going to get manipulated by this guy. … And the deeper I got into this case, the more contradictions appeared, and I realized that there was really nothing to back up this narrative about ‘the rapist,’ ‘the narcissist,’ ‘the traitor,’ and all this, but that this really had been created, this narrative, intentionally, to divert attention from what this case is really about.”
What it is about, Melzer went on: “This 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, saying “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 Hillary Clinton’s emails were leaked, showing that she intended to steal the Democratic Party nomination, she being a major warmonger, that should have been an enormous red flag, caused an outrage, caused action immediately.”
