The Julian Assange Extradition

[Brian4Liberty]

Julian Assange LIVE Hearing Reaction! Free Speech vs The Deep State #freeassange - Stay Free #308

Today, we are live from London, covering the Julian Assange trial outside the Royal Court of Justice. Join us for guest appearances, an in-depth analysis of Assange’s case, and much more.

To find and support Assange please visit freeassange.org

 

[Brian4Liberty]

...

Last Chance For Assange?

As Wikileaks founder and publisher Julian Assange makes one final appeal before UK judges to avoid being extradited to the US to face 175 years in prison, press freedom advocates worldwide call on the governments of the US and UK to cease the years-long persecution. Journalism itself is on trial. What to expect? Also today: Trump 2.0 a "Christian nationalist" Administration? Also - Is it really "white supremacism" to like reading?

 

[Brian4Liberty]

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1759891231847391688

#FreeAssange

Dear President Biden,

As Members of Congress deeply committed to the principles of free speech and freedom of the press, we write to strongly encourage your Administration to withdraw the U.S. extradition request currently pending against Australian publisher Julian Assange and halt all prosecutorial proceedings against him as soon as possible.

Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, faces multiple charges under the Espionage Act due to his role in publishing classified documents about the U.S. State Department, Guantanamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has been detained on remand in London since 2019 and is pending extradition to the U.S., having lost his appeal of the extradition order in the courts of the United Kingdom.

Deep concerns about this case have been repeatedly expressed by international media outlets, human rights and press freedom advocates, and Members of Congress, among others. To cite only a few of the commentaries, in November 2022, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, DER SPEIGEL and El Pais came together to express their grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials, arguing that "publishing is not a crime." In December 2022, a coalition of press freedom, civil liberties, and international human rights organizations wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging him to correct course and abandon the relentless pursuit of Mr. Assange in order to protect the ability of journalists to report freely on the United States without fear of retribution. U.S. elected officials have previously called on the Administration to drop the charges against Mr. Assange, including in April of this year when Members of the House argued that “[e]very day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home."

We believe the Department of Justice acted correctly in 2013, during your vice-presidency, when it declined to pursue charges against Mr. Assange for publishing the classified documents because it recognized that the prosecution would set a dangerous precedent. We note that the 1917 Espionage Act was ostensibly intended to punish and imprison government employees and contractors for providing or selling state secrets to enemy governments, not to punish journalists and whistleblowers for attempting to inform the public about serious issues that some U.S. government officials might prefer to keep secret. We are aware that the Assange case has been cited by officials of the People's Republic of China to claim that the U.S. is "hypocritical" when it comes to its purported support for media freedom. We are also well aware that should the U.S. extradition and prosecution go forward, there is a significant risk that our bilateral relationship with Australia will be badly damaged.

It is the duty of journalists to seek out sources, including documentary evidence, in order to report to the public on the activities of government. The United States must not pursue an unnecessary prosecution that risks criminalizing common journalistic practices and thus chilling the work of the free press. We urge you to ensure that this case be brought to a close in as timely a manner as possible.

Sincerely,

James P. McGovern

Thomas Massie

Rashida Tlaib

Eric Burlison

Ilhan Omar

Paul A. Gosar

Ayanna Pressley

Marjorie Tayler Greene

Pramila Jayapal

Matthew Rosendale

Greg Casar

Cori Bush

Jamaal Bowman

Jesús G. "Chuy" Garcia

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Rand Paul

 

[Brian4Liberty]

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1759939789615136920

 

[Brian4Liberty]

VivekGRamaswamy:

Every American who has rightly denounced Navalny’s death should also speak out about an injustice we still have an opportunity to correct: pardon Julian Assange. He now sits in a foreign prison for doing what the DC press corps does every day. Yet Chelsea Manning, the government officer who actually *leaked* the information to Assange, had “her” sentence commuted by Obama for obvious reasons: she’s trans (or is smart enough to pretend to be). This is wrong & the two-tiered justice system needs to end.

https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1759990441951273159

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Enough is enough—it’s time to set Julian Assange free
The Wikileaks founder’s last-ditch attempt to fight extradition to America confronts us with fundamental questions about press freedom and the power of the state
By Alan Rusbridger

You may well have forgotten about Julian Assange. It’s been 11 years since he disappeared from public view—first into the claustrophobic seclusion of the Ecuadorian embassy and then, nearly five years later, to the maximum security Belmarsh prison. Out of sight, out of mind.

All that is about to change as he fights a last-ditch attempt in London’s High Court to prevent being extradited to America—and the strong likelihood of once more vanishing, this time into a state penitentiary for a very long time.

Why should we care?

There is no shortage of people who don’t, much. They may dislike Assange—and it has to be conceded that he has a unique ability to lose friends and alienate people. Many in the media don’t believe he’s a “proper” journalist, and therefore won’t lift a finger to defend him. Some will never forgive him for his role in leaking information about the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and accuse him of being Putin’s patsy.

And then there are people who have a touching faith in the secret corners of our state, and deplore anyone who lifts the lid. James Bond is a world-beating brand, even if the counter-narrative is sometimes more George Smiley or Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses. I will never forget a distinguished editor, at the height of the Edward Snowden revelations, writing: “If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest… who am I to disbelieve them?”

In other words, trust the state. If they say “jump”, your role is to ask “how high?”

But why would you? “The state”—don’t we know it?—routinely gets all kinds of things wrong. The same is, inevitably, true of the secret state, the security state, the deep state—whatever you want to call it.

Would you trust the police or security services to monitor all your communications and movements? Not if you’ve read any Orwell. Did you not notice the intelligence failures/embellishments that helped shape US and UK policy before the disastrous attack on Iraq in 2003? Really?

Were you blind to the proven allegations of torture and rendition during and after 9/11? Did you miss the findings of illegal surveillance in the wake of the Snowden revelations? Do you shrug when you read about the police or intelligence agencies penetrating protest groups, behaving in ways that form the subject of the UK’s ongoing undercover policing inquiry?

In other words, the security state—for all that it does good and necessary work—needs to be monitored and held to account. Especially as it has immense powers over the lives of individuals, including questions of life and death.

But any attempt at scrutiny, given that the shadowier parts of the state are bolstered by an increasingly prohibitive protective shield of law and punishment, is not easy.
...
More: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...-is-enoughits-time-to-set-julian-assange-free

 

[Brian4Liberty]

https://twitter.com/EndTribalism/status/1759594819423199341

 

[Brian4Liberty]

https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_/status/1759978450452959659

 

[WarriorLiberty]

https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_/status/1759978450452959659

The US Govt would rather spend crying over Alexei navalny than journalists.

 

[Matt Collins]

https://youtu.be/zec2E6t_vEE

 

[susano]

Wonder where those Swedish bitches who first leveled false charges against Assange are now.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Wonder where those Swedish bitches who first leveled false charges against Assange are now.

Recently, a low info leftist told me that Assange belonged in jail because he raped women. He was a very bad man.

 

[osan]

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1759939789615136920

Since when do Theye pay the least attention to their own laws when to do so proves inconvenient?

I didn't follow the details of the whole wikileaks thing, but I seem to recall that Assange was given those documents. That is, he didn't do the stealing. Assuming this, how could his actions have been espionage?

He pissed in Their cornflakes and now they want his head.

 

[osan]

Recently, a low info leftist told me that Assange belonged in jail because he raped women. He was a very bad man.

"Low info leftist"

Department of Redundancy Department.

 

[osan]

Wonder where those Swedish bitches who first leveled false charges against Assange are now.

Murdered by muslim immigrants?

Sweden is a ripe shit hole. Then again, so it most of the rest of the world.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Why Is Alexei Navalny's Death Being Depicted as So Vital for Americans—As Assange Faces Final “Life or Death” Extradition Appeal? | SYSTEM UPDATE #230
https://rumble.com/v4eecn0-system-update-230.html
{Glenn Greenwald | 19 February 2024}

CLIP:

Media Apathetic as Assange Faces “Life or Death” Extradition Appeal
https://rumble.com/v4enjhf-media-apathetic-as-assange-faces-life-or-death-extradition-appeal.html
{Glenn Greenwald | 20 February 2024}

​

 

[osan]

Humans are hypocritical assholes and have been forever. Anyone believing there is real freedom of the press is either low on IQ power, morally compromised, painfully naive, or some combination of these. Let us consider a quick example from an era past, when "freedom" was so patrioticallt waved like a flag by most Americans in the purported land of the free.

Back in my days at military school we had a staff member, commander Duncan, who'd fought in the Pacific. He was retired navy when I knew him and always struck me as a solidly good and admirable man. I've known many veterans of that war - well enough to know that they tended to talk very little of their experiences of those days - so when one would open up about something, we tended to listen with great care.

So one day several of us were hanging about by the little gymnasium where we would form up for muster during inclement weather. But this was a fine day and commander Duncan was there and we all got to talking. Viet Nam was still swinging and we were asking about going to war and what was it like, and all that sort of thing. Out of nowhere, the commander broke into a short story about a thing that happened one day late in the war. I don't recall the battle, but I think it may have been Iwo Jima. Duncan was 19 and piloting a landing craft. At some point, his boat was filled with Japanese POWs and his CO then had him raise the ramp, at which time he was ordered to stand to attention, face aft, and that whatever he heard he was not to turn around. He turned after which he told us there was a great fusillade of small arms fire. He was then ordered at ease and turned to see his boat was then filled with dead Japanese soldiers.

That was an act of murder in gross violation of the Geneva Conventions; the sorts of act for which we Americans hung several hundreds of German officers with all manner of self-righteousness being waved about as if we were saintly people dispatching evil pursuant to Divine command. And yet, had a journalist been privy to that act, perhaps in possession even of photographic evidence to the fact of it and had his press published the fact, what does anyone here think would have happened? He'd have been lucky to escape being killed no only by "government", but by about ten million Americans... you know, the lovers of all that is right and decent... all the time.

But more likely he would have been taken up on some sort of charges such as aiding and abetting... anything to keep him bottled up at least until the war was over, after which perhaps he would have been quietly released with the unequivocal warning that his life, much less his freedoms, now hung by a very thin thread.

If the press is truly free, then they must be free at all times, with all secrets revealed, come what may. This is the bitch-side of freedom, and she really can be quite the bitch.

We talk a big lip of freedom, but the fact is that most Americans hate it. What they love is pretty slavery. They love it because they are corrupt and rotten in their souls, their nice demeanors and smiles failing to belie this truth to any man with eyes to see and an inclination to do so.

The truly sad irony in all this is that the more we advance materially in terms of technology and wealth, the more rotten we seem to become with dissatisfaction, the will to turn our backs to all principle growing as the inconveniences it sets in the path of our desires becomes ever more an irritant to our avarice. We are nothing better than shitty, nasty little apes, once moral principle goes by the wayside.

So we can talk and rage and froth all we like. I think mean humanity is full of lies and falseness that chase our ever inflating and self-absorbed egos.

But what in hell do I know?

 

[Occam's Banana]

THREAD: Massie to host brother of Julian Assange at SOTU