JULIAN ASSANGE ROTS IN JAIL AS US SLAUGHTERS FIRST AMENDMENT

From CounterPunch
18 JUNE 2021
Julian Assange Rots in Jail as U.S. Slaughters First Amendment
BY EVE OTTENBERG

Photograph Source: thierry ehrmann – CC BY 2.0

Years pass, and journalist Julian Assange languishes in a British jail. His crime? Truthful reporting of U.S. military atrocities in Iraq, reporting that sparked a lust for vengeance among U.S. politicos and military men. With Assange, the American empire would manage what imperialists couldn’t with whistleblower Edward Snowden, who slipped through their fingers by wisely fleeing to Russia – namely, torture him to death in prison.

For whatever reason, perhaps a mistaken belief in the rule of law, the power of a free press and the force of public opinion, Assange did not take refuge in Russia, China or Venezuela. This was a fatal mistake. Legal niceties simply fall like matchsticks in the wind when the empire takes offense. Its gaudy invocations of truth and justice are then exposed as mere words.

If you doubt that, recall U.S. military jets forcing the grounding of Bolivian president Evo Morales’ plane in Vienna in 2013, because Obama hacks were convinced Snowden hid on board en route to Latin America. The U.S. didn’t hesitate to violate international law, not for a second. Eight years later, the West hollers its outrage over the authoritarian government of Belarus doing the same thing. But it’s useless to call out this hypocrisy, because the U.S. does what it pleases almost anywhere in the world, and the first law of its precious, thoroughly mendacious rules-based order is that those rules never apply to IT.

That so-called rules-based order very damagingly replaces international laws and United Nations agreements. If the U.S. abided by a system of laws applied to all countries equally, it would not impose criminal sanctions on countries it deems too independent; hunger would not stalk Venezuelans, plague would not sicken Iranians, because without sanctions, both would have access to food and medicine. If the U.S. abided by international law, it would not so easily snap its fingers and have a vassal state like the UK assault its own hallowed legacy of press freedom by locking up a journalist in a dungeon.

Think – if the U.S. honored international law, another country might even take legal action against American judicial abuses, like the de facto double jeopardy of Chelsea Manning. Even more critically, if the U.S. adhered to international law, which includes the Nuremberg laws, it never would have committed the war crime that caused its scandalous treatment of Assange and Manning to begin with – namely, invading and destroying Iraq.

Assange has suffered from years holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he sought asylum. Dignitaries like Hillary Clinton lamented publicly that he couldn’t be “droned.” The press vilified him for everything from a phony rape case to how he treats his cat. He has been held for years in Belmarsh prison, full of murderers and covid. And yet, if extradited to the U.S., his treatment would surely be shockingly worse. That’s why judge Vanessa Baraitser, no friend to Assange, whom journalist Chris Hedges in fact compares to the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, refused his extradition in January – she thought he would commit suicide.

Speaking of the extremely anti-Assange biased Baraitser and how she managed her courtroom, Hedges called the trial “a judicial farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Julian in the embassy…recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial.”

Hedges also cites the indispensable reporting of Craig Murray, who documented how the U.S. government directed the London prosecutor, James Lewis. “Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser,” Hedges writes. “Bariatser adopted them as her legal decision. It was judicial pantomime.” Close to one thousand years of English law just whooshed out the window with what this courtroom travesty inflicted on Assange, and scarcely a peep about it in our cowardly corporate media.

Those already alarmed by the life-threatening abuse heaped on Assange and Manning by the U.S. government surely noted that prospects for the longevity of the first amendment dimmed even more in early June. That’s when news came of a justice department assault on the first amendment, brewing below the headlines, since the close of the Trump administration. I say below the headlines, because while the four New York Times reporters whose emails the DOJ had demanded did not know about this, Times executives did. However, the Biden administration had imposed a gag order on those executives.

This battle for the emails started under Trump – no surprise there, from that sworn enemy of truth and a free press – and continued under Biden, for the first few months of his administration. Biden’s March 3 “gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government’s efforts to seize the records,” according to the Times on June 4, “even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.”

The Biden administration ultimately “notified the four reporters that the Trump administration, hunting for their sources, had in 2020 secretly seized months of their phone records from early 2017,” the Times reported. Google had refused to cooperate with these prosecutorial excesses. A similar confiscation of records and gag order involving CNN and the Washington Post unfolded recently also.

If this news didn’t chill every reporter and potential source who read about it, I don’t know what would. It is classic, brazen, government overreach to subvert freedom of the press. The Times article also reveals that “the government had never before seized the Times’ phone records without advance notification of the effort.” So things are getting worse. U.S. rulers and their legal henchmen became even more arrogant under Trump. Surprise! But it didn’t stop there. There were also secret seizures of congressional phone records. The Trump team drove several nails in the coffin of the first and fourth amendments, and the Biden folks quite tellingly hesitated for months to pull them out.

So while Biden claims to support free speech, actions speak louder than words. Prosecuting Julian Assange speaks loudest of all. If Assange is convicted under the Espionage Act, that will kill off the first amendment once and for all. It will mean any reporter, of any nationality, working in any country, who digs into the U.S. government’s dirt, risks fatal grasp in the empire’s iron talons, namely, being hustled onto a plane, hijacked to Northern Virginia, charged with Espionage Act violations and being buried alive, for 175 years, in supermax, solitary confinement. True, most reporters are far too timorous ever to find themselves in that predicament. But for those brave souls who do, it will be cold and bitter comfort to know that their abduction, arrest and imprisonment testify to the truth of their reporting.

.Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Birdbrain. She can be reached at her website.

WORSE THAN THE DREYFUSS AFFAIR: THE PERSECUTION OF JULIAN ASSANGE

12 May 2021
Worse Than the Dreyfuss Affair: the Persecution of Julian Assange
by Alfred de Zayas
Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

It may appear unnecessary to repeat the truism that democracy depends on transparency and accountability, and yet, how often has the democratic order been betrayed by our leaders in the recent past? How often have the media abandoned their watchdog function, how often have they simply accepted the role of an echo-chamber for the powerful, whether government or transnational corporations?

Among the many scandals and betrayals of democracy and the rule of law we recognize the persecution of inconvenient journalists by governments and their helpers in the media. Perhaps the most scandalous and immoral example of the multinational corruption of the rule of law is the “lawfare” conducted against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who in the year 2010 uncovered war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the United States and its NATO allies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In a world where the rule of law matters, these war crimes would have been promptly investigated, indictments would have been issued in the countries concerned. But no, the ire of the governments and the media focused instead on the journalist who had dared to uncover these crimes. The persecution of this journalist was a coordinated assault on the rule of law by the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden, later joined by Ecuador. The instrumentalization of the administration of justice – not for purposes of doing justice, but to destroy a human being pulled more and more people into a joint-criminal conspiracy of defamation, trumped-up charges, investigations without indictment, deliberate delays and covers-up.

In April 2021 my colleague, Professor Nils Melzer, the UN Rapporteur on torture, published a meticulously researched and methodically unassailable documentation of this almost incredible saga. His book, The Case of Julian Assange (Piper Verlag, München 2021), can well be called the “J’accuse” of our time, reminding us how our authorities have betrayed us, how four governments colluded in the corruption of the rule of law. Like Emile Zola, who in 1898 exposed the web of lies surrounding the scandalous judicial framing of the French Colonel Alfred Dreyfuss in France, Nils Melzer shocks us 122 years later with proof of how countries that are ostensibly committed to the rule of law and human rights can betray the democratic ethos with the complicity of the mainstream media. Melzer writes about “concrete evidence of political persecution, gross arbitrariness on the part of the administration of justice and deliberate torture and abuse.”

This is an enormously important book because it requires us to abandon our “comfort zone” and demand transparency and accountability from our governments. Indeed, it is scandalous that none of the four governments involved in the frame-up cooperated with Professor Melzer and only answered with “political platitudes.” Me too, I experienced the same lack of cooperation from powerful countries to whom I addressed notes verbales concerning violations of human rights – none of them responded satisfactorily.

Melzer reminds us of Hans-Christian Andersen’s fable “The Emperor’s new clothes”. Indeed, everyone involved in the Assange frame-up consistently maintains the illusion of legality and repeats the same untruths, until an observer says – but the emperor has no clothes! That is the point. Our administration of justice has no clothes and instead of advancing justice, it colludes in the persecution of a journalist, with all the implications that this behaviour has for the survival of the democratic order.

Melzer convinces us with facts that we are living in a time of “post-truth”, and that it is our responsibility to correct this situation now, lest we wake up in a tyranny.

Alfred de Zayas is a professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and served as a UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order 2012-18.

JULIAN ASSANGE: COVID RISKS AND CAMPAIGNS FOR PARDON

From CounterPunch 14 December 2020 Julian Assange: COVID Risks and Campaigns for Pardon by Binoy Kampmark

Before the January 4 ruling of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in the extradition case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher will continue to endure the ordeal of cold prison facilities while being menaced by a COVID-19 outbreak. From November 18, Assange, along with inmates in House Block 1 at Belmarsh prison in south-east London, were placed in lockdown conditions. The measure was imposed after three COVID-19 cases were discovered.

The response was even more draconian than usual. Exercise was halted; showers prohibited. Meals were to be provided directly to the prisoner’s cell. Prison officials described the approach as a safety precaution. “We’ve introduced further safety measures following a number of positive cases,” stated a Prison Service spokesperson.

Assange’s time at Belmarsh is emblematic of a broadly grotesque approach which has been legitimised by the national security establishment. The pandemic has presented another opportunity to knock him off, if only by less obvious means. The refusal of Judge Baraitser to grant him bail, enabling him to prepare his case in conditions of guarded, if relative safety, typifies this approach. “Every day that passes is a serious risk to Julian,” explains his partner, Stella Moris. “Belmarsh is an extremely dangerous environment where murders and suicides are commonplace.”

Belmarsh already presented itself as a risk to one’s mental bearings prior to the heralding of the novel coronavirus. But galloping COVID-19 infections through Britain’s penal system have added another, potentially lethal consideration. On November 24, Moris revealed that some 54 people in Assange’s house block had been infected with COVID-19. These included inmates and prison staff. “If my son dies from COVID-19,” concluded a distressed Christine Assange, “it will be murder.”

The increasing number of COVID-19 cases in Belmarsh has angered the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer. On December 7, ten years from the day of Assange’s first arrest, he spoke of concerns that 65 out of approximately 160 inmates had tested positive. “The British authorities initially detained Mr. Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence.” He was currently being “detained for exclusively preventive purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years.”

The picture for the rapporteur is unmistakable, ominous and unspeakable. The prolonged suffering of the Australian national, who already nurses pre-existing health conditions, amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Imprisoning Assange was needlessly brutal. “Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.” Melzer suggested immediate decongestion measures for “all inmates whose imprisonment is not absolutely necessary” especially those, “such as Mr Assange, who suffers from a pre-existing respiratory health condition.”

Free speech advocates are also stoking the fire of interest ahead of Baraitser’s judgment. In Salon, Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, penned a heartfelt piece wondering what had happened to the fourth estate. “Where is the honest reporting that we all so desperately need, and upon which the very survival of democracy depends?” Never one to beat about the bush, Waters suggested that it was “languishing in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.” To extradite Assange would “set the dangerous precedent that journalists can be prosecuted merely for working with inside sources, or for publishing information the government deems harmful.” The better alternative: to dismiss the charges against Assange “and cancel the extradition proceedings in the kangaroo court in London.”

In the meantime, a vigorous campaign is being advanced from the barricades of Twitter to encourage President Donald Trump to pardon Assange. Moris stole the lead with her appeal on Thanksgiving. Pictures of sons Max and Gabriel were posted to tingle the commander-in-chief’s tear ducts. “I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas.”

Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has added her name to the Free Assange campaign, directing her pointed wishes to the White House. “Since you’re giving pardons to people,” she declared, “please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality in the deep state.”

Pamela Anderson’s approach was somewhat different and, it should be said, raunchily attuned to her audience. She made no qualms donning a bikini in trying to get the president’s attention. “Bring Julian Assange Home Australia,” went her carried sign, tweeted with a message to Trump to pardon him. Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept, proved more conventional, niggling Trump about matters of posterity. “By far the most important blow Trump could strike against the abuse of power by CIA, FBI & the Deep State – as well as to impose transparency on them to prevent future abuses – is a pardon of @Snowden & Julian Assange, punished by those corrupt factions for exposing their abuses.” Alan Rusbridger, formerly editor of The Guardian, agrees.

While often coupled with Assange in the pardoning stakes, Edward Snowden has been clear about his wish to see the publisher freed. “Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange. You alone can save his life.” As well meant as this is, Trump’s treasury of pardons is bound to be stocked by other options, not least for himself.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

THE STALINIST TRIAL OF JULIAN ASSANGE

 CounterPunch 7 September 2020

By John Pilger

The Stalinist Trial of Julian Assange 

Drawing of Julian Assange by Nathaniel St. Clair

Having reported the long, epic ordeal of Julian Assange, John Pilger gave this address outside the Central Criminal Court in London on September 7 as the WikiLeaks Editor’s extradition hearing entered its final stage.

When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism.”

I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name.

If the powerful lie to us, we have the right to know. If they say one thing in private and the opposite in public, we have the right to know. If they conspire against us, as Bush and Blair did over Iraq, then pretend to be democrats, we have the right to know.

It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury Julian alive in Trumps fascist America.

In 2008, a top secret US State Department report described in detail how the United States would combat this new moral threat. A secretly-directed personal smear campaign against Julian Assange would lead to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”.

The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its founder. Page after page revealed a coming war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and democracy.

The imperial shock troops would be those who called themselves journalists: the big hitters of the so-called mainstream, especially the “liberals” who mark and patrol the perimeters of dissent.

And that is what happened. I have been a reporter for more than 50 years and I have never known a smear campaign like it: the fabricated character assassination of a man who refused to join the club: who believed journalism was a service to the public, never to those above.

Assange shamed his persecutors. He produced scoop after scoop. He exposed the fraudulence of wars promoted by the media and the homicidal nature of America’s wars, the corruption of dictators, the evils of Guantanamo.

He forced us in the West to look in the mirror. He exposed the official truth-tellers in the media as collaborators: those I would call Vichy journalists. None of these imposters believed Assange when he warned that his life was in danger: that the “sex scandal” in Sweden was a set up and an American hellhole was the ultimate destination. And he was right, and repeatedly right.

The extradition hearing in London this week is the final act of an Anglo-American campaign to bury Julian Assange. It is not due process. It is due revenge. The American indictment is clearly rigged, a demonstrable sham. So far, the hearings have been reminiscent of their Stalinist equivalents during the Cold War.

Today, the land that gave us Magna Carta, Great Britain, is distinguished by the abandonment of its own sovereignty in allowing a malign foreign power to manipulate justice and by the vicious psychological torture of Julian – a form of torture, as Nils Melzer, the UN expert has pointed out, that was refined by the Nazis because it was most effective in breaking its victims.

Every time I have visited Assange in Belmarsh prison, I have seen the effects of this torture. When I last saw him, he had lost more than 10 kilos in weight; his arms had no muscle. Incredibly, his wicked sense of humor was intact.

As for Assange’s homeland, Australia has displayed only a cringeing cowardice as its government has secretly conspired against its own citizen who ought to be celebrated as a national hero. Not for nothing did George W. Bush anoint the Australian prime minister his “deputy sheriff”.

It is said that whatever happens to Julian Assange in the next three weeks will diminish if not destroy freedom of the press in the West. But which press? The Guardian? The BBC, The New York Times, the Jeff Bezos Washington Post?

No, the journalists in these organisations can breathe freely. The Judases on the Guardian who flirted with Julian, exploited his landmark work, made their pile then betrayed him, have nothing to fear. They are safe because they are needed.

Freedom of the press now rests with the honourable few: the exceptions, the dissidents on the internet who belong to no club, who are neither rich nor laden with Pulitzers, but produce fine, disobedient, moral journalism – those like Julian Assange.

Meanwhile, it is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still believe that freedom is possible. I salute him.

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

TORTURING ASSANGE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW FOWLER

From CounterPunch 20 AUGUST 2020

Torturing Assange: An Interview with Andrew Fowler

By John Kendall Hawkins

 

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

“I love Wikileaks.”

– DJ Trump

“Can’t we drone him?”

– Hillary Clinton

Andrew Fowler is an Australian award-winning investigative journalist and a former reporter for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent and Four Corners programs. and the author of The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ Fight for Freedom. This is an updated edition of his 2011 account of the rise and political imprisonment of Assange. Much of that account explained how Assange seemingly inevitably moved toward an adversarial positioning against American imperialism abroad. He was a tonic for the indifference expressed by so many ordinary Americans in the traumatic aftermath of 9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state. Boston Legal’s Alan Shore (James Spader) seems to sum it up succinctly.

His updated version discusses the torture Assange is currently undergoing at Belmarsh prison in Britain. Here is a mut-see film regarding his torture.

His book also contains the latest on UC Global’s comprehensive spying on Assange and his visitors at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in the last year of his ‘refuge’ there. UC Global is a Spanish security company hired to protect the embassy. It has since been revealed that they were passing on data to American intelligence, presumably the CIA. Certainly, Fowler implies such a connection in his updated book, citing two Assange hacking breaches of US government servers, each of which, Fowler writes, the CIA went berserk, as if they’d been hit by a foreign enemy. In the last (new) chapter of the book, “The Casino,” Fowler describes how outraged the CIA was when Assange published their hacking tools, known as Vault 7, on Wikileaks: “Sean Roche, the deputy director of digital innovation at the CIA, remembers the reaction from those inside the CIA. He said he got a call from another CIA director who was out of breath: ‘It was the equivalent of a digital Pearl Harbor.’” Below is my recent interview with the author.

* Note: Upon his release of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg was referred to as “the most dangerous man in the world.”

What is the up-to-date status of Julian’s health?

It seems quite clear that there is an attempt by the British and US administrations to destroy Assange, either driving him to suicide or a psychological breakdown. He has had a lung condition for a number of years, which has not been properly treated, and is clearly suffering from huge stress. During his last court appearance over a video link, there were long pauses between his words, even when speaking his own name.

When Chelsea Manning was imprisoned at Quantico she spent 23 hours per day in solitary confinement and was stripped naked at night. How does Julian’s treatment at Belmarsh compare? Manning’s treatment was said to be an attempt to coerce her into ratting on others, including, presumably Assange. What do you see as the ultimate purpose of Assange’s treatment? And how does it amount to torture?

The ultimate purpose of Assange’s treatment is a warning to others. Particularly other journalists. It’s the modern day equivalent of crucifixion, putting heads of enemies on spikes, or public hangings. The torture of Assange involves two main areas: being confined to three rooms in a single building for 7 years, and unable to leave without fear of arrest and extradition to Sweden which was playing an underhand role to allow Assange to be extrdited to the US. As the UN rapporteur on torture Nils Meltzer wrote that never in the two decades he had spent investigating war crimes had he ever seen such a ganging up of so many powerful nations against one individual. It is a testament to Assange’s mental strength that he resisted at all.

No effort was made by the Swedes to “question” Assange once he was lifted from the Ecuadorian Embassy, suggesting that their purpose all along was, as Assange and his defenders averred, a pretext for hand-over. You’d think there was some way to nix the bail jump charge given this likelihood of intergovernmental collusion. Thoughts?

There are no outstanding allegations for Assange to answer in Sweden. They were always only allegations, rather than charges. It is important to understand that if the Swedish prosecutors had charged Assange, they would have had to reveal the evidence of the ‘offences’ to his lawyers upon which those charges were based. And the evidence was not only thin, it pointed to a conspiracy. So it was possible to keep Assange in the embassy, while the UK prosecuting authority worked at ways of getting him extradited to Sweden. There seems little doubt that the plan all along was to use Sweden as a holding pen for Assange as the US applied for his extradition. It is possible he could take his case to the European Human Court of Human Rights, but the Brexit decision, makes this area extremely murky.

Can you provide more details about the UC Global, the Spanish company brought into the Ecuadorian Embassy to spy on Assange? Do we know more about what data that they gathered? Has a more definitive connection to the CIA been made? Has any further effort been put into place to quash the extradition process based on this fact alone? (He could never expect a fair trial back in the US if such surveillance and potentially framing were done.)

UC Global not only recorded hundreds of conversations inside the Ecuadorian embassy, but also photographed the phones [and] their location identifying IMEI numbers, passports and other documents of everyone who visited Assange in the embassy between 2015 and 2018. It’s my understanding that the case running in Madrid at the moment against the former CEO of UC Global, David Morales, who is charged with illegally spying on Assange and his lawyers (a specifically illegal act in Europe) will be used by the Assange legal team to argue that the US extradition case should be thrown out. It is my understanding that if any material gathered spying on Assange and his lawyers is used, or even known about, by those involved in the US prosecution – the charges must be withdrawn. There has been no definitive connection to the CIA. The closest I have managed to make the link is to the State Department and White House confidantes.

Snowden’s, Permanent Record is one of the best reads I’ve had in quite some time. You could argue that his revelations are equally, if not more significant, than what Assange offers up through Wikileaks. Where do you stand on the difference of value, if any, between Wikileaks and the Snowden revelations?

The main differences are: Assange is a recipient of information which as a journalist he publishes. Snowden is a source. When it comes to quantifying the different values of their work, Assange mainly provided information and analysis, whereas Snowden exposed intelligence gathering systems. In the source-journalist relationship, they both need each other. Both exposed the activities of a war-making machine. Without Assange it is unlikely that we would have had Snowden. It was WikiLeaks that opened up the public on a truly massive scale to a secret world of horror and deception which until then had been largely hidden from view. For Snowden’s part he brought the argument home that it wasn’t just foreign governments who were being spied on, it was the Americans themselves. They both played a significant and at times overlapping role in revealing the truth about the world we’re in.

Assange and Snowden seem to have had their differences over the years. Snowden describes in PR how he chose his nickname: “The final name I chose for my correspondence was ‘Verax,’ Latin for ‘speaker of truth,’ in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called ‘Mendax’ (‘speaker of lies’)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange.” (p.193) There was irritability there between them, and Snowden didn’t trust Assange with his life (fearing that a dump, rather than a journo-processed revelation system, would close off future whistleblower arguments). His first choice had been the NYT, but their suppression of James Risen’s 2004 pre-election piece on STELLARWIND enraged him and he ended up going with Greenwald et al, instead. Snowden suggests character differences between the two, but on the other hand Assange really pissed the US government off when he sent a woman to rescue Snowden from Hong Kong. Some of us thought Obama was going to shoot down Bolivia One with president Evo Morales on board because Obama thought Snowden was onboard.

I see in Permanent Record Snowden says he decided not to go with WikiLeaks because of a change of policy to publish material unredacted, or ‘pristine’ as he calls it. Not sure why he says this because WL policy is to redact. [Here’s Snowden’s explanation.] WL did put all the Iraq/Afghanistan/Cablegate documents online un-redacted, but only after David Leigh of the Guardian published the password — and the material was already out on the internet. I’ve never asked Assange this, but there is another Mendax. In the 1920s an Australian science fiction writer Erle Cox’a Mendax was an eccentric inventor. Mendax experiments with ‘matter transmission’ ‘invisibility’ and ‘extracting gold from seawater’. There is a tension between the two, no doubt about it. Snowden still errs on the side of secrecy and Assange on the side of publication, possibly the difference between an ex-intelligence agent and a journalist.

Covid-19 seems to be the wild card in the deck, vis-a-vis Assange’s extradition to the US. If he doesn’t contract the illness in prison, then his extradition next year could prove problematic — courts, protests, circus. How do you think the virus will affect the legal proceedings? Do you think he’ll be better off under Biden’s DOJ? Or worse, given the perceived threat to the Democrats he represents? Do you see a way for his defense to exploit the DNC/Russia hack dishonesty?

Not sure how Covid will impact anything much, other than slowing down the process, which in itself is extremely problematic for Assange. He’s already been in prison or under house arrest (including the embassy) for nine years. I’m not sure what it takes to embarrass the UK government into refusing the extradition request, but the new indictment is surely turning the political prosecution into a farce. The US now wants to re-arrest Assange to wrap in a new indictment because the first one was likely to fail. In past years it might have been possible for the UK Government to reject this deceptive or incompetent behaviour by the US, but Britain is a spent force now on the world stage, and the US can do whatever it wants.

As for Biden’s DoJ, he’s called Assange a ‘high-tech terrorist’ and has recently said though he favours freedom of the press it should not compromise US national security. Not much hope there.

One hope Assange has is the possible pardoning of Snowden. It plays to Trump’s ‘deep state’ argument that the intelligence agencies are out of control and were involved in the fabrication of Russian collusion. [Here’s Snowden referencing his work for the “Deep State”] Assange’s work has exposed CIA atrocities (which supports Trump’s position) but WikiLeaks has also revealed evidence of war crimes by the US military, an establishment so admired by his core supporters. I fear that a Snowden pardon, much as I would personally welcome it, would only further isolate Assange.

If Assange goes down, do you see a future for journalism in the world — given America’s so-called leadership in this area, by way of the holy first amendment, but with dwindling global newspapers. The Guardian, WaPo and the NYT remain the only papers of record available in every international terminal in the world — and sales falling for them, the fight over what’s real news and what isn’t underway (a proxy war to control the narrative), how do you see the fight for journalism ahead?

If Assange goes down, it will be the third domino. First, the rising power of executive government; second, the destruction of the, at times, countervailing power of the mainstream media, including public broadcasters who draw their political power from their audiences (and thus to a certain extent are independent). The internet has savaged media budgets which has weakened the overall media environment and empowered governments to attack and cut public broadcasters. Assange who used the internet as a weapon for journalism provided a way to re-energise old media structures — engage readers and challenge executive government authority. He provided a way to democratise journalism. It is the reason he is such a threat to the hegemony of the US led five eyes nations, who until recently in a uni-polar political and strategic world, have ruled supreme.

I sometimes marvel at the effect on journalism and even constitutional issues in America that Australians have had. Early on, Assange seems to have declared war on the DoD and, later, the US State Department; John Pilger has, with his interview with the CIA “rogue” Duane Clarridge, exposed the full fuckin hubris of American foreign policy; and, Fox News has so dumbed down the political conversation in America that it may be heading for a fate like that depicted in Idiocracy. Any thoughts?

There’s a strange contradiction in Australia. Australians are very conservative, and cautious, but part of the national identity is tied to the notion of anti-authoritarianism, dating back to the nation’s convict past. The degradation of the mainly poor, transported to Australia from the UK and Ireland two centuries ago for often minor crimes, created a bedrock of antagonism against the ruling ‘elites’. This long history of dissent in Australia has produced outstanding journalists such as Pilger and Assange, Wilfred Burchett and Philip Knightly. I can think of no better way to explain how Assange and Murdoch became two of the most influential global media figures in the past century. Murdoch rose to power as an anti-establishment figure in the UK and Assange has done the same on a global basis.

More articles by:John Kendall Hawkins

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.

DEMOCRACY IN THE UK HAS COME TO A GRINDING HALT: UK GOVERNMENT REFUSES TO RELEASE INFORMATION ABOUT ASSANGE JUDGE WHO HAS 96% EXTRADITION RECORD

K

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

By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis• 31 July 2020

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves Westminster Magistrates Court in London, 13 January 2020. (Photo: EPA-EFE/ Facundo Arrizabalaga) Less

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is blocking the release of basic information about the judge who is to rule on Julian Assange’s extradition to the US in what appears to be an irregular application of the Freedom of Information Act, it can be revealed.

Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis

Declassified has also discovered that the judge, Vanessa Baraitser, has ordered extradition in 96% of the cases she has presided over for which information is publicly available.

Baraitser was appointed a district judge in October 2011 based at the Chief Magistrate’s Office in London, after being admitted as a solicitor in 1994. Next to no other information is available about her in the public domain.

Baraitser has been criticised for a number of her judgments so far concerning Assange, who has been incarcerated in a maximum security prison, HMP Belmarsh in London, since April 2019. These decisions include refusing Assange’s request for emergency bail during the Covid-19 pandemic and making him sit behind a glass screen during the hearing, rather than with his lawyers.

Declassified recently revealed that Assange is one of just two of the 797 inmates in Belmarsh being held for violating bail conditions. Over 20% of inmates are held for murder.

Declassified has also seen evidence that the UK Home Office is blocking the release of information about home secretary Priti Patel’s role in the Assange extradition case.

The only known photograph of district judge Vanessa Baraitser — who will rule on 

Julian Assange’s extradition to the US — in the public domain. 

Anonymisation by Declassified. (Photo: Instagram)

Request denied
A request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was sent by Declassified to the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) on 28 February 2020 requesting a list of all the cases on which Baraitser has ruled since she was appointed in 2011. The MOJ noted in response that it was obliged to send a reply within 20 working days.

Two months later, on 29 April 2020, an information officer at the HM Courts and Tribunals Service responded that it could “confirm” that it held “some of the information that you have requested”. 
But the request was rejected since the officer claimed it was not consistent with the Constitutional Reform Act. “The judiciary is not a public body for the purposes of FOIA… and requests asking to disclose all the cases a named judge ruled on are therefore outside the scope of the FOIA,” the officer stated.

The officer added that the “information requested would in any event be exempt from disclosure… because it contains personal data about the cases ruled on by an individual judge”, and that “personal data can only be released if to do so would not contravene any of the data protection principles” in the Data Protection Act.

A British barrister, who wished to remain anonymous, but who is not involved with the Assange case, told Declassified: “The resistance to disclosure here is curious. A court is a public authority for the purposes of the Human Rights Act and a judge is an officer of the court. It is therefore more than surprising that the first refusal argued that, for the purposes of the FOIA, there is no public body here subject to disclosure.” 

The barrister added: “The alternative argument on data doesn’t stack up. A court acts in public. There is no default anonymity of the names of cases, unless children are involved or other certain limited circumstances, nor the judges who rule on them. Justice has to be seen to be done.”

Despite the HM Courts and Tribunals Service invoking a data protection clause, Declassified was able to view a host of cases with full names and details in Westlaw, a paid-for legal database. The press has also reported on a number of extradition cases involving Baraitser. 

An internal review into the rejection of Declassified’s freedom of information (FOI) request upheld the rejection. 

Identical request

On 10 April 2020 Declassified sent an identical information request to the MOJ asking for a case list for a different district judge, Justin Barron, who was appointed on the same day as Baraitser in October 2011.

This request was answered by the MOJ swiftly, within 17 days, compared to two months with Baraitser. The information officer also noted that it “holds all the information you have requested” rather than “some” in the case of Baraitser. It is unclear why the HM Courts and Tribunals Service would hold only partial information on Baraitser, but not on Barron.

On this occasion, the request was not blocked. Instead, the information officer asked for further clarification about the information being sought, suggesting issues such as final hearing dates, the defendants’ names and what the defendants were charged with.

Declassified clarified that it wanted the list to include “the date, the defendant, the charge and the judge’s decision”. 

The officer eventually declined the request, stating that it “would exceed the cost limit set out in the FOIA”, but adding: “Although we cannot answer your request at the moment, we may be able to answer a refined request within the cost limit.” 

With Baraitser’s identical records, the possibility of refining the search was never offered – two “absolute” exemptions being applied to the request from the start. 

Baraitser’s record

Despite the rejection by the MOJ, Declassified has found 24 extradition cases that Baraitser ruled on from November 2015 to May 2019, discovered using the media archive Factiva and Westlaw. Of these 24 cases, Baraitser ordered the extradition of 23 of the defendants, a 96% extradition record from publicly available evidence.

Baraitser has ordered the extradition of defendants to at least 11 countries in this period, including one person to the US. Six of the extraditions, or 26% of the rulings, were successfully appealed. 
In one case, Baraitser’s decision to extradite was overturned because the appeal judge “attached considerable weight to the likely impact of extradition upon the health and wellbeing of the defendant’s wife”, who “will be left with very little support”.

Recently, Baraitser controversially refused to guarantee anonymity to Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, which led her to publicly reveal her relationship with Assange and their two children. 

The appointment of Baraitser to preside over the Assange case remains controversial and the decision untransparent. It is likely that Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot was involved in the decision to appoint Baraitser to the case.

A list of all the extradition cases District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled on that are publicly available. (Compiled by Declassified)

 

The chief magistrate has a “leadership responsibility” for the roughly 300 district and deputy judges across England and Wales. Arbuthnot hears “many of the most sensitive or complex cases in the magistrates’ courts and in particular extradition and special jurisdiction cases”.

Arbuthnot’s role also includes “supporting and guiding” district judges such as Baraitser and “liaising with the senior judiciary and presiding judges” on the cases they are ruling on. 

But Arbuthnot’s role in the Assange case is mired in controversy and conflicts of interest due to her family’s connections to the British military and intelligence establishment, as Declassified has previously revealed. Arbuthnot has personally received financial benefits from partner organisations of the UK Foreign Office, which in 2018 called Assange a “miserable little worm”.

Arbuthnot directly ruled on the Assange case in 2018-19 and has never formally recused herself from it. According to a statement given to Private Eye, she stepped aside because of a “perception of bias”, but it was not elucidated what this related to. 

Since Arbuthnot has not formally recused herself, Assange’s defence team cannot revisit her rulings while it also could have left open the possibility of her choosing which of her junior judges was to preside over the Assange case. 

In a key judgment in February 2018, Arbuthnot rejected the findings of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention – a body composed of international legal experts – that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained”, characterised Assange’s stay in the embassy as “voluntary” and concluded Assange’s health and mental state was of minor importance.

In a second ruling a week later, Arbuthnot dismissed Assange’s fears of US extradition. “I accept that Mr Assange had expressed fears of being returned to the United States from a very early stage in the Swedish extradition proceedings but… I do not find that Mr Assange’s fears were reasonable,” she said. 

In May 2019, soon after Assange was seized from his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy by British police, the US government requested his extradition on charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years. 

Lady Arbuthnot attends the Queen’s garden party at Buckingham Palace in May 2017 with her husband Lord Arbuthnot, a former Conservative defence minister with links to the British military and intelligence establishment. Anonymisation by Declassified. (Photo: Instagram)

More silence

Declassified also made a request under the Freedom of Information Act for a list of all the cases heard at Woolwich Crown Court, near Belmarsh, for 2019. Baraitser had controversially moved Assange’s hearing to Woolwich — which is often used for terrorism cases — before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. It has now been moved back to the Old Bailey, the central criminal court of England and Wales.

This request, sent on 31 March 2020, was again rejected. The MOJ officer stated: “I can confirm that the MOJ holds the information that you have requested. All of the information is exempt from disclosure under section 32 of the FOIA because it is held in a court record.”

It added that: “Section 32 is an absolute exemption and there is no duty to consider the public interest in disclosure.” 

Despite daily lists of the cases heard at Woolwich being freely available online, including names of defendants, an internal review conducted at Declassified’s request reached the same conclusion.
On 15 May 2020, Declassified sent a further FOI request, this time to the Home Office, asking for information on any phone calls or emails made or received by the current Home Secretary Priti Patel concerning the Assange case.

The Home Office replied: “We neither confirm nor deny whether we hold any information, within the scope of your request.” It added that the reason was “to protect personal data”. 

But, in January 2020, Declassified had requested the same information for the period when Sajid Javid was home secretary, April 2018 – July 2019. In this case, the Home Office responded: “We have carried out a thorough search and we have established that the Home Office does not hold the information that you have requested.”

The responses from the Home Office appear to indicate that Patel has had communications regarding Assange during her tenure as home secretary, but that the government is reluctant to disclose this information. The Assange case continues to set a legal precedent in being mired in opacity and conflicts of interest. 

Patel — who is also linked to Arbuthnot’s husband, Lord Arbuthnot — will sign off Assange’s extradition to the US if it is ordered by Baraitser. DM

Matt Kennard is head of investigations, and Mark Curtis is editor, at Declassified UK.. Sign up to receive Declassified’s monthly newsletter here. 

About Declassified UK

Declassified UK is the leading website for in-depth analysis and exclusive news on British foreign policy, investigating the UK military, intelligence agencies and its most powerful corporations.
The UK’s traditional media is increasingly acting as part of the establishment and failing to report independently and critically on Britain’s real role in the world.
By contrast, Declassified UK is independent and produces public-service journalism that informs people about what is being done in their name, without fear or favour.
As well as focusing on current policies, we also uncover historical secrets, by investigating the declassified files in the National Archives in London. And our work is also read beyond the UK—in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States where UK foreign policy is often influential.

The task of uncovering Britain’s role in the world is vital given the UK’s global power:

• An arms industry that is one of the world’s largest exporters of weapons
• One of the world’s largest networks of overseas military bases, with barracks from Belize to Brunei
• A booming cyber warfare industry and hub for private military firms
• Permanent member of the UN security council and one of the world’s leading soft powers
• Among the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world in the form of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ
• Special forces currently operating in at least seven covert wars
• An unparalleled archipelago of tax havens stretching across the Atlantic Ocean
• Numerous powerful corporations in arms, extractives, mining, and finance

Our first articles revealed a secret British military unit commanded by Saudi Arabian soldiers, how the UK intelligence agencies neutralised the Guardian newspaper after the Snowden leaks, how the intelligence establishment is fortifying the repressive regime in Bahrain, and how the UK legal trial of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange is mired in conflicts of interest.

You can follow us on Twitter at @DeclassifiedUK

Why Declassified is needed

The “mainstream” UK media is not uncovering the reality of Britain’s role in the world and the public is being largely kept in the dark. This means that governments are not being held to account for their policies.
The problem is not just with the UK’s right-wing, billionaire-owned media but also with its more “liberal” outlets and the BBC, the most popular source of news for the British public.
The British media are less and less mainstream – and are if anything becoming even more embedded in the establishment, regularly amplifying extremist policies that support war, human rights abusers and corporations contributing to catastrophic climate change.
The government publishes key information on its policies virtually every day which is often very revealing. But only a tiny proportion of this is ever covered in the establishment media. Those journalists choose not to cover it, or else don’t care. We do.
However, much remains hidden. Britain’s culture of secrecy is deeply embedded in Whitehall. This means that numerous government policies are hidden from the same public who should be able to hold a government to account in a democracy. These hidden policies often need to be exposed, and the secret state challenged.

Why are we publishing with the Daily Maverick?

Declassified is hosting its articles on the website of the Daily Maverick, a leading independent news site, begun in South Africa but increasingly global. It has a strong track record in exposing corruption and breaking major political stories such as the Gupta Leaks.
Declassified’s staff have written articles for most of Britain’s national media, but the space for independent analysis and critical investigations is ever declining. Perhaps this is not surprising. Britain ranked bottom for press freedom in Western Europe in 2019 and scored lower internationally than South Africa and Australia.
When the Daily Maverick offered to host our stories, we saw it as an ideal opportunity to team up with one of the best investigative and independent news sites in the Global South.
Declassified Media Ltd is a not-for-profit UK registered company.
Donate to Declassified UK.

---

From CounterPunch 13 April 2020

Julian Assange: One Year in Belmarsh

by Binoy Kampmark

It should not be a matter of distinction, but Julian Assange is a figure who is becoming the apotheosis of political imprisonment.  This seems laughable to those convinced he is an agent without scruple, a compromiser of the Fourth Estate, a figure best packed off to a prison system that will, in all assuredness, kill him.

That’s if he even gets there.  Having spent a year at Her Majesty’s Belmarsh prison, the WikiLeaks publisher faces the permanent danger of contracting COVID-19 as he goes through the bone-weariness of legal proceedings.  Even during the extradition hearings, he has been treated with a snooty callousness by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser, which does not bode well for a favourable finding against the US submission.  As he endures them, he suffers in a facility that is succumbing to the misrule caused by the coronavirus.

On April 9, Assange’s friend Vaughan Smith gave a description of conditions that gave little cause for Easter cheer. “Julian is now confined alone in a cell for 23.5 hours every day.  He gets half an hour of exercise and that is in a yard crowded with other prisoners.”  Smith also had a shot at the running of the prison.  “With over 150 Belmarsh prison staff off work self-isolating, the prison is barely functioning.”

The UK Department of Justice has adopted a mild approach to the issue of releasing prisoners in the face of the coronavirus epidemic.  Despite the Prison Governors’ Association suggesting the release of 15,000 non-violent prisoners, the Department of Justice has opted for the lower total of 4,000.  To date, a meagre 100 have been released.  Assange insists that the situation is graver at Belmarsh than is otherwise advertised.  Official figures put the number of COVID-19 deaths at one in the maximum security facility.  There are at least two, with the possibility, argues Assange, of more.

By any reasonable assessment, Assange fits the bill of a non-violent prisoner, and one with genuine political credentials.  He was granted asylum by Ecuador, a point of little interest to Baraister.  His condition both physical and mental has appalled friends, acquaintances and a number of officials.

Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has spent much time beating the drum of awareness about his plight.  Since 2010, he stated in May last year, “there has been a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation against Mr Assange, not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Sweden and, more recently, in Ecuador.”

Rather than turning their attention to this state of circumstances, news outlets prefer to gorge themselves on other details, such as the newly revealed identity of his partner, which Judge Baraitser refused to keep concealed.  The writing on this subject is needlessly though predictably tawdry.

  “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fathered two sons while hiding in embassy,” has been a favourite formulation. The Daily Mail can barely resist stirring the sauce pot, giving Assange the appearance of an international man of fornicating mystery.  “Gabriel, aged two, and his one-year-old brother Max were conceived while their father was hiding out to avoid extradition to America, where he faces espionage charges over the leaking of thousands of classified US intelligence documents.”  But the man who sowed his oats was also, the Mail is thrilled to remind us, “wanted in Sweden where he was accused of rape.”  It was rather good of them to also tell readers that Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation, though it does so with customary scepticism.

The old hacks can barely resist regarding the entire matter of Assange having a partner and children as peculiar.  The Mail seemed to think it had uncovered a stunning morsel of information that would shock all.  “The news will come as a bombshell to Assange’s friends and enemies since he was widely understood to have led a near-monastic life since entering the embassy in 2012.”  Monks would surely disagree with that flawed assessment, as would his friends.

The theme of oddity has also made it across the Atlantic.  The New York Post, for instance, considered it “an even odder twist” that “British rapper M.I.A. is a godmother to the children”.  Hardly – M.I.A, along with a large clutch of celebrities, has been a vocal supporter and barracker.

This mixture of lazy scribbling, creepy curiosity and saccharine interest will do little to aid Assange.

 His partner, now revealed as lawyer Stella Moris-Smith Robertson, attempted to take some of the edge off perceptions of the publisher in a court statement supporting bail.  “My close relationship with Julian has been the opposite of how he is viewed – of reserve, respect for each other and attempts to shield each other from some of the nightmares that have surrounded our lives.”  Retaining that shield will be an increasingly difficult matter now.

Assange’s scalp is precious.  The application for bail made by his defence team on March 25 was denied.  Access to him from his legal team is limited, hobbling the case.  Even during a raging pandemic, where entire states have mobilised their resources, there is always room for little bit of vindictiveness.  Scores need to be settled; the balance sheet ordered.  To that end, Judge Baraister and the UK justice system, have not disappointed.
 

 More articles by:Binoy Kampmark

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

December 25, 2019

Medical Opinion, Torture and Julian Assange

by Binoy Kampmark

On November 27 this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, delivered an address to the German Bundestag outlining his approach to understanding the mental health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. These comprised two parts, the initial stage covering his diplomatic asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, the second dealing with his formal detention in the United Kingdom at the hands of the UK legal and judicial system. The conclusion was a recapitulation of previous findings: that Assange has been subjected to a prolonged, state-sponsored effort in torture, nothing less than a targeting of his being.

Melzer’s address is an expansive portrait of incremental inter-state torment that led to Assange’s confinement “in a highly controlled environment within the Ecuadorean embassy for more than six years.” There was the eventually justified fear that he would be sought by the United States in extradition proceedings. The Swedish authorities threw in their muddled lot between 2010 and 2019, attempting to nab Assange for rape claims despite “not being able to produce enough evidence for an indictment, and which now, after almost a decade, has been silently closed for the third time based on precisely that recognition.”

Then came the British contribution, consisting of encouragement to the Swedes by the Crown Prosecution Service that the investigation should not be closed, inspiring them not to get “cold feet”. (The cold feet eventually came.) The Ecuadorean contribution completed the four-piece set, with the coming to power of a pro-Washington Lenín Moreno. Embassy personnel in London were encouraged to make conditions that less pleasant; surveillance operations were conducted on Assange’s guests and meetings.

Melzer, along with a medical team, attended to Assange on May 9, 2019 in Belmarsh, finding a man with “all the symptoms that are typical of persons having been exposed to psychological torture for a prolonged period of time.” There was little doubt, in Melzer’s mind, that symptoms “already measurable physically, neurologically and cognitively”, had been shown.

These calls went unheeded. Melzer, in early November, accused the UK authorities of showing “outright contempt for Mr Assange’s rights and integrity.” Despite warnings issued by the rapporteur, “the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.” Melzer’s prognosis was bleak. “Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.”

This point has been restated by Dr. Stephen Frost, a chief figure of the dedicated outfit calling itself Doctors for Assange. “We repeat that it is impossible to assess adequately let alone treat Mr Assange in Belmarsh prison and that he must as a matter of urgency be moved to a university teaching hospital. When will the UK government listen to us?”

The medical degrading of Assange has assumed ever greater importance, suggesting unwavering state complicity. On November 22, over 65 notable medical doctors sent the UK Home Secretary a note based on Melzer’s November 1 findings and Assange’s state at the October 21 case management hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court. “It is our opinion that Mr Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health. Any medical treatment indicated should be administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital (tertiary care).”

In a second open letter to the UK Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice dated December 4, the Doctors for Assange collective warned that the UK’s “refusal to take the required measures to protect Mr Assange’s rights, health and dignity appears [to] be reckless at best and deliberate at worst and, in both cases, unlawfully and unnecessarily exposes Mr Assange to potentially irreversible risks.”

The same grounds were reiterated in a December 16 letter to Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, with a curt reminder that she had “an undeniable legal obligation to protect your citizen against the abuse of his fundamental rights, stemming from US efforts to extradite Mr Assange for journalism and publishing that exposed US war crimes.” In the event that Payne took no action on the matter, “people would want to know what you […] did to prevent his death.”

In the addendum to the open letter, further to reiterating the precarious state of Assange’s health and medical status as a torture victim, the doctors elaborate on the circular cruelty facing the publisher. An individual deemed “a victim of psychological torture cannot be adequately medically treated while continuing to be held under the very conditions constituting psychological torture, as is currently the case for Julian Assange.” Appropriate medical treatment was hardly possible through a prison hospital ward.

A lesson in understanding mental torture is also proffered. “Contrary to popular misconception, the injuries caused by psychological torture are real and extremely serious. The term psychological torture is not a synonym for mere hardship, suffering or distress.”

At Assange’s case management hearing on December 19, restrictions on medical opinion were again implemented; psychiatrist Marco Chiesa and psychologist David Morgan were prevented from attending. Both had been signatories to the spray of open letters. According to Morgan, he had hoped to “provide some observations about Julian Assange’s health, psychologically, and with my colleagues, physically.” Instead, it transpired that access was denied, according to psychologist Lissa Johnson, “despite members of the public offering to give up seats for them.”

Cold-shouldering expert opinion can be counted as one of the weapons of the state in punishing whistleblowers and publishers. The State has always made it a bureaucratic imperative to sift the undesirable evidence from the apologetic message. Accepting Assange’s condition would be tantamount to admission on the part of UK authorities, urged on by the United States, that intolerable, potentially martyring treatment, has been meted out to a publisher.

More articles by:Binoy Kampmark

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

JULIAN ASSANGE AND PETER GRESTE

Because I do not agree with people over political differences does not mean that I should ignore the fact that as Australian citizens they should all be entitled to equal treatment.

Peter Greste, as a journalist, was treated criminally in Egypt, and the Australian government, albeit very  reluctantly, eventually went into some sort of action to get him released, not forgetting that one of his Al Jazeera colleagues was still held criminally by the Egyptian government.

Julian Assange is an Australian citizen and the Australian government has shown it is completely indifferent to doing anything to help him over the years when he has been illegally held in the Ecuadorian embassy and they have now kicked him out and handed him over to the UK government.

Now the USA has applied for him to be extradited to the USA to face several charges with Chelsea Manning over the saga of the Wikileaks published documents which exposed the USA's lies over the Iraq war and many other devious plots for which the US government needs to be charged - in the International criminal court in The Hague, together with its middle east ally, Israel.

All of this involves exposures, whistleblowers, journalists exposing the lies and cover-ups and somehow alerting people around the globe to what our governments are telling us - and not telling us and the cover-ups which fool most of the people most of the time.

Now we come to Peter Greste who worked for an organisation which was involved with exposing information which Israel and the United States do not want the middle east and others to know about.

Peter Greste says that Julian Assange is not a journalist and does not deserve to have the protection which government are supposed to give to journalists.

Governments are not only not supporting journalists, but are murdering them and/or exposing them to situations where they are not protected, are imprisoned and tortured and often murdered. Think of Khashoggi and the Saudi embassy in Turkey and another foul murder.

Greste was imprisoned in Egypt while doing his job. After a great battle he was released and managed to come home to Australia. Why doesn't Greste do something?

Why should Assange as an Australian citizen not be extended the same privileges and support and why don't more journalists in Australia speak out and complain? They forget how easily they could be next on the list, and their union as also not doing an awful lot to show support either.

The MEAA should hang its head in shame, and I as a retired unionist have watched most unions in Australia behave in the same disgusting way towards their trusting members.

CHELSEA MANNING AND BARACK OBAMA PART 1

When Barack Obama became president of the United States of America he made some promises which he broke soon after the election and soon after he became the president in that election.

Obama promised to close Guanatanamo Bay Concentration camp in 2008. We are now in 2015 and Guantanamo is still open despite the current thaw between the US and Cuba.

Obama promised a fair deal and support for whistleblowers. Think of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and many others. Their treatment at the hands of the US administration has been criminal and the current behaviour towards Chelsea Manning is not only criminal but human rights abuses of the worst kind.

It is not Chelsea Manning who should be behind bars but Barack Obama and those who have supported him through these travesties of justice in which this young person is being treated worse than some of the US mass murderers and the processes by which guns are more or less freely distributed in the US to anyone who wants them.

Chelsea Manning should not have been sent to Iraq in the first place. That in itself was an abuse of power, and it only got worse stage after stage in the process.

And what about the whole story with Julian Assange and many of those in the USA who have been locked up whistleblowers.

The so-called greatest democracy on earth which supports the greatest apartheid state on earth Israel and punishes in concentration camps growing smaller by the day as their lands are stolen in large chunks for Jewish religious fanatics who mostly come from the USA.

Barack Obama's legacy will not be one to be credited with any great achievements.

But the treatment of Chelsea Manning is one of the darkest episodes in modern USA history.

This article by John Pilger is from CounterPunch

July 31, 2015

Julian Assange: the Untold Story of an Epic Struggle for Justice

by John Pilger

This is an updated version of John Pilger’s 2014 investigation which tells the unreported story of an unrelenting campaign, in Sweden and the US, to deny Julian Assange justice and silence WikiLeaks.

The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a gruelling farce.  For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost £12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

The persecution of Julian Assange is about to flare again as it enters a dangerous stage. From August 20, three quarters of the Swedish prosecutor’s case against Assange regarding sexual misconduct in 2010 will disappear as the statute of limitations expires. At the same time Washington’s obsession with Assange and WikiLeaks has intensified. Indeed, it is vindictive American power that offers the greatest threat – as Chelsea Manning and those still held in Guantanamo can attest.

The Americans are pursuing Assange because WikiLeaks exposed their epic crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of tens of thousands of civilians, which they covered up, and their contempt for sovereignty and international law, as demonstrated vividly in their leaked diplomatic cables. WikiLeaks continues to expose criminal activity by the US, having just published top secret US intercepts – US spies’ reports detailing private phone calls of the presidents of France and Germany, and other senior officials, relating to internal European political and economic affairs.

None of this is illegal under the US Constiution. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor of constitutional law, lauded whistleblowers as “part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal”. In 2012, the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama boasted on its website that he had prosecuted more whistleblowers in his first term than all other US presidents combined. Before Chelsea Manning had even received a trial, Obama had pronounced the whisletblower guilty. He was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison, having been tortured during his long pre-trial detention.

Few doubt that should the US get their hands on Assange, a similar fate awaits him. Threats of the capture and assassination of Assange became the currency of the political extremes in the US following Vice-President Joe Biden’s preposterous slur that the WikiLeaks founder was a “cyber-terrorist”. Those doubting the degree of ruthlessness Assange can expect should remember the forcing down of the Bolivian president’s plane in 2013 – wrongly believed to be carrying Edward Snowden.

According to documents released by Snowden, Assange is on a “Manhunt target list”. Washington’s bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is “unprecedented in scale and nature”. In Alexandria, Virginia, a secret grand jury has spent five years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers.

Faced with this constitutional hurdle, the US Justice Department has contrived charges of “espionage”, “conspiracy to commit espionage”, “conversion” (theft of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and general “conspiracy”. The Espionage Act has life in prison and death penalty provisions. .

Assange’s ability to defend himself in this Kafkaesque world has been handicapped by the US declaring his case a state secret. In March, a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the “national security” investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rosthstein, said it was necessary to show “appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security”. Such is the “justice” of a kangaroo court.

The supporting act in this grim farce is Sweden, played by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny. Until recently, Ny refused to comply with a routine European procedure routine that required her to travel to London to question Assange and so advance the case. For four and a half years, Ny has never properly explained why she has refused to come to London, just as the Swedish authorities have never explained why they refuse to give Assange a guarantee that they will not extradite him on to the US under a secret arrangement agreed between Stockholm and Washington. In December 2010, The Independent revealed that the two governments had discussed his onward extradition to the US.

Contrary to its 1960s reputation as a liberal bastion, Sweden has drawn so close to Washington that it has allowed secret CIA “renditions” – including the illegal deportation of refugees. The rendition and subsequent torture of two Egyptian political refugees in 2001 was condemned by the UN Committee against Torture, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; the complicity and duplicity of the Swedish state are documented in successful civil litigation and in WikiLeaks cables. In the summer of 2010, Assange had flown to Sweden to talk about WikiLeaks revelations of the war in Afghanistan – in which Sweden had forces under US command.

“Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” wrote Al Burke, editor of the online Nordic News Network, an authority on the multiple twists and dangers facing Assange, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is every reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

Why hasn’t the Swedish prosecutor resolved the Assange case?  Many in the legal community in Sweden believe her behaviour inexplicable. Once implacably hostile to Assange, the Swedish press has published headlines such as: “Go to London, for God’s sake.”

Why hasn’t she? More to the point, why won’t she allow the Swedish court access to hundreds of SMS messages that the police extracted from the phone of one of the two women involved in the misconduct allegations? Why won’t she hand them over to Assange’s Swedish lawyers? She says she is not legally required to do so until a formal charge is laid and she has questioned him. Then, why doesn’t she question him? And if she did question him, the conditions she would demand of him and his lawyers – that they could not challenge her – would make injustice a near certainty.

On a point of law, the Swedish Supreme Court has decided Ny can continue to obstruct on the vital issue of the SMS messages. This will now go to the European Court of Human Rights. What Ny fears is that the SMS messages will destroy her case against Assange. One of the messages makes clear that one of the women did not want any charges brought against Assange, “but the police were keen on getting a hold on him”. She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV] test”. She “did not want to accuse JA of anything” and “it was the police who made up the charges”. (In a witness statement, she is quoted as saying that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her”.)

Neither woman claimed she had been raped. Indeed, both have denied they were raped and one of them has since tweeted, “I have not been raped.” That they were manipulated by police and their wishes ignored is evident – whatever their lawyers might say now. Certainly, they are victims of a saga which blights the reputation of Sweden itself.

For Assange, his only trial has been trial by media. On August 20, 2010, the Swedish police opened a “rape investigation” and immediately – and unlawfully – told the Stockholm tabloids that there was a warrant for Assange’s arrest for the “rape of two women”. This was the news that went round the world.
In Washington, a smiling US Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that the arrest “sounds like good news to me”. Twitter accounts associated with the Pentagon described Assange as a “rapist” and a “fugitive”.

Less than 24 hours later, the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, took over the investigation. She wasted no time in cancelling the arrest warrant, saying, “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation altogether, saying, “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”  The file was closed.

Enter Claes Borgstrom, a high profile politician in the Social Democratic Party then standing as a candidate in Sweden’s imminent general election. Within days of the chief prosecutor’s dismissal of the case, Borgstrom, a lawyer, announced to the media that he was representing the two women and had sought a different prosecutor in the city of Gothenberg. This was Marianne Ny, whom Borgstrom knew well, personally and politically.

On 30 August, Assange attended a police station in Stockholm voluntarily and answered all the questions put to him. He understood that was the end of the matter. Two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case. Borgstrom was asked by a Swedish reporter why the case was proceeding when it had already been dismissed, citing one of the women as saying she had not been raped. He replied, “Ah, but she is not a lawyer.” Assange’s Australian barrister, James Catlin, responded, “This is a laughing stock… it’s as if they make it up as they go along.”

On the day Marianne Ny reactivated the case, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence service – which has the acronym MUST — publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled “WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers.” Assange was warned that the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO, had been told by its US counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be “cut off” if Sweden sheltered him.

For five weeks, Assange waited in Sweden for the new investigation to take its course. The Guardian was then on the brink of publishing the Iraq “War Logs”, based on WikiLeaks’ disclosures, which Assange was to oversee. His lawyer in Stockholm asked Ny if she had any objection to his leaving the country. She said he was free to leave.

Inexplicably, as soon as he left Sweden – at the height of media and public interest in the WikiLeaks disclosures – Ny issued a European Arrest Warrant and an Interpol “red alert” normally used for terrorists and dangerous criminals. Put out in five languages around the world, it ensured a media frenzy.

Assange attended a police station in London, was arrested and spent ten days in Wandsworth Prison, in solitary confinement. Released on £340,000 bail, he was electronically tagged, required to report to police daily and placed under virtual house arrest while his case began its long journey to the Supreme Court. He still had not been charged with any offence. His lawyers repeated his offer to be questioned by Ny in London, pointing out that she had given him permission to leave Sweden. They suggested a special facility at Scotland Yard commonly used for that purpose. She refused.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: “The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction… The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?”

This question remained unanswered as Ny deployed the European Arrest Warrant, a draconian and now discredited  product of the “war on terror” supposedly designed to catch terrorists and organised criminals. The EAW had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state to provide any evidence of a crime. More than a thousand EAWs are issued each month; only a few have anything to do with potential “terror” charges. Most are issued for trivial offences, such as overdue bank charges and fines. Many of those extradited face months in prison without charge. There have been a number of shocking miscarriages of justice, of which British judges have been highly critical.

The Assange case finally reached the UK Supreme Court in May 2012. In a judgement that upheld the EAW – whose rigid demands had left the courts almost no room for manoeuvre – the judges found that European prosecutors could issue extradition warrants in the UK without any judicial oversight, even though Parliament intended otherwise. They made clear that Parliament had been “misled” by the Blair government. The court was split, 5-2, and consequently found against Assange.

However, the Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, made one mistake. He applied the Vienna Convention on treaty interpretation, allowing for state practice to override the letter of the law. As Assange’s barrister, Dinah Rose QC, pointed out, this did not apply to the EAW.

The Supreme Court only recognised this crucial error when it dealt with another appeal against the EAW in November 2013. The Assange decision had been wrong, but it was too late to go back. With extradition imminent, the Swedish prosecutor told Assange’s lawyers that Assange, once in Sweden, would be immediately placed in one of Sweden’s infamous remand prisons..

Assange’s choice was stark: extradition to a country that had refused to say whether or not it would send him on to the US, or to seek what seemed his last opportunity for refuge and safety. Supported by most of Latin America, the courageous government of Ecuador granted him refugee status on the basis of documented evidence and legal advice that he faced the prospect of cruel and unusual punishment in the US; that this threat violated his basic human rights; and that his own government in Australia had abandoned him and colluded with Washington. The Labor government of prime minister Julia Gillard had even threatened to take away his passport.

Gareth Peirce, the renowned human rights lawyer who represents Assange in London, wrote to the then Australian foreign minister, Kevin Rudd: “Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions… it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.”

It was not until she contacted the Australian High Commission in London that Peirce received a response, which answered none of the pressing points she raised. In a meeting I attended with her, the Australian Consul-General, Ken Pascoe, made the astonishing claim that he knew “only what I read in the newspapers” about the details of the case.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice was drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks were aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, to freedom of speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious.

Books were published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and an assumption that attacking Assange was fair game and he was too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”. It became part of his marketing plan to raise the newspaper’s cover price.

With not a penny going to Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also revealed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.

The injustice meted out to Assange is one of the reasons Parliament reformed the Extradition Act to prevent the misuse of the EAW. The draconian catch-all used against him could not happen now; charges would have to be brought and “questioning” would be insufficient grounds for extradition. “His case has been won lock, stock and barrel,” Gareth Peirce told me, “these changes in the law mean that the UK now recognises as correct everything that was argued in his case. Yet he does not benefit.” In other words, the change in the UK law in 2014 mean that Assange would have won his case and he would not have been forced to take refuge.

Ecuador’s decision to protect Assange in 2012 bloomed into a major international affair. Even though the granting of asylum is a humanitarian act, and the power to do so is enjoyed by all states under international law, both Sweden and the United Kingdom refused to recognize the legitimacy of Ecuador’s decision. Ignoring international law, the Cameron government refused to grant Assange safe passage to Ecuador. Instead, Ecuador’s embassy was placed under siege and its government abused with a series of ultimatums. When William Hague’s Foreign Office threatened to violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, warning that it would remove the diplomatic inviolability of the embassy and send the police in to get Assange, outrage across the world forced the government to back down. During one night, police appeared at the windows of the embassy in an obvious attempt to intimidate Assange and his protectors.

Since then, Julian Assange has been confined to a small room under Ecuador’s protection, without sunlight or space to exercise, surrounded by police under orders to arrest him on sight. For three years, Ecuador has made clear to the Swedish prosecutor that Assange is available to be questioned in the London embassy, and for three years she has remained intransigent. In the same period Sweden has questioned forty-four people in the UK in connection with police investigations. Her role, and that of the Swedish state, is demonstrably political; and for Ny, facing retirement in two years, she must “win”.

In despair, Assange has challenged the arrest warrant in the Swedish courts. His lawyers have cited rulings by the European Court of Human Rights that he has been under arbitrary, indefinite detention and that he had been a virtual prisoner for longer than any actual prison sentence he might face. The Court of Appeal judge agreed with Assange’s lawyers: the prosecutor had indeed breached her duty by keeping the case suspended for years. Another judge issued a rebuke to the prosecutor. And yet she defied the court.

Last December, Assange took his case to the Swedish Supreme Court, which ordered Marianne Ny’s boss – the Prosecutor General of Sweden Anders Perklev – to explain. The next day, Ny announced, without explanation, that she had changed her mind and would now question Assange in London.

In his submission to the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General made some important concessions: he argued that the coercion of Assange had been “intrusive” and that that the period in the embassy has been a “great strain” on him. He even conceded that if the matter had ever come to prosecution, trial, conviction and serving a sentence in Sweden, Julian Assange would have left Sweden long ago.

In a split decision, one Supreme Court judge argued that the arrest warrant should have been revoked. The majority of the judges ruled that, since the prosecutor had now said she would go to London, Assange’s arguments had become “moot”. But the Court ruled that it would have found against the prosecutor if she had not suddenly changed her mind. Justice by caprice. Writing in the Swedish press, a former Swedish prosecutor, Rolf Hillegren, accused Ny of losing all impartiality. He described her personal investment in the case as“abnormal” and demanded that she be replaced.

Having said she would go to London in June, Ny did not go, but sent a deputy, knowing that the questioning would not be legal under these circumstances, especially as Sweden had not bothered to get Ecuador’s approval for the meeting. At the same time, her office tipped off the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen, which sent its London correspondent to wait outside Ecuador’s embassy for “news”. The news was that Ny was cancelling the appointment and blaming Ecuador for the confusion and by implication an “unco-operative” Assange – when the opposite was true.

As the statute of limitations date approaches – August 20 – another chapter in this hideous story will doubtless unfold, with Marianne Ny pulling yet another rabbit out of her hat and the commissars and prosecutors in Washington the beneficiaries. Perhaps none of this is surprising.  In 2008, a war on WikiLeaks and on Julian Assange was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch”. It described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of “trust” which is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising such a rare source of truth-telling was the aim, smear the method. While this scandal continues the very notion of justice is diminished, along with the reputation of Sweden, and the shadow of America’s menace touches us all.

Listen to Eric Draitser’s interview with John Pilger on Episode 12 of the CounterPunch Radio podcast.

For important additional information, click on the following links:

http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/assange-could-face-espionage-trial-in-us-2154107.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ImXe_EQhUI
https://justice4assange.com/Timeline.html
https://justice4assange.com/Timeline.html
http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/wikileaks_doj_05192014.pdf
https://wikileaks.org/59-International-Organizations.html
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1202703/doj-letter-re-wikileaks-6-19-14.pdf
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/23/julian-assange-ecuador-and-sweden-in-tense-standoff-over-interview?CMP=twt_gu
http://assangeinsweden.com/2015/03/17/the-prosecutor-in-the-assange-case-should-be-replaced/
https://justice4assange.com/Prosecutor-cancels-Assange-meeting.html

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com