 My name is Ann Wright. I'm a retired Army colonel. I'm a former U.S. diplomat. I resigned 20 years ago against the Bush war on Iraq. And as WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, gives the evidence for U.S. criminal actions in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we see that who is getting criminalized. It's the journalist that posted this. We're here in front of the State Department to hand in a letter to Secretary Blinken, because he was just in Australia. And when he met with the foreign minister, Penny Wong, she said that this case against Julian Assange, whose Australian citizen has gone on for way too long, the prime minister has said the same thing. A group of 48 members of the Australian officialdom have said the same thing. They all want the case dropped. They want the U.S. to stop trying to extradite Julian Assange to the United States, where he faces charges that could lead to 175 years in prison. We're very disturbed by comments that Secretary of State Blinken made in Australia that Julian Assange is wanted for very serious crimes. Those documents that he published show evidence of very serious crimes, as well as U.S. interference to prevent covering them up. When I think of very serious crimes, something like U.S. soldiers executing 10 handcuffs civilians and then calling in an airstrike to cover up the evidence is a serious crime. Secretary of State Blinken has made human rights and press freedom and democracy a huge part of the rhetoric he uses when doing diplomacy. But the rest of the world rightfully sees this as the persecution of a dissident by the world's so remaining superpower, and that whenever Blinken or Biden or others bring up press freedom, bring up human rights, bring up democracy, not only countries that we have correlations with, but our own allies respond with what about Julian Assange as they should. So we're here to say to Secretary Blinken immediately end the dangerous and inhumane persecution of Julian Assange, free Julian Assange now.