On Sat., Oct. 8, 2022, members of Haïti Liberté joined over 200 other demonstrators in a three-hour protest outside the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, DC. The rally was in solidarity with an action in London where some 7,000 people formed a human chain around the Houses of Parliament to protest the British government’s imprisonment and persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Washington rally included dozens of illustrious speakers including Chris Hedges, Garland Nixon, Scott Ritter, Steven Donziger, John Kiriakou, Dan Cohen, Esther Iverem, Joe Lauria, Medea Benjamin, Matthew Hoh, and Jill Stein.
The action was followed by a get-together at one of Washington’s Busboys and Poets restaurants, where the first episode of the upcoming documentary series “Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising” was aired.
Berthony Dupont, the director of Haïti Liberté, delivered the following speech at the rally.
Friends and Comrades,
In 2011, Wikileaks provided Haïti Liberté newspaper with 2,000 pages of classified diplomatic cables which allowed our team to write dozens of articles over the past eleven years about Washington’s machinations in Haiti.
We have published articles about how the U.S. tried to sabotage Venezuela’s project to provide cheap gas and a loan account to Haiti known as the PetroCaribe Fund,
how it fought efforts to raise Haiti’s minimum wage from $1.75 per day to $5 per day,
how it unilaterally deployed U.S. troops into Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake,
how it integrated coup-making soldiers into Haiti’s police force, how it approved of deadly assaults on Haitian shantytowns, and how it fought tooth and nail for seven years to thwart President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return to Haiti after he was exiled in 2004.
We have also used the secret U.S. Embassy cables to profile corrupt Haitian politicians like Youri Latortue and Rudi Hériveaux, expose the Haitian bourgeoisie’s attempts to turn the Haitian police into a private militia, and reveal that even U.S. officials saw the UN’s military occupation as a brutal, polluting, and ineffective force.
Wikileaks had provided all 250,000 cables which were part of Chelsea Manning’s famous Cablegate leak to mainstream media outlets like the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. However, these outlets, which are beholden to their respective establishments, did virtually nothing with the revealing documents. That is why Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team undertook the difficult task of securely delivering the cables to Haïti Liberté in Haiti. They did similar deliveries around the world.
It is for this valiant effort to disseminate truth and transparency to the world that Julian Assange is now being held and virtually tortured in Belmarsh Prison. It is one of the greatest travesties of justice in our lifetimes.
The fate of press freedom is in our hands. Let us use all our force to demand and work for the release of Julian Assange from the clutches of the U.S./Anglo axis which now holds and torments him in a jail cell for the crime of simply publishing indisputable facts which the public needs to know and shocking videos which the public needs to see.
We at Haïti Liberté are proud to have been one of Wikileaks’ original partners in publishing the truth about Washington’s crimes and mischief worldwide. In this way, Wikileaks has played an historic role in contributing to Haiti’s national liberation struggle, as they have done in other countries.
Free Julian Assange! Long live Wikileaks!
