Anti Globalist
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Assange didn't kill himself.
Biden admin to continue persecution of Julian Assange
- Thread starter Occam's Banana
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UK opens door to Assange extradition to US on spying charges
https://apnews.com/article/julian-assange-espionage-extradition-87c7f8f5acf747bbddb7cb87005fded6
Danica Kirka and Jill Lawless (10 December 2021)
LONDON (AP) — A British appellate court opened the door Friday for Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States on spying charges by overturning a lower court decision that the WikiLeaks founder’s mental health was too fragile to withstand incarceration in America.
The High Court in London ruled that U.S. assurances about Assange’s detention, received after the lower court decision, were enough to guarantee he would be treated humanely. Assange’s lawyers say they will ask to appeal.
In the ruling, the High Court directed the lower court judge to send the extradition request to Home Secretary Priti Patel, who would make the final decision on whether to send Assange to the U.S. for trial.
“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” a two-judge panel of the High Court said in its ruling.
Since WikiLeaks began publishing classified documents more than a decade ago, Assange has become a lightning rod for both criticism and veneration.
Some see him as a dangerous secret-spiller who endangered the lives of informers and others who helped the U.S. in war zones. Others say WikiLeaks has publicized official malfeasance that governments wanted to keep secret.
Both views have been debated as Assange has sought his freedom — and to evade the Americans.
The U.S. has asked British authorities to extradite Assange so he can stand trial on 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse linked to WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents.
Assange’s fiancée, Stella Moris, called Friday’s decision a “grave miscarriage of justice” that threatens the rights of journalists everywhere to do their jobs without fear of retaliation by governments that don’t like what they publish. She said Assange’s lawyers would seek to appeal.
“We will fight,” Moris said outside the court, where supporters chanted and waved banners demanding Assange’s release. “Every generation has an epic fight to fight and this is ours, because Julian represents the fundamentals of what it means to live in a free society.”
Assange, 50, is currently being held at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in London. The High Court ordered that he remain in custody pending the outcome of the extradition case.
Assange has been in detention since he was arrested in April 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years holed up inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London. Assange sought protection in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.
Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.
In January, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the U.S. request to extradite Assange, saying the Australian citizen was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions.
U.S. authorities later provided assurances that Assange would not face the severely restrictive conditions that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.
If convicted, Assange won’t be imprisoned at the “supermax” penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, the highest-security prison in the United States, American authorities promised the court. They also pledged that he wouldn’t be held under “special administrative measures,” which can include segregation from other prisoners and the loss of privileges such as visits, correspondence and use of the telephone.
They also said he would be eligible to serve any prison sentence in his native Australia.
American prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk.
The charges Assange faces carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, though lawyers for the U.S. have told British courts that the longest sentence ever imposed for such an offense was five years and three months.
Lawyers for Assange argue that their client shouldn’t have been charged because he was acting as a journalist and is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees freedom of the press. The documents he published exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, they say.
Barry J. Pollack, a lawyer for Assange in the U.S., called Friday’s decision “highly disturbing,” citing unfounded allegations that the U.S. plotted to kidnap or kill his client.
“The U.K. court reached this decision without considering whether extradition is appropriate when the United States is pursuing charges against him that could result in decades in prison, based on his having reported truthful information about newsworthy issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
Human rights advocates argue that the U.S. government wants to stifle its critics. While the British High Court was not ruling on the merits of the charges, the extradition proceedings have opened a broader discussion about Assange’s case.
Amnesty International’s Europe director, Nils Muižnieks, said the indictment “poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”
“If upheld, it would undermine the key role of journalists and publishers in scrutinizing governments and exposing their misdeeds — and would leave journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders,” Muižnieks said Friday.
But so far, the court has opted to ignore these issues all together, said Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition at the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service. Now that the American assurances, have been accepted, Assange would have to base his appeal on other matters he raised in the district court — all of which had been rejected in the past.
“All of the political heat is interesting for the media, but for the extradition court, they don’t seem to be concerned about it,” Vamos told the BBC.
Vamos said that if Assange is given permission to appeal, the case could go on for another six months. If the courts decide he has no grounds for appeal, it could be over as soon as January.
“We had a phrase when I was working on the extradition team at the CPS ... that extradition isn’t over until the wheels are up on the plane,” he said. “Anything can happen, even at the last second.”
https://apnews.com/article/julian-assange-espionage-extradition-87c7f8f5acf747bbddb7cb87005fded6
Danica Kirka and Jill Lawless (10 December 2021)
LONDON (AP) — A British appellate court opened the door Friday for Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States on spying charges by overturning a lower court decision that the WikiLeaks founder’s mental health was too fragile to withstand incarceration in America.
The High Court in London ruled that U.S. assurances about Assange’s detention, received after the lower court decision, were enough to guarantee he would be treated humanely. Assange’s lawyers say they will ask to appeal.
In the ruling, the High Court directed the lower court judge to send the extradition request to Home Secretary Priti Patel, who would make the final decision on whether to send Assange to the U.S. for trial.
“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” a two-judge panel of the High Court said in its ruling.
Since WikiLeaks began publishing classified documents more than a decade ago, Assange has become a lightning rod for both criticism and veneration.
Some see him as a dangerous secret-spiller who endangered the lives of informers and others who helped the U.S. in war zones. Others say WikiLeaks has publicized official malfeasance that governments wanted to keep secret.
Both views have been debated as Assange has sought his freedom — and to evade the Americans.
The U.S. has asked British authorities to extradite Assange so he can stand trial on 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse linked to WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents.
Assange’s fiancée, Stella Moris, called Friday’s decision a “grave miscarriage of justice” that threatens the rights of journalists everywhere to do their jobs without fear of retaliation by governments that don’t like what they publish. She said Assange’s lawyers would seek to appeal.
“We will fight,” Moris said outside the court, where supporters chanted and waved banners demanding Assange’s release. “Every generation has an epic fight to fight and this is ours, because Julian represents the fundamentals of what it means to live in a free society.”
Assange, 50, is currently being held at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in London. The High Court ordered that he remain in custody pending the outcome of the extradition case.
Assange has been in detention since he was arrested in April 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years holed up inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London. Assange sought protection in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.
Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.
In January, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the U.S. request to extradite Assange, saying the Australian citizen was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions.
U.S. authorities later provided assurances that Assange would not face the severely restrictive conditions that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.
If convicted, Assange won’t be imprisoned at the “supermax” penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, the highest-security prison in the United States, American authorities promised the court. They also pledged that he wouldn’t be held under “special administrative measures,” which can include segregation from other prisoners and the loss of privileges such as visits, correspondence and use of the telephone.
They also said he would be eligible to serve any prison sentence in his native Australia.
American prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk.
The charges Assange faces carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, though lawyers for the U.S. have told British courts that the longest sentence ever imposed for such an offense was five years and three months.
Lawyers for Assange argue that their client shouldn’t have been charged because he was acting as a journalist and is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees freedom of the press. The documents he published exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, they say.
Barry J. Pollack, a lawyer for Assange in the U.S., called Friday’s decision “highly disturbing,” citing unfounded allegations that the U.S. plotted to kidnap or kill his client.
“The U.K. court reached this decision without considering whether extradition is appropriate when the United States is pursuing charges against him that could result in decades in prison, based on his having reported truthful information about newsworthy issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
Human rights advocates argue that the U.S. government wants to stifle its critics. While the British High Court was not ruling on the merits of the charges, the extradition proceedings have opened a broader discussion about Assange’s case.
Amnesty International’s Europe director, Nils Muižnieks, said the indictment “poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”
“If upheld, it would undermine the key role of journalists and publishers in scrutinizing governments and exposing their misdeeds — and would leave journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders,” Muižnieks said Friday.
But so far, the court has opted to ignore these issues all together, said Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition at the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service. Now that the American assurances, have been accepted, Assange would have to base his appeal on other matters he raised in the district court — all of which had been rejected in the past.
“All of the political heat is interesting for the media, but for the extradition court, they don’t seem to be concerned about it,” Vamos told the BBC.
Vamos said that if Assange is given permission to appeal, the case could go on for another six months. If the courts decide he has no grounds for appeal, it could be over as soon as January.
“We had a phrase when I was working on the extradition team at the CPS ... that extradition isn’t over until the wheels are up on the plane,” he said. “Anything can happen, even at the last second.”
AngryCanadian
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No doubt they will try to blame Russia on Julian Assange.
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Working Poor
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I am praying that his lawyers are smart enough to fight this persecution cause I know Clinton wants to bring her evil down upon him and will laugh while doing it like she did with Qaddafi :we came, we saw, he died cackle cackle what an evil evil bitch she is.
CCTelander
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GlennwaldSnowdenAssanged
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I can only hope he gets a judge that is impartial and not political.I am praying that his lawyers are smart enough to fight this persecution cause I know Clinton wants to bring her evil down upon him and will laugh while doing it like she did with Qaddafi :we came, we saw, he died cackle cackle what an evil evil bitch she is.
GlennwaldSnowdenAssanged
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How does a person being tried on foreign soil get a jury of his peers?
If Assange were to get a jury of his peers, would that mean a jury of journalists?
If Assange were to get a jury of his peers, would that mean a jury of journalists?
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Yeah, I was going to remark on that, but I let it slide.
Given the way they've dealt with him, I don't have much confidence in whatever it is they consider to be humane treatment.
And what the hell are the Brits gonna do about it if the US just goes ahead does all the things they said they wouldn't do?
Not a damn thing, that's what.
- Joined
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- Messages
- 40,893
UK COURT APPROVES BIDEN'S EXTRADITION REQUEST FOR ASSANGE
https://rumble.com/vqjzc0-uk-court-approves-bidens-extradition-request-for-assange.html
Julian Assange Loses Appeal: British High Court Accepts U.S. Request to Extradite Him for Trial
Press freedom groups have warned Assange's prosecution is a grave threat. The Biden DOJ ignored them, and today won a major victory toward permanently silencing the pioneering transparency activist.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/julian-assange-loses-appeal-british
Glenn Greenwald (10 December 2021)
In a London courtroom on Friday morning, Julian Assange suffered a devastating blow to his quest for freedom. A two-judge appellate panel of the United Kingdom's High Court ruled that the U.S.'s request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial on espionage charges is legally valid.
As a result, that extradition request will now be sent to British Home Secretary Prita Patel, who technically must approve all extradition requests but, given the U.K. Government's long-time subservience to the U.S. security state, is all but certain to rubber-stamp it. Assange's representatives, including his fiancee Stella Morris, have vowed to appeal the ruling, but today's victory for the U.S. means that Assange's freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances.
In endorsing the U.S. extradition request, the High Court overturned a lower court's ruling from January which had concluded that the conditions of U.S. prison — particularly for those accused of national security crimes — are so harsh and oppressive that there is a high likelihood that Assange would commit suicide. In January's ruling, Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected all of Assange's arguments that the U.S. was seeking to punish him not for crimes but for political offenses. But in rejecting the extradition request, she cited the numerous attestations from Assange's doctors that his physical and mental health had deteriorated greatly after seven years of confinement in the small Ecuadorian Embassy where he had obtained asylum, followed by his indefinite incarceration in the U.K.
In response to that January victory for Assange, the Biden DOJ appealed the ruling and convinced Judge Baraitser to deny Assange bail and ordered him imprisoned pending appeal. The U.S. then offered multiple assurances that Assange would be treated "humanely" in U.S. prison once he was extradited and convicted. They guaranteed that he would not be held in the most repressive "supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado — whose conditions are so repressive that it has been condemned and declared illegal by numerous human rights groups around the world — nor, vowed U.S. prosecutors, would he be subjected to the most extreme regimen of restrictions and isolation called Special Administrative Measures ("SAMs”) unless subsequent behavior by Assange justified it. American prosecutors also agreed that they would consent to any request from Assange that, once convicted, he could serve his prison term in his home country of Australia rather than the U.S. Those guarantees, ruled the High Court this morning, rendered the U.S. extradition request legal under British law.
What makes the High Court's faith in these guarantees from the U.S. Government particularly striking is that it comes less than two months after Yahoo News reported that the CIA and other U.S. security state agencies hate Assange so much that they plotted to kidnap or even assassinate him during the time he had asylum protection from Ecuador. Despite all that, Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced today that “the court is satisfied that these assurances” will serve to protect Assange's physical and mental health.
The effective detention by the U.S. and British governments of Assange is just months shy of a full decade. Ecuador granted Assange asylum in August 2012 on the ground that his human rights were imperiled by U.S. attempts to imprison him for his journalism. For the next seven years, Assange remained in that embassy — which is really a tiny apartment in central London — with no outdoor space other than a tiny balcony, which he typically feared using due to the possibility of assassination. Ecuador withdrew its asylum in 2019 after its sovereignty-protective president Rafael Correa was succeeded in office by the meek and submissive Lenin Moreno. Trump officials led by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Richard Grenell persuaded and coerced the new Ecuadorian president to withdraw Assange's asylum protection, clearing the way for London police to enter the building and arrest him on April 11, 2019. Ever since, Assange has been imprisoned in the high-security Belmarsh prison, described in the BBC in 2004 as “Britain's Guantanamo Bay.” He has thus spent close to seven years inside the embassy and two years and eight months inside Belmarsh: just five months shy of a decade with no freedom.
The British government justified Assange's 2019 arrest by pointing to pending charges of “bail-jumping": meaning that he sought and obtained legal asylum from Ecuador in 2012 rather than attend a scheduled hearing in a British court over whether he should be extradited to Sweden to be questioned about claims of sexual assault made by two Swedish women. Swedish prosecutors closed that investigation in 2017, citing the time that had elapsed. But once he was arrested, Assange was sentenced by a British judge on the bail-jumping charges to 50 weeks in prison, close to the maximum punishment allowed by law (one year). With the Swedish case closed, Assange was set to finally be free after he served that 50-week jail term.
Knowing Assange's release was finally imminent, the U.S. Government quickly acted to ensure he remained in prison indefinitely. In May 2019, it unveiled an 18-count felony indictment against him for espionage charges, based on the role he played in WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables, which revealed multiple war crimes by the U.S. and U.K. as well as rampant corruption by numerous U.S. allies throughout the world. Even though major newspapers around the world published the same documents in partnership with WikiLeaks — including The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais and others — the DOJ claimed that Assange went further than those newspapers by encouraging WikiLeaks’ source, Chelsea Manning, to obtain more documents and by trying to help her evade detection: something all journalists have not only the right but the duty to their sources to do.
Because the acts of Assange that serve as the basis of the U.S. indictment are acts in which investigative journalists routinely engage with their sources, press freedom and civil liberties groups throughout the West vehemently condemned the Assange indictment as one of the gravest threats to press freedoms in years. In February, following Assange's victory in court, “a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop efforts to extradite” Assange, as The New York Times put it.
That coalition — which includes the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Committee to Protect Journalists — warned that the Biden DOJ's ongoing attempt to extradite and prosecute Assange is “a grave threat to press freedom,” adding that “much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.” Kenneth Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times that “most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day.” Shortly after the indictment was issued, I explained in a Washington Post op-ed why the theory on which the indictment was based “would make journalism a felony” (and indeed, just eight months after I wrote that op-ed warning of the dangers to all journalists, the Brazilian government copied the U.S. indictment of Assange and the theories it embraced in its unsuccessful effort to prosecute me for the reporting I did that exposed corruption by senior Brazilian security officials and prosecutors). “Brazil’s Attack on Greenwald Mirrors the US case against Assange,” was the headline used by the Columbia Journalism Review to condemn the charges against me as a blatant retaliatory act against my reporting.
But the Biden administration — led by officials who, during the Trump years, flamboyantly trumpeted the vital importance of press freedoms — ignored those pleas from this coalition of groups and instead aggressively pressed ahead with the prosecution of Assange. The Obama DOJ had spent years trying to concoct charges against Assange using a Grand Jury investigation, but ultimately concluded back in 2013 that prosecuting him would pose too great a threat to press freedom. But the Biden administration appears to have no such qualms, and The New York Times made clear exactly why they are so eager to see Assange in prison:
In other words, the Biden administration is eager to see Assange punished and silenced for life not out of any national security concerns but instead due to a thirst for vengeance over the role he played in publishing documents during the 2016 election that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Those documents published by WikiLeaks revealed widespread corruption at the DNC, specifically revealing how they cheated in order to help Clinton stave off a surprisingly robust primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). WikiLeaks’ reporting led to the resignation of the top five DNC officials, including its then-Chair, Rep. Debbie Wassserman Schultz (D-FL). Democratic luminaries such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Al Gore's 2000 campaign chair Donna Brazile both said, in the wake of WikiLeak's reporting, that the DNC cheated to help Clinton.
Press freedom groups expressed indignation this morning over the U.K.'s ruling approving Assange's extradition. Rebecca Vincent, Director of International Campaigns and UK Bureau Director for the international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, said: “This is an utterly shameful development that has alarming implications not only for Assange’s mental health, but also for journalism and press freedom around the world.” The organizational statement issued this morning from Reporters Without Borders went further:
The Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose Board I sit) issued a statement this morning which described the ruling as “an alarming setback for press freedom in the United States and around the world.” The group's Executive Director, Trevor Timm, said that “these proceedings, and today's ruling, are a black mark on the history of press freedom,” adding: "That United States prosecutors continued to push for this outcome is a betrayal of the journalistic principles the Biden administration has taken credit for celebrating.”
It is difficult at this point to avoid the conclusion that Julian Assange is not only imprisoned for the crime of journalism which exposed serious crimes and lies by the west's most powerful security state agencies, but he is also a classic political prisoner. When the Obama DOJ was first pursuing the possibility of prosecution, media outlets and liberal advocacy groups were vocal in their opposition. One thing and only one thing has changed since then: in the interim, Assange published documents that were incriminating of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and Democrats, as part of their long list of villains who they blamed for Clinton's defeat (essentially everyone in the world except Clinton and the Democratic Party itself), viewed WikiLeaks' reporting as a major factor in Trump's victory.
That is why they and their liberal allies in corporate media harbor so much bloodlust to see Assange imprisoned. Julian Assange is a pioneer of modern journalism, a visionary who was the first to see that a major vulnerability of corrupt power centers in the digital age was mass data leaks that could expose their misconduct. Based on that prescient recognition, he created a technological and journalistic system to enable noble sources to safely blow the whistle on corrupt institutions by protecting their anonymity: a system now copied and implemented by major news organizations around the world.
Assange, over the last fifteen years, has broken more major stories and done more consequential journalism than all the corporate journalists who hate him combined. He is not being imprisoned despite his pioneering journalism and dissent from the hegemony of the U.S. security state. He is imprisoned precisely because of that. The accumulated hostility toward Assange from employees of media corporations who hate him due to professional jealousy and the belief that he undermined the Democratic Party, and from the U.S. security state apparatus which hates him for exposing its crimes and refusing to bow to its dictates, has created a climate where the Biden administration and their British servants feel perfectly comfortable imprisoning arguably the most consequential journalist of his generation even as they continue to lecture the rest of the world about the importance of press freedoms and democratic values.
No matter the outcome of further proceedings in this case, today's ruling means that the U.S. has succeeded in ensuring that Assange remains imprisoned, hidden and silenced into the foreseeable future. If they have not yet permanently broken him, they are undoubtedly close to doing so. His own physicians and family members have warned of this repeatedly. Citizens of the U.S. and subjects of the British Crown are inculcated from birth to believe that we are blessed to live under a benevolent and freedom-protecting government, and that tyranny only resides in enemy states. Today's judicial approval by the U.K. High Court of the U.S.'s attack on core press freedom demonstrates yet again the fundamental lie at the heart of this mythology.
Correction, Dec. 10, 8:52 a.m. ET: This article was edited to reflect that Assange's sentence for bail-jumping was fifty weeks in prison, not fifty months as originally indicated.
https://rumble.com/vqjzc0-uk-court-approves-bidens-extradition-request-for-assange.html
Julian Assange Loses Appeal: British High Court Accepts U.S. Request to Extradite Him for Trial
Press freedom groups have warned Assange's prosecution is a grave threat. The Biden DOJ ignored them, and today won a major victory toward permanently silencing the pioneering transparency activist.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/julian-assange-loses-appeal-british
Glenn Greenwald (10 December 2021)
In a London courtroom on Friday morning, Julian Assange suffered a devastating blow to his quest for freedom. A two-judge appellate panel of the United Kingdom's High Court ruled that the U.S.'s request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial on espionage charges is legally valid.
As a result, that extradition request will now be sent to British Home Secretary Prita Patel, who technically must approve all extradition requests but, given the U.K. Government's long-time subservience to the U.S. security state, is all but certain to rubber-stamp it. Assange's representatives, including his fiancee Stella Morris, have vowed to appeal the ruling, but today's victory for the U.S. means that Assange's freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances.
In endorsing the U.S. extradition request, the High Court overturned a lower court's ruling from January which had concluded that the conditions of U.S. prison — particularly for those accused of national security crimes — are so harsh and oppressive that there is a high likelihood that Assange would commit suicide. In January's ruling, Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected all of Assange's arguments that the U.S. was seeking to punish him not for crimes but for political offenses. But in rejecting the extradition request, she cited the numerous attestations from Assange's doctors that his physical and mental health had deteriorated greatly after seven years of confinement in the small Ecuadorian Embassy where he had obtained asylum, followed by his indefinite incarceration in the U.K.
In response to that January victory for Assange, the Biden DOJ appealed the ruling and convinced Judge Baraitser to deny Assange bail and ordered him imprisoned pending appeal. The U.S. then offered multiple assurances that Assange would be treated "humanely" in U.S. prison once he was extradited and convicted. They guaranteed that he would not be held in the most repressive "supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado — whose conditions are so repressive that it has been condemned and declared illegal by numerous human rights groups around the world — nor, vowed U.S. prosecutors, would he be subjected to the most extreme regimen of restrictions and isolation called Special Administrative Measures ("SAMs”) unless subsequent behavior by Assange justified it. American prosecutors also agreed that they would consent to any request from Assange that, once convicted, he could serve his prison term in his home country of Australia rather than the U.S. Those guarantees, ruled the High Court this morning, rendered the U.S. extradition request legal under British law.
What makes the High Court's faith in these guarantees from the U.S. Government particularly striking is that it comes less than two months after Yahoo News reported that the CIA and other U.S. security state agencies hate Assange so much that they plotted to kidnap or even assassinate him during the time he had asylum protection from Ecuador. Despite all that, Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced today that “the court is satisfied that these assurances” will serve to protect Assange's physical and mental health.
The effective detention by the U.S. and British governments of Assange is just months shy of a full decade. Ecuador granted Assange asylum in August 2012 on the ground that his human rights were imperiled by U.S. attempts to imprison him for his journalism. For the next seven years, Assange remained in that embassy — which is really a tiny apartment in central London — with no outdoor space other than a tiny balcony, which he typically feared using due to the possibility of assassination. Ecuador withdrew its asylum in 2019 after its sovereignty-protective president Rafael Correa was succeeded in office by the meek and submissive Lenin Moreno. Trump officials led by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Richard Grenell persuaded and coerced the new Ecuadorian president to withdraw Assange's asylum protection, clearing the way for London police to enter the building and arrest him on April 11, 2019. Ever since, Assange has been imprisoned in the high-security Belmarsh prison, described in the BBC in 2004 as “Britain's Guantanamo Bay.” He has thus spent close to seven years inside the embassy and two years and eight months inside Belmarsh: just five months shy of a decade with no freedom.
The British government justified Assange's 2019 arrest by pointing to pending charges of “bail-jumping": meaning that he sought and obtained legal asylum from Ecuador in 2012 rather than attend a scheduled hearing in a British court over whether he should be extradited to Sweden to be questioned about claims of sexual assault made by two Swedish women. Swedish prosecutors closed that investigation in 2017, citing the time that had elapsed. But once he was arrested, Assange was sentenced by a British judge on the bail-jumping charges to 50 weeks in prison, close to the maximum punishment allowed by law (one year). With the Swedish case closed, Assange was set to finally be free after he served that 50-week jail term.
Knowing Assange's release was finally imminent, the U.S. Government quickly acted to ensure he remained in prison indefinitely. In May 2019, it unveiled an 18-count felony indictment against him for espionage charges, based on the role he played in WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables, which revealed multiple war crimes by the U.S. and U.K. as well as rampant corruption by numerous U.S. allies throughout the world. Even though major newspapers around the world published the same documents in partnership with WikiLeaks — including The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais and others — the DOJ claimed that Assange went further than those newspapers by encouraging WikiLeaks’ source, Chelsea Manning, to obtain more documents and by trying to help her evade detection: something all journalists have not only the right but the duty to their sources to do.
Because the acts of Assange that serve as the basis of the U.S. indictment are acts in which investigative journalists routinely engage with their sources, press freedom and civil liberties groups throughout the West vehemently condemned the Assange indictment as one of the gravest threats to press freedoms in years. In February, following Assange's victory in court, “a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop efforts to extradite” Assange, as The New York Times put it.
That coalition — which includes the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Committee to Protect Journalists — warned that the Biden DOJ's ongoing attempt to extradite and prosecute Assange is “a grave threat to press freedom,” adding that “much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.” Kenneth Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times that “most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day.” Shortly after the indictment was issued, I explained in a Washington Post op-ed why the theory on which the indictment was based “would make journalism a felony” (and indeed, just eight months after I wrote that op-ed warning of the dangers to all journalists, the Brazilian government copied the U.S. indictment of Assange and the theories it embraced in its unsuccessful effort to prosecute me for the reporting I did that exposed corruption by senior Brazilian security officials and prosecutors). “Brazil’s Attack on Greenwald Mirrors the US case against Assange,” was the headline used by the Columbia Journalism Review to condemn the charges against me as a blatant retaliatory act against my reporting.
But the Biden administration — led by officials who, during the Trump years, flamboyantly trumpeted the vital importance of press freedoms — ignored those pleas from this coalition of groups and instead aggressively pressed ahead with the prosecution of Assange. The Obama DOJ had spent years trying to concoct charges against Assange using a Grand Jury investigation, but ultimately concluded back in 2013 that prosecuting him would pose too great a threat to press freedom. But the Biden administration appears to have no such qualms, and The New York Times made clear exactly why they are so eager to see Assange in prison:
Democrats like the new Biden team are no fan of Mr. Assange, whose publication in 2016 of Democratic emails stolen by Russia aided Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory over Hillary Clinton.
In other words, the Biden administration is eager to see Assange punished and silenced for life not out of any national security concerns but instead due to a thirst for vengeance over the role he played in publishing documents during the 2016 election that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Those documents published by WikiLeaks revealed widespread corruption at the DNC, specifically revealing how they cheated in order to help Clinton stave off a surprisingly robust primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). WikiLeaks’ reporting led to the resignation of the top five DNC officials, including its then-Chair, Rep. Debbie Wassserman Schultz (D-FL). Democratic luminaries such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Al Gore's 2000 campaign chair Donna Brazile both said, in the wake of WikiLeak's reporting, that the DNC cheated to help Clinton.
Press freedom groups expressed indignation this morning over the U.K.'s ruling approving Assange's extradition. Rebecca Vincent, Director of International Campaigns and UK Bureau Director for the international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, said: “This is an utterly shameful development that has alarming implications not only for Assange’s mental health, but also for journalism and press freedom around the world.” The organizational statement issued this morning from Reporters Without Borders went further:
We condemn today’s decision, which will prove historic for all the wrong reasons. We fully believe that Julian Assange has been targeted for his contributions to journalism, and we defend this case because of its dangerous implications for the future of journalism and press freedom around the world. It is time to put a stop to this more than decade-long persecution once and for all. It is time to free Assange.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose Board I sit) issued a statement this morning which described the ruling as “an alarming setback for press freedom in the United States and around the world.” The group's Executive Director, Trevor Timm, said that “these proceedings, and today's ruling, are a black mark on the history of press freedom,” adding: "That United States prosecutors continued to push for this outcome is a betrayal of the journalistic principles the Biden administration has taken credit for celebrating.”
It is difficult at this point to avoid the conclusion that Julian Assange is not only imprisoned for the crime of journalism which exposed serious crimes and lies by the west's most powerful security state agencies, but he is also a classic political prisoner. When the Obama DOJ was first pursuing the possibility of prosecution, media outlets and liberal advocacy groups were vocal in their opposition. One thing and only one thing has changed since then: in the interim, Assange published documents that were incriminating of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and Democrats, as part of their long list of villains who they blamed for Clinton's defeat (essentially everyone in the world except Clinton and the Democratic Party itself), viewed WikiLeaks' reporting as a major factor in Trump's victory.
That is why they and their liberal allies in corporate media harbor so much bloodlust to see Assange imprisoned. Julian Assange is a pioneer of modern journalism, a visionary who was the first to see that a major vulnerability of corrupt power centers in the digital age was mass data leaks that could expose their misconduct. Based on that prescient recognition, he created a technological and journalistic system to enable noble sources to safely blow the whistle on corrupt institutions by protecting their anonymity: a system now copied and implemented by major news organizations around the world.
Assange, over the last fifteen years, has broken more major stories and done more consequential journalism than all the corporate journalists who hate him combined. He is not being imprisoned despite his pioneering journalism and dissent from the hegemony of the U.S. security state. He is imprisoned precisely because of that. The accumulated hostility toward Assange from employees of media corporations who hate him due to professional jealousy and the belief that he undermined the Democratic Party, and from the U.S. security state apparatus which hates him for exposing its crimes and refusing to bow to its dictates, has created a climate where the Biden administration and their British servants feel perfectly comfortable imprisoning arguably the most consequential journalist of his generation even as they continue to lecture the rest of the world about the importance of press freedoms and democratic values.
No matter the outcome of further proceedings in this case, today's ruling means that the U.S. has succeeded in ensuring that Assange remains imprisoned, hidden and silenced into the foreseeable future. If they have not yet permanently broken him, they are undoubtedly close to doing so. His own physicians and family members have warned of this repeatedly. Citizens of the U.S. and subjects of the British Crown are inculcated from birth to believe that we are blessed to live under a benevolent and freedom-protecting government, and that tyranny only resides in enemy states. Today's judicial approval by the U.K. High Court of the U.S.'s attack on core press freedom demonstrates yet again the fundamental lie at the heart of this mythology.
Correction, Dec. 10, 8:52 a.m. ET: This article was edited to reflect that Assange's sentence for bail-jumping was fifty weeks in prison, not fifty months as originally indicated.
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Democrats Want Julian Assange Imprisoned For One Reason: His 2016 Reporting on Hillary/DNC
A clip from the one-hour live report I did last night on Rumble regarding the Assange case: https://rumble.com/vqjzc0-uk-court-approves-bidens-extradition-request-for-assange.html [see post #32 - OB]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS2a_XUikLU
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Well, there is an additional reason the Democrat-deep state is going to punish Assange. It is the fact that all pretenses of equal justice and following the Constitution have been abandoned. They are more than willing to pick and choose which “press” will have “freedom”. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal.
Welcome to to Marxist totalitarian Amerika.
kahless
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Julian Assange Suffers Stroke In Jail, Fiancée Says 'never-ending Court Cases Stressful'
https://www.republicworld.com/world...-says-never-ending-court-cases-stressful.html
WikiLeaks founder Assange suffered 'mini-stroke' in prison: Fiancee
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/wor...e-suffered-mini-stroke-prison-fiancee-2374731
https://www.republicworld.com/world...-says-never-ending-court-cases-stressful.html
WikiLeaks founder Assange suffered 'mini-stroke' in prison: Fiancee
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/wor...e-suffered-mini-stroke-prison-fiancee-2374731
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"The corporate press is the enemy of the people." -- Michael Malice
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1470062341681254401
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1470062341681254401
Anti-Neocon
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How not surprising at all. The one thing all the kleptocrats in power can agree with is that they don't want any checks on their power.
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enhanced_deficit
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Turns out Deep State is not as woke as some had claimed recently.. at least not on all issues.
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