'Nothing WikiLeaks ever printed was false, fake, or inaccurate' [Transcript]

Lee Camp is the former host and head writer of Redacted Tonight, the host of the podcast Moment of Clarity, and The Lee Camp Show as well as co-host of Government Secrets with Graham Elwood, and Common Censored with Eleanor Goldfield. Camp is the author of titles such as Moment of Clarity, Bullet Points and Punch Lines, and most recently Dangerous Ideas. He co-manages the news platform RadIndieMedia.com, and his newest show America Inc. with Lee Camp is on Breakthrough News. Camp had a wide-ranging conversation with Plea for the Fifth, that will be published in four parts. The fourth and final in our series focuses on Julian Assange's long-deserved freedom. Watch the video of this segment here, and the rest in our series with Lee Camp here.

Sean Ghazala: Well, and as we begin to close out, I wanted to invite you to talk about Julian Assange. Folks might know he's the Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks. He was free about three weeks ago, after agreeing to a plea bargain with the US Department of Justice, and received the sentence of 62 months in British prison while he awaited extradition, I know that you've been very outspoken on his ordeal. And I just wanted to invite you to share that with our audience, your reaction to what he's been through, but also what might be in his future now.

Lee Camp: Yeah, I think he's one of the most important and pivotal figures in my lifetime. I mean, people, partly by design, people have forgotten how powerful and influential WikiLeaks was. It was definitely responsible for a lot of the spark the power behind things like the Arab Spring, and Occupy and so many other efforts to change our world for the better. And if it had been allowed to continue, it would have brought in a new time of transparency, of anti-corruption. But of course, the corrupt don't want to allow that. So instead, they very carefully dismantled and attacked every facet of WikiLeaks, they viewed it as more dangerous than a gun or a missile, to make sure that that Assange and WikiLeaks were destroyed. And part of that plan was to come up with false charges against Julian Assange, and make sure he could not do his work. It was to make sure WikiLeaks could not get any funding PayPal cut them off, all the credit cards cut them off. It was also to go after various board members and other figures at WikiLeaks. And they largely succeeded. They especially succeeded at destroying Assange his life, and he was in essentially solitary confinement 23 hours a day in Belmarsh prison for seven years, and essentially all the time in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he was basically had one to two rooms that he could walk around in, in the Ecuadorian Embassy. And this is what we do to someone who reveals the truth, who reveals the crimes of the US Empire, nothing WikiLeaks ever printed, ever, not a sentence was proven false or fake or inaccurate. And that is the polar opposite of every news source. You can name the mainstream media, they often have retractions, they admit themselves. Many times they don't admit them, and they are proven wrong over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. And yet the guy who's getting it right, the guy who's actually speaking the truth, he's tortured in prison. Now, in terms of the plea deal, I If I were him, and as a supporter of him, and his life and what he's achieved, I absolutely think he should have taken a plea deal. He should be a free man; he had been tortured enough. I don't care what the plea deal said, I think he should be free. But - and he knows this as well - the plea deal is a joke, acknowledging - they forced him to acknowledge that, basically, he's guilty of violating the Espionage Act - but you know for a few reasons that's ridiculous. One is freedom of speech should allow you to speak freely about the truth, which this was all the truth. Another is that for the first several years that WikiLeaks was printing these things, they were working with mainstream media, Guardian, Reuters, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, were all printing their articles, were all using these as major stories. And then once the US government said, 'Oh, no, we're going to attack the person doing this', all of those cowardly, pathetic, pro Empire outlets turned and abandoned him and basically just let him hang. But then another reason we did this is because Julian Assange is not a US citizen. He never operated for the United States, WikiLeaks was never in the United States. It's basically the US setting a precedent where we can prosecute and attack any journalist for saying things we don't like or revealing secrets we don't like, which is a horrifying precedent for journalism, or press in any regards, but especially for non-US citizens who have nothing to do with the US and now all of a sudden, they got to think 'Oh, I could be prosecuted by the US for revealing the truth.'