(Newswire.net— September 17, 2020) — One of the most famous whistleblowers in history, Daniel Ellsberg, testified today in favor of Julian Assange before a court in London, which is deciding on the US request for the extradition of the founder of WikiLeaks, the Guardian reports.
Ellsberg, 89, who many consider responsible for ending the Vietnam War because he released the so-called “Pentagon Papers” in 1971, said via video link that after several meetings with Assange, he concluded that they shared the same aspirations, they both wanted to shed light on “a great lack of transparency” regarding U.S. decision-makers, especially when it comes to war issues.
He said dispatches about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, published by Wikileaks, showed that torture had become “normalized”.
“I was acutely aware that what was depicted in that video deserved the term murder, a war crime,” he told London’s Old Bailey court via videolink. “I was very glad that the American public was confronted with this reality of our war,” Ellsberg stated.
U.S. prosecutors have charged 49-year-old Assange with 17 counts of espionage and as well as misconduct over the release of secret U.S. military documents from WikiLeaks 10 years ago, mostly regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The maximum sentence Assange could receive is 175 years in prison.
Similar to Assange, Ellsberg was tried on 12 counts of espionage, after he gave the media 7,000 pages of confidential documents of the American army.
He was threatened with a sentence of up to 115 years in prison, but the charges were dropped in 1973 due to the illicit treatment he was subjected to.
Ellsberg, who worked at both the State Department and the Pentagon, said that Assange will not be able to justify his moves if he is extradited to the United States.
He added that Assange “cannot get a fair trial in the United States for what he is accused of doing.”
Earlier, John Goetz, an investigative reporter who worked for Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine on the first publication of the documents in 2010, also spoke on behalf of Assange, saying that he was “careful to ensure that the names of informants in hundreds of thousands of leaked secret US government documents were never published.” the Guardian wrote.