Julian Assange Extradition Trial: World Powers Seek Revenge
[September 9, 2020]

Julian Assange has been held in isolation at Belmarsh high-security prison 23 hours a day since dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, April 11, 2019.

British police drag publisher Julian Assange out of the Ecuador’s London embassy, April 11, 2019 (The Guardian)

United States government claims that he violated its Espionage Act of 1917, and committed illegal computer hacking. It requested England’s government to arrest and extradite him. He would be tried in Alexandria, Virginia. It is there that a secret grand jury began gathering a case against him on May 11, 2011.

The extradition trial at Old Bailey, the central criminal court of London, is expected to last three or four weeks.

Following his arrest, the court’s first legal proceedings against Assange dealt with his breach of bail conditions once he sought asylum in Ecuador’s embassy, in order to avoid imprisonment in the US. Assange had only 15 minutes to prepare with his lawyer and the hearing lasted only 15 minutes. One judge, Michael Snow, said that Assange was a “narcissist who cannot get beyond his own self-interest.”

The judges, including Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, ruled that he should be held in “custody” for 50 weeks. Bail violations are usually punished by a fine, and/or a few days in jail. Assange’s “custody” for such a minor offense resulted in isolation. He has long since served that time but the government won’t release him pending results on the extradition matter. US’ original charges against Assange would have netted a maximum of five years imprisonment.

In June, Magistrate Arbuthnot ruled that a full extradition hearing should begin February 25, 2020, then expected to last five days. The trial was postponed while the US fabricated more charges against him, which now amounts to 18 counts with a possible sentence of 175 years imprisonment.
When there are court hearings, Assange is usually too sick to attend, and participates via video. He is allowed few visitors and even his lawyer is often not allowed in, or is limited to a few minutes. Julian is not even allowed to have materials pertaining to the case in his cell.

No Fair Trial is Possible

Counsels for the US government contend that Assange has committed the largest “crimes” of compromises of information in US history. It was irrelevant to the US government and England’s magistrates that the “compromises of information” exposed truths of many types of governmental crimes, including war crimes punishable by years to life imprisonment.

If Assange is sent to Alexandria, he has no chance of a fair trial. According to Alexandria’s demographics, the city of 159,000 people is located 12 kilometers from downtown Washington DC. Of 96,500 employed persons, 24,000 work directly for the government, mainly for intelligence services (CIA, NSA) and defense departments, and many private company employees are government contractors. (1)

Grand Juror selection always has government employees or private workers associated with the government. That is why the government always prosecutes accused violators of national security and espionage laws there. No journalist has ever been so tried. The Espionage Act was made in wartime to prohibit US residents-citizens from supporting US enemies in times of war. Julian Assange does not fit those criteria.

According to the UN rapporteur on torture, Nils Meltzer, even more Alexandria residents than the demographics agency stated work for the US government. He told interviewer Daniel Ryser: “The choice of location is not by coincidence, because the jury members must be chosen in proportion to the local population, and 85 percent of Alexandria residents work in the national security community – at the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Department and the State Department. When people are tried for harming national security in front of a jury like that, the verdict is clear from the very beginning.

The cases are always tried in front of the same judge behind closed doors and on the strength of classified evidence. No one has ever been acquitted there on a similar case.” (Note 1.)

The most contentious exposes for the US and England are connected to the downloading of a “vast amount of classified documents” by Chelsea Manning when she was a US army intelligence analyst. She subsequently served seven years in prison. These files included approximately 90,000 reports about the war in Afghanistan, 400,000 Iraq war reports and 800,000 Guantánamo Bay detainee assessments, as well as 250,000 US diplomatic cables. Many daily newspapers published information and documentation provided by Assange-led Wikileaks. Many of these newspapers, which used Wikileaks exposures, such as, The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, and BBC TV and radio since abandoned Assange and this historic case against freedom of the press.

In Denmark, the daily Politiken also published some of these documents. Yet both it and state-sponsored DR media headlined news articles of the upcoming extradition trial as an outgrowth of earlier “Rape Charges” against him. When this reporter confronted the media with this error, they did nothing to correct the falsehood. This is a typical example of how the Western mass media in most countries demeans and dismiss Assange-Wikileaks as a legitimate medium.

Sweden Joins the Witch-Hunt

Two Swedish women, Anna Ardin and Sophia Wilén, had consensual sex with Assange when he had visited them and held talks in Stockholm, in August 2010. Ardin invited Assange to her home and bedroom. After hosting a party for him at her flat, she tweeted friends that she was with Assange one of the “world’s coolest, smartest people; it’s amazing”. After several days of sexual relations, Ardin and Wilén went to police to ask that Assange be tested for venereal disease. They said he had not always worn a condom and that one had torn. There was no question of use of force.

Assange did go to the police station on his own. He was cleared of any illegality by prosecutor Eva Finne, who said, “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.” (2)

Only after the government, following encouragement from the CIA, changed prosecutors did the new one issue a warrant for simply “questioning” him. By then, Assange was in England. He agreed to return to Sweden if the government would guarantee that it would not extradite him to the US, as he realized the Obama government wanted his scalp. Even though that is frequently granted, Sweden refused to do so for this publisher-activist.

In the summer 2012, an English court ordered Assange’s extradition to Sweden for “questioning”. Assange, his staff, and lawyers were fearful that Sweden would send him further to the US. Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy when Rafael Correa was president. Correa granted him asylum and later granted him citizenship.

It took Sweden five years before they finally interviewed him after his lawyers had suggested dozens of times they come to the Ecuadorian embassy where he awaited them. Finally, Sweden wanted to drop the case, but Britain kept appealing to them not to.

In Ryser’s interview with Nils Meltzer, he asked, “Why were the British so eager to prevent the Swedes from closing the case?”

“We have to stop believing that there was really an interest in leading an investigation into a sexual offense,” Meltzer replied. “What Wikileaks did is a threat to the political elite in the U.S., Britain, France and Russia in equal measure. Wikileaks publishes secret state information – they are opposed to classification. And in a world, even in so-called mature democracies, where secrecy has become rampant, that is seen as a fundamental threat.”

Sweden finally dropped the case in November 2019. By that time, Russiagate was in full swing. So, that replaced the Sweden “rape” card. The Democratic Party National Committee with Hillary Clinton in the lead claimed Russia hacked into its computer and had Wikileaks publish emails, revealing corruption by Hillary Clinton, and sabotaging the primaries.

Democratic leaders and the CIA saw a good chance to blame Putin and Assange, their two main enemies, for what was a probable disenchanted insider’s leak. (3)

Authorities didn’t even do forensics on the equipment. No proof was found, not even by the anti-Trump, anti-Putin Robert Mueller inquiry. Probably in an effort to compromise, Trump and cohorts decided to blame Julian Assange alone for exposing state secrets, “espionage”. By that time, Wikileaks had disclosed well over ten million documents exposing crimes and corruption of scores of governments.

The new Ecuadorian president, Lenin Moreno, withdrew Assange’s asylum and revoked his Ecuadorian passport overnight and without consulting or even informing Assange. Moreno did so after assurances that the US would guarantee loans, increase trade and investments. USAID funding for US propaganda programs returned to Ecuador after its new president betrayed his fellow citizen.

After a decade of internment, either in jail, under house arrest, or seven years in a small area of the Ecuadorian embassy in London where the CIA had a Spanish company, Undercover Global, spy on him. The Spanish National Court opened an investigation into this. (4)

“Undercover Global is suspected of having installed microphones in a fire extinguisher at the embassy as well as in the women's toilets where Assange used to meet with his lawyers for fear of being spied on…´Meetings which Assange held with his lawyers, as well as medical visits and those of other nature were recorded,’ the court said.”

The information, including video film, was then transferred to computer servers that were accessible to both the Ecuadorian and US intelligence services, the court added.

Judicial Conflict of Interest

Judge Arbuthnot’s husband, Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom , “a former defense minister, is a paid chair of the advisory board of military corporation Thales Group”, and was an adviser to arms company Babcock International. Both companies have major contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD). (5)

British judges are required to declare any potential conflicts of interests to the courts, but Emma Arbuthnot did not excuse herself from judging the Wikileaks publisher. Lady Arbuthnot began presiding over Assange’s legal case in 2017. She remains the supervising legal figure in the process. According to the UK courts service, the chief magistrate is “responsible for… supporting and guiding district judge colleagues”.

“At a time when Lady Arbuthnot was in her former position as a district judge in Westminster, she personally benefited from funding together with her husband from two sources which were exposed by WikiLeaks in its document releases,” wrote Mark Curtis and Matt Kennard. (Note 5)

There is more than a mere “appearance of bias”. The judge’s husband was part of a delegation, including a former chair of the British joint intelligence committee, which co-ordinates GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, who met with Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu and energy minister Berat Albayrak, PM Erdogan’s son-in-law. In 2016, WikiLeaks published 57,934 of Albayrak’s personal emails, of which more than 300 mentioned Çavusoglu, in its “Berat’s Box” release.

“Thus at the same time Lady Arbuthnot was presiding over Assange’s legal case, her husband was holding talks with senior officials in Turkey exposed by WikiLeaks, some of whom have an interest in punishing Assange and the WikiLeaks organization,” wrote Curtis-Kennard.

Britain Tortures the Messenger

Assange is still isolated in Belmarsh prison despite torturous conditions described by UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Meltzer. He and two doctor specialists in torture, examined Assange in prison, and concluded that he is a victim of “psychological torture”. Meltzer went so far as to compare what was being done to Assange with what the Nazis did. They realized that using psychological torture is more effective in breaking victims than physical torture. (Note 1)

The Convention on Torture—to which the US, USA, Sweden, Ecuador are parties all of which are involved in persecuting and/or prosecuting Assange—requires that member countries conduct investigations into such charges by the UN rapporteur. They all refused to do so.

Several politicians have publically stated that Assange should be “hunted down” (Sarah Palin), or “assassinated” (Tom Flanagan). Flanagan was a senior adviser to the Canadian PM Stephen Harper when issuing “a fatwa against Assange”, on the Canadian TV station CBC. “I think Assange should be assassinated…I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something ." (6)

Hillary Clinton said the same to her staff, November 23, 2010. “Can’t we just drone him? ” (7)

Collage posted by Aaron Kesel https://wearechange.org/hillary-clinton-proposed-drone-strike-julian-assange/

Cablegate

Wikileaks disclosure of US diplomatic cables between 1966 and 2010 are of extreme embarrassment to the US government. Among disclosures were Hillary Clinton orders to US diplomats, and US ambassadors’ complaints about US allies, such as:

• British troops in Afghanistan are not very good at the job. This angered British politicians who always stand beside US warmongers.
• US is working with Sweden’s military and secret services inside NATO, although Sweden is not a member and the majority are opposed to NATO membership. Cables revealed this “real politic” in which Sweden’s parliament was in the dark.
• Secretary of State Clinton ordered diplomats to steal personal material information—DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card information—and tap phones from UN officials, even its general secretary, and from human rights group leaders.
• Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to “protect US interests”.
• Cables show that the US supports Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese governments’ massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians over decades, even before a civil war broke out. During the last days of the civil war, April-May 2009, when guerrilla forces surrendered, thousands of civilians were massacred, and surrendering fighters were executed.

So yes, a truly free press can be dangerous to criminal politicians. That is why a free press must be turned into a servile adjunct.

Jonathan Cook explains how the media has failed in its mission to inform the public honestly. (8)

“Eight years of misdirection by the corporate media has laid the ground for the current public indifference to Assange’s extradition and widespread ignorance of its horrendous implications.”

“Journalists do not need to care about Assange or like him. They have to speak out in protest because approval of his extradition will mark the official death of journalism. It will mean that any journalist in the world who unearths embarrassing truths about the US, who discovers its darkest secrets, will need to keep quiet or risk being jailed for the rest of their lives. That ought to terrify every journalist. But it has had no such effect.

“Instead, through whistleblowers, Assange rooted out the unguarded, unvarnished, full-spectrum truth whose exposure helped no one in power—only us, the public, as we tried to understand what was being done, and had been done, in our names. For the first time, we could see just how ugly, and often criminal, the behavior of our leaders was.”

“Assange did not just expose the political class, he exposed the media class too—for their feebleness, for their hypocrisy, for their dependence on the centers of power, for their inability to criticize a corporate system in which they were embedded.”

Meltzer concluded the comprehensive Republik interview thusly:
“In order for the division of powers to work, the state must be monitored by the press as the fourth estate. WikiLeaks is the logical consequence of an ongoing process of expanded secrecy: If the truth can no longer be examined because everything is kept secret, if investigation reports on the U.S. government’s torture policy are kept secret and when even large sections of the published summary are redacted, leaks are at some point inevitably the result.”

1. https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/VA/Alexandria-Demographics.html
https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange
2.https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/04/assange-extradition-after-cheering-assanges-abuse-journalists-have-paved-path-to-us-gulag/
3. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-index-of-russiagate-debunkery-f5b6f4101dd0
4. https://news.yahoo.com/spanish-court-probes-alleged-spying-assange-ecuadorian-embassy-180112903.html
5. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52548.htm
6. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/us-embassy-cables-executed-mike-huckabee
7. https://wearechange.org/hillary-clinton-proposed-drone-strike-julian-assange/
8. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/04/assange-extradition-after-cheering-assanges-abuse-journalists-have-paved-path-to-us-gulag/