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Thread: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

  1. Link to Post #441
    UK Moderator/Librarian/Administrator Tintin's Avatar
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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    Stella Moris with an update on the US appeal against M. Baraitser's judgement in January:

    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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    Default Re: Julian Assange arrested after Ecuador tears up asylum deal

    U.S. Says Assange Would Be Kept Out of Supermax Prison as U.K. Court Reopens Door to Extradition
    https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/...to_extradition
    Headline Jul 08, 2021

    The United Kingdom’s High Court has granted the Biden administration the right to appeal a lower court’s ruling blocking the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. This comes as The Wall Street Journal reports U.S. officials have given assurances to the U.K. that Julian Assange wouldn’t be held in a “supermax” prison if extradited to the U.S. On Wednesday, Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris called on the Biden administration to end its pursuit of Assange.

    Stella Moris: “The lawyers of Julian were spied on. Their offices were broken into. Even our 6-month-old baby was targeted while he was in the embassy. And now the High Court has limited the grounds on which they are allowed to appeal. So the case is falling apart. … If the Biden administration is serious about respecting the rule of law, the First Amendment and defending global press freedom, the only thing it can do is drop this case. This case is the most vicious attack on global press freedom in history.”
    Assange faces up to 175 years in prison in the U.S. for violations of the Espionage Act related to the publication of classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes.

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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    Pink Floyd's Roger Goes Off On Mark Zuckerberg, Refuses Giant Facebook Offer
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    Netherlands Avalon Member ExomatrixTV's Avatar
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    Default Re: Julian Assange arrested after Ecuador tears up asylum deal

    • Corporate Media SHUNNED Julian Assange - How Can We Trust Them??:
    No need to follow anyone, only consider broadening (y)our horizon of possibilities ...

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  9. Link to Post #445
    UK Moderator/Librarian/Administrator Tintin's Avatar
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    Default US Government Preliminary Appeal Hearing

    August 11, 2021
    _______________

    British High Court Expands US Government's Appeal In Assange Extradition Case

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was overheard after the hearing, as he tried to process the High Court of Justice's decision

    Source: The Dissenter

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was astounded by Britain’s High Court after it reversed a prior decision and permitted the United States government’s appeal on grounds related to his health.

    Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde accepted the U.S. could challenge the weight that was given to Professor Michael Kopelman’s evidence because he “misled” the district court and did not disclose the fact that he knew Assange was in a relationship with Stella Moris and fathered two children in the Ecuador embassy.

    He also allowed the U.S. to argue the district judge had erred when considering the evidence that went to Assange’s risk of suicide.

    The High Court of Justice already granted an appeal on grounds related to how Assange would be treated in a U.S. jail or prison and whether Judge Vanessa Baraitser should have sought "assurances" from the U.S. to alleviate human rights concerns.

    Speaking via video link from Belmarsh prison after the hearing, Assange told Edward Fitzgerald QC, one of his defense attorneys, an “expert witness has a legal obligation to protect people from harm.”

    Kopelman, a neuropsychiatrist who treated him from May to December 2019, was looking out for "my children," Assange added.

    Assange referred to the guns that were found in UC Global director David Morales’ home when a search was conducted by police. The brand and serial numbers were erased on both weapons. (UC Global is the private security company that spied on the Ecuador embassy, tried to obtain a diaper from one of Assange’s children for DNA testing, and discussed potentially kidnapping or poisoning him.)

    Fitzgerald agreed that human rights need to be considered, but now the legal team must turn to the “assurances” the U.S. is offering to persuade the court Assange will not be cruelly or inhumanely treated.

    He further noted that the decision by the High Court was part of a preliminary hearing. It was not the appeal. The court simply ruled that the grounds were “arguable,” and it’s “not the end of the line,” Fitzgerald pointed out. They would discuss the implications of what unfolded later when they could do so privately.

    It was an extraordinarily rare moment, where press on the video link were given a glimpse of how this case that has unfolded over the past two years is wearing on Assange.

    The Constant Threats And Intimidation
    “The judges today said that the court will allow the factual evidence to be argued at the final hearing on the 27th and 28th of October. They'll allow the factual evidence to be argued,” Moris declared. “What has not been discussed today is why I fear for my safety and the safety of our children and Julian's life.”
    Moris highlighted the “constant threats and intimidation” that they have endured for the past few years. Threats have been issued against her, against their children, against Assange’s eldest son, Daniel, and against Assange's life.

    Of course, Moris added, there are “threats of a 175-year prison sentence and the actual ongoing imprisonment of a journalist for doing his job. These are sustained threats to his life for the past 10 years. These are not just items of law. This is our lives. We have the right to exist. We have a right to live and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.”

    Clair Dobbin QC, who is with the Crown Prosecution Service representing the U.S. government, relied on a declaration to the district court that Kopelman signed, where he agreed to be an impartial expert witness. It informed him of his obligation to the court and instructed him not to withhold information that could adversely impact the evidence he provided.

    “If an expert has misled the court, he has failed in his duty,” Dobbin stated. She maintained Baraitser did not “appreciate the significance of the fact that Kopelman was willing to mislead” the court.

    In response, Fitzgerald contended the district judge was fully aware of the prosecution’s criticism and she concluded that Kopelman misled the court. However, in light of all the evidence, which included two psychiatric reports and in-person testimony in court, Baraitser decided Kopelman did not fail in his duty to the court.

    There was no “tactical advantage being gained,” Fitzgerald said. It was simply a matter of concern for the “human predicament.” For example, there were “very real fears and concerns” around UC Global and their surveillance against Assange and his family.

    “Where is the point of law? Where is the arguable point of principle? Where indeed is the basis for the reviewing court to say this is wrong?” Fitzgerald rhetorically asked.

    “I did not accept that Professor Kopelman failed in his duty to the court when he did not disclose Ms. Moris’s relationship with Mr. Assange,” Baraitser ruled. “In my judgment Professor Kopelman’s decision to conceal their relationship was misleading and inappropriate in the context of his obligations to the court, but an understandable human response to Ms. Moris’s predicament.”

    Baraitser additionally detailed, “He explained that her relationship with Mr. Assange was not yet in the public domain and that she was very concerned about her privacy. After their relationship became public, he had disclosed it in his August 2020 report. In fact, the court had become aware of the true position in April 2020, before it had read the medical evidence or heard evidence on this issue.”

    In other words, Baraitser was not misled by the omissions. She assessed his medical evidence while considering the fact that Assange had a new family that he started while in the Ecuador embassy.

    The Judge Should Be The Primary Decision Maker

    The High Court judges also concluded that a separate ground of appeal, previously rejected by the court, can now be argued by the U.S. government in the appeal hearing scheduled for October 27 and 28.

    As to the risk of suicide, the U.S. government asserted Baraitser misinterpreted medical evidence or gave insufficient weight to evidence presented by forensic psychiatrists Professor Seena Fazel and Dr. Nigel Blackwood. They told the court too much weight was given to Kopelman and Dr. Quinton Deeley's evidence.

    Deeley is a consultant psychiatrist specializing in autism and various mental health conditions. He concluded that Assange is on the “high functioning end” of the autism spectrum.

    The prosecution’s written appeal argued that the evidence given last year by Deeley showed that any suicide risk would be the result of a rational and voluntary choice. If this is the case, then the relevant legal test prohibiting his extradition could not be satisfied.

    But this interpretation of Deeley’s evidence was contradicted by the actual testimony he gave in September 2020 at the extradition hearing. Deeley made clear that Assange's autism combined with the conditions under which he would be held in the U.S. would result in a high risk of suicide—a point raised by Fitzgerald during today’s hearing.

    Assange’s legal team emphasized that Baraitser weighed the testimony and evidence of all of the experts and was ultimately entitled, as the decision maker, to determine whom she found most convincing.

    “[The prosecution’s] attack [on Baraitser’s decision to prefer the defense's medical evidence] totally fails to recognize the entitlement of the primary decision maker to reach her own decision on the weight to be attached to the expert evidence of the defense on the one hand and the prosecution experts on the other," Assange’s lawyers argued in their written submissions.

    The High Court determined, since they allowed the prosecution to challenge how Baraitser weighed the evidence from Kopelman, it was only logical to permit this ground to be argued as well. (Though Holroyde, who was one of two judges at the hearing, appeared to doubt whether these arguments added much to the prosecution’s case.)

    Fazel, one of the prosecution's preferred doctors, argued in 2020 that suicide risks are "dynamic." They can change as circumstances change, and it is "very, very difficult to anticipate" with any certainty what one’s suicide risk would be over the course of many months.

    He did not concur with Deeley’s autism diagnosis but did recognize that, unlike Deeley, he did not specialize in the field. Fazel also noted, as an expert in suicides in prisons, that the U.S. has a lower suicide rate than that of the U.K.

    Fitzgerald pointed out that the latter issue was raised during the extradition hearings when Fazel accepted that U.S. incarceration rates are six to seven times higher than that of the U.K., and therefore, the suicide rates “are not comparable."

    Previously, the High Court had no response to the request from Assange's legal team for a cross-appeal. They would like to challenge the legal arguments Baraitser accepted, which pose a threat to press freedom.

    Holroyde indicated the High Court would wait until after resolving the appeal from the U.S. before proceeding with any arguments from the cross-appeal.
    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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    Default Re: Julian Assange arrested after Ecuador tears up asylum deal

    Scathing indictment of western media by Paul Craig Roberts regarding the Julian Assage situation . Brave independant journalism is all but dead according to Mr Roberts, who I follow everyday.

    https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/202...erm=2021-08-12

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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    John Pilger outside the Ministry of Justice responding to the decision yesterday:



    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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  15. Link to Post #448
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    Default John Pilger | A Day in the Death of British Justice

    The reputation of British justice now rests on the shoulders of the High Court in the life or death case of Julian Assange.



    By John Pilger, in London
    Special to Consortium News

    Source: Consortium News

    I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London Wednesday with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. Today, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege.

    The barrister, Clair Dobbin, is in the pay of the regime in Washington, first Trump’s then Biden’s. She is America’s hired gun, or “silk”, as she would prefer. Her target is Julian Assange, who has committed no crime and has performed an historic public service by exposing the criminal actions and secrets on which governments, especially those claiming to be democracies, base their authority.

    For those who may have forgotten, WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments, such as Venezuela’s, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the CIA’s Vault 7 campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your TV set, into a spy in your midst.

    WikiLeaks released almost a million documents from Russia which allowed Russian citizens to stand up for their rights. It revealed the Australian government had colluded with the U.S. against its own citizen, Assange. It named those Australian politicians who have “informed” for the U.S. It made the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the rise of jihadism in American-armed states in the Gulf.

    About Those Who Take Us to War


    There is more: WikiLeaks disclosed the U.S. campaign to suppress wages in sweatshop countries like Haiti, India’s campaign of torture in Kashmir, the British government’s secret agreement to shield “U.S. interests” in its official Iraq inquiry and the British Foreign Office’s plan to create a fake “marine protection zone” in the Indian Ocean to cheat the Chagos islanders out of their right of return.

    In other words, WikiLeaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the preordained, repetitive spin that fills newspapers and television screens. This is real journalism; and for the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in one form of incarceration or another, including Belmarsh prison, a horrific place.

    Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, he is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent, and accountable.

    On Wednesday, the United States sought the approval of Britain’s High Court to extend the terms of its appeal against a decision by a district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January to bar Assange’s extradition. Baraitser accepted the deeply disturbing evidence of a number of experts that Assange would be at great risk if he were incarcerated in the U.S.’s infamous prison system.

    Professor Michael Kopelman, a world authority on neuro-psychiatry, had said Assange would find a way to take his own life — the direct result of what Professor Nils Melzer, the United Nations rapporteur on torture, described as the craven “mobbing” of Assange by governments – and their media echoes.

    Those of us who were in the Old Bailey last September to hear Kopelman’s evidence were shocked and moved. I sat with Julian’s father, John Shipton, whose head was in his hands. The court was also told about the discovery of a razor blade in Julian’s Belmarsh cell and that he had made desperate calls to the Samaritans and written notes and much else that filled us with more than sadness.

    Watching the lead barrister acting for Washington, James Lewis — a man from a military background who deploys a cringingly theatrical “aha!” formula with defence witnesses — reduce these facts to “malingering” and smearing witnesses, especially Kopelman, we were heartened by Kopelman’s revealing response that Lewis’s abuse was “a bit rich” as Lewis himself had sought to hire Kopelman’s expertise in another case.

    No Contradiction

    Lewis’s sidekick is Clair Dobbin, and Wednesday was her day. Completing the smearing of Professor Kopelman was down to her. An American with some authority sat behind her in court.

    Dobbin said Kopelman had “misled” Judge Baraister in September because he had not disclosed that Julian Assange and Stella Moris were partners, and their two young children, Gabriel and Max, were conceived during the period Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

    The implication was that this somehow lessened Kopelman’s medical diagnosis: that Julian, locked up in solitary in Belmarsh prison and facing extradition to the U.S. on bogus “espionage” charges, had suffered severe psychotic depression and had planned, if he had not already attempted, to take his own life.

    For her part, Judge Baraitser saw no contradiction. The full nature of the relationship between Stella and Julian had been explained to her in March 2020, and Professor Kopelman had made full reference to it in his report in August 2020. So the judge and the court knew all about it before the main extradition hearing last September. In her judgement in January, Baraitser said this:
    “[Professor Kopelman] assessed Mr. Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr. Assange background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician and he was well aware of the possibility of exaggeration and malingering. I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.”
    She added that she had “not been misled” by the exclusion in Kopelman’s first report of the Stella-Julian relationship and that she understood that Kopelman was protecting the privacy of Stella and her two young children.

    In fact, as I know well, the family’s safety was under constant threat to the point when an embassy security guard confessed he had been told to steal one of the baby’s nappies so that a CIA-contracted company could analyse its DNA. There has been a stream of unpublicised threats against Stella and her children.

    Based on a Fraudster

    For the U.S. and its legal hirelings in London, damaging the credibility of a renowned expert by suggesting he withheld this information was a way, they no doubt reckoned, to rescue their crumbling case against Assange. In June, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin reported that a key prosecution witness against Assange has admitted fabricating his evidence. The one “hacking” charge the Americans hoped to bring against Assange if they could get their hands on him depended on this source and witness, Sigurdur Thordarson, an FBI informant.

    Thordarson had worked as a volunteer for WikiLeaks in Iceland between 2010 and 2011. In 2011, as several criminal charges were brought against him, he contacted the FBI and offered to become an informant in return for immunity from all prosecution. It emerged that he was a convicted fraudster who embezzled $55,000 from WikiLeaks, and served two years in prison. In 2015, he was sentenced to three years for sex offenses against teenage boys. The Washington Post described Thordarson’s credibility as the “core” of the case against Assange.

    On Wednesday, Lord Chief Justice Holroyde made no mention of this witness. His concern was that it was “arguable” that Judge Baraitser had attached too much weight to the evidence of Professor Kopelman, a man revered in his field. He said it was “very unusual” for an appeal court to have to reconsider evidence from an expert accepted by a lower court, but he agreed with Ms. Dobbin it was “misleading” even though he accepted Kopelman’s “understandable human response” to protect the privacy of Stella and the children.

    If you can unravel the arcane logic of this, you have a better grasp than I who have sat through this case from the beginning. It is clear Kopelman misled nobody. Judge Baraitser – whose hostility to Assange personally was a presence in her court – said that she was not misled; it was not an issue; it did not matter. So why had Lord Chief Justice Holroyde spun the language with its weasel legalise and sent Julian back to his cell and its nightmares? There, he now waits for the High Court’s final decision in October – for Julian Assange, a life or death decision.

    In the Land of Magna Carta

    And why did Holroyde send Stella from the court trembling with anguish? Why is this case “unusual”? Why did he throw the gang of prosecutor-thugs at the Department of Justice in Washington — who got their big chance under Trump, having been rejected by Obama – a life raft as their rotting, corrupt case against a principled journalist sunk as surely as Titantic?

    This does not necessarily mean that in October the full bench of the High Court will order Julian to be extradited. In the upper reaches of the masonry that is the British judiciary there are, I understand, still those who believe in real law and real justice from which the term “British justice” takes its sanctified reputation in the land of the Magna Carta. It now rests on their ermined shoulders whether that history lives on or dies.

    I sat with Stella in the court’s colonnade while she drafted words to say to the crowd of media and well-wishers outside in the sunshine. Clip-clopping along came Clair Dobbin, spruced, ponytail swinging, bearing her carton of files: a figure of certainty: she who said Julian Assange was “not so ill” that he would consider suicide. How does she know?

    Has Ms. Dobbin worked her way through the medieval maze at Belmarsh to sit with Julian in his yellow arm band, as Professors Koppelman and Melzer have done, and Stella has done, and I have done? Never mind. The Americans have now “promised” not to put him in a hellhole, just as they “promised” not to torture Chelsea Manning, just as they promised ……

    And has she read the WikiLeaks’ leak of a Pentagon document dated 15 March, 2009? This foretold the current war on journalism. U.S. intelligence, it said, intended to destroy WikiLeaks’ and Julian Assange’s “centre of gravity” with threats and “criminal prosecution”. Read all 32 pages and you are left in no doubt that silencing and criminalising independent journalism was the aim, smear the method.

    I tried to catch Ms. Dobbin’s gaze, but she was on her way: job done.

    Outside, Stella struggled to contain her emotion. This is one brave woman, as indeed her man is an exemplar of courage. “What has not been discussed today,” said Stella, “is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and for Julian’s life. The constant threats and intimidation we endured for years, which has been terrorising us and has been terrorising Julian for 10 years. We have a right to live, we have a right to exist and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.”
    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions. - Robert Anton Wilson

    The present as you think of it, and in practical working terms, is that point at which you select your physical experience from all those events that could be materialized. - Seth (The Nature of Personal Reality - Session 656, Page 293)

    (avatar image: Brocken spectre, a wonderful phenomenon of nature I have experienced and a symbol for my aspirations.)

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  19. Link to Post #450
    UK Moderator/Librarian/Administrator Tintin's Avatar
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    Default CIA grab-team footage from 2017

    Following the confirmation that the CIA had planned a 'hit' on Julian and (presumably) other associates, WikiLeaks have provided a link to the Archive.org resource of footage strongly believed to be showing a CIA grab team staking out the Ecuadorean Embassy in late 2017.



    Source: https://ia801008.us.archive.org/14/i...mpetition1.mp4

    Last edited by Tintin; 27th September 2021 at 13:25.
    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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    Default Re: Julian Assange arrested after Ecuador tears up asylum deal

    CIA was ready to wage gun battle in London streets against Russian operatives to kill or snatch Assange, bombshell report claims
    https://www.rt.com/usa/535871-cia-war-assange-yahoo/
    26 Sep, 2021 14:43

    Under Obama, the CIA wanted to define Julian Assange and other journalists as “information brokers” in order to ramp up their spying on them. And during the Trump era, it prepared plans to abduct or kill the WikiLeaks founder.

    The claims about the extraordinary lengths to which the CIA under Director Mike Pompeo were prepared to go to get Assange were made on Sunday in a Yahoo News report based on interviews with more than 30 former US officials. The report offers an insight into how the US national security apparatus was escalating its war with WikiLeaks under two consecutive US administrations.

    At the peak of preparations for hostilities in 2017, the CIA was allegedly expecting Russian agents to help Assange flee the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. In such a contingency, the Americans, together with the British, were planning to engage in street battles against the Russians, potentially starting a firefight, ramming a Russian diplomatic vehicle, or shooting at the tires of a Russian plane to prevent it from lifting off, the story said. The attempt to spring Assange was reportedly expected on Christmas Eve.

    “It was beyond comical,” a former senior official told the outlet regarding the situation in the vicinity of the embassy at the time. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services – whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”

    The CIA was also deliberating plans to kill Assange and other members of WikiLeaks, the report said. Alternatively, the agency was considering snatching him from the embassy and bringing him to the US, or handing him over to the British authorities. At the time, the UK wanted Assange for skipping bail in an extradition trial on a request from Sweden – a case that has since been dropped.

    The possibility of carrying out a successful rendition or assassination were described as “ridiculous” by one intelligence official, because of the location. “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt – we’re talking about London,” the source was quoted as saying. There was also resistance in the Trump administration because such an operation might be deemed illegal under US law. A source said using CIA powers meant only for spy-versus-spy activities would be “the same kind of crap we pulled in the War on Terror.”

    As far as the CIA was concerned, WikiLeaks prompted these extreme measures after the so-called ‘Vault 7’ publications, which exposed a cyber-offensive toolkit used by US agents. The leak of those tools was a major humiliation for US intelligence, so “Pompeo and [then-Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange,” Yahoo was told.

    Pompeo had to do some legal maneuvering so the agency could go more aggressively after Assange and WikiLeaks without having then-president Donald Trump sign off such operations. When, shortly after taking office, he infamously called WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” during a public speech, it was more than just rhetoric, according to the report. Designating in that way allowed the CIA to file its snooping under “offensive counterintelligence” activities, which it’s allowed to conduct on its own volition.

    “I don’t think people realize how much [the] CIA can do under offensive [counterintelligence] and how there is minimal oversight of it,” a former official said.

    While Pompeo’s CIA ramped up its “war on WikiLeaks” to 11, even under then-president Barack Obama the agency was likewise angling for ways to target the transparency group. It lobbied the White House to redesignate WikiLeaks and a number of high-profile journalists, including Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras as “information brokers,” allowing more surveillance powers to be deployed against them, the report says.

    “Is WikiLeaks a journalistic outlet? Are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald truly journalists?” a source speculated in an interview with Yahoo News. “We tried to change the definition of them, and I preached this to the White House, and got rejected.”

    Ultimately, Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy and currently remains in custody in a high-security British prison. The US has appealed a court decision to deny its request to extradite him on charges related to hacking. Proceedings are expected to resume next month.

    Concerns about jeopardizing the US case against Assange were among the factors that prevented the CIA’s plants from going further, according to Yahoo News. Assange’s defense team hopes this proves true.

    “My hope and expectation is that the UK courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite him to the US,” his lawyer, Barry Pollack, told the outlet when asked about the alleged CIA plans targeting his client.

    Resentment towards Assange is a bipartisan endeavor in the US establishment. Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 election, reportedly joked about “droning” the Australian citizen back in 2010, but later said she didn’t remember having said that.

    The presidential election and WikiLeaks’ publication of Democratic emails was a pivotal moment for the CIA’s campaign against Assange, according to Yahoo News, since it was able to claim the leak was carried out in collaboration with Russian intelligence. WikiLeaks denied it and Moscow insists the accusation of election interference was baseless and was part of the Democrats’ attempt to downplay Clinton’s defeat.

    https://www.rt.com/usa/535871-cia-war-assange-yahoo/

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    Default Re: Julian Assange arrested after Ecuador tears up asylum deal

    Quote Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)
    • Julian Assange and WikiLeaks — story of a whistleblower | Documentary:
    In the library since July 6th 2021

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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    Pompeo Effectively Admits To Assange Allegations
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/09...e-allegations/
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

    (There are Tweets, a sound recording and videos which I haven't embedded here, but a Mod might want to. It's a good article!)


    We are unable to embed soundcloud at this time, enjoy listening at the link:

    https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?vis...&maxwidth=1060

    "In the process of issuing another not-really-a-denial about a Yahoo News report that the CIA plotted to kidnap, extradite and assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017, former CIA director Mike Pompeo said that the 30 former government officials the report was based on “should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

    Here are some quotes from the exchange on Pompeo’s recent Megyn Kelly Show appearance courtesy of Mediaite:

    Kelly asked Pompeo about the claims.

    “Makes for pretty good fiction, Megyn,” said Pompeo. “They should write such a novel.”

    He added, “Whoever those 30 people who allegedly spoke with one of these reporters, they should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

    Pompeo called Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” that is “actively seeking to steal American classified information.”

    “You deny the report?” asked Kelly.

    “There’s pieces of it that are true,” said Pompeo. “We tried to protect American information from Julian Assange and Wikileaks, absolutely, yes. Did our justice department believe they had a valid claim which would’ve resulted in the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial? Yes. I supported that effort for sure. Did we ever engage in activity that was inconsistent with U.S. law?… We’re not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations. We never acted in a way that was inconsistent with that.”



    Pompeo’s point that “We’re not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations” is not especially convincing considering how the Trump administration openly assassinated Iran’s top military commander Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike last year, a move which Pompeo supported and defended.

    “President Trump and those of us in his national security team are re-establishing deterrence, real deterrence, against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo gushed in support of the assassination at the time.

    Pompeo’s pseudo-denial is of course further undermined by his position that the former officials who spoke to the press should all be prosecuted for “speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.” Is it false or is it “classified activity”? It can’t be both. The two things Pompeo admitted to, trying to “protect American information” and working to extradite Assange, are not classified information. The classified information he wants them prosecuted for is therefore something else.

    After a lot of flailing and humming and hawing Pompeo does eventually make what sounds like a concrete denial with the curiously-worded phrase “I can say we never conducted planning to violate US law.” But even this wouldn’t be a denial of the claims in the Yahoo News report, because the report is mostly about the intelligence community and the Trump administration trying to find legal loopholes that would allow them to take out Assange.

    For example, this quote from the Yahoo News article: “A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal.” This would in no way be contradicted by Pompeo’s claim that “we never conducted planning to violate US law.” It would mean that there were discussions and plans about assassinating Assange amid conversations and debates about whether it would be legal to do so. The fact that they didn’t plan to violate US law doesn’t mean they didn’t plan to assassinate Assange if they could find a legal loophole for it.



    This follows an earlier non-denial by Pompeo of the exact same nature in an interview with conservative pundit Glenn Beck. Pompeo points out that one of the article’s authors was a Russiagater and says of the former officials cited in the report that “those sources didn’t know what we were doing.” But he doesn’t actually deny it.

    If Pompeo had not been involved in plots to kidnap, rendition and assassinate Julian Assange, he would have just said so. He wouldn’t have engaged in all kinds of verbal gymnastics to squirm his way out of a difficult question, and he certainly wouldn’t be calling for the criminal prosecution of his accusers for “speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

    Mike Pompeo is a literal psychopath. He chuckles about lying, cheating and stealing with the CIA. He defends murderous sanctions and openly admits to using them to foment civil war in empire-targeted nations. He defends assassination. He strongly implied the US would interfere in UK politics if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister. And yet somehow he escaped the Trump administration the mass media so despised with nary a scratch of media criticism on him.

    This is because Mike Pompeo, as full of centipedes and demon spawn as his enormous head may be, is highly representative of the mainstream US power establishment. He is the embodiment of the empire’s values. He’s just one of its less-subtle representatives."

    Also posted here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1454823
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    Default Thordason jailed in Iceland

    As it relates to Julian's situation it will be interesting to see where this leads next. I'd admit to not feeling optimistic but there's a slim hope (perhaps) that the extradition case will career off the tracks.

    Couldn't Iceland perhaps rescue Julian?

    In any case, it's pretty big news here all the same although the main thrust being that this appears to be mainly an Iceland domestic incident/multiple instances of violation of local laws.

    ----------------------

    "Last week we learned of the CIA plan to kidnap or kill Assange in the centre of London and now the key witness of the US prosecution against him is in prison for serial offences - the same person that a few weeks ago confirmed in interviews that the elements in the indictment against Julian where he was the only witness, were total fabrications. The case against Assange should be dropped and under no circumstances, given recent revelations, can the UK extradite him.”
    - Kristin Hrafnsson

    Key witness in Assange case jailed in Iceland after admitting to lies and ongoing crime spree

    Source: https://stundin.is/grein/14117/socio...g-crime-spree/

    The judgment utilizes a rar­ely in­vo­ked law in­t­ended to stop repeat of­f­end­ers from runn­ing amok and accumulat­ing crim­inal cases before the system has a chance to catch up.

    Sigurdur Thordarson, a key witness for the FBI against Julian Assange, has been jailed in Iceland. The notorious alleged hacker and convicted pedophile was remanded to custody in Iceland’s highest security prison, Litla Hraun, on September 24. Þórðarson´s lawyer, Húnbogi J. Andersen, confirms that he is in custody. Thordarson was given immunity by the FBI in exchange for testimony against Julian Assange.

    Thordarson was arrested the same day he arrived back in Iceland from a trip to Spain, and was subsequently brought before a judge after police requested indefinite detention intended to halt an ongoing crime spree. The judge apparently agreed that Thordarson’s repeated, blatant and ongoing offences against the law put him at high risk for continued re-offending.

    On a crime spree accourding to the Icelandic police
    The judgment utilizes a rarely invoked law intended to stop repeat offenders from running amok and continuing to violate the law before the system has a chance to catch up. It requires very specific criteria to be met and the legal bar is set high. One can only be remanded to custody under the law if there is a clear and present reason to assume the offender will continue on a path of crime as long as he is a free man and thus pose a danger to the public.

    Whether Thordarson’s recent admissions to Stundin about his continued crime spree played any part in this decision is unknown at this time.

    Indeed, he plainly admitted to continuing his crimes in a recent interview with Stundin. In the same interview he said: “The idea behind all the companies [that I run in Iceland] is to squeeze out every last penny, knowing it will inevitably lead to bankruptcy by request of the tax authorities and the bill would end with them. Is it illegal? No, it’s just very immoral, that much I would agree with. But I have not heard of anyone being convicted for this sort of thing,” he claimed. Yet people have been convicted of very similar things in Iceland.

    Key witness for the FBI
    Thordarson is a key witness for the United States Justice Department according to documents presented to a UK court in an effort to secure the extradition of Julian Assange. He was recruited by US authorities to build a case against Assange after misleading them to believe he was previously a close associate of his. In a recent interview with Stundin he admitted to fabricating statements to implicate Assange and contradicted what he was quoted as saying in US court documents.

    In fact he had volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010 but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than $50,000 from the organization. Julian Assange was visiting Thordarson’s home country of Iceland around this time due to his work with Icelandic media and members of parliament in preparing the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a press freedom project that produced a parliamentary resolution supporting whistleblowers and investigative journalism.

    [article continues...]
    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    House Intelligence Committee Seeks Answers from CIA on Plot Against Assange
    October 19, 2021
    By Joe Lauria
    Consortium News
    https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/1...TUkaHXzNchEN7A

    "The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee told Yahoo! News that the committee has asked Langley to explain reports of plans to kill or kidnap the WikiLeaks publisher.

    Adam Schiff, the chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday the committee has requested information from the CIA about reported plans to assassinate or abduct Julian Assange, the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher.

    Schiff told Yahoo! News that the request has already been made to the agency but refused to comment on whether the CIA has yet replied, the news site reported.

    Schiff acted after reading a Yahoo! story last month that confirmed and expanded upon earlier reports from a Spanish court case that the CIA was seriously discussing killing or renditioning Assange.

    Assange is next week to face a U.S. appeal of a January decision by lower court Judge Vanessa Baraitser not to extradite him because of a high-risk of suicide. The U.S. is seeking to overturn the ruling that Assange is too sick to be sent to a U.S. prison. U.S. prosecutors allege that Assange is a malingerer.

    Assange’s lawyers intend to bring up the CIA’s plans. Yahoo! reported Tuesday that “lawyers for Assange intend to raise the issue of what they view as the CIA’s misconduct, arguing that returning him to a country where some top officials once plotted to kidnap him strengthens the judge’s conclusions about the risk of suicide and should be an additional basis for turning down the U.S. extradition request.”

    Baraitser, who heard testimony in Assange’s extradition hearing about the CIA plot against him, showed little concern, even sympathy with the agency, writing in her judgement that “if the allegations are true, they demonstrate a high level of concern by the US authorities regarding Mr. Assange’s ongoing activities.”

    The CIA plot against Assange was discussed at senior levels of the Trump administration and was instigated by Trump’s CIA chief Mike Pompeo, Yahoo! reported. Schiff was a bitter foe of Donald Trump. The Yahoo! reporting mentions that discussions about covert action against Assange had already been discussed in the Obama administration, presumably by Obama’s CIA director John Brennan.

    Fears that he could be assassinated go back to at least October 2010, when the Obama CIA refused to say if there were such plans after a Freedom of Information Act request. This tweet is from eleven years ago:

    Quote WikiLeaks
    @wikileaks
    CIA refuses to confirm or deny plot to assassinate WikiLeaks editor; open government-Obama style http://is.gd/gLvcn
    8:34 PM · Nov 5, 2010
    88
    9
    Share this Tweet
    Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional work as a stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe . "
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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    Chief Justice of England & Wales, Who Blocked Lauri Love Extradition, Joins Bench for Assange Hearing
    October 22, 2021
    https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/2...Wqqg5_SHR_Vu8w
    By Joe Lauria
    Consortium News



    "The most senior judge in England and Wales, who let activist Lori Love evade extradition to the U.S. on humanitarian grounds, will join Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde at the U.S. appeal hearing against Julian Assange next week.
    Ian Duncan Burnett, the most powerful judge in England and Wales, will join Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde on the bench next week for the two-day U.S. appeal in the extradition case of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange at the High Court in London, according to a spokesman at the Royal Courts of Justice.

    Burnett, known as Baron Burnett of Maldon, was the High Court justice who on humanitarian grounds overturned a lower court ruling that British activist Lauri Love should be extradited to the United States. Burnett ruled in February 2018 that Love’s extradition would be “oppressive by reason of his physical and mental condition.”

    Burnett and Mr. Justice Duncan Ouseley said in their decision that, “We accept that the evidence shows that the fact of extradition would bring on severe depression, and that Mr. Love would probably be determined to commit suicide, here or in America.”

    Instead they recommended that Love be tried in the United Kingdom on charges of hacking into U.S. government computers. Unlike Love, Assange is accused of no crimes in Britain. But like Love, he has been deemed (by the magistrate’s court) at high risk of suicide if he were to be extradited to the United States.

    The U.S. is appealing the lower court’s decision not to extradite Assange to the U.S. based on his propensity for suicide. The U.S. is arguing that Assange is not too sick to be sent to the U.S. and that he is a malingerer.

    Holroyde is the High Court judge who on Aug. 11 reversed an earlier High Court order limiting the U.S. from appealing Assange’s medical issues. Holroyde was originally to sit with Dame Judith Farbey, according to the Ministry of Justice.

    Burnett has presided over some of the most high profile cases in Britain in recent years, including the 1987 Kings Cross fire, the inquiry into the convictions of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, the 1997 Southall rail crash and 1999 Ladbroke Grove rail crash inquiries and the 1997 inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed.

    Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former UN correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London and began his professional work as a stringer for The New York Times. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe . "
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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    Time Assange was freed - this is not just an unconscionable situation of justice, but an unconscionable excuse for political stand-offs, this man is NOT a PAWN. He is just an honest international HUMAN journalist who are now a rare breed. Let him go free to prove we are not monsters who deny reality. FREE ASSANGE, he has a wife and children.
    The love you withhold is the pain that you carry
    and er..
    "Chariots of the Globs" (apols to Fat Freddy's Cat)

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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent
    OCTOBER 28, 2021
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/10/28/the-assange-persecution-is-western-savagery-at-its-most-transparent

    https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue/the-assange-persecution-is-western-savagery-at-its-most-transparent

    https://projectavalon.net/The_Assang..._Oct_2021).mp3

    "The first day of the US appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the US government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats its other prisoners.

    I wish I was kidding.

    In their write-up on Wednesday’s proceedings, The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that “the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the U.S. government offered ‘assurances’ that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado.”

    What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange’s health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer “assurances” that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.
    Quote Mohamed Elmaazi
    @MElmaazi
    Prosecution bashes judge for blocking Julian Assange’s extradition

    My latest w/ @kgosztola via The Dissenterhttps://thedissenter.org/prosecutor-attacks-judges-decision-which-blocked-us-from-extraditing-assange/ …


    Prosecutor Bashes Judge For Blocking Assange Extradition
    At the High Court of Justice, the Crown Prosecution Service presented U.S. government's appeal in the extradition case against Julian Assange.

    thedissenter.org
    45
    5:05 PM - Oct 27, 2021
    What’s ridiculous about these “assurances”, apart from the obvious, is that within its own legal argument the US government reserves the right to reverse those assurances at any time and impose SAMs or maximum security imprisonment upon Assange if it deems them necessary. As Amnesty International explains:

    “They say: we guarantee that he won’t be held in a maximum security facility and he will not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures and he will get healthcare. But if he does something that we don’t like, we reserve the right to not guarantee him, we reserve the right to put him in a maximum security facility, we reserve the right to offer him Special Administrative Measures. Those are not assurances at all. It is not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise.”

    So the prosecution’s legal argument here is essentially “We promise we won’t treat Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to.”

    This is not just a reflection on the weakness of the extradition appeal, it’s a reflection on the savagery of all the so-called free democracies that have involved themselves in this case.
    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    This argument made minutes after Assange had to excuse himself from his own hearing due to ill health. https://twitter.com/kgosztola/status...26702155870213

    Kevin Gosztola

    @kgosztola
    Replying to @kgosztola
    The position of the Crown Prosecution Service—and therefore the US government—is that Assange's medical problems are limited to his mental condition. Because Love's problems were physical and mental, Love should not apply to the Assange case.

    109
    6:46 AM - Oct 27, 2021
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
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    This same prosecution argued that Assange should not be denied US extradition from the UK on humanitarian grounds as in the case of activist Lauri Love because Love suffered from both physical and psychological ailments while Assange’s ailments are only psychological. They stood before the court and made this argument even as Assange was visibly pained and unwell in his video appearance from Belmarsh, which he was only able to attend intermittently due to his frail condition.

    “For my newspaper, I have worked as media partner of WikiLeaks since 2009,” tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi who attended the hearing via video link. “I have seen Julian Assange in all sorts of situations, but I have never ever seen him so unwell and so dangerously thin.”

    So they’re just openly brutalizing a journalist for exposing US war crimes, while arguing that they can be trusted to treat him humanely and give him a fair trial if granted extradition. This after it has already been confirmed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him during the Trump administration, after we learned that the prosecution relied on false testimony from a convicted child molester and diagnosed sociopath, after it was revealed that the CIA spied on Assange and his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy, and after intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein famously died under highly suspicious circumstances in a US prison cell.

    Quote Consortium News
    #Assange Lawyer in Fiery Rebuttal at Day’s Conclusion https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/2...ys-conclusion/

    DAY ONE: Assange Lawyer in Fiery Rebuttal at Day's Conclusion
    Edward Fitzgerald QC, a lawyer for Julian Assange, ended the first day of the U.S. appeal with a thunderous response to the case put forward by a prosecutor for the United States. Consortium News has...
    consortiumnews.com
    133
    2:45 PM - Oct 27, 2021
    The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category.

    The goal is to set a legal precedent which allows journalists who expose the crimes of the powerful to be persecuted not covertly as is normally done in “free democracies”, but right out in the open. To tell journalists “We’ll just throw you in prison if you cross us.”

    What makes this precedent uniquely dangerous is that it is not just threatening to imprison American journalists who expose US crimes, but any journalist anywhere in the world. This is an Australian journalist in the process of being extradited from the UK for publishing facts about US war crimes in the nations it has invaded. The aim is to set up a system where anyone in the US-aligned world can be funneled into its prison system for publishing inconvenient facts.

    This is the savagery of the western world at its most transparent. It’s not the greatest evil the US-centralized empire has perpetrated; that distinction would certainly be reserved for its acts of mass military slaughter that it has been inflicting upon our species with impunity for generations. But it’s the most brazen. The most overt. It’s the most powerful part of the most depraved power structure on earth looking us all right in the eyes and telling us exactly what it is.

    And if we can really look at this beast and what it is doing right now, really see it with eyes wide open, it reveals far more about those who rule over us than anything any journalist has ever exposed."
    Last edited by Bill Ryan; 29th October 2021 at 15:13. Reason: embedded the MP3
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  37. Link to Post #459
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    Default Assange Defence Appeal Arguments and Extradition Glossary

    As ever, I've been keeping as close an eye as possible on the current episode in Julian's plight, namely the US appeal, and there's a lot of synoptic and sympathetic commentary from multiple sources doing their level best to keep us informed that it is simply too much to be posting up as it comes in.

    For interest - and this is too large to embed here - here's the link to the Assange defence team Appeal arguments and extradition glossary:

    https://defend.wikileaks.org/wp-cont...n-Glossary.pdf
    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
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    Default Re: Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

    From Press Freedom To Prison Systems, Everything Assange Touches Gets Illuminated
    OCTOBER 29, 2021
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/10...s-illuminated/

    https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue/f...ts-illuminated

    "The US appeal of a British court ruling on the Assange extradition case has concluded, and the judges will probably not have a decision ready until at least January—a full year after the extradition was denied by a lower court. Assange, despite being convicted of no crime, will have remained in Belmarsh Prison the entire time.

    During that time the judges will be weighing arguments they’d heard about the cruel nature of the US prison system, which formed a major part of the reasoning behind Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s rejection of the US extradition request. They’ll be considering the draconian policy of Special Administrative Measures, whose victims are cut off from human contact and from the outside world. They’ll be considering the brutality of the supermax ADX facility in Florence, Colorado whose inmates are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, and where Assange could easily wind up imprisoned despite the prosecution’s flimsy assurances.

    Assange probably never set out on this journey with the goal of calling attention to the abuses of the US prison system as his foremost priority, but, as is so often the case with anything his journey touches, those abuses keep getting pulled into the light of public awareness anyway. His case is now no longer just about press freedom, US war crimes, corrupt governments collaborating to stomp out inconvenient truth tellers, and the malfeasance of US alphabet agencies, but about the abusive nature of the US prison system as well.

    Quote Consortium News
    @Consortiumnews
    Chris Hedges: The Most Important Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time https://consortiumnews.com/2021/10/2...m-in-our-time/
    Chris Hedges: The Most Important Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time
    If Assange he is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting. By Chris Hedges in Washington, D.C....

    consortiumnews.com
    399
    8:16 PM - Oct 28, 2021
    And this is a big part of what I find so endlessly captivating about the life of this extraordinary individual. No matter what he’s doing, no matter where he is, no matter how beaten down and silenced and immobilized they may appear to have him, his life keeps exposing things. Keeps bringing things into the light.

    It’s been a constant throughout his life as near as I can tell, from when he was a young man using his technical prowess to help Australian police bring down distributors of online child pornography in the mid-nineties. This curious impulse to bring what is hidden in the dark out into the light where it can be seen is what gave birth to WikiLeaks and all the major revelations about the criminality and corruption of the powerful which resulted from its publications.

    And as paradigm-shattering as those many bombshell revelations were, they were arguably small potatoes compared to the criminality Assange exposed by simply standing his ground until the most powerful institutions in the world conspired to drag him from the Ecuadorian embassy and lock him in Belmarsh Prison for telling the truth.

    Assange created an innovative publishing platform which allowed whistleblowers to upload files anonymously on the premise that corrupt power needs to be able to communicate secretly in order to operate efficiently. Corrupt power responded by silencing, immobilizing, isolating, imprisoning and torturing him. In so doing, corrupt power exposed itself and its true nature far more than any WikiLeaks drop ever could.

    Since Assange’s imprisonment there’s been a jaw-dropping deluge of revelations about the malfeasance of the power structures which rule over us which could not have been exposed to such an extent in any other way.

    It was revealed that the US power alliance will openly jail journalists for telling the truth with as much brazenness and despotism as any other tyrannical regime, giving US-targeted nations the ability to rightly call out the hypocrisy of Washington’s concern trolling about human rights.

    Quote Hua Chunying 华春莹

    @SpokespersonCHN

    China government official
    If the #US truly defends freedom, why won't they allow others to tell the truth when they are making up lies? Why has Mr. #Assange been thrown in prison after being forced to shelter in the #Ecuadorian Embassy in London for 7 years?
    https://twitter.com/i/status/1391792014388121600
    3,319
    11:27 AM - May 10, 2021
    It was revealed that because he inconvenienced the most powerful government in the world, Assange has been subjected to abuses which amount to psychological torture according to a UN special rapporteur on torture.

    It was revealed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate Assange, an earth-shaking discovery we wouldn’t have been able to confirm for decades under normal circumstances, but due to a miraculous combination of partisan feuding and their frantic compulsion to silence him it was confirmed just a few short years after the fact.

    It was revealed that CIA proxies spied on Assange and his lawyers at the Ecuadorian embassy and conspired to collect the DNA of his child from a soiled diaper.

    It was revealed that the US prosecution relied on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester who collaborated with the FBI.

    It was revealed that the western news media are so propagandistic and morally bankrupt that they will viciously smear a dissident journalist for years to manufacture consent for his arrest and imprisonment, and then act completely guiltless when the most powerful government on earth works to extradite him into its dungeons.

    And now we’re seeing the same US government which has been plotting this man’s destruction and even death for many years humiliating itself by hilariously trying to argue that he would be safe under their care, just so they can get their claws into him. Like Count Olaf in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events taking on whatever disguise might allow him to nab the Baudelaire orphans.

    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent

    "So the prosecution's legal argument here is essentially 'We promise we won't treat Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to.'"https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-assange-persecution-is-western …


    The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent
    The first day of the US appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the US government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder...

    caitlinjohnstone.substack.com
    799
    7:44 PM - Oct 27, 2021
    The more they come after him, the more damage they do to themselves. It’s like Assange is standing in a beam of sunlight surrounded by vampires, and every time they reach in to grab him they wind up disintegrating their own limbs.

    Their old tactics never seem to have the intended effect. The harder they struggle to keep him from being able to expose their crimes, the more of their own criminality they reveal.

    It always reminds me of the lyrics to that Johnny Cash song: “Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand, workin’ in the dark against your fellow man/ But as sure as God made black and white, what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.”

    And the struggles of our world today really do seem to come down to a battle between light and darkness. I say this not in any kind of mystical or metaphysical sense, but in the sense that there are on all levels forces which wish to bring the unseen out of hiddenness and forces which have a vested interest in keeping things hidden.

    On the global level there are vast power structures which have a vested interest in keeping their misdeeds out of public attention and making sure we all remain confused and misinformed about what’s really going on in the world. On a sociological level there are individuals who have a vested interest in keeping their personal actions out of the light and preventing anyone from clearly seeing what they’re really up to. On an internal level we’ve all got subconscious forces at play within ourselves whose existence depends on avoiding the light of conscious perception.

    And on every level there’s a struggle to bring those things into the light. On a global level there are forces working to expose the corruption and tyranny of ruling power structures. On a sociological level there are forces working to expose liars, manipulators, abusers, crooks and psychopaths. On an internal level there are always forces working to bring the endarkened aspects of ourselves into consciousness.



    It’s a struggle that’s happening on every level of our species, and Julian Assange seems to be one of the very brightest points in that struggle.

    It appears to be a very reliable principle of the human condition that if you firmly and sincerely resolve deep within yourself to desire truth above all else and to seek it at all cost, it causes everything your life touches to move into the light: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Hidden psychological tendencies become seen, understood and resolved. Abusive family dynamics, manipulative behavior patterns and everything untruthful around you and in you all starts to move into the spotlight. Some relationships end, others deepen. It upends your world while grounding you in something far more meaningful than the sources in which you’d formerly sought stability.

    This movement into truth can be devastating, humbling, humiliating or downright terrifying, and sometimes all of them at once, because it’s a relinquishing of control and a surrendering to whatever’s true, no matter what that turns out to be, no matter how insecure or embarrassed or inadequate it might make you feel at first. But looking back there’s an immediate understanding that you wouldn’t have had it any other way.

    I don’t know Julian Assange personally, but I suspect he may have signed an internal contract like this at some point in his life. The desire for truth, come what may, whatever the cost, whatever the consequences. Whether he did or did not, that has been the result of the luminescent path his journey has blazed through humanity during his time on this planet. And the world is a much better place for it."
    Each breath a gift...
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