On September 7, hearings will begin in London where the British court will rule on whether the US extradition request against Julian Assange will be executed. The inaction of the mainstream media on the case is vengeful, yet it is undeniably shown that the British court is violating all rules of fair and equitable trial for political purposes.
On September 7, hearings of the British court hold that should lead to a verdict on the request for extradition of Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, to the US for "espionage". The US court's indictment mentions 17 offenses for a total of 175 years in prison.
Director Juan Passarelli summarized Julian Assange's case in a 38'25 ”documentary, which can be viewed in full at the bottom of this post (English spoken with English subtitles for the Spanish-language comments).
Judging by the way the British court has conducted the preliminary hearings and how Assange is being treated at Belmarsh Prison, it must be assumed that there will be no trial where the rights of the defense are respected. An approval of the extradition request is therefore almost a certainty.
After newly elected president of Ecuador Lenin Moreno withdrew Julian Assange's political asylum, Assange was detained by British police in Ecuador's embassy in London on April 11, 2019 and immediately taken to court. There, he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for violating the terms of his provisional release seven years ago, with his flight to the Ecuadorian embassy on June 19, 2012.
Although the Swedish court had previously dropped his extradition request and the reason for his prosecution in Great Britain had lapsed, he was still punished with the most severe penalty. In addition, immediately after the verdict, he was transferred to Belmarsh Prison, a maximum-security prison for serious criminals and terrorists. Since then he has been living there in conditions amounting to solitary confinement, even though the court never formally issued an order for "solitary confinement".
The facts leading up to this state of affairs are well known, at least to those who do not simply accept the statements of the Swedish, British and US governments as "factual".
Those facts go against the assertions that have been taken for granted in the mainstream media for a decade. Those claims can be summed up as an attack on the person without judging on the merits of the case. A brief overview of what preceded Assange's arrest in 2019:
- there has never been a charge from the Swedish court, only a request for extradition to hear Assange in a preliminary investigation about possible "sexual misconduct". A Swedish right-wing politician and a Swedish tabloid were the first to use the term "rape", after which the "rape allegation" has continued to lead a media life;
- Assange has never opposed questioning by the Swedish court for a complaint from two Swedish ladies who are indicting him for "sexual misconduct", namely having unprotected sexual relations with two different persons during the same period, which is a criminal offense in Sweden; he presented himself for questioning twice in Sweden and did not leave for his next travel destination only four weeks after the complaint of the ladies concerned, after obtaining permission from the Swedish court;
- the first investigating judge in the case decided to dismiss the case due to the "lack of sufficient elements for a judicial investigation"; after a right-wing MP asked, the case was reopened by a second investigating judge (which is a legal procedure in Sweden);
- Marianne Ny, the second investigating judge, refused for years to question Assange in London; during the same period, Sweden did agree to a 'letters rogatory' to interrogate several Swedish and British persons in Great Britain who are being prosecuted for serious sexual offenses;
- the Swedish court for all those years refused to give Assange guarantees that he would not be extradited by Sweden to a third country after extradition to Sweden, also a normal procedure before letters rogatory which is almost always allowed;
- finally, the Swedish court questioned Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and decided to dismiss the case definitively without further action;
- Assange's lawyers in Sweden were able to obtain e-mail traffic from Marianne Ny showing that she consulted with the FBI on a regular basis during her investigation, although it was formally about an investigation that the US is completely excluded from;
- Correspondence from the British court has also shown that the British authorities put pressure on the Swedish authorities not to drop the demand for extradition, which was already considered by the Swedish authorities after one year.
During Assange's stay in the embassy, several falsehoods about him and about WikiLeaks were sent out into the world. Most active in this mudslinging campaign was the British newspaper The Guardian.
This newspaper still refuses to correct the following lies:
- At one point, Assange is said to have endangered several people whose identities were mentioned in the emails with an uncensored publication of thousands of emails. In reality, it was Luke Harding, a Guardian's own journalist, who made the WikiLeaks passwords public, in a book;
- Assange allegedly (also according to Luke Harding) had three conversations with Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign manager (see Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources say). The Guardian still refuses to rectify this, even though they have been completely refuted by other media outlets such as The Independent, The New York Times and the Washington Post;
- the most persistent gossip that is still being recycled without any evidence is the claim that WikiLeaks received the Hillary Clinton campaign team emails from Russia's secret services in 2016; these emails showed that the Democratic Party leadership was working with Clinton's campaign team to sabotage Bernie Sanders' campaign and manipulate primaries results; what was in fact a case of electoral deception by one of the two power parties in the US was successfully twisted into a Russian plot that continues to pop up in all sorts of variants in the mainstream media. In April 2018, the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint against Assange and WikiLeaks for "attacking American democracy." In July 2019, the complaint was completely dismissed by the judge because "Assange and WikiLeaks did not participate in any crime in obtaining the material" and were thus fully legally entitled to publish this information. The charge was, according to the judge, “entirely divorced from the facts”.
Since Assange has been held in Belmarsh Prison, a number of new elements have emerged that indicate that this is a trial with political ends:
- a Spanish security company with a contract for the Ecuadorian embassy in London appears to have made video and audio recordings of all Assange's movements and conversations in the embassy for years, including conversations with his lawyers; these recordings were passed on to the US intelligence agencies FBI and CIA;
- Assange has no access to his file and can only consult his lawyers in Belmarsh very sporadically; since the beginning of March 2020 he has not had any private contact with his lawyers;
- during the preparatory hearings for the organization of the trial, Assange was placed behind glass where he couldn't hear the hearing and speak directly to his lawyers;
- Sitting Judge Emma Arbuthnot repeatedly made biased statements during those hearings, she read her decisions unaltered from a paper she already had with her at the beginning of the hearing; she adopted arguments of the opposing party (in this case the US embassy) as factual material against the defense;
- Judge Arbuthnot is the wife of James Arbuthnot, a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1985 to 2015 and a member of the House of Lords; as a Member of Parliament he spoke out several times against Julian Assange;
- the chief judge of the court dealing with the case is Emma Baraitser, she was a sitting judge on the Swedish extradition request; her husband is a shareholder in arms companies identified in bribery scandals, which came out in the open through WikiLeaks revelations; her son owns a company that does cybersecurity assignments for British intelligence services; his company is also mentioned in documents leaked by WikiLeaks; both judges refuse to withdraw from the case.
This case can be summed up as a deliberate strategy to keep a journalist blocked by legal proceedings for years. Without the slightest doubt, the judges concerned know that this case will one day be annulled for all the reasons mentioned above, after years of litigation. Even if it is then ruled that Assange's extradition is illegal, he will have been in a prison in the US for years.
All of this raises two fundamental questions.
Why the persistence of Britain and the US to punish a journalist for disclosures that are already known? The answer is simple. WikiLeaks has broken through the myth of the "good" wars fought by ourselves and our allies. Assange is a daunting example to all journalists around the world that there are limits to what can and should be investigated.
Why the reluctance of the mainstream media to defend Assange as a colleague? Now almost forgotten, but originally WikiLeaks and Julian Assange were welcomed as true heroes. The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and El Pais have all had huge scoops of wikiLeaks revelations that they were the first to publish. That changed when WikiLeaks published evidence of war crimes in Afghanistan by the US military and its allies, mainly the British military. WikiLeaks shattered the myth of the Western mainstream media as a critical observer. After all, the war crimes committed by British and Americans had long been known to those who wanted to know. They were not even always kept quiet. However, they were invariably presented as "mistakes", "miscommunication," or "tragic incidents". In other words, WikiLeaks made it clear to the world that "we" and our media use the same propaganda methods as the "Russians" and "Chinese" we branded. The character assassination of Assange is a strategy to divert attention from what this is really about. Assange committed the most crucial crime a journalist can commit by shattering the semblance of quality and critical objectivity of the Western media.
https://video.emergeheart.info/videos/watch/f2467447-f5a8-45c9-8d08-804d6a2d4747
The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange (38’25”). A film by Juan Passarelli -
