Martin Sonneborn, independent MEP, on Julian Assange

Courtesy of X, but it's a good posting--and it reveals, once again, the depravity of the 'rules-based order'

Source link; posted on X on 22 Feb. 2024, at 00:05 a.m. This is Google’s machine translation (emphases mine):

Unfree Assange

Because the process is extremely confusing, first a short (joke!) summary. From the pub. Sorry. But the circumstances... (You can find the long one on my homepage, a 32-page brochure to download.)

The fact is that in January '21 the London District Court rejected Assange's extradition to the USA - for health reasons.

The US side appealed, whereupon the High Court in June 22 overturned the district court's ruling and instead found that #Assange , who suffered a minor stroke during the trial, was in top physical and mental health and could be safely extradited.

At the current hearing, Assange's lawyers presented the reasons for their request to be allowed to conduct their own appeal proceedings against the original district court ruling, which had ignored elementary factual reasons:

• The fact that an Australian journalist outside US territory is said to have been convicted of 17 counts under a US espionage law from the First World War for publishing material in the public interest, which is protected by freedom of the press, is completely absurd.

• Even if, following the US argument, one were to consider A. to be a spy, a British court should not have approved his extradition. Espionage has been consistently classified as a political crime by British jurisprudence for 130 years, and the 2003 US-UK Extradition Treaty expressly excludes political crimes from mutual extradition.

• The 18th count - hacking conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to steal data together - is based largely on what he himself now describes as a "lied!" admitted lie by a pedophile Icelander who should be given impunity in Iceland for it (we have forgotten and suppressed the unsavory details, they are in our brochure) . ( By the way, we would be ashamed to even go to court with something like that.)

• The US side wants to hold Australian A. accountable under the US criminal code, but at the same time insists on denying him the protections of the 1st Amendment because he is not a US citizen. Rules-based order, my ass!

• We believe that the allegation that Taliban chief Osama bin Laden had enjoyed Wikileaks printouts in a quiet place (probably next to MAD and Süddeutsche Zeitung - toilet reading!) is just as valid as the baseless claim that Wikileaks has been used for years Informants have been put at risk. Even 14 years after the material was first published, the US government has yet to locate or even name anyone who actually suffered any harm.

• Even if some damage had occurred, the public interest in the publications would have exceeded the need for protection of individuals "on a titanic scale" - after all, it was not just about exposing torture, kidnapping, murder and smaller and larger war crimes, but "about a real one "Events that happened to real people". In addition, the Wikileaks publications were intended to put an end to these real and ongoing crimes. The drone killings in Pakistan have stopped, as have the helicopter massacres in Iraq. (The fact that Wikileaks itself did not publish any names and that they ultimately became public through journalistic negligence is a different story.)

• Information that only became known after the original procedure was completed. For example, the planning for the kidnapping and murder of Julian Assange, who at the time was staying as a political refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was commissioned by then CIA chief dick Mike "Fatty" Pompeo and approved by US President Trump.

• After the "Vault 7" leak of 2017 (see our text on Joshua Schulte, who had just been sentenced to 40 years in prison!), Fatty Pompeo famously invented the new enemy category of the "non-state enemy secret service" for Wikileaks, which we refer to here as Assange. Attorney Fitzgerald oppose our own. If anything, Wikileaks spied for all of humanity: "Wikileaks is an espionage agency for the people."

If the court grants Assange's request for his own appeal, then these points can be raised. If not, he actually faces immediate extradition. As Stella Assange fears, he could find himself on a plane bound for Virginia within hours. One way. (

The court is not given a time frame for its decision.

There is cautious hope among trial observers that, in addition to the ongoing controversies over its Ukraine and Israel policies, which have earned it dwindling support, the Biden administration is currently seeking to avoid a third political battleground - at least until the US presidential election in November.

It would correspond to this scenario if the British High Court accepted Assange's request - with all due leisure. For Assange, that would mean at least another year in London's Hellmarsh maximum security prison. With the renewed prospect of a trial, the outcome of which is of course completely open again.

Unfortunately, there is no get-out-of-jail-free card for Assange, one way or the other.

The first day of the trial on Tuesday belonged to the brilliant Assange lawyers Edward Fitzgerald and Mark Summers. You have once again explained what a nightmarish idea it is to extradite to a country an Australian publicist who published documents on US war crimes - torture, disappearances, murder (of children, civilians, journalists) - on his Wikileaks platform , which had official plans drawn up to murder him.

The second day for the somewhat simpler lawyers on the US side. In a sometimes incoherent presentation, they repeated unsubstantiated and with innate condescension parts of the presentation from the district court hearing that had long since been refuted. Assange is actually not a journalist at all because he hacked something when he was a teenager (Australian government waste disposal or something like that), Chelsea Manning is not a whistleblower (that's right! a whistleblower), she just did whistleblower things, and any dubious murder plans are irrelevant Matter...

Incidentally, the press had difficulty following all of this because the world-famous high-tech pioneer Great Britain cannot provide suitable microphone technology in the smallest hall of its highest court.

Instead, the approximately two dozen journalists who had arrived were herded by bailiffs into a gallery from which they were supposed to follow a broadcast of the proceedings on screens on hard church benches (without a table). The heads of judges and lawyers were the size of postage stamps, the sound was sometimes not transmitted at all, then doubled to compensate, and remained completely incomprehensible for long stretches.

The court had ordered in advance that the "public" hearing, probably the most crucial for press freedom in the world, could only be followed online by journalists who were in England and Wales.

The cage made of solid iron bars, which was courteously kept ready for Assange in the courtroom, remained empty on both days. His health is "delicate and is rapidly deteriorating," says his brother Gebriel Shipton. And he probably wouldn't survive his extradition to the USA, says Stella Assange.

On both days of the trial, a large crowd chanted "FREE, FREE, FREE ASSANGE!" in the British rain outside the High Court in London. At the same time there were demonstrations in Barcelona, ​​Paris and Berlin.

Unfortunately, no leader in the Western world found time to comment on this case [let that sink in while you consider Mr. Navalny’s demise].

At the end of this procedural tapeworm that the British court system around Julian Assange is producing, it will become clear whether the West will continue its moral descent into the Middle Ages. This trial is only superficially about Julian Assange. It's about law, democracy, law and freedom. It's about government crime and war crimes. It's about the criminalization of journalism, the abolition of democratic accountability and the crushing of civil libertarians. Sorry: freedoms.

The European policy advisor says: "It's not perfect yet, and one sentence was strange," office manager Hoffmann orders a whiskey sour. I'm putting this online here now. Finally it's already 11:59 p.m. Cheers!

Here is a useful link to Craig Murray’s website who’s been on Mr. Assange’s side for some time now. Mr. Murray also provides in-depth reporting.

#freeAssange