 Surprise, surprise. There are a few people in Washington, DC who were not afraid to talk about Julian Assange all these years. And our next member of Tribunal is one of them. So it's my big pleasure to present the one and only Chip Gibbons, policy director of the organization Defending Rights and Descent. Thank you so much for that introduction. And thank you everyone who is coming as one of the few people in DC willing to talk about Assange's case. It gets very lonely, but I'm very heartened and inspired to see all of you here today. I wanna start by acknowledging three people who cannot be here today. One is Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in a dungeon called Belmarsh. The second is Daniel Hale, who is currently being held in a communications management unit. I've been told that Daniel watches Democracy Now, which is streaming this. Daniel, if you can hear this, I wanna say on behalf of everyone in this room, you have our solidarity. Never let them break your spirit. A better world is possible only because of people like you. And as an aside, I'd like to note the CMU, much like Belmarsh, is associated with the war on terror. When governments kill civilians, not only is it not terrorism, but when you expose murder by government, they treat you as the terrorist. And the third person who can't be here is of course, Edward Snowden, who exposed that our government was lying to us about how they were spying on us. And for this patriotic act was driven into exile while the lying spies continue to enjoy lucrative careers with war profiteers and cable news programs. And you have to ask yourself, do they view those as two different jobs? Because after all, someone has to sell the wars that line their pockets. I am here today to talk about Julian Assange's case. Assange is the persecution of Assange is part of a larger war on truth. Assange is a journalist and a publisher, not a whistleblower or a source, but the normalization of the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers paved the way for Assange's unprecedented indictment. My fellow witness, Jessalyn, has long argued the war on whistleblowers was a backdoor war on journalism. Do you know who else agrees with this? The US Army Counterintelligence Center, who in 2008 noted that the governments of North Korea, Russia, and Israel, DC's favorite democracy, had blocked the WikiLeaks website, but there was a better way to destroy them, expose and prosecute the whistleblowers. And they used to phrase whistleblowers in this document. They never do so publicly, but they did so privately in this document to prosecute those whistleblowers to destroy WikiLeaks. The US government knows, like we know, that without sources, there is no journalism. But the US government is no longer content with merely going after the sources. They have made Assange the first person ever indicted under the Espionage Act for the crime of publishing truthful information. Make no mistake, the attempts to silence Assange is part of a larger war to silence those who expose the crimes of empire, militarism, and the US national security state. And it's not just a legal war involving a prosecution, but an extra legal war involving covert action and propaganda. While the US security state is cloaked in secrecy, there have been a steady trickle of revelations about the three-letter agency's war on WikiLeaks. The NSA added Assange to their manhunting database. The CIA plotted to kidnap and maybe even kill Assange. Various agencies sought to get around rules protecting press freedom by arguing WikiLeaks were not journalists. The NSA discussed the idea of declaring WikiLeaks a malicious foreign actor. The FBI and the CIA demanded a personal audience with Barack Obama to persuade him that rules protecting press freedom should not apply to WikiLeaks as WikiLeaks should instead be classified as information brokers. I'm not sure what an information broker is. I don't think the CIA and the FBI know either. And finally, they invented the term hostile non-state intelligence agency to allow the CIA to engage in offensive counterintelligence against WikiLeaks, something previously reserved only for rival spy agencies and requires even less oversight, and there's very little oversight over the CIA, over CIA covert action. The US government's legal and extra legal war on WikiLeaks is a war on journalism itself. By bringing an indictment under the Espionage Act, the US government has endangered the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom. By applying the Espionage Act extraterritorially to a foreign national, they jeopardize press freedom globally. It's also a war on everyone in this room's right to know. The Supreme Court has long held the First Amendment also includes a right to receive information and ideas. Through its lawfare, covert actions, and propaganda campaigns, the US government hopes to prevent WikiLeaks from publishing. Thus, the US government has engaged in a conspiracy to deprive the US people writ large of our First Amendment right to receive information and ideas. They are seeking to kill the messenger in order to prevent all of us from getting the message. And I know my time is up, but I have my own message. I'm sure there's someone from the J. Edgar Hoover building, which is just a few blocks down the street, sitting in the audience somewhere. So I want you to write this down and take this to your bosses. We will free Julian. We will free Daniel. We will bring Edward home. And you can put in my FBI file that I said that. Thank you very much.