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Kiriakou was the first person to be sentenced in the US for leaking classified material to a journalist as part of President Barack Obama's crackdown on whistleblowers. His case was heard by the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He took a plea bargain in October 2012 and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

The same court is handling the case against Julian Assange, who is alleged to have conspired with WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning as part of her leaking the damning classified materials. Assange was arrested by the UK authorities on Thursday after Ecuador allowed British police into its embassy in London to drag the whistleblower out.

Kiriakou believes that once in US custody, Assange would face additional charges and may spend the rest of his life in jail.

"I think that there are many more charges to be considered for Julian. I would expect a superseding indictment, possibly to include espionage charges," he told RT.

I don't think Julian is looking at five years in prison. He is probably looking at 50 years in prison.

The US court that would try Assange will not give him a fair trial, Kiriakou believes. "They don't call EDVA the 'Espionage Court' for nothing," he tweeted earlier in the day. He told RT he was speaking from his personal experience.

"Judge Leonie Brinkema is a Reagan appointee to the federal bench and she was promoted to District Court bench by Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. She reserves all national security cases for herself. She handled my case, the Jeffrey Sterling case [over leaking details of a CIA op to journalist James Risen], she is Julian's judge, she has reserved the [NSA whistleblower] Ed Snowden case for herself."

"No national security defendant has ever won a case in the EDVA. In my case, I asked Judge Brinkema to declassify 70 documents that I needed to defend myself. She denied all 70 documents. And so I had literally no defense for myself and was forced to take a plea."

Kiriakou said he hopes that the way Assange is being treated by the US justice will galvanize the US public and result in more documents being leaked to expose the misdeeds of the US government.

[The prosecution of Assange] was only theoretical until this morning. Now it is a reality that we have to face. This is an assault on our civil liberties here in the United States. It's an assault on our constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.

Critics of the US case against Assange, like Kiriakou, say all he has been doing was publishing material of public interest, which was also embarrassing to the US government. This is exactly what journalists in the US have been doing before him when they reported major scandals in cases like Watergate, Pentagon Papers or Iran-Contra.

"If Julian Assange as publisher and journalist is prosecuted, then there is literally nothing to stop the government from prosecuting journalists at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and anywhere else," he warned.

The arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is a severe blow to press freedom, but the mainstream media has no objections, despite never shying away from writing articles based on his publications, analysts told RT.

"What we're seeing right now is criminalization of journalism; the criminalization of publishing," analyst Patrick Henningsen said hours after the UK police forcibly removed Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

This "very unfortunate" development affects each and every journalist, but the "supine mainstream media isn't protesting what's going on," he added. The leading Western outlets are "in lockstep with the government of the US, the UK, Spain and others" and just don't see Assange as their colleague.

© Reuters / Henry Nicholls
Members of the media are reflected in a window of a police van as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen inside, after he was arrested in London.

There's "no viable Fourth Estate" anymore, only the "government media complex," Henningsen said.

That aside, Julian Assange has been "a modern Robin Hood for independent journalists. Everybody used what he revealed on [Hillary] Clinton; on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," independent journalist Luc Rivet told RT.

And the MSM also heavily relied on the work done by the WikiLeaks, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell explains. "Assange didn't leak anything," but only made documents, obtained by Chelsea Manning, available to the public. He's "a publisher in the same way that the New York Times and the Guardian that also published the leaks of Chelsea Manning," Tatchell said.

The fact that it's only Assange, who is being persecuted by the US, but not those outlets, "smacks of double standards. It smacks of a vendetta," the activist pointed out.

The reason the US authorities are going after him isn't because he caused any damage per say, but because he caused huge embarrassment exposing American wrongdoing around the world.

Henningsen stressed that nowadays "things only become protest-worthy if the mainstream media is giving it coverage," so Assange's arrest won't lead to large-scale rallies, adding that only concerned activists will take to the streets.

He expressed the belief that Ecuador, which sheltered Assange for more than six years, withdrew the publisher's asylum claim as a result of "backroom deal that's been done between the Ecuadorian, British and the US governments."

Assange will most likely be extradited to the US where and the "danger is that Julian Assange will not face justice," but only "a facade of due process," he said.

"What's he's going to face is secret grand jury proceedings, most likely in northeastern Virginia, most likely it'll be ruled on by the judge, who has ruled against every single whistleblower under the Obama administration, including Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou and many others."