Peter Whish-Wilson returns home from Washington as part of a lobby group speaking on behalf of Julian Assange and the continuation of free press.
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00:00 This is the first time that the US government has ever charged any journalist with espionage
00:13 charges, which are political charges by their very nature, political charges.
00:18 So they're charging a foreign journalist for activities on foreign soil and trying to extradite
00:23 them to the US, partly because if he was a US citizen, he'd be covered by First Amendment
00:28 laws. So of course Julian's lawyers, if he gets extradited, would be arguing he should
00:32 also be covered by First Amendment. So that's actually what they're trying to do. Because
00:36 he's a foreign citizen, the reason they're charging him and not their own journalist.
00:40 And the publications, the rules of engagement disclosure that he got from Chelsea Manning,
00:47 two US websites published those in full before WikiLeaks did, and they're not being charged.
00:52 And the US officials weren't aware of that. They weren't aware that Cheng Li is being
00:57 charged on very similar charges to Julian Assange for leaking state secrets. And whenever
01:02 we raise this with the Chinese government, they just laugh and go, "You hypocrites. Look
01:06 what the Western nations are doing to Julian Assange." So we brought that up in every meeting
01:10 we had, and the Americans were quite surprised. So one of the most important things we achieved
01:15 was letting them know, getting that line of communication open. We put our political differences
01:21 aside to focus on saving Julian and saving his life, basically. And they hadn't seen
01:28 anything like that before. And we said, "Well, we haven't done anything like this before
01:31 either." It was a precedent. But such a diverse group of politicians with basically
01:37 six different beliefs, we put their differences aside.
01:39 And you were going over there, so how did that, what was the process of that?
01:44 So we're going to try and build that alliance across party lines in the US, as hard as that's
01:48 going to be, because they are so divided. And the Prime Minister goes there on October
01:53 26th, first time in 10 years, for an official state visit, where he'll sit in the Senate
01:58 over there, and he'll meet with the President. And we want this to be on the agenda, so that's
02:03 the next step.
02:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]