{"id":170132,"date":"2020-10-12T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T11:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=170132"},"modified":"2020-11-29T06:28:23","modified_gmt":"2020-11-29T06:28:23","slug":"the-unprecedented-and-illegal-campaign-to-eliminate-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/10\/the-unprecedented-and-illegal-campaign-to-eliminate-julian-assange\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unprecedented and Illegal Campaign to Eliminate Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Assange would never receive a fair trial in the U.S., but he\u2019s not receiving one in Britain either.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

6 Oct 2020 – <\/em>Over the 17 days of Julian Assange\u2019s extradition hearing in London, prosecutors succeeded in proving both crimes and conspiracy. The culprit, however, was not Assange. Instead, the lawbreakers and conspirators turned out to be the British and American governments. Witness after witness detailed illegal measures to violate Assange\u2019s right to a fair trial, destroy his health, assassinate his character, and imprison him in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Courtroom evidence exposed illegality on an unprecedented scale by America\u2019s and Britain\u2019s intelligence, military, police, and judicial agencies to eliminate Assange. The governments had the edge, like the white man of whom Malcolm X wrote, \u201cHe\u2019s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The deck was clearly stacked. Assange\u2019s antagonists were marking the cards as early as February 2008, when the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center set out, in its words, to \u201cdamage or destroy this center of gravity\u201d that was WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, from the time Assange and his friends created it in 2006, was attracting sources around the world to entrust them, securely and anonymously, with documents exposing state crimes. The audience for the documents was not a foreign intelligence service, but the public. In the governments\u2019 view, the public needed protection from knowledge of what they were doing behind closed doors and in the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq. To plug the leaks, the governments had to stop Assange. The Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department soon followed the Counterintelligence Center\u2019s lead by establishing their own anti-Assange task forces and enlisting the aid of Britain, Sweden, and Ecuador.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What a ride it\u2019s been. The first recorded \u201cblack op\u201d against Assange occurred on September 27, 2010, when a suitcase containing three laptops, hard drives, and clothing vanished from the aircraft carrying him from Sweden to Germany. Efforts to retrieve his belongings, which included privileged communications with his legal counsel, elicited vague excuses from the airline that it knew nothing. The fate of the purloined items became public knowledge in 2013 when information from his laptops appeared in prosecution briefs against U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In 2011, FBI agents went to Iceland to employ an 18-year-old informant, Sigurdur \u201cSiggi\u201d Thordarson, to spy on WikiLeaks. When Iceland\u2019s authorities discovered the FBI\u2019s illegal activities, it deported the FBI agents. Thodarson, whom the FBI had paid $5,000 and flown around the world, later confessed to stealing money from WikiLeaks and was convicted for sexually abusing underage boys.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"GettyImages-544088452\"<\/p>\n

Scenes outside the Ecuadorian embassy in Brompton Road, Knightsbridge in London on Aug. 19, 2014. Photo: James D. Morgan\/Getty images<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Surveillance, constant wherever Assange found himself, intensified when he took political asylum in Ecuador\u2019s London Embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden. He told me on one of my visits to him there that life in the embassy, with cameras and microphones everywhere, was like \u201cThe Truman Show.\u201d The intelligence services observed his every movement and heard his every word. They spied on private discussions with his lawyers and his physicians. If a priest had visited the Catholic Assange, they would have violated the sanctity of the confessional.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the NSA and Britain\u2019s equivalent, GCHQ, tracked people who logged onto the WikiLeaks website. U.S. financial institutions attempted to cripple WikiLeaks financially by denying donors the use of credit cards and PayPal to support the organization. Assange\u2019s legal counsel did not escape scrutiny. His Spanish lawyer, the famed former judge, Baltasar Garz\u00f3n, who had prosecuted Chile\u2019s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, was followed, and his computer was stolen from his office in late 2017. I had a curious experience in 2019, and I\u2019m just a journalist. Two days after one of my meetings with Assange at the embassy, burglars broke into an office I shared with two designers in London. The only item missing was my computer, the thieves having left my office mates\u2019 computers untouched. It\u2019s impossible to prove who did it, but it\u2019s not impossible to guess.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The extreme measures taken against Assange reached their all-time low when Len\u00edn Boltaire Moreno Garc\u00e9s replaced the pro-Assange Rafael Correa as president of Ecuador on May 24, 2017. Former employees of a private Spanish firm, Undercover Global SL, which was employed to provide security at the London embassy, testified on the final day of the Assange hearing that they installed more cameras and microphones, tampered with the mobile phones of visitors, stole the diapers of one of Assange\u2019s babies to take his DNA, and discussed kidnapping and murdering him. They fed live video to the CIA of Assange\u2019s legal consultations. Something similar happened to Daniel Ellsberg after he released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1971. The White House \u201cplumbers,\u201d who would later rob the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington\u2019s Watergate Complex, broke into Ellsberg\u2019s psychiatrist\u2019s office to steal his medical files. The FBI had bugged Ellsberg\u2019s phone without a warrant. So outrageous was the government\u2019s behavior that Judge William Matthew Byrne dismissed the Espionage Act case against Ellsberg \u201cwith prejudice,\u201d meaning that the government could not appeal.<\/p>\n

Legal experts testified that Assange would not receive a fair trial in the U.S., but at London\u2019s Central Criminal Court it was becoming apparent that he was not receiving one in Britain either. The first magistrate assigned to his case, Emma Arbuthnot, in 2017, turned out to have a husband and a son with links to people cited for criminal activities in documents published by WikiLeaks. When her family\u2019s additional connections to the intelligence services and defense industries became public, she withdrew from the case for what she told Private Eye magazine was a \u201cperception of bias.\u201d She did not formally recuse herself or declare a conflict of interest. As Westminster\u2019s chief magistrate, she nonetheless oversees the conduct of lesser magistrates. One is Vanessa Baraitser, who presided at Assange\u2019s hearing. Records uncovered by the Declassified website showed that of her\u00a024 previous extradition hearings, she ordered extradition in 23. Not a bad record from the prosecution\u2019s point of view, but appeals courts subsequently reversed her verdict in six of the 23.<\/p>\n

When Assange\u2019s hearing convened on September 8, the defense applied for more time to prepare their case. The government had had 10 years of preparation and access to defense lawyers\u2019 correspondence with their client. Assange\u2019s advocates were permitted to see him only rarely and under observation at Her Majesty\u2019s Prison Belmarsh, a maximum-security facility in south London for prisoners<\/a> who \u201cpose the most threat to the public, the police or national security.\u201d Vital documents were not reaching him. Baraitser rejected the request. She also forced Assange to observe the hearing from a glass cage, usually reserved for violent offenders, at the back of the courtroom where he could not confer with his lawyers. Technical problems interrupted sound transmission to Assange, causing him to miss much of the testimony. When Assange addressed his lawyers across the room, the prosecution could hear what he said. Edward Fitzgerald, Assange\u2019s lead barrister and one of Britain\u2019s best, was in the ring with his hands tied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"GettyImages-1201691218\"<\/p>\n

Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie (center) and George Christensen (center left), speak outside Belmarsh prison, ahead of the first day of the extradition hearing due to take place next week for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London on Feb. 18, 2020.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Photo: Victoria Jones\/PA Images\/Getty Images<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Testimony demonstrating Assange\u2019s<\/u> legal handicaps and his failing health should be enough to prevent extradition. When police removed Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy and incarcerated him in Belmarsh in April 2019, they did not allow him to take with him any of his belongings. These included not only his clothes, but also his reading glasses, which he was denied for several weeks. U.S. authorities seized all his legal papers and other possessions from the embassy without a warrant or the presence of Assange\u2019s legal representatives.<\/p>\n

Assange\u2019s mental health has deteriorated during his confinement in Belmarsh. Numerous psychiatrists have attested that he is on the verge of suicide. Dr.\u00a0Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of psychiatry at King\u2019s College, London, told the court, based on\u00a019 consultations with Assange at Belmarsh, \u201cI reiterate again that I am as certain as a psychiatrist ever can be that, in the event of imminent extradition, Mr.\u00a0Assange would indeed find a way to commit suicide.\u201d Guards at Belmarsh had already discovered a razor blade in Assange\u2019s cell. Assange has sought Catholic absolution, asked to write his will, and called the Samaritans\u2019 suicide prevention hotline. Lurking in the background is a family history of suicide, which makes that outcome more probable. His depression worsened during several months\u2019 solitary confinement in the prison\u2019s medical wing, from which he was released after other prisoners protested the abuse. Testimony by leading psychiatrists Drs.\u00a0Sandra Crosby and Quinton Deeley confirmed Kopelman\u2019s diagnosis of clinical depression. Deeley estimated that the risk of Assange\u00a0killing himself if transferred to the U.S. was \u201chigh,\u201d noting that \u201crates of suicide are higher in people on the autistic spectrum.\u201d The U.N. special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, declared, \u201cMr.\u00a0Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to persistent and progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I sent Assange a transistor radio. The prison returned it. I then sent him a book on how to make a radio and that too came back.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Normal practice has not applied to Assange, who has received unique treatment at every stage of his incarceration. When he pleaded guilty for the relatively minor offense of bail evasion in April 2019, the court sentenced him to\u00a050 weeks at Belmarsh. At that time, Jack Shepherd, convicted of manslaughter in the death of a young woman in a speedboat incident, received a sentence of half that time. Two-thirds of the 797 inmates then in Belmarsh were violent offenders, among them convicted terrorists and gang members. Nonviolent bail jumpers under usual practice serve their time in less restrictive Category B or C prisons, but Assange was not a normal prisoner. When he served his\u00a050 weeks, the magistrate ordered him to stay in Belmarsh\u2019s harsh environment for the duration of his extradition proceedings.<\/p>\n

The petty persecution of Assange went so far as the refusal to allow him use of a radio, which is allowed under prison regulations. When veteran BBC correspondent John Simpson publicized this denial last June, I sent Assange a transistor radio. The prison returned it. I then sent him a book on how to make a radio and that too came back. I asked a friend in the prison service to intervene, but he demurred, \u201cBelmarsh is a law unto itself.\u201d A respected former hostage of Hezbollah in the 1980s then wrote to Belmarsh\u2019s governor to point out that his captors had given him a radio that he called \u201ca godsend and helped me considerably to get through the ordeal.\u201d When the prison gave Assange a radio the next day, it was either a coincidence or the authorities\u2019 avoiding the appearance of small-minded cruelty more obscene than that of Lebanese kidnappers.<\/p>\n

More special treatment followed. At the hearing, the prosecution initially stated that Assange stood accused under America\u2019s 1917 Espionage Act for publishing government secrets. When defense witnesses showed that Assange\u2019s actions were no different from those of any other journalist cultivating sources, prosecutors reversed course to allow that any journalist publishing classified documents could be liable to prosecution. Given that Assange collaborated with the New York Times, The Guardian, El Pa\u00eds, and Le Monde, their editors would be liable for prosecution. No one believes they will be. The prosecution failed to explain why another publisher, Crymptome.org, was not being investigated when it had published the massive Cablegate collection of State Department communications on September 1, 2011, a day before WikiLeaks had.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"GettyImages-1155860871\"<\/p>\n

Supporters of the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange gather to show their solidarity ahead of his expected appearance by video-link at the latest hearing in his ongoing extradition case at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London on June 14, 2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Not only did<\/u> the U.S. choose to ignore other publishers of the American documents, but it also applied the law in a unique manner to suit their case against Assange. U.S. prosecutors had applied under the U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty of March 2003 to compel Britain to hand over Assange. Article 4(1) of the treaty, inconveniently for the prosecution, states, \u201cExtradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense.\u201d The prosecution and the court, however, cited British domestic legislation, the Extradition Act of 2003, which does not mention the political exclusion. This sleight of hand mirrored the contradiction between American claims to apply the Espionage Act to Assange, who is Australian, for actions undertaken in Iceland and the U.K., while denying him protection of a more fundamental American law, the Constitution\u2019s First Amendment with its guarantee of freedom of speech and the press. Can the prosecution get away with choosing which British and American laws apply to Assange and which don\u2019t? How much prosecutorial chicanery can a court swallow without destroying its own legitimacy?<\/p>\n

Britain has ratified other international treaties that prevent dispatching Assange to the U.S. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment requires the prohibition and punishment of torture in law and practice. It also \u201cforbids the forced return of any person to a country where they would risk being tortured.\u201d The United States ratified it in 1994. Two years earlier, it had ratified the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights guaranteeing immunity from torture, as well as the rights to life and free expression.<\/p>\n

The U.S. has abrogated both treaties, as many documents published by WikiLeaks have shown, despite the fact that they have the force of law in signatory states. Amnesty International observed in 1998, three years before the September 11 attacks provided an excuse for torture, that the U.S. consistently \u201cdiluted\u201d the conventions with \u201creservations, interpretations and statements that limit the protections they require.\u201d It added, \u201cThe cruel use of restraints, resulting in unnecessary pain, injury or even death, is widespread in U.S. prisons and jails. Mentally disturbed prisoners have been bound, spread-eagled, on boards for prolonged periods in four-point restraints without proper medical authorization or supervision. Restraints are deliberately imposed as punishment, or used as a routine control measure rather than as an emergency response.\u201d Amnesty also criticized the near-permanent solitary confinement in America\u2019s \u201csupermax\u201d prisons with no sensory stimulation that \u201ccan cause severe physical and psychological damage.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Can the prosecution get away with choosing which British and American laws apply to Assange and which don\u2019t?<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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One recent British precedent would require denial of the extradition application on health grounds. Computer hacker Lauri Love, accused of \u201cbreaching thousands of computer systems in the United States and elsewhere,\u201d has Asperger\u2019s syndrome. An appeal court found in 2018 that sending him to the U.S. for trial would so harm his mental health that he had to remain in Britain. Physicians have diagnosed Assange with Asperger\u2019s, and 117 psychiatrists signed an open letter declaring that Assange would not survive trial and imprisonment in the U.S.<\/p>\n

An American former public defender, Yancey Ellis, described for the London hearing the conditions in Virginia\u2019s Alexandria Detention Center, which would house Assange before and during his trial. Assange, he said, would be confined \u201cat least\u00a022 hours in a cell\u201d that was \u201cabout the size of a parking space\u201d with only a mat on a concrete shelf for a bed. Joel Stickler, an American prisoner advocate, testified that if Assange were convicted, his treatment at the \u201cAlcatraz of the Rockies,\u201d otherwise known as the\u00a0U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Facility in Florence, Colorado, would be worse. Assange would be housed alone amid inmates like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, FBI agent-turned-Russian spy Robert Hanssen, Mexican drug baron Joaqu\u00edn \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Archivaldo Guzm\u00e1n Loera, and Oklahoma City co-bomber Terry McNichols. The\u00a0prison\u2019s regime is as ruthless as its prisoners: twenty-three-hour daily confinement in a concrete box cell with one window four inches wide, six bed checks a day with a seventh at weekends, one hour of exercise in an outdoor cage, showers spraying water in one-minute spurts, and \u201cshakedowns\u201d at the discretion of prison staff. There won\u2019t be many other journalists and publishers there.<\/p>\n

Barristers for the prosecution and defense have one month to submit closing arguments in writing to Baraitser, the magistrate, who will render her verdict on January 4. An impartial tribunal would have no option but to exonerate Assange \u2014 but fairness has not thus far featured in proceedings with the prosecution\u2019s 10-year head start on the defense; the inability of Assange\u2019s solicitor, Jennifer Robinson, to confer with him for six months; and the prosecution\u2019s possession of his confidential lawyer-client documents and transcripts of his conversations with his advocates in heavy-handed violation of the law.<\/p>\n

The maltreatment of Assange revealed at London\u2019s Central Criminal Court will not end if he is extradited. Extradition will intensify his \u201ccruel and unusual punishment.\u201d The prohibition of such punishment appears in both the Eighth Amendment of the American Constitution and its predecessor, Clause Ten of England\u2019s 1689 Bill of Rights. That fundamental protection has applied to everyone in Britain and America for centuries. Once again, though, they may make an exception for Assange.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

Charles Glass<\/em><\/a> – charlesglassbooks@\u200bgmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 Oct 2020 – Over the 17 days of Julian Assange\u2019s extradition hearing in London, courtroom evidence exposed illegality on an unprecedented scale by America\u2019s and Britain\u2019s intelligence, military, police, and judicial agencies to eliminate Assange. The governments had the edge, like the white man of whom Malcolm X wrote, \u201cHe\u2019s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.\u201d The deck was clearly stacked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":169400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[229,918,910,942,487,378,651,234,911,454,572,639,292,70,126,921,113],"class_list":["post-170132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-activism","tag-assange","tag-big-brother","tag-ecuador","tag-human-rights","tag-journalism","tag-justice","tag-media","tag-surveillance","tag-sweden","tag-torture","tag-uk","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-whistleblowing","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}