InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to US?

Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Julian Assange and the Conservative Press

September 14, 2020 by IWB

Link: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/julian-assange-and-the-conservative-press/

by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

To be honest, I didn’t think it would ever happen, even though it’s been so obvious for so long. But all of a sudden, the conservative voices questioning the Russia collusion narrative and all the investigations that followed from it, are finally figuring out that those behind that narrative and all that resulted from it, are the same people who have been chasing down Julian Assange for many years.

And that to get to the bottom of the hunt for Trump by the DNC, Clinton campaign, US intelligence and last but not least the media in their pockets, the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN et al, they will have to take a much closer look at what happened to Assange. If they don’t they will never understand. How do we know it’s starting to dawn on them? Look at this illustration at the Last Refuge site yesterday. More on them later.

Note: the mostly left wing Assange supporters would do good to consider the same thing: they in turn must look into the RussiaRussia Trump collusion stories, much as they may not like the president. Because those stories are why Assange has been chased down like so much roadkill. And because the right win of America is their best chance at getting him pardoned/released. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, to put it bluntly. Sometimes you need blunt.

As I’ve pointed out countless times, the Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign -and presidency- may have come up glaringly empty, but the report they issued maintained that “13 Russians” and Julian Assange were responsible for hacking DNC emails. There is no proof of this, but since none of the “accused” can speak out, the report make the claim, and did.

Actually, a source connected to the “13 Russians” that was also named, the firm Concord Management, linked to Internet Research Agency, both owned by “Putin’s cook” Yevgeniy Prigozhin, one of the 13 Russians, did speak out and hired lawyers in the US. The case was quietly dropped when it became clear Mueller had nothing on them. The rest didn’t speak, and hired no defense, so that part of the report, nonsense as it may be, still stands.

Mueller et al could simply have met with Assange, he wasn’t going anywhere as they knew, but they didn’t, because A) the last thing they wanted was confirmation that “the Russians” did not provide any information to WikiLeaks, since that was what little was left of what the entire report was based on, and B) they wanted to make Assange look like an enemy of the US. Meeting with him would have blown both A) and B) out of the water, and he wouldn’t have been any use to them, or the DNC, or the FBI/CIA/DOJ. Assange was useful to them exactly because he could *not* speak.

The wake up call for the right must have been Tucker Carlson’s interview with Glenn Greenwald about Assange this week. Of which I said: “Bless Tucker Carlson for providing the platform. Bless Glenn Greenwald for his eloquent statement. Don’t miss this.” But still, as I also said: “Wonder why it took the right wing so long to wake up to how Julian Assange is linked to the whole machine. Did they really need Tucker Carlson for that?”

Greenwald said Trump could pardon Assange, and Snowden too, and there’s “widespread support across the political spectrum for doing both” (something I never heard anyone confirm, btw), and “the only people who would be angry would be Susan Rice, John Brennan, Jim Comey and James Clapper, because they’re the ones who both of them exposed”. Well, there’s your people. Those are the people who’ve been after both Trump and Assange since at least 2015.

Do both sides realize what they have in common now?

I don’t want to make this too long, and there’s more ground to cover. First, take a look at what Paul Craig Roberts had to say recently. He knows the territory. He worked extensively both as a journalist before that became a tainted term, and served under Ronald Reagan as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Like his views on economics or not, he knows a thing or two about DC. Here’s what he had to say 3 days ago, which ties right into the Assange/RussiaRussia/Mueller/CIA tall tale :

The United States & Its Constitution Have Two Months Left

To stop Kennedy they assassinated him. To stop Trump they concocted Russiagate, Impeachgate, and a variety of wild and unsubstantiated accusations. The presstitutes repeat the various accusations as if they are absolute proven truth. The presstitutes never investigated a single one of the false accusations. These efforts to remove Trump did not succeed. Having pulled off numerous color revolutions in which the US has overthrown foreign governments, the tactics are now being employed against Trump. The November presidential election will not be an election. It will be a color revolution.

[..] the CIA has controlled the prestige American media since 1950. The American media does not provide news. It provides the Deep State’s explanations of events. This ensures that real news does not interfere with the agenda. The German journalst, Udo Ulfkotte, wrote a book, Bought Journalism, in which he showed that the CIA also controls the European press. To be clear, there are two CIA organizations. One is an agency that monitors world events and endeavors to provide more or less accurate information to policymakers.

The other is a covert operations agency. This agency assassinates people, including an American president, and overthrows uncooperative governments. President Truman publicly stated after he was out of office that he made a serious mistake in permitting the covert operations branch of the CIA. He said that it was an unaccountable government in itself. President Eisenhower agreed and in his last address to the American people warned of the growing unaccountable power of the military/security complex. President Kennedy realized the threat and said he was going “to break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” but they killed him first.

It would be easy for the CIA to kill Trump, but the “lone assassin” has been used too many times to be believable. It is easier to overthrow Trump’s reelection with false accusations as the CIA controls the American and European media and has many Internet sites pretending to be dissident, a claim that fools insouciant Americans.

Indeed, it is the leftwing that the CIA owns. The rightwing goes along because they think it is patriotic to support the military/security complex. After the CIA overthrows Trump, they will use Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and their presstitutes to foment race war. Then the CIA will ride in on the Pale Horse, and the population will submit.

And yes, you are right, Julian Assange got in the way of that. Not because he hated Hillary Clinton, though he detested what she and Obama did to Libya, but because Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning provided him with material that bore witness to the crimes committed by the US intelligence “cabal”. In Snowden’s case, it was the NSA spying on -the- American people, in Manning’s it was war crimes executed overseas.

The way the “cabal” reacted to all that material -there was/is a lot- was to link Assange to a fictitious story about Russia meddling in US elections, a very convenient link because it tied into what they were already constructing to get rid of Trump.

Here is lawyer “sundance” at the Conservative Treehouse (aka The Last Refuge). The -recommended- article has a lot more info, not just on Assange, but also on the set-up of the “cabal”; he’s been digging for a long time. I know, it’s right wing media. But nobody else will cover this. And we want to get Assange released, don’t we?! So take a listen to how similar this is, written yesterday, to what I, and others, have been saying about the case for a long time.

Again, I have no idea why it took so long for people like “sundance” to catch up, but it’s people like him who may well be our best shot at keeping Assange alive. And people like Tucker, of course; you can bet Trump is watching him, and has seen the Greenwald interview by now.

What’s Behind The DOJ Aggression Toward Julian Assange

Nancy Pelosi previously labeled all Trump supporters as “enemies of the state.” Similarly we note the apparatus of the administrative state labels Julian Assange the same. There’s a good argument that the reason why Assange is considered such a threat to the U.S. is specifically because he could expose the lies of the administrative state.

As a consequence the U.S. intelligence apparatus has targeted the WikiLeaks founder and the Bill Barr DOJ is being extremely aggressive in their effort to get control of him. Tucker Carlson discussed this dynamic last night; albeit stopping short of the brutally honest part. To understand the risk Julian Assange represents to the administrative state, it is important to understand the extent of CIA, FBI and DOJ operations in 2016.

[..] On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the EDVA. From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018. On Tuesday April 15th more investigative material was released. Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, *December of 2017* This means FBI investigation prior to…. The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time.

The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019. Why the delay? What was the DOJ waiting for? Here’s where it gets interesting…. The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.” [..]

Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017. Within three months of the grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018.

The EDVA sat on the indictment while the Mueller probe was ongoing. As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London<, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed.

As a person who has researched this three year fiasco; including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17 intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16; and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17; this timing against Assange is just too coincidental. It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian Assange because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.

This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements.

The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor.

The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative. Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.

This Russian “hacking” claim is ultimately so important to the CIA, FBI, DOJ, ODNI and U.K intelligence apparatus…. Well, right there is the obvious motive to shut Assange down as soon intelligence officials knew the Mueller report was going to be public. Now, if we know this, and you know this; and everything is cited and factual… well, then certainly AG Bill Barr knows this.

That is a lot of information in one go, and not much of it is new, at least to me or to regular readers of the Automatic Earth. What is new is that the Conservative press are figuring out that if they want to defend Trump against the “cabal”, they need to look much more deeply into the role Julian Assange has played in the whole story, especially over the past few years.

And as I said above, it would be good if the “Free Assange” side would so something similar, reach out, because the Conservative press may well be the best ally there is for their cause. It’s not about how you feel about Trump, it’s about the “cabal” targeting Trump through Assange, and the other way around.

And in the end it’s real simple: Trump has the power to pardon Assange and set him free, him and Snowden. Would you rather *not* appeal to that power, and leave Julian to rot in Belmarsh and g-d knows where next, or do you think you now understand how the game has been played, and will be going forward? Your pick. But remember: it will take Trump overruling Bill Barr and the DOJ, and the right wing can’t do that alone.

One last thing, something I’ve also tried to explain umpteen times: Whenever you see someone claim that Assange plays to his personal political choices, or that he has something anything to do with the Kremlin, or that he lies about anything at all, please remember this: Julian Assange has always been acutely aware of the one weakness of WikiLeaks which is simultaneously its main strength:

That is, he cannot lie, he cannot align with a political side, he cannot align with any one country or ideology (I would almost write: ”he could not” instead of he cannot, but thank God Julian is alive, so I will not).

The reason for this is that people like Snowden and Manning and many others, who are in possession of highly sensitive evidence of government or intelligence malfeasance, must be sure the material will not be used for -party- political purposes, or to make a country look good, and first and foremost that it is not distorted or lied about in any way, shape or form.

Because if Julian Assange would ever do any such thing, the bond of trust would be broken, for every single potential future source and/or whistleblower, and for all time. He would never be able to repair that. It would be the end of WikiLeaks, right there. Julian would never have allowed that to happen to his brainchild; he would die first. And they all know it, the entire “cabal”; that’s why you read in the press what you do, that’s why the smear campaigns are there. None of which are even remotely true.

A last last thing: Julian Assange is so skilled at the digital side of things that no secret service in the entire world, no matter how many people they put on it, has ever come close to hacking or breaking into WikiLeaks. That should make us all feel safer, and that is why there are all these attempts to make us feel the opposite.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Court Docs: Trump Offered Assange Deal If He Revealed Source of DNC Hack

POTUS presented the Wikileaks founder with a ‘win-win situation’

Kelen McBreen | Infowars.com - September 18, 2020 49 Comments

Link: https://www.infowars.com/court-docs-trump-offered-assange-deal-if-he-revealed-source-of-dnc-hack/

President Trump offered Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a deal to avoid extradition and to “get on with his life” if he revealed the source of the 2016 DNC hack, according to Daily Mail.

During a hearing at London’s Old Bailey courthouse on Friday, Assange attorney Jennifer Robinson said Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Trump associate Charles Johnson pitched the idea in August of 2017.

The pair allegedly showed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Assange was staying at the time and told the whistleblower President Trump approved of the meeting.

“Congressman Rohrabacher explained he wanted to resolve the ongoing speculation about Russian involvement in the Democratic National Committee leaks to WikiLeaks, which were published by WikiLeaks and other media organisations in 2016,” Robinson told the court.

“He stated that he regarded the ongoing speculation as damaging to US-Russian relations, that it was reviving Cold War politics, and that it would be in the best interests of the US if the matter could be resolved. He and Mr Johnson also explained that any information from Mr Assange about the source of the DNC leaks would be of interest, value and assistance to Mr Trump.”

Rohrabacher and Johnson allegedly pitched Assange a “win-win situation” where he could leave the embassy and “get on with his life” with a promise not to be extradited to the US.

To solidify the deal, Assange would have to “identify the source for the 2016 election publications in return for some kind of pardon, assurance or agreement which would both benefit President Trump politically and prevent US indictment and extradition.”

The Trump messengers told Julian they’d report back to President Trump following the meeting.

Despite the gracious offer, Robinson maintains Assange did not reveal his source to Johnson and Rohrabacher.

Assange is currently being held at the British HM Prison Belmarsh after the Ecuadorian Embassy kicked him out for allegedly breaking the Bail Act.

This Julian Assange extradition hearing is ongoing.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Slavoj Zizek: The treatment of Assange is an assault on everyone’s personal freedoms

Slavoj Zizek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.

Link: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/501272-zizek-assange-treatment-assault-freedom/

21 Sep, 2020 12:06

Julian Assange has had his rights stripped away in a case that should alarm millions, but too few people care because his character has been assassinated. He might have to go to prison before he gets the support he deserves.

There is an old joke from the time of World War I about an exchange of telegrams between the German Army headquarters and the Austrian-Hungarian HQ. From Berlin to Vienna, the message is “The situation on our part of the front is serious, but not catastrophic,” and the reply from Vienna is: “With us, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.”

The reply from Vienna seems to offer a model for how we react to crises today, from the Covid-19 pandemic to forest fires on the west coast of the US (and elsewhere): ‘Yeah, we know a catastrophe is pending, media warn us all the time, but somehow we are not ready to take the situation seriously…’

There is a similar case that has been dragging on for years: the fate of Julian Assange. It’s a legal and moral catastrophe – just consider how he is being treated in prison, unable to see his children and their mother, unable to communicate regularly with his lawyers, a victim of psychological torture so that his survival itself is under threat. They are killing him softly, as the song goes.

Also on rt.com Bobby Sands died in jail 39 years ago. Julian Assange is his modern equivalent and will one day also be hailed as a martyr
But very few seem to take his situation seriously, with an awareness that our own fate is at stake in his case. The forces which violate his rights are the forces which prevent the effective battle against global warming and the pandemic. They are the forces that ensure the pandemic is making the rich even richer and hitting the poor hardest. They are the forces which ruthlessly exploit the pandemic to assert their control over our social and digital space, regulating and censoring it at our expense – the forces which protect us, but also deny us our own freedom.

Assange fought for the public transparency of the digital space, and there is a cruel irony in the fact that the pandemic is being used as a pretext to isolate him from his family and his defense. We are always ready to protest the limitation of basic human freedoms imposed on Hong Kong by China; should we not turn the gaze back on ourselves? Maybe we should remember Marx Horkheimer’s old saying from the late 1930s: “Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism?” Our version is: “Those who don’t want to talk about the injustice imposed on Assange should also keep silent about the violation of human rights in Hong Kong and Belarus.”

Slavoj Žižek: Elon Musk’s desire to control our minds is dehumanizing and not what is needed in a socially distanced world Slavoj Žižek: Elon Musk’s desire to control our minds is dehumanizing and not what is needed in a socially distanced world Assange’s well-planned and well-executed character assassination is one of the reasons why his defense has not grown into a wider movement, like Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion. Now that his very survival is at stake, only such a movement can – perhaps – save him.

Remember the lyrics (written by Joan Baez to Ennio Morricone’s music) of ‘Here’s To You,’ the title song of the movie ‘Sacco and Vanzetti’: “Here’s to you, Nicola and Bart / Rest forever here in our hearts / The last and final moment is yours / That agony is your triumph”?

There were mass gatherings all around the world in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti – and the same is needed now in defense of Assange, although in a different form.

If Assange were to die (or disappear in a US prison cell, like the living dead), that agony will be his triumph; he will die in order to live in all of us. This is the message we all must deliver to those who have held him: if you kill a man, you create a myth which will continue to mobilize thousands.

The message to us from those who are after Assange is clear: We can do what we want. But why does this only apply to them? What they are doing to Assange is radically changing the political weather, so perhaps we need new weathermen.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Fairbanks Testifies Trump Ordered Assange Arrest

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

Link: https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/...-publish-cables-but-says-it-had-widest-reach/

Fairbanks said she learned in October 2018 directly from Arthur Schwartz, a Trump backer and member of the president’s inner circle, that the U.S. would have Assange taken from the Ecuadorian embassy; that he would only be charged with the Chelsea Manning leaks and not for the Vault 7 CIA or DNC email releases; that the U.S. would again go after Manning to testify against Assange; that Richard Grenell, then U.S. ambassador to Germany and later director of national intelligence, had worked out a deal with Ecuador to hand Assange over, that the order to get Assange had come directly from Trump and that the U.S. would not seek the death penalty to make extradition possible.

All of these things came true, Fairbanks’ testified. Armed with this information she traveled to London from Washington and met with Assange at the embassy where she revealed these details to him.

Upon return she says she was contacted by Schwartz who was furious because he learned of her informing Assange, evidently through surveillance at the embassy. When she tweeted about this Grenell contacted her employer at The Gateway Pundit and tried to have her fired. A panicked Schwartz informed her that there was an investigation into who leaked this information to her. Fairbanks has posted the audio recording of Schwartz’s call in which he fears going to jail.

She testified that Schwartz said Assange and everyone else at WikiLeaks should get “lethal injections.”

Her testimony was read by defense lawyer Edward Fitzgerald after the government objected. But defense argued that hearsay rules do not apply to political testimony. Her testimony, especially of Trump’s role, bolstered the defense argument that Assange’s prosecution is political and therefore violates the U.S.-UK extradition treaty.

It was probably best for the prosecution to forgo cross examination, say nothing and just let Fairbanks’ testimony be read in court. She stated she was a WikiLeaks supporter so the prosecutor couldn’t go after her for hiding bias. It would have been difficult to pick apart her testimony, especially as she has recordings. And the prosecution would not have wanted to go near surveillance at the embassy nor that Trump ordered the arrest.

9:38 am EDT: Prosecution argued it only learned in the morning of the next scheduled defense witness, journalist Andy Worthington, and did not have sufficient to time to prepare cross examination. Extraordinary, as the prosecution has repeatedly been told by defense witnesses that they are being sent a bundle of prosecution documents sometimes only hours before they were to testify, giving them no time to prepare for cross examination.

It appears Worthington will not appear as a witness and that journalist Cassandra Fairbanks may be up next.

US Concedes WikiLeaks Was Not First
to Publish Unredacted Diplomatic Cables;
But Says it Had Widest Reach

8:24 am EDT: The prosecution Monday morning was trying to establish that even if WikiLeaks was not the first to publish the unredacted State Department cables containing informants’ names (even though only Julian Assange is the only one being prosecuted for it), it made WikiLeaks more liable than others who published first because WikiLeaks has a larger reach on the internet and included a search engine with the files, unlike those who published the cables before it.

It is a curious argument from the government in that until this point it tried to establish that WikiLeaks was first, or the only one, to publish. The indictment against Assange makes no mention of the chronology of publishing, which is crucial because as the defense is trying to establish, WikiLeaks would not have published the unredacted archive at all if others had not done so first. It could amount to selective prosecution.

The turn in prosecution argument is similar to it dropping its contention that Assange is not a journalist by making it clear that the U.S. is not precluded from charging a member of the media for disclosing national defense information.

Grothoff (YouTube)

7:20 am EDT: Defense witness Christian Grothoff, a professor of computer science at Bern University, Switzerland has laid out the chronology of the publication of the unredacted State Dept. cables that are at the heart of this case.

He traces it back to the publication of the password in the Feb. 2011 book by David Leigh and Luke Harding. Grothoff then explained that the German publication Freitag wrote on Aug. 25, 2011 about the password being available in the book, which led to the cables being published on Aug. 31 on a torrent site, followed by their publication by Cryptome.org on Sept. 1.

WikiLeaks then published it on Sept. 2. Grothoff testified that WikiLeaks was a “responsible publisher” that tried to protect the unredacted cables. Defense attorney Mark Summers on direct asked Grothoff if the files were still available on Cryptome.

Grothoff: “Yes I accessed them last week.”

Summers: “Was Cryptome ever prosecuted for this?”

Grothoff: “The defense never provided me with information, no.”

On cross examination, prosecutor Joel Smith attempted, as the prosecution has with virtually every defense witness, to undermine Grothoff’s impartiality.

Smith: “Can you think of anything that shows you are not impartial?”

Grothoff: “I don’t know what you are thinking about. Obviously we know that Mr, Assange did publish information about war crimes by governments, which makes him a sympathetic character. But that does not make me partial.”

Smith then said that Grothoff had signed an open letter to President Donald Trump in 2017 asking that he end the grand jury and drop all charges against Assange because of the threat to press freedom it represented. Grothoff said he didn’t remember signing the letter.

Grothoff: “I have a view that this prosecution is unfair but I only tried to look if there was a case for the prosecution and I did not find it.”

Smith: “You are biased, you are partial.”

Grothoff: “No you are confusing actions WikiLeaks took to hide these cables. So when you say WikiLeaks published these cable first, you are wrong and did not do your homework. It is unfair to accuse Mr. Assange of publishing those cables.”

Smith: “When you first signed that letter did you have knowledge of the release of the unredacted cables?”

Grothoff: “Yes. Even at that time it seemed clear to me the primary publisher was not WikiLeaks because they were known for being responsible. So I had knowledge it lost control of the cables.” On cross examination, Mark Summers for the defense, said that among other signers of the letter to Trump were former U.S. military and intelligence figures, judges and members of the German Bundestag.

The prosecution brought up an open vote that WikiLeaks conducted on Twitter and Facebook on Sept. 1, 2011, after the files had been published on Kryptome. The vote was on whether or not WikiLeaks should also now release the cables. Smith told the court that the “global vote” was 100 to 1 to publish.

What was not raised by the defense on re-direct examination is that the main reason given during the debate before the vote was that governments would be most likely to find the files on Cryptome, or decrypt the files themselves from the password that Leigh had made available, and that WikiLeaks wanted to use its wider reach to alert informants whose names had been revealed to seek safety.

Grothoff had testified on direct examination that Assange had been extremely reluctant to give Leigh the pass code to the entire unredacted archives, but eventually gave in. On redirect, Summers read a passage from Leigh’s book in which The Guardian journalist pressured Assange to give him the entire cache. Assange had offered to give Leigh 50 percent of the archive. Leigh and Harding wrote:

“Leigh refused. All or nothing, he said. ‘What happens if you end up in an orange jump-suit en route to Guantánamo before you can release the full files?’ In return he would give Assange a promise to keep the cables secure, and not to publish them until the time came.”

Grothoff said he saw mention of Guantanamo as part of the pressure that WikiLeaks had been put under. At the time, on Sept. 1 2011, The Guardian issued a statement:

“It’s nonsense to suggest the Guardian’s WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way.

“Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours.

“It was a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database.

“No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files. That they didn’t do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian’s book.”

It is possible this was all a screw up. It’s also possible that no one at WikiLeaks saw the book until the Freitag article.

The prosecution appeared to be trying to muddy the waters by bringing up 133,000 diplomatic files that WikiLeaks published in August 2011, before the released of the unredacted cables. These files came from the U.S. missions in numerous countries including Iran, China, Russia, Israel, Yemen, Syria, Australia, Bahrain and Zimbabwe. Grothoff testified that he analyzed all of these files and found that none were classified.

The government alleges the names of some informants appeared in some of these documents. German journalist John Goetz, who testified for the defense last Wednesday, said that while some of these documents were marked “Strictly Protect,” it did not men informants’ names were present.

5:01 am EDT: Court is in session. First defense witness is Christian Grothoff, a professor of computer science at Bern University, Switzerland. Network security and cryptography are his specialities. He was asked to investigate of the unredacted chache of diplomatic cables in September 2011.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Trump works for who funds and manages his political campaigns, u brainless puke--and who do u think would be dominant among those?--Jews, fools (who else?)--and esp. the ones working for Israel-first, suckers. Politics in Jew S A is one set of kikes, the "globalist" atheists on pretend "left" vs. the Israel-first, "Judeo-Christians" (see Whtt.org and TruthTellers.org for expo) on the pretend "right," "good-cops vs. bad-cops" for the moralistic suckers who predominate among the poor, stupid, over-populated morons and scum, called "the people."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Explosive Evidence from Trump Insider: Assange Dragged from Embassy “on the Orders of the President”

Link: https://www.globalresearch.ca/explo...ange-dragged-embassy-orders-president/5724546

By Laura Tiernan and Thomas Scripps
Global Research, September 22, 2020

Alt-right media personality Cassandra Fairbanks’ witness testimony was read out in court yesterday, providing evidence that Julian Assange’s April 2019 arrest at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London was politically motivated and directed by United States President Donald Trump.

Fairbanks testified that Arthur Schwartz, a wealthy Republican Party donor and key Trump ally, had told her that Assange was taken from the Ecuadorian Embassy “on orders from the president.” The conversation between Schwartz and Fairbanks occurred in September 2019 and was recorded by Fairbanks.

Schwartz, a frequent visitor to the White House and “informal adviser” or “fixer” to Donald Trump Jr., told Fairbanks the president’s orders were conveyed via US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who brokered a deal with the Ecuadorian government for Assange’s removal. Grenell is currently director of national intelligence (acting), appointed by Trump in February this year.

Assange’s lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald QC, spelled out the significance of Fairbanks’ disclosures, telling Judge Vanessa Baraitser they were, “evidence of the declared intentions of those at the top who planned the prosecution and the eviction from the embassy.”

Fairbanks, who writes for the pro-Trump Gateway Pundit, is a prominent Assange supporter who visited the WikiLeaks founder at the Embassy on two key occasions. Her evidence was read into proceedings yesterday afternoon unopposed, with Fitzgerald explaining, “My learned friend [James Lewis QC for the prosecution] reserves the right to say ‘because she’s a supporter of Julian Assange you must take that into account in weighing her evidence.’ But we say [her evidence] is true.”

Given her close connections to leading figures in the Trump administration’s fascistic entourage, Fairbanks is uniquely positioned to expose key aspects of the politically motivated vendetta against the WikiLeaks founder. Throughout the extradition hearing, lawyers for the US government have repeatedly claimed the charges against Assange under the Espionage Act are motivated by “criminal justice concerns” and are “not political.”

Police ejecting Julian Assange from Ecuadorian embassy in London, April 11, 2019. (YouTube)

Fairbanks’ evidence shreds the official narrative of the Department of Justice (DoJ) that Assange was arrested on April 11, 2019 in relation to “hacking.” In a phone call with Schwartz on October 30, 2018, he made clear that Assange would be arrested as political payback for his role in “the Manning case,” i.e., the disclosure by US Army whistle-blower Chelsea Manning of US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“He also told me that they would be going after Chelsea Manning,” Fairbanks recalled of her October 2018 phone conversation with Schwartz. This was one of several predictions by the Trump insider that were soon confirmed (Manning was re-arrested in March 2019), with Fairbanks concluding, “He knew very specific details about a future prosecution [of Assange] … that only those close to the situation then would have known.”

Fairbanks’ testimony provided chilling evidence of plans by the Trump administration to impose the death penalty. In his October 2018 phone call with Fairbanks, Schwartz said Assange would “probably” only serve life in prison, but went on to qualify this,

“He told me that the US government has said they will not pursue the death penalty, something that would have prevented the UK and Ecuador from extraditing him here.”

Less than six months later, just hours after Assange’s seizure from the embassy, Fairbanks again messaged Schwartz to ask if he “knew anything.”

“He responded with a series of messages about how Assange deserved a lethal injection and how both he and Manning should die in prison.” Further, “He sent me lots of messages about how everyone involved with WikiLeaks deserved the death penalty. I noted in our conversation that it had been reported that Grenell only got a verbal agreement that there would be no death penalty, nothing in writing. Schwartz’s response to this was to send me a shrug emoji and he continued his tirade about how Assange deserved to die.”

On January 7, 2019, Fairbanks travelled to London to warn Assange of US plans to seize him from the embassy and have him extradited to the US. They discussed quietly, Assange using “a little radio to cover up the conversation.” They exchanged written notes.

Fairbanks’ testimony recounts the extraordinary measures they faced during a second two-hour visit on March 25. She was left alone in a cold room for a full hour, while Assange was kept outside and subjected to a “full body scan with a metal detector” before being let in. The pair had only two minutes to talk. Fairbanks is later made to understand the reason for this aborted visit after Schwartz “called and informed me that he knew I had told Assange” during the earlier visit.

Fairbanks’ testimony provides insight into the criminal underworld surrounding the White House. After Trump fires National Security Adviser John Bolton and Grenell’s name is floated as a replacement, Fairbanks tweets about his involvement in Assange’s arrest, which elicits a “frantic” call from Schwartz.

“He was ranting and raving that he could go to jail and that I was tweeting ‘classified information’… Schwartz informed me that in coordinating for Assange to be removed from the embassy, Grenell had done so on ‘direct orders from the president’” and that “other persons who Schwartz said might also be affected included individuals who he described as ‘lifelong friends’.”

These individuals included Grenell and Las Vegas Sands boss and long-time Trump ally Sheldon Adelson.

In the first half of the day, Professor Christian Grothoff of the Bern University of Applied Sciences testified to the chronology of events leading up to the bulk release of unredacted US State Department cables in September 2011. He is a computer scientist with experience reporting on the Edward Snowden revelations. His evidence demolished the prosecution’s claim that Assange and WikiLeaks were responsible for this mass disclosure.

Grothoff explained that the cables were stored online by WikiLeaks and “encrypted with a cipher that made it basically useless to anybody that did not have the encryption key.” This was, he said, common practice when dealing with sensitive data that is too large to be sent between trusted parties by encrypted email.

When the WikiLeaks website came under attack in late 2010, limiting access to it, copies of the site began to be created by third parties. A minority of these third parties copied the encrypted documents, contrary to WikiLeaks’ instructions.

One of the people given the encryption key to these documents was Guardian journalist David Leigh. In February 2011, he and fellow Guardian writer Luke Harding published a book titled WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, in which the key was revealed in full.

By late August 2011, the connection between Leigh’s key and the encrypted documents posted on copies of the WikiLeaks website, but outside of WikiLeaks’ control, was reported. On August 31 and September 1, the cables began to be published on sites like Cryptome and Pirate Bay. Only afterwards, on September 2, did WikiLeaks publish the cables, explaining their reasons in an editorial:

“Revolutions and reforms are in danger of being lost as the unpublished cables spread to intelligence contractors and governments before the public. The Arab Spring would not have started in the manner it did if the Tunisian government of Ben Ali had copies of those WikiLeaks releases which helped to take down his government.”

Grothoff’s testimony highlighted the central role played by David Leigh in these events. He explained, “As far as I can tell Mr. Leigh was one of the very few given access to the full set [of cables].” Assange, Grothoff said, based on the account provided by Leigh’s own book, was “very reluctant” to give the Guardian journalist this access. Substantiating that point, Summers referred to a section of Leigh’s book which reads:

“[Leigh] asked Assange to stop procrastinating and hand over the biggest trove of all: the cables. Assange said, ‘I can give you half of them containing the first 50 percent’ and Leigh refused. All or nothing, he said. ‘What happens if you end up in an orange jumpsuit en route to Guantánamo before you can release the full files?’… Eventually, Assange capitulated.”

In another section of the book, referred to by the prosecution, Leigh describes how “It had been a struggle to prise these documents out of Assange.” Just six months later, with WikiLeaks engaged in a long process of publishing safe and redacted documents with media partners around the world, Leigh published the password to the full online store of classified, unredacted cables.

Speaking outside the court, Assange’s father, John Shipton, said,

“Today we had the prosecution trying to prove that water runs uphill and up is down. … The defence replied and conclusively demonstrated that it was David Leigh [who caused the unredacted cables to be released]. We can only conclude from the amount of time that the prosecution spent defending David Leigh that David Leigh is a state asset.”

At the end of the hearing’s morning session, an exchange between District Judge Vanessa Baraitser and the legal teams pointed to further restrictions being imposed on the defence’s ability to present its case.

Seizing on the delays caused by a potential COVID-19 outbreak in the first week of the hearing, Baraitser insisted that the defence prepare a timetable that allowed the hearing to “finish within two weeks.” When the defence replied that this would leave no time for closing submissions, she reacted enthusiastically to the suggestion of prosecution lawyer James Lewis QC that these could be submitted in written form and summarised in just half a day each for the prosecution and the defence. A final decision is forthcoming.

The hearing continues today.

*

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READ MORE:Sinking Transparency at the Old Bailey: The Assange Extradition Hearing Resumes
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Why Are Amnesty International Monitors Not Able to Observe the Assange Hearing?

Link: https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-a...tors-not-able-observe-assange-hearing/5724636

By Stefan Simanowitz
Global Research, September 23, 2020

Earlier this month, the street outside the Old Bailey criminal court in London, where Julian Assange’s extradition hearing has been taking place, was transformed into a carnival.

Inside the Old Bailey, the courtroom has turned into a circus. There have been multiple technical difficulties, a COVID-19 scare which temporarily halted proceedings and numerous procedural irregularities including the decision by the presiding judge to withdraw permission for Amnesty International’s fair trial observer to have access to the courtroom.

If the outside was a carnival, the inside of the court soon became a circus. -Stefan Simanowitz, Amnesty International

Arriving at the court each morning was an assault to the senses with the noise of samba bands, sound systems and chanting crowds and the sight of banners, balloons and billboards at every turn.

The first day of the hearing, which started on Monday 7 September, drew more than two hundred people to gather outside the court. People in fancy dress mingled with camera crews, journalists and a pack of hungry photographers who would disappear regularly to give chase to any white security van heading towards the court, pressing their long lenses against the darkened windows.

One of the vans had come from Belmarsh high security prison, Julian Assange’s home for the last 16 months.

The Wikileaks founder was in court for the resumption of proceedings that will ultimately decide on the Trump administration’s request for his extradition to the US. The American prosecutors claim he conspired with whistleblowers (army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning) to obtain classified information. They want him to stand trial on espionage charges in the US where he would face a prison sentence of up to 175 years.

Assange’s lawyers began with a request that the alleged evidence in a new indictment handed down in June be excluded from consideration given that it came so late. The Judge denied this. In the afternoon session, the lawyers requested an adjournment until next year to give his lawyers time to respond to the US prosecutor’s new indictment. They said they had been given insufficient time to examine the new allegations, especially since they had only “limited access” to the imprisoned Assange. Indeed, this most recent hearing was the first time in more than six months that Julian Assange had been able to meet with his lawyers. The judge rejected this request.

We requested access to the court for a trial monitor to observe the hearings, but the court denied us a designated seat in court. -Stefan Simanowitz, Amnesty International

Reacting to the decision, Kristinn Hrafnsson the editor-in-chief of Wikileaks told me that: “the decision is an insult to the UK courts and to Julian Assange and to justice. For the court to deny the request to adjourn is denying Assange his rights.”

Amnesty International had requested access to the court for a trial monitor to observe the hearings, but the court denied us a designated seat in court. Our monitor initially did get permission to access the technology to monitor remotely, but the morning the hearing started he received an email informing us that the Judge had revoked Amnesty International’s remote access.

We applied again for access to the proceedings on Tuesday 8 September, setting out the importance of monitoring and Amnesty International’s vast experience of observing trials in even some of the most repressive countries.

The judge wrote back expressing her “regret” at her decision and saying: “I fully recognise that justice should be administered in public”. Despite her regret and her recognition that scrutiny is a vital component of open justice, the judge did not change her mind.

If Amnesty International and other observers wanted to attend the hearing, they would have to queue for one of the four seats available in a public gallery. We submitted a third application to gain direct access to the overflow room at the court where some media view the livestream, but this has also been denied.

Amnesty International have monitored trials from Guantanamo Bay to Bahrain, Ecuador to Turkey. For our observer to be denied access profoundly undermines open justice. -Stefan Simanowitz, Amnesty International

READ MORE:Julian Assange’s Political Indictment: Old Wine in Older Bottles

The refusal of the judge to not to give any “special provision” to expert fair trial monitors is very disturbing. Through its refusal, the court has failed to recognize a key component of open justice: namely how international trial observers monitor a hearing for its compliance with domestic and international law. They are there to evaluate the fairness of a trial by providing an impartial record of what went on in the courtroom and to advance fair trial standards by putting all parties on notice that they are under scrutiny.

Amnesty International have monitored trials from Guantanamo Bay to Bahrain, Ecuador to Turkey. For our observer to be denied access profoundly undermines open justice.

In the court, the overflow room has experienced ongoing technical problems with sound and video quality. More than a week after the proceedings began, these basic technical difficulties have not been properly ironed out and large sections of witness evidence are inaudible. These technological difficulties were not restricted to the overflow room. In court, some witnesses trying to “call into” the court room last week, were not able to get in. These basic technical difficulties have hampered the ability of those in the courtroom to follow the proceedings.

If Julian Assange is silenced, others will also be gagged either directly or by the fear of persecution and prosecution. -Stefan Simanowitz, Amnesty International

We are still hopeful that a way can be found for our legal expert to monitor the hearing because the decision in this case is of huge importance. It goes to the heart of the fundamental tenets of media freedom that underpin the rights to freedom of expression and the public’s right to access information.

The US government’s unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange for having published disclosed documents is nothing short of a full-scale assault on the right to freedom of expression. The potential chilling effect on journalists and others who expose official wrongdoing by publishing information disclosed to them by credible sources could have a profound impact on the public’s right to know what their government is up to.

If Julian Assange is silenced, others will also be gagged either directly or by the fear of persecution and prosecution which will hang over a global media community already under assault in the US and in many other countries worldwide.

The US Justice Department is not only charging a publisher who has a non-disclosure obligation but a publisher who is not a US citizen and not in America. The US government is behaving as if they have jurisdiction all over the world to pursue any person who receives and publishes information of government wrongdoing.

If the UK extradites Assange, he would face prosecution in the USA on espionage charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life – possibly in a facility reserved for the highest security detainees and subjected to the strictest of daily regimes, including prolonged solitary confinement. All for doing something news editors do the world over – publishing information provided by sources, that is in the interest of the wider public.

It is ironic that no one responsible for potential war crimes in Iraq & Afghanistan has been punished. Yet the publisher who exposed these potential crimes is the one in the dock. -Stefan, Simanowitz, Amnesty International

Outside the court, I bumped into Eric Levy, aged 92. His interest in Assange’s case is personal. He was in Baghdad during the American “shock and awe” bombardment in 2003 having travelled to Iraq as part of the Human Shield Movement aiming to stop the war and – failing that – to protect the Iraqi population.

“I’m here today for the same reason I was in Iraq. Because I believe in justice and I believe in peace,” he tells me. “Julian Assange is not really wanted for espionage. He is wanted for making America look like war criminals.”

Indeed, it is ironic that no one responsible for possible war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan has been prosecuted, let alone punished. And yet the publisher who exposed their crimes is the one in the dock facing a lifetime in jail.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

British Ambassador Craig Murray Exposes the Corrupt and Censored Assange Extradition Hearing

September 25, 2020
Paul Craig Roberts

Ambassador Murray is upfront: “I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.”

Although the hearing is being conducted in a British court, the US government has controlled the hearing and has determined what evidence could be presented:

“The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured that those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.”

Even Ambassador Murray’s reports on the hearing are censored by social media:

“Even my blog has never been so systematically subject to shadowbanning from Twitter and Facebook as now. Normally about 50% of my blog readers arrive from Twitter and 40% from Facebook. During the trial it has been 3% from Twitter and 9% from Facebook. That is a fall from 90% to 12%. In the February hearings Facebook and Twitter were between them sending me over 200,000 readers a day. Now they are between them sending me 3,000 readers a day. To be plain that is very much less than my normal daily traffic from them just in ordinary times. It is the insidious nature of this censorship that is especially sinister – people believe they have successfully shared my articles on Twitter and Facebook, while those corporations hide from them that in fact it went into nobody’s timeline. My own family have not been getting their notifications of my posts on either platform” ( https://www.craigmurray.org.uk ).

Ambassador Murray believes that the misconduct of the judge and prosecution, serving as Washington’s agents, has destroyed the legal principles on which British justice rests:

“I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. . . . I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she [Judge Baraitser] has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.”

In Stalin’s show trials all rulings were pre-written before arguments in court were heard.

It is obvious from the behavior of the British court that the extradition hearing is orchestrated to set Assange up as guilty of whatever false charges Washington wishes to make. The presstitutes will explain that the fact the British court allowed Assange to be handed over to Washington is (1) proof that the British have concluded that he will be treated well and get a fair trial, and (2) proof that the British have determined that there is a strong case against Assange. Otherwise, the presstitutes will say, the British would not have handed Assange over to Washington.

The result of this reporting will be that it is impossible for Assange to get a fair trial as Americans will already be convinced that he is guilty. No member of a jury would dare vote “not guilty” as the juror would become a despised person in his neighborhood and perhaps as well among members of his family. Those in the alt media who point out Assange was convicted on the basis of propaganda and not evidence of a crime will be dismissed with the claim that two courts, British and American, found Assange guilty.

Assange’s conviction will become a precedent, and no journalist will ever again publish leaked (“stolen”) information revealing crimes of government. As time passes, investigations by congressional committees will find themselves hampered in the same way. Voting in elections will continue, but accountable government will not.

The fact that the extradition hearing in Britain, which in effect is repealing the First Amendment to the US Constitution, received no media coverage, no questioning of an obviously rigged process, and no expressed alarm of the threat it poses to the First Amendment demonstrates: (1) the success of the Deep State in eliminating the civil liberties put into the Constitution to ensure accountable government, (2) the control the Deep State has over the media, and (3) the insouciance of the American people while the Constitution is eviscerated.

Indeed, I see that even my readers have little interest. My column yesterday, “The Murder of the First Amendment” ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/24/the-murder-of-the-first-amendment/ ), was opened by only one-fifth of the newsletter subscribers, the lowest percentage in the history of the website.

Compared to the general population, most of my readers are aware, skeptical of establishment explanations, and able to think for themsleves. Hopefully, their lack of response means they already know that Washington’s attack on Assange is an attack on the US Constitution, something that has been going on in earnest since September 11, 2001.

Yes, I know, the Constitution has always been under attack, but the concentrated attack on civil liberty of the past 20 years is unprecedented. Where is the response of the law schools, bar associations, media, and the American people themselves?

The real assault on our country comes from the inside.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Assange’s Eighteenth Day at the Old Bailey: Abuse of Power, Breaching Attorney-Client Privilege and Adjournment

October 1, 2020. Central Criminal Court, London.
By Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Global Research, October 02, 2020

Link: https://www.globalresearch.ca/assan...attorney-client-privilege-adjournment/5725481

The Old Bailey has been the venue for a trial that should never have taken place. But during the course of these extradition proceedings against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder accused by the US Department of Justice for violating the US Espionage Act (17 charges) and one under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an impressive battalion of defence witnesses has been called upon. They have assisted Assange’s legal team to build a picture of obscene politicisation, imperial overreach and wanton callousness.

A picture of the detention facilities awaiting the publisher was painted with fine strokes: the alienating brutality of solitary confinement; likely special administrative measures restraining the detainee’s access to legal representation and family; inadequate health facilities both physical and mental for those at risk of self-harm. Then came the chilling realisation, made clear on the seventeenth day: that the US intelligence services, through the Spanish security firm UC Global SL, had conducted surveillance of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and proposed kidnapping or poisoning a political asylee.

Peirce and violations of attorney-client privilege

In the court on Thursday, attention turned to written submissions from human rights activist Gareth Peirce, Assange’s solicitor, who described brazen breaches of attorney-client privilege. Trial observers noted how “extraordinarily difficult” it had been to follow Peirce’s statements, largely because of Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s penchant for preventing a full reading in the court.

Despite such stints of constipation, the point of Peirce’s submissions was clear enough. Legally privileged documents were seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. The Ecuadorean intelligence service was complicit. Two diplomatic pouches with USB sticks were placed in a diplomatic bag, sent to Ecuador, then onwards to the United States.

Peirce claimed that, between 2017 and 2018, three legally privileged meetings were subjected to surveillance without her knowledge. Assange’s Spanish lawyer Aitor Martínez was also the subject of such intrusion, his legal file photographed when absent in a meeting with his client. The legal team representing Assange had a nagging sense that their gatherings might be monitored. While not knowing the full extent of such intrusions, “an exceptionally high level of anxiety” was present during those meetings.

Martínez also furnished the court with an update on the criminal investigation against UC Global SL director David Morales, being conducted by Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional. Morales’s part in this sordid matter was much in evidence the day before, when his role in facilitating surveillance of Assange and his embassy meetings, at the behest of his “American friends”, was given a generous airing by former employees of his company. The outcome of that case may well shed light upon an already troubling bridge linking UC Global with the Central Intelligence Agency and Las Vegas Sands, owned by Trump supporter and Republican donor, Sheldon Adelson.

Tigar’s testimony and abuse of power

Testimony from Professor Michael Tigar of Duke Law School was read, drawing parallels between the abuses of power perpetrated by the Nixon administration in 1971 and those of the Trump administration vis-à-vis Assange.

The first case centred on the outcome of President Richard Nixon’s attempts to prosecute the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. After the publication of the papers, Nixon’s staffers formed a covert unit known as the “White House Plumbers,” a blunt outfit that proceeded to commit crimes with abandon for the unforgettable Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP). Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was burgled by the Plumbers in an effort to pilfer his medical files; Nixon ordered the illegal wiretapping of Ellsberg; the government then claimed to have mislaid those wiretaps when asked to produce them at trial. And just to spice things further, US District Court Judge William M. Byrne, Jr., presiding over Ellsberg’s trial, was also approached by Nixon and his assistant for domestic affairs, John D. Ehrlichman, about the possibility of becoming the FBI’s next director. Judge Byrne could only conclude that the government’s actions had “offended a sense of justice,” leading him to declare “a mistrial and grant the motion for dismissal.”

READ MORE:Sinking Transparency at the Old Bailey: The Assange Extradition Hearing Resumes

The US intelligence effort against Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, perpetrated through UC Global’s installation of surveillance facilities, threw up richly disturbing similarities. Confidential files had been accessed; privileged conversations with lawyers had been recorded; over eager proposals for kidnapping or poisoning Assange expressed. For Ellsberg, this was certainly damning. “That’s essentially the same information that ended my case and confronted Nixon with impeachment, leading to his resignation.”

Baraitser’s exclusions

Patience on the bench, and among the prosecution team, began to wear thin. The prosecution, led by James Lewis QC, argued that the defence had run out of time. Objections mounted, temperatures rose. Material was excluded. Judge Baraitser decided to exclude one of Peirce’s witness statements addressing the new allegations made in the second superseding indictment served in July. The statement, argued the defence, was only appropriate to address “fresh and different” allegations the prosecution only saw fit to include at a later date.

She also batted away the defence’s effort to submit a statement made by US Attorney General William Barr on September 15, outlining his belief that the executive branch had “virtually unchecked discretion” in deciding whether or not to initiate prosecutions. “The power to execute and enforce the law is an executive function altogether,” Barr stated. “That means discretion is invested in the executive to determine when to exercise prosecutorial power.”

Readying the ground

The ground, then, is being readied for closing arguments by the defence. Three areas promise to feature. The first is the heavy air of political motivation in the prosecution of Assange. Outlets that had published the unredacted cables prior to WikiLeaks doing so on September 2, 2011, and left unmolested by the DOJ and law enforcement, suggest distinct targeting. To this can be added the manoeuvrings in the Trump administration, noted in the testimony of Cassandra Fairbanks, about the decision to arrest Assange. A clear change of heart had manifested in the matter, given the loss of interest shown by the Obama administration in pursuing the publisher. Coupled with the theory of executive power endorsed by the Attorney General Barr – that such an officer should defer to the views of the presidential office in determining prosecutions – add to claims that this is a politically driven endeavour.

The second focuses on an abuse of power, sharply drawn in the testimony of two anonymous former employees of UC Global. The third: that Assange, should he be extradited, will face cruel and inhumane treatment. Frail health and appalling prison conditions at both the pre-trial Alexandria Detention Center, and the post-trial ADX Florence supermax in Colorado, promise to be a debilitating, even lethal mix.

With the evidence now in her possession, Baraitser will have much to get through. Unfortunately, we are none the wiser about what items of evidence her judicial mind will accept or reject. The jaw dropping accounts of embassy espionage, suggested poisoning and proposed kidnapping of Assange may be deemed, as the prosecutors insist, irrelevant to the charges at hand.

A date for judgment was also set. “Unless any further application for bail is made, and between now and the 4th of January, you will remain in custody for the same reasons as you have been before,” Baraister explained to Assange.

After the adjournment, Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris spoke of the highest of stakes, of this being not merely a fight for life but press freedom and truth. “This case is already chilling press freedom. It is a frontal assault on journalism, on the public’s right to know and our ability to hold governments, domestic and foreign, to account.”

Moris noted, with pertinence, the prosecution’s admission, under oath “that it has no evidence that a single person has ever come to any physical harm because of these publications. Let me repeat that: there is no evidence that a single person has ever come to any physical harm because of these publications.” Assange was in prison for informing “you of actual crimes and atrocities being committed by a foreign power. That foreign power has ripped away his freedom and torn our family apart.” It was a power determined “to put him in incommunicado detention in the deepest darkest hole of its prison system for the rest of his life.”

Assange will continue spending time at Belmarsh Prison, one of Britain’s most notorious facilities reserved for only the most hardened species of criminal. He will put in court appearances every 28 days via videolink. The defence will submit closing arguments on November 16; the prosecution will then make its final pitch to convince the court two weeks later. The legions of press members, writers and scribblers should now ruminate, along with Judge Baraitser, about the consequences of this entire process. Moris is clear about one of them. “The US administration won’t stop with him. The US says that it can put any journalist, anywhere in the world, on trial in the US if it doesn’t like what they are publishing.”
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Revealed: Key Assange Prosecution Witness Is Part of Academic Cluster Which Has Received Millions of Pounds from UK and US Militaries

Link: https://www.globalresearch.ca/assan...ived-millions-pounds-uk-us-militaries/5725688

By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis
Global Research, October 05, 2020
Declassified UK 2 October 2020

One of the US prosecution’s key medical witnesses in the Julian Assange hearing, who claimed that Assange’s risk of suicide is ‘manageable’ if extradited to the US, works for an academic institute that is funded by the UK Ministry of Defence and linked to the US Department of Defence, it can be revealed.

***

Dr Nigel Blackwood, a reader in forensic psychiatry at King’s College London (KCL), told the extradition hearing in London last week that Julian Assange was suffering only “moderate” depression.

Giving evidence as an expert witness for the US prosecution, Dr Blackwood rebutted other experts’ findings on the seriousness of Assange’s condition, adding his suicide risk was “manageable”. He told the court: “Mr Assange has proved himself to be a very resilient and very resourceful man, and he has underplayed that.”

At the request of US prosecution lawyers, Dr Blackwood examined Assange during two meetings in March. In his written submission to the court, he said that it would “not be unjust” to extradite Assange to the US.

Declassified has discovered that Dr Blackwood’s professional work at KCL is linked to a cluster of academic groups which are funded by or associated with the British and American militaries.

Declassified has seen a contract showing that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) provided more than £2-million to KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry for the years 2013-16 for a project which KCL is forbidden to mention in public without MOD approval. It is likely the contract has been renewed and is still active.

The £2.2m contract between King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry and the UK Ministry of Defence. Click here to read the document.

The project is managed “on behalf of the Secretary of State for Defence” and is for Phase 4 of a “wellbeing” study of veterans of Britain’s recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeking to “inform MOD decision-making”, the project began in 2003.

The value of the first three phases of the contract is not known but if the Institute of Psychiatry received a similar level of funding for Phase 4 as they had previously, the total contract value would be more than £8-million. A spokesperson for the institute refused Declassified’s request to divulge the amount of funding from the MOD.

Dr Blackwood works in the Department of Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences, which is part of KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. He told Declassified he was aware of MOD funding the institute in which he works, but said he had never personally worked on an MOD contract.

Asked by Declassified if he declared any conflicts of interest to the hearing, Blackwood responded, “I had no conflicts to declare.”

However, Declassified has found that the Forensic Research Group (FRG) that Dr Blackwood heads at KCL — and which “explores the complex relationship between mental disorders and crime” — is conducting research which uses data from Phase 3 of the MOD-funded project.

In addition, the FRG works “in collaboration” with the King’s Centre for Military Health Research (KCMHR), which is part-funded by the MOD and was “originally funded by the US Department of Defence”. A KCMHR webpage, which is undated, states that “latterly” the centre is being funded by the Department of Defence “again”.

US Department of Defence

The King’s College website states that the KCMHR is “the leading civilian UK centre of excellence for military health research and independent of the UK Ministry of Defence”. The centre notes that it also “collaborates” with the UK Ministry of Justice and the US Department of Defence.

The KCMHR is a “joint initiative between the Institute of Psychiatry and the Department of War Studies and makes significant contributions to UK military personnel policy”, the university website states.

KCL’s Departments of War Studies and Defence Studies “have a number of contracts/agreements with various departments within government, including the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence”, according to a response to a Freedom of Information Act request sent to KCL by Declassified.

However, “more specific information” on the contracts themselves was withheld by KCL because “the majority of contracts are listed as classified under UK security legislation. This means we are not permitted to disclose details, since they predominantly involve areas either directly or pertaining to the UK security services.”

The university also said disclosure would damage its commercial opportunities. “Two of the largest contracts [with the UK government] are due for renewal in the next 12 months and will go to open tender,” it explained.

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta visited King’s College War Studies Department in 2013, saying: “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience.”

READ MORE:The UK Signed Up in Secret to Support Saudi Military Action against Yemen. New Documents

Panetta, who also served as director of the CIA from 2009 to 2011, recently said in an interview that the purpose of prosecuting Assange was to stop other journalists from revealing information about the US government: “All you can do is hope that you can ultimately take action against those who were involved in revealing that information so you can send a message to others not to do the same thing.”

One of the two co-directors of the KCHMR, which collaborates with Dr Blackwood’s FRG, is Nicola Fear, a professor of epidemiology and a former MOD staffer who is on the study team working on the MOD “wellbeing” project.

According to the centre, Professor Fear “leads several studies… which have been awarded funding from the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defence”.

One recent project led by Professor Fear for the KCHMR, which was funded by the US Department of Defence, studies how the military deployments of parents affect children’s emotional development.

King’s College London rejects a Declassified Freedom of Information Act request for its UK government contracts “since they predominantly involve areas either directly or pertaining to the UK security services”. Click here to read the document.

A biography of Professor Fear notes that “Nicola frequently briefs senior government officials and military leaders on the work of KCMHR and the impact of service life on personnel, veterans and families”. From 2014-15, she worked on a US army contract.

Declassified has also discovered other KCMHR projects funded by the US Department of Defence. Different KCL researchers have received funding from the US Office of Naval Research for a project which “examined the political, social and the strategic dimension of cybersecurity”.

The KCMHR’s other co-director is the vice-dean of Academic Psychiatry, Professor Sir Simon Wessely, who is one of the “approved” researchers on the MOD “wellbeing” contract.

The KCHMR has been developing data-sharing links with colleagues in the US, according to the university’s webpage. “We want to make increasing use of the possibilities of electronic data linkage, reflecting the fact that the UK and US have been fighting the same war,” Professor Wessely is quoted as saying.

Wessely and Fear are two of the four members of the “senior team” of KCL’s Academic Department of Military Mental Health (ADMMH) which, according to KCL’s website, appears to be funded solely by the MOD. The ADMMH “works directly” with the KCMHR, with which it shares a research policy, and has“both academic and military personnel seconded to the unit”.

The other two senior members of the ADMMH, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Jones and Major Amos Simms, are both serving UK military personnel.

The ADMMH says its “mission is to act as the uniformed focus for military mental health research” for the UK military. It adds: “The centre aims to gather, assess and report on information that will enhance the health and operational effectiveness of the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces.”

A slide from a presentation by Professor Nicola Fear, the co-director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, advertising the centre’s US Department of Defense-funded study on the children of military personnel.

Forensic research

Dr Blackwood told Declassified he had never personally worked with the KCMHR, adding that his “colleague” has “worked with” the centre examining Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the ex-service population.

That colleague, Dr Deirdre MacManus, is the co-team leader with Dr Blackwood of the FRG and — according to the KCL website — a member of the KCMHR team. She is also part of the study teamworking on the MOD “wellbeing” contract.

MacManus, a clinical senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry, has been funded directly by the UK military to produce research. MacManus also appears to have published a number of outputs produced from the MOD “wellbeing” contract alongside academic papers co-authored with, among others, a serving member of the British army.

Dr MacManus and Dr Blackwood co-authored an academic paper in September 2019 on the subject of PTSD in prisons, which “identified significant associations between PTSD and suicidality”. This was a subject on which Blackwood gave evidence to the Assange hearing.

Intelligence training

The War Studies Department at KCL, which co-founded the KCMHR with the Institute of Psychiatry, is also linked to the UK and US intelligence community.

The department was in the mid-2000s commissioned by the “professional head of intelligence analysis” — working within the Cabinet Office’s Intelligence and Security Secretariat — “to develop a course for experienced [intelligence] analysts” in order to “enhance the analytic capability of the United Kingdom’s intelligence community”.

A study titled “Teaching Intelligence Analysts in the UK” and published in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) in-house journal, notes that: “Exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system.”

Co-written by David Omand — a former director of the UK’s largest intelligence agency, GCHQ, who teaches on KCL’s War Studies course — the article notes that “the CIA had recognised as early as 1960 how beneficial it would be to use universities as a means of intelligence training”.

The paper continues by noting that KCL “offers a containing space in which analysts from every part of the [intelligence] community can explore with each other the interplay of ideas about their profession”.

The Department of War Studies is currently home to a number of personnel connected to the US militaryand intelligence community.

The university also runs a cross-department centre — called the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cybersecurity Research — which brings King’s College academics together to look at the “sociotechnical aspects of cybersecurity”. The body runs “in association” with the National Cybersecurity Centre, an arm of GCHQ.

Consent of the MOD

The contract seen by Declassified is made out between the “Secretary of State for Defence” and the “Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London”. Worth £2.17-million, Phase 4 of the project ran from February 2013 to January 2016. Earlier phases were renewed in 2006 and 2010.

The Institute for Psychiatry refused to disclose to Declassified the total level of funding provided by the MOD, saying that the university’s “web pages are very comprehensive and should help with your queries”. KCL’s website does not appear to provide such details.

The contract stipulates that KCL cannot “without the prior written consent of the [MOD], advertise or publicly announce that work is being undertaken for the [MOD]”. It adds that KCL researchers “may not communicate on these matters with any communications media representatives” unless they are granted written permission by the MOD.

Declassified searched the British government’s contract database and could find no other contract between the MOD and a department of psychiatry in the UK.

The contract states that “the Ministry of Defence did not expect, and was unprepared for, the criticism that arose some years after the 1991 Gulf conflict over the so-called Gulf War Syndrome”. The project’s purpose is to “have early warning of any similar problem arising from the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to be in a position to respond appropriately with targeted medical research”.

Excerpts from the contract between King’s College’s Institute of Psychiatry and the UK Ministry of Defence.

Funding of the Forensic Research Group

Dr Blackwood told Declassified his FRG at King’s College had never received funding, directly or indirectly, from the MOD.

The group does, however, receive funds from organisations associated with the British military. One of its six listed funders is Help for Heroes, which supports wounded military personnel. The organisation receives funds from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, an MOD-funded charity that was until 2018 based inside the ministry.

Another funder of the FRG is the Forces in Mind Trust (FIMT), which supports former British military personnel. The chair of FIMT’s board, Hans Pung, is President of RAND Europe and a former US army officer.

Other directors include Major General Martin Rutledge, who served in UK military headquarters during the Iraq campaign, and General Sir John McColl, a former deputy commander of Nato.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

EXPOSED: How British Intelligence Manipulated Julian Assange Trial

Link: https://www.blacklistednews.com/art...-intelligence-manipulated-julian-assange.html

Published: October 8, 2020
Source: great game india

Investigative journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis of Declassified UK have extensively studied numerous aspects of the Julian Assange extradition hearing revealing the legal irregularities and conflicts of interest in the case. The reports expose how British Intelligence manipulated Julian Assange trial.

Julian Assange’s judge and her husband’s links to the British intelligence

The husband of Lady Emma Arbuthnot, the Westminster chief magistrate overseeing WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US, has financial links to the British military establishment, including institutions and individuals exposed by WikiLeaks.

It can also be revealed that Lady Arbuthnot has received gifts and hospitality in relation to her husband, including from a military and cybersecurity company exposed by WikiLeaks. These activities indicate that the chief magistrate’s activities cannot be considered as entirely separate from her husband’s.

Lord Arbuthnot’s military and intelligence connections

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, a former defence minister, is a paid chair of the advisory board of military corporation Thales Group, and was until earlier this year an adviser to arms company Babcock International. Both companies have major contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD).

Lord James Arbuthnot of Edrom
Lord James Arbuthnot of Edrom is the husband of the chief magistrate presiding over Julian Assange’s US extradition case. A long-standing Conservative Party politician, he has significant links to the British military and intelligence establishment. (Photo: UK Parliament)

Lord Arbuthnot also has connections to former officials in the UK intelligence services which WikiLeaks has exposed in its publications and which have conducted intelligence operations in the UK against WikiLeaks.

Until December 2017, Lord Arbuthnot was one of three directors of a private security firm, SC Strategy, along with the former director of MI6, Sir John Scarlett, and Lord Carlile. Until June 2019, Arbuthnot remained a “senior consultant” to SC Strategy. Scarlett is mentioned in WikiLeaks releases and has largely remained out of public debates around privacy and surveillance.

Little is known of SC Strategy, which does not have a website, but Companies House lists an address in Watford. Carlile states on his register of interests that SC Strategy was formed by him and Scarlett in 2012 “to provide strategic advice on UK public policy, regulation, and business practice”. It lists one client as the Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Investment Authority.

Before becoming a peer, Lord Arbuthnot was a member of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee from 2001-06. He is also currently an officer of the all party parliamentary group on cybersecurity which is administered by the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway, University of London. The ISG manages a project worth £775,000 that is part-funded by GCHQ.

Lord Arbuthnot himself appears in documents published by WikiLeaks, including two confidential US diplomatic cables. A December 2009 US confidential cable notes Arbuthnot telling an official in the US embassy in London that he supported President Obama’s speech on US strategy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Son of Julian Assange’s judge linked to anti-data leak company Darktrace created by British intelligence

The son of Julian Assange’s senior judge is linked to an anti-data leak company created by the UK intelligence establishment and staffed by officials recruited from US intelligence agencies behind that country’s prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder.

Dark Trace British Intelligence Julian Assange
Alexander Arbuthnot’s employer, the private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, has a multimillion-pound investment in Darktrace, a cyber-security company which is also staffed by officials recruited directly from the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The son of Lady Emma Arbuthnot, the Westminster chief magistrate overseeing the extradition proceedings of Julian Assange, is the vice-president and cyber-security adviser of a firm heavily invested in a company founded by GCHQ and MI5 which seeks to stop data leaks, it can be revealed.

Alexander Arbuthnot’s employer, the private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, has a multimillion-pound investment in Darktrace, a cyber-security company which is also staffed by officials recruited directly from the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

These intelligence agencies are behind the US government’s prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secret documents. Darktrace has also had access to two former UK prime ministers and former US President Barack Obama.

Darktrace and UK intelligence

Darktrace, which Alexander Arbuthnot describes as an “AI [artificial intelligence] based cyber-security” company, was established by members of the UK intelligence community in June 2013.

GCHQ, the UK’s major surveillance agency, approached investor Mike Lynch—regarded as Britain’s most established technology entrepreneur – who then brokered a meeting between GCHQ officers and Cambridge mathematicians who co-founded the company.

Company material openly mentions “the UK intelligence officials who founded Darktrace”. It states that its team includes “senior members of the UK’s and US’s intelligence agencies including the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Security Service (MI5) and the NSA.”

Another co-founder was Stephen Huxter, a senior figure in MI5’s “cyber defence team” who became Darktrace’s managing director. Soon after the company launched in September 2013, Darktrace announced that former MI5 director-general Sir Jonathan Evans had been appointed to its advisory board. Huxter welcomed Evans’ “unparalleled stature in the field of cyber operations”.

Chief magistrate in Assange case received financial benefits from UK Foreign Office

The senior judge overseeing the extradition proceedings of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange received financial benefits from two partner organisations of the British Foreign Office before her appointment, it can be revealed.

It can further be revealed that Lady Emma Arbuthnot was appointed Chief Magistrate in Westminster on the advice of a Conservative government minister with whom she had attended a secretive meeting organised by one of these Foreign Office partner organisations two years before.

Liz Truss, then Justice Secretary, “advised” the Queen to appoint Lady Arbuthnot in October 2016. Two years before, Truss — who is now Trade Secretary — and Lady Arbuthnot both attended an off-the-record two-day meeting in Bilbao, Spain.

Tertulias

The expenses were covered by an organisation called Tertulias, chaired by Lady Arbuthnot’s husband — Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, a former Conservative defence minister with extensive links to the British military and intelligence community exposed by WikiLeaks.

Tertulias British Intelligence Julian Assange
Liz Truss, then minister for DEFRA, speaks in the Guggenheim museum at the secretive Tertulias meeting in Bilbao, Spain, 18 October 2014. Standing to her right is Tertulias’ chairman, Lord Arbuthnot. Foreign Office partner organisation Tertulias also paid for Lady Arbuthnot — Julian Assange’s senior judge — to attend this event.

Tertulias, an annual forum held for political and corporate leaders in the UK and Spain, is regarded by the UK Foreign Office as one of its “partnerships”. The 2014 event in Bilbao was attended by David Lidington, the Minister for Europe, while the Foreign Office has in the past funded Lord Arbuthnot’s attendance at the forum.

The Foreign Office has long taken a strong anti-Assange position, rejecting UN findings in his favour, refusing to recognise the political asylum given to him by Ecuador, and even labelling Assange a “miserable little worm”.

Key Assange prosecution witness links to UK military

One of the US prosecution’s key medical witnesses in the Julian Assange hearing, who claimed that Assange’s risk of suicide is ‘manageable’ if extradited to the US, works for an academic institute that is funded by the UK Ministry of Defence and linked to the US Department of Defence, it can be revealed.

•US prosecution witness works at Institute of Psychiatry funded by UK military, although is not personally funded by it.

•Witness leads research group which works “in collaboration” with centre set up with US Department of Defence funding.

•He co-leads the group with academic whose work is often funded by UK military.

•Institute’s partner department is closely linked to the Anglo-American military and intelligence communities, and created a course for British intelligence officers on behalf of the UK government.

•Responding to Declassified, witness says: “I had no conflicts [of interest] to declare.”

•Revelations come following end of Old Bailey hearing on Assange’s US extradition.

Dr Nigel Blackwood, a reader in forensic psychiatry at King’s College London (KCL), told the extradition hearing in London that Julian Assange was suffering only “moderate” depression.

Nigel Blackwood, a Reader in forensic psychiatry at King’s College London
Nigel Blackwood, a Reader in forensic psychiatry at King’s College London, who was a US prosecution medical witness in the Julian Assange extradition hearing. (Photo: King’s College London)

Declassified has discovered that Dr Blackwood’s professional work at KCL is linked to a cluster of academic groups which are funded by or associated with the British and American militaries.

Declassified has seen a contract showing that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) provided more than £2-million to KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry for the years 2013-16 for a project which KCL is forbidden to mention in public without MOD approval. It is likely the contract has been renewed and is still active.

The project is managed “on behalf of the Secretary of State for Defence” and is for Phase 4 of a “wellbeing” study of veterans of Britain’s recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeking to “inform MOD decision-making”, the project began in 2003.

Dr Blackwood told Declassified his FRG at King’s College had never received funding, directly or indirectly, from the MOD.

The group does, however, receive funds from organisations associated with the British military. One of its six listed funders is Help for Heroes, which supports wounded military personnel. The organisation receives funds from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, an MOD-funded charity that was until 2018 based inside the ministry.

References

•Julian Assange’s judge and her husband’s links to the British military establishment exposed by WikiLeaks (link), 14 November 2019

•The son of Julian Assange’s judge is linked to an anti-data leak company created by the UK intelligence establishment (link), 15 November 2019

•REVEALED: Chief magistrate in Assange case received financial benefits from secretive partner organisations of UK Foreign Office (link), 21 February 2020

•Revealed: Key Assange prosecution witness is part of academic cluster which has received millions of pounds from UK and US militaries (link), 2 October 2020
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

‘None Of It Reported’: How Corporate Media Buried The Assange Trial

Link: https://www.blacklistednews.com/art...d-how-corporate-media-buried-the-assange.html

Published: October 8, 2020
Source: media lens

One of the most imposing features of state-corporate propaganda is its incessant, repetitive nature. Over and over again, the ‘mainstream’ media have to convince the public that ‘our’ government prioritises the health, welfare and livelihoods of the general population, rather than the private interests of an elite stratum of society that owns and runs all the major institutions, banks, corporations and media.

We are constantly bombarded by government ministers and their media lackeys telling us that ‘our’ armed forces require huge resources, at public expense, to maintain the country’s ‘peace’ and ‘security’. We do not hear so much about the realpolitik of invading, bombing or otherwise ‘intervening’ in other countries with military force, diplomatic muscle, and bribes of trade and aid deals to carve up natural resources and markets for the benefit of a few.

For those old enough to remember 2002-2003, who can forget the endless repeated rhetoric of the ‘threat’ posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, of how his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ could be launched within 45 minutes of his order, and how ‘we’ simply had to remove him from power? Or how, in 2011, the US, UK and France had to launch ‘humanitarian intervention’ to stop the ‘mass slaughter’ of civilians by Gaddafi’s forces in Libya. And on and on.

Moreover, the public is saturated by obsequious ‘news’ about the royal family, allowing for the odd scandal now and again, to convince us of their ‘relevance’, the ‘great work’ they do for the country, not least ‘boosting the tourism industry’, and their supposedly vital role in maintaining a ‘stable society’ steeped in tradition and rich history.

But when it comes to arguably the most important political trial in our lifetimes, there is a not-so-curious media reluctance to dwell on it or even mention it, never mind grant it the kind of blanket coverage that celebrity trials regularly generate.

Thus, media attention given to the extradition hearing of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and editor, was minimal and dwarfed by the coverage devoted to the actor Johnny Depp over the summer.

We monitored BBC News at Ten, the main evening BBC news programme on BBC1, during the four weeks of the Assange hearing. As far as we could tell, there was not a single substantive item (there may have been passing mention on the first day). We observed that the last time Paul Royall, the editor of BBC News at Ten, had mentioned Assange in his daily tweets giving the running order for that evening’s News at Ten was in November 2019. We challenged Royall politely several times on Twitter, but received no response. We received the same non-response from deputy editor Lizzi Watson and her colleague Jonathan Whitaker.

We also challenged Daniel Sandford, the BBC’s home affairs correspondent whose remit, according to his Twitter bio, includes law.

We asked him:

‘Hello @BBCDanielS

‘As Home Affairs Correspondent for @BBCNews, where is your reporting of the #JulianAssange extradition hearing?’

To his credit, Sandford did at least respond, unlike the majority of his BBC colleagues in recent years. He told us:

‘The case is being covered by our World Affairs unit. I have been in a few hearings, and it is slightly repetitive at the moment. It will return as a news story.’

Those words – ‘slightly repetitive’ – look destined to become Sandford’s journalistic epitaph. Ironically, they have been endlessly repeated back to him by members of the public who were understandably incredulous, perplexed, irritated or even angry at his dismissive response to Assange’s ordeal and the huge implications of the trial.

We asked Sandford why he had never mentioned the testimony of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture:

‘Thanks for replying. The UN’s @NilsMelzer notes that “the case is a battle over press freedom, the rule of law & the future of democracy, none of which can coexist with secrecy”. Surely the requirement of impartiality means you should report this; not wait until it is too late?’

We received no further response from the BBC correspondent. However, Rebecca Vincent, Director of International Campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, followed up our challenge and told Sandford:

‘I find this disappointing, Daniel. Repetitive or not, the public needs to know what is happening in these proceedings. And meanwhile – NGOs have been barred access. I can only get in thanks to the support of a network of grassroots activists queuing from 5 am over four weeks.’

Sandford bristled:

‘So you decided to join the pile-on too Rebecca? Thank you. I politely explained to @medialens why I personally was not covering the case and added that I had attended some hearings from personal interest, and explained why it is not news every day. But you are disappointed?’

‘Pile-on’ is the pejorative term used when a journalist receives critical replies from the public. Unfortunately, Sandford had received some abuse, but most people made polite and rational points. As we have learned over the years, most journalists hate being challenged by informed members of the public. And any instances of abuse – usually in the minority – are often leaned upon as an excuse to ignore or dismiss all challenges.

The home affairs correspondent continued:

‘I don’t have great influence over what is covered each day except on those stories I am working on, but press freedom does include the freedom for a news organisation to decide what should be included in the news each day.’

Rebecca Vincent replied again:

‘Which very often does not seem to include stories of massively egregious press freedom violations – that will in turn set a precedent affecting said news organisation. As I said, disappointing.’

Teymoor Nabili, a former news presenter on Al Jazeera, BBC and CNBC, replied to Sandford:

‘That’s a particularly bizarre reading of “press freedom”’

Indeed. In the ‘mainstream’ media – BBC News included – ‘press freedom’ amounts to publishing power-friendly ‘news’ articles, biased ‘analysis’ and commentary, and diversionary pabulum and tittle-tattle.

Journalist Mohammed Elmaazi, who had been reporting daily from the trial, also replied to Sandford:

‘This is probably the most significant case involving press freedom, the right to know and the Rule of Law, in the Western world in half a century, if not more so. Though as an individual reporter I wouldn’t hold you personally responsible for BBC’s coverage (or lack thereof).’

As John McEvoy noted in a piece on The Canary website:

‘To write about the greatest press freedom case in recent history, it has been necessary to rely almost exclusively on the work of independent journalists.’

An extensive list of these journalists can be found here.

Richard Medhurst, one of the independent journalists reporting the trial, made a powerful short speech outside the Old Bailey on one of the final days. The trial, and the lack of media coverage, was ‘an abomination’, he said. So too was the fact that the West’s war criminals were not even mentioned in court – Tony Blair, George Bush, Jack Straw, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest. In sum, the hearing was:

‘An absolute mockery of any kind of semblance of justice in this country’.

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray concurred when he too spoke outside the Old Bailey, saying of Assange:

‘His ordeal goes on and on. And all because he published the truth. There is no allegation in that court room that anything he published was a lie. Anything he published was true. And much of that truth revealed terrible crimes – war crimes and crimes against humanity, and lies and corruption by government. And not one of the people who committed those war crimes is on trial anywhere. Instead we have the man who had the courage to reveal those war crimes is the one whose liberty is at stake.’

A Twitter commenter made a point about one of the independent reporters at the trial:

‘Kevin Gosztola has reported more on the Julian Assange extradition trial than the NY Times, WaPo, BBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, MSNBC have combined.’

Gosztola, editor of Shadowproof.com website, followed up with:

‘Fact-checked this and it only took a few minutes to confirm #AssangeTrial’

And yet, bizarrely, there was a BBC reporter present throughout the Assange hearing, according to both Rebecca Vincent and James Doleman of Byline Times, who was providing daily trial updates. As Vincent noted:

‘The BBC had a reporter in court (I could see him from the public gallery) who was apparently filing twice a day. There were 18 days of proceedings. Why weren’t more pieces published?’

So, what was happening to the reports that were presumably being submitted by the BBC reporter? Nobody could tell us, including the ever-silent editors of BBC News at Ten.

Investigative journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis of Declassified UK have extensively studied numerous aspects of the Assange extradition hearing and published seven articles concerning legal irregularities and conflicts of interest in the case. These articles revealed:

1.Julian Assange’s judge and her husband’s links to the British military establishment exposed by WikiLeaks

2.The son of Julian Assange’s judge is linked to an anti-data leak company created by the UK intelligence establishment

3.Chief magistrate in Assange case received financial benefits from secretive partner organisations of UK Foreign Office

4.UK minister who approved Trump’s request to extradite Assange spoke at secretive US conferences with people calling for him to be “neutralized”

5.At risk from coronavirus, Julian Assange is one of just two inmates in Belmarsh maximum-security prison held for skipping bail

6.UK government refuses to release information about Assange judge who has 96% extradition record

7.As British judge made rulings against Julian Assange, her husband was involved with right-wing lobby group briefing against WikiLeaks founder

BBC News and other corporate media could certainly not be accused of being at all ‘repetitive’ about such deeply damaging aspects of the extradition hearing.

Observing the court proceedings from the limited space of the public gallery day by day, Murray warned:

‘It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that [magistrate Vanessa] Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.

‘I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.’

Murray added:

‘The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider population.’

In a superb piece for Consortium News, political commentator Alexander Mercouris demolished the shifting and nonsensical US case for extradition. He nailed the fundamental reason that Washington is pursuing Assange:

‘Julian Assange and his organization WikiLeaks, have done those things which the U.S. government and its national security apparatus most fear, and have worked hardest to prevent, by exposing the terrible reality of much of what the U.S. government now routinely does, and is determined to conceal, and what much of the media is helping the U.S. government to conceal.’

He continued:

‘the true purpose of the U.S. government’s relentless pursuit of Assange is to prevent him from exposing more of its crimes, and to punish him for exposing those of its crimes which he did expose, if only so as to deter others from doing the same thing, is perfectly obvious to any unbiased and realistic observer.’

Mercouris added:

‘Assange and WikiLeaks have exposed rampant war crimes and human rights abuses over the course of illegal wars waged by the U.S. government and its allies. The death toll from these wars runs at the very least into the tens of thousands, and more plausibly into the hundreds of thousands or even millions.’

In conclusion:

‘In other words, it is Assange and his sources, first and foremost Chelsea Manning, who are the defenders of international law, including the Nuremberg Principles, and including in the case which is currently underway, whilst it is those who persecute them, including by bringing the current case against Assange, who are international law’s violators.

‘This is the single most important fact about this case, and it explains everything about it.’

At the end of the trial, RT’s Afshin Rattansi noted:

‘English magistrate Vanessa Baraitser declares at London’s Old Bailey that she will judge on Julian Assange’s extradition to a Virginia Court to face Espionage charges on 4 January 2021. The judgement will impact every journalist in the world.’

We highlighted that last sentence on our Twitter feed, adding:

‘As for stenographers and guardians of power in the “mainstream” media, they can just carry on as before…’

This, of course, is a central reason why state-corporate ‘journalists’ are so disinterested in the trial. The overwhelming majority simply do not – cannot – see themselves threatened by Washington’s assault on real journalism and truth-telling.

Closing Scene: A BBC Man Appears

On the penultimate day of the four-week hearing, the BBC’s avuncular veteran reporter John Simpson turned up (‘Still with BBC after 53 yrs, trying to make sense of a mad world’, says his Twitter bio): someone we had sparred with on the topic of Iraq in the early days of Media Lens.

He tweeted after his day at court:

‘I went to Julian #Assange’s extradition hearing at the Old Bailey today. It will end tomorrow or Friday, with a decision expected in January. Alarming witness statements today from whistleblowers about the bugging of Assange’s lawyers in Spain.’

Simpson’s comment was not entirely accurate or comprehensive. According to whistleblower testimony presented at the Old Bailey by former employees of UC Global, a Spanish security company, attempts had allegedly been made by the company to bug Assange and his lawyers inside the Ecuador embassy, under the auspices of the CIA. That fact alone should have been sufficient to throw out any court case against Assange, given the supposedly sacrosanct confidentiality of private legal conversations between lawyers and clients. There were even proposals by UC Global to kidnap or poison the WikiLeaks publisher on behalf of the CIA. Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal has done valuable work in exposing all of this, as he detailed in an interview with Deepa Driver of the campaign group Don’t Extradite Assange, and in an extensive article for The Grayzone website.

These shocking details appear never to have surfaced in BBC coverage, such as it was. On October 2 – the day after the hearing had ended – we observed that there had been just four articles published on the website during the hearing. One was a short, bland report of the first day of the case. Two were more ‘human interest’ pieces about Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, and their two children. A fourth piece was titled, ‘Julian Assange: Campaigner or attention seeker’. Perhaps ‘the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster’ believes the latter to be the case, thus deciding to all but ignore the hearing and its serious implications for justice, journalism and democracy.

It is worth noting that Stuart Millar is the digital news editor at BBC News, so presumably has responsibility for the website. He is the former head of news at the Guardian. This ‘comical’ tweet about Assange dates from Millar’s time at the Guardian:

‘I like to think that #Assange chose the Ecuadorean embassy because it’s so convenient for Harrods’

Yet more proof, if any were needed, of the groupthink that prevails among even the most ‘respected’ media outlets. If you need to demonstrate that your media credentials are bona fide – that you are ‘one of us’ – making a ‘joke’ at the expense of Julian Assange is a sure-fire way to show you can be trusted.

It would never do, for example, to give headline coverage to the CIA-instigated spying of Assange in the Ecuador embassy, the torture he is enduring by his incarceration, his parlous mental and physical state, the real risk of suicide should he be extradited to the US, almost certainly being dumped into the ‘hellhole’ of a ‘supermax’ US prison. All of this is to ensure that Assange serves as a warning example to anyone – anywhere in the world – who might dare to publish information that the US government does not wish to be made public.

Such grotesquely disturbing details did not even approach becoming ‘slightly repetitive’ to consumers of BBC News. Instead, they were buried. The BBC could, for instance, have interviewed Fidel Narvaez, former Ecuadorian Consul, to speak about the spying (which took place after Narvaez had been replaced in the embassy, following the election of Ecuador president, Lenin Moreno, who has been bending over backwards to do the US’s bidding under Donald Trump).

BBC journalists, and other ‘mainstream’ reporters could have included something of Noam Chomsky’s five-page submission to the hearing in support of Assange. They could have printed just one line, namely that Assange:

‘has performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy’.

Reporters routinely behave as stenographers to power – the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and ITV’s political editor Robert Peston are prime examples. But to be a stenographer to cogent commentary from Noam Chomsky is, of course, unthinkable. As we pointed out on Twitter on October 2, the day after the hearing ended, Kuenssberg has mentioned Assange a grand total of four times on her Twitter account – all back in 2014. Then, she had asked blankly:

‘What do you think should happen to him?’

Her silence on the extradition hearing spoke volumes: BBC News in a nutshell.

As far as we can tell from Twitter searches, Peston last mentioned Julian Assange on January 29, 2017. When we published a media alert last month that discussed Assange, we challenged Peston and Kuenssberg about their long-term silence on the WikiLeaks founder. Needless to say, they did not reply.

Likewise, other high-profile media figures including the BBC’s Andrew Marr, Huw Edwards, Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson, and Sky News political editor Adam Boulton, kept quiet when we asked them to explain their silence on Assange.

As US comedian Jimmy Dore said:

‘We need everybody exposing war crimes and the crimes of our government… So if you see a newsperson and they’re not screaming about this, the reason why they’re not is because it helps their career.’

‘Free Julian Assange’ campaigner John Mcghee, one of those protesting outside the Old Bailey on the day John Simpson was there, wrote an account of having met the BBC world affairs editor and enjoying a warm friendly exchange:

‘We talked for a few minutes and he revealed to me his incomprehension at the glaring absence of media representatives in or indeed outside the Old Bailey. He was genuinely shocked by the fact that a mainstream media embargo has apparently been imposed on the trial of the century that could sound the death knell for freedom of speech the world over.’

Certainly, some credit is due to John Simpson for reporting on the extradition hearing on that day’s BBC Radio 4 PM Programme. But it was a short segment of just 3 mins, 28 secs near the end of the hour-long programme, and it wasn’t even trailed at the start of PM. Shocked or not, Simpson certainly made no mention of his ‘incomprehension’ at the lack of media coverage.

Moreover, although it included short quotes from Stella Moris, Assange’s partner, and Jen Robinson, one of Assange’s lawyers, it was a thin piece that even repeated the debunked claim that US agents and informers had been harmed as a result of the work of WikiLeaks and Assange. It missed out so much of importance that was being diligently chronicled daily by Craig Murray. His detailed updates included copious vital facts that were glaringly absent from almost all ‘mainstream’ coverage; in particular BBC News.

Simpson reacted with short shrift (or silence) to those who complained to him on Twitter about the dearth of BBC coverage. He replied to one:

‘So how come I reported on this for the BBC yesterday? Find another conspiracy theory, is my advice.’

We are aware that the BBC did not totally blank Assange. But surely even Simpson could recognise that coverage had been pitifully inadequate given the importance and possible repercussions of the case? No ‘conspiracy theory’ is required. It is simply a fact.

Recently, when Tim Davie, the new BBC director general, tried to make his mark by declaring:

‘We are going to be publishing clear social guidelines… the enforcement policies will be very clear… we’ll be able to take people off Twitter’

he was asked by MPs ‘about the impartiality of those who work for the BBC’. But so far, none of them have asked about the impartiality of those who work for the BBC and have tweeted (or reported) nothing about a hugely significant political trial taking place in this country. It is what John Pilger rightly calls, ‘lying by omission’.

We sent an open tweet to any prospective BBC whistleblowers struggling with their consciences:

‘Most large organisations have whistleblowers who step forward when ethics, conscience and courage prevail.

‘Where are the whistleblowers inside BBC newsrooms? #JulianAssange’

Nobody has responded, so far.

‘Shaming’

Afshin Rattansi interviewed John Pilger about the Assange hearing and its ramifications on the Going Underground programme on RT (which, as Twitter is keen to tell everyone, is ‘Russia state-affiliated media’. As yet, BBC News Twitter accounts have not been labelled as ‘UK state-affiliated media’).

Rattansi asked Pilger to respond to Daniel Sandford’s excuse for not reporting on the hearing as it was ‘slightly repetitive’. Pilger said:

‘For that BBC journalist to describe [the hearing] as “repetitive” doesn’t quite leave me speechless. But it leaves me with a sense that it’s over with much of the media.’

He explained:

‘To watch this day after day. This extraordinary, important trial telling us so much about how those who govern us, those who want to control our lives, and what they do to other countries, how they lie to us – watch this day after day and see none of it reported. Or, if you do see it reported, you’ll see something like “Assange told to pipe down” by the judge on a day – he only did this two or three times, I don’t know how he kept his mouth shut – where he stood up and protested at evidence that was clearly false and offensive to him. That was the headline. That was the story of the day.’

One vital example was when Assange was wrongly accused by the prosecution lawyers of having endangered the lives of US agents and their informers in releasing WikiLeaks documents that had not been redacted of names. This endlessly repeated propaganda claim was refuted by the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who testified on behalf of Assange:

‘I have also spoken to [Assange] privately over many hours. During 2010 and 2011, at a time when some of the published material had not yet seen the light of day, I was able to observe [Julian’s] approach. It was the exact opposite of reckless publication and nor would he wilfully expose others to harm.

‘Wikileaks could have published the entirety of the material on receipt. Instead I was able to observe but also to discuss with him the unprecedented steps he initiated, of engaging with conventional media partners, [to maximise] the impact of publication [so] it might [best] affect US government policy and its alteration.’

Award-winning Australian journalist Mark Davis was an eye-witness to the preparation of the Afghan War Logs in 2010 for newspaper publication, documented in Davis’s film, ‘Inside Wikileaks’. Davis spoke at a public meeting in Sydney last year and said that he was present alongside Assange in the Guardian’s ‘bunker’ where a team from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel worked on the publication of articles based on, as the NYT put it:

‘a six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war.’

Davis attests that, far from being ‘cavalier’ about releasing documents that might endanger lives, it was:

‘Guardian journalists [who] neglected and appeared to care little about redacting the documents.’

Moreover:

‘They had a “graveyard humour” about people being harmed and no one, he stated emphatically, expressed concern about civilian casualties except Julian Assange.’

Assange had:

‘subsequently requested that the release of the Afghan War Logs be delayed for the purpose of redaction, but the Guardian not only insisted on the agreed date, they abandoned him to redact 10,000 documents alone.’

In fact, Assange worked through the night to do this, after the Guardian journalists had gone home.

Moreover, the claim that lives had been put at risk by WikiLeaks in publishing US cables could not even be substantiated by the US itself. As Patrick Cockburn observed in the Independent:

‘The Pentagon has admitted that it failed to find a single person covertly working for the US who had been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures. This failure was not for lack of trying: The Pentagon had set up a special military task force, deploying 120 counter-intelligence officers, to find at least one death that could be blamed on Assange and his colleagues but had found nothing.’

In the same RT interview mentioned earlier, Rattansi asked about the role of the Guardian in the Assange case; something we have documented at length. Pilger summed up their ‘campaign of vilification against Assange, the way they turned on their source, as ‘a disgrace’.

In an interview for the Australian magazine Arena, Pilger expanded on this important component of the Assange story:

‘How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assange’s work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardian’s David Leigh, now retired as “investigations editor” and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian “scoop” that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assange—written behind their subject’s back—disclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardian’s ‘partnership’. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.’

He continued:

‘Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.’

True to their role as ‘leftist’ Guardian figleaves, neither Owen Jones nor George Monbiot published an article so much as mentioning Julian Assange during the four-week hearing. Jones tweeted ‘support’ by linking back to an article he published in April 2019. Monbiot stumped up the energy to send out three token tweets. But he tweeted nothing about Nils Melzer, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky or the shocking revelations from UC Global whistleblowers about spying on Assange, along with CIA-sponsored plans to kidnap or poison him.

One Twitter user asked:

‘Why are people “spooked” by the Assange case? It’s a genuine question, the media silence is weird, even on the left, @AyoCaesar @AaronBastani @GeorgeMonbiot to name a few.

‘What’s stopping them from screaming this from the rooftops? Are they scared, threatened, what?’

Monbiot at least replied:

‘I’ve tweeted about it many times. But for me it’s one of hundreds of crucial issues, many of which are even more important. It’s terrible, but compared to, say, soil loss, it’s a long way down my list.’

Challenged further about his near-silence, he said:

‘I have nothing to add to what others have already said. I never write about an issue unless I have something new and original to say. It’s not about ticking boxes for me, it’s about expanding the field.’

We responded:

‘What a happy coincidence that @GeorgeMonbiot can find nothing “new and original” to say about Assange, who has been targeted with a ferocious smear campaign by his employer. Try citing @NilsMelzer’s arguments, George, that would be “expanding the field” for most Guardian readers.’

As the former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook noted:

‘Monbiot could have served as a counterweight to the relentless maligning of Assange in the Guardian’s pages by pointing out how these smears were unfounded. Instead he has either echoed those smears, or equivocated on them, or remained silent.’

Cook added:

‘Monbiot is not the free thinker, the fearless investigator of difficult truths, the leftwing conscience he claims to be. It is not really his fault. It is in the nature of the function he serves at the Guardian …He enjoys the freedom to speak out loudly on the dangers of environmental destruction, but that freedom comes at a price – that he closely adhere to the technocratic, liberal consensus on other issues.’

In short:

‘Monbiot, therefore, treads the finest line of all the Guardian’s columnists. His position is the most absurd, the one plagued with the biggest internal contradiction: he must sell extreme environmental concern from within a newspaper that is entirely embedded in the economic logic of the very neoliberal system that is destroying the planet.’

This is supremely relevant to the Assange case. Because if the US wins, then journalism and the public’s ability to know what is going in the world will be even more crushed than they already are. And that spells disaster for avoiding worldwide environmental breakdown in an era of rampant global capitalism.
 
Re: InfoWars reports Julian Assange ("Wikileaks") has been arrested in London--to be extradited to U

Julian Assange cannot be extradited to US, British judge rules

Judge says it would be ‘oppressive’ to extradite WikiLeaks founder to US, citing concerns for his mental health

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2...annot-be-extradited-to-us-british-judge-rules

Ben Quinn
@BenQuinn75
Mon 4 Jan 2021 06.49 EST
First published on Mon 4 Jan 2021 06.00 EST

Julian Assange cannot be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage and of hacking government computers, a British judge has decided.

Lawyer for US authorities are to appeal against the ruling, which was delivered at the central criminal court by the district judge, Vanessa Baraitser.

Delivering her ruling the judge said said the WikiLeaks founder was likely to be held in conditions of isolation in a so-called supermax prison in the US and procedures described by US authorities would not prevent him from potentially finding a way to take his own life.

“I find that the mental condition of Mr Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” she said.

Assange has been taken back to Belmarsh prison ahead of an application on Wednesday for his release on bail, which will refer to conditions at the high-security prison in south London against the backdrop of the worsening Covid-19 pandemic.

The judge’s decision, focusing on Assange’s health, came after she knocked down one argument after another made last year by Assange’s lawyers. Sending him to the US would not breach a bar on extradition for “political offences” she said, and she had no reason to doubt that “the usual constitutional and procedural protections” would be applied to a trial he might face in the US.

But she accepted the evidence of prominent medical experts, including details of how Assange had suffered from depression while in prison in London. “The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man who is genuinely depressed about his future,” said Baraitser.

The case against the 49-year-old relates to WikiLeaks’s publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, in 2010 and 2011.

Prosecutors say Assange helped the US defence analyst Chelsea Manning breach the US Espionage Act, was complicit in hacking by others and published classified information that endangered informants.

Assange denies plotting with Manning to crack an encrypted password on US computers and says there is no evidence anyone’s safety was compromised. His lawyers argue the prosecution is politically motivated and that he is being pursued because WikiLeaks published US government documents that revealed evidence of war crimes and human rights abuses.

At the weekend, Assange’s partner had said a decision to extradite the WikiLeaks co-founder to the US would be “politically and legally disastrous for the UK”.

Stella Moris, who has two children with Assange, said a decision to allow extradition would be an “unthinkable travesty”, adding in an article published by the Mail on Sunday that it would rewrite the rules of what it was permissible to publish in Britain.

“Overnight, it would chill free and open debate about abuses by our own government and by many foreign ones, too.”

Over the course of hearings last year, lawyers for Assange had called witnesses who told the court that WikiLeaks had played a vital role in bring revelations to light that exposed the way in which the US had conducted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among them, the founder of the legal charity Reprieve, Clive Stafford-Smith, said “grave violations of law” such as the use of US drones for targeted strikes in Pakistan had been brought to light with the help of documents published by WikiLeaks.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war, had also defended Assange, saying he had acted in the public interest, and warned he would not get a fair trial in the US.

Assange has been in custody in Britain since April 2019, when he was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had taken refuge seven years previously to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault case that was subsequently dropped.
 
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