On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended lawns.\u00a0 He was too ill to attend what may well be the final appeal against his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States.\u00a0 Were he to be sent to the US, he faces a possible sentence amounting to 175 years arising from 18 venally cobbled charges, 17 spliced from that archaic horror, the Espionage Act of 1917.<\/p>\n
The appeal to the High Court, comprising Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp, challenges the extradition order by the Home Secretary and the conclusions<\/a> of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser who, despite ordering his release on risks posed to him on mental health grounds, fundamentally agreed with the prosecution.\u00a0 He was, Varaitser scorned, not a true journalist.\u00a0 (Absurdly, it would seem for the judge, journalists never publish leaked information.)\u00a0 He had exposed the identities of informants.\u00a0 He had engaged in attempts to hack computer systems.\u00a0 In June 2023, High Court justice, Jonathan Swift, thought it inappropriate to rehear the substantive arguments of the trial case made by defence.<\/p>\n Assange\u2019s attorneys had informed the court that he simply could not attend in person, though it would hardly have mattered.\u00a0 His absence from the courtroom was decorous in its own way; he could avoid being displayed like a caged specimen reviled for his publishing feats.\u00a0 The proceedings would be conducted in the manner of appropriate panto, with dress and procedure to boot.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, as things chugged along, the two judges were seemingly ill versed in the field they were adjudicating.\u00a0 Their ignorance was telling on, for instance, the views of Mike Pompeo, whose bilious reaction to WikiLeaks when director of the Central Intelligence Agency involved rejecting the protections of the First Amendment of the US Constitution to non-US citizens.\u00a0 (That view is also held by the US prosecutors.)\u00a0 Such a perspective, argued Assange\u2019s legal team, was a clear violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights<\/a>.<\/p>\n They were also surprised to be informed that further charges could be added to the indictment on his arrival to the United States, including those carrying the death penalty.\u00a0 To this could be added other enlightening surprises for the judicial bench: the fact that rules of admissibility might be altered to consider material illegally obtained, for instance, through surveillance; that Assange might also be sentenced for an offence he was never actually tried for.<\/p>\n Examples of espionage case law were submitted as precedents to buttress the defence, with Edward Fitzgerald KC calling espionage a \u201cpure political offence\u201d which barred extradition in treaties Britain had signed with 158 nation states.<\/p>\n The case of David Shayler, who had been in the employ of the British domestic intelligence service MI5, saw the former employee prosecuted for passing classified documents to The Mail on Sunday<\/em> in 1997 under the Official Secrets Act.\u00a0 These included the names of various agents, that the agency kept dossiers on various UK politicians, including Labour ministers, and that the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, had conceived of a plan to assassinate Libya\u2019s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.\u00a0 When the UK made its extradition request to the French authorities, they received a clear answer from the Cour d\u2019Appel: the offence charged was found to be political in nature.<\/p>\n Mark Summers KC also emphasised<\/a> the point that the \u201cprosecution was motivated to punish and inhibit the exposure of American state-level crimes\u201d, ample evidence of which was adduced during the extradition trial, yet ignored by both Baraitser and Swift.\u00a0 Baraitser brazenly ignored evidence of discussions by US intelligence officials about a plot to kill or abduct Assange.<\/p>\n For Summers, chronology was telling: the initial absence of any prosecution effort by the Obama administration, despite empanelling a grand jury to investigate WikiLeaks; the announcement by the International Criminal Court that it would be investigating potential crimes committed by US combatants in Afghanistan in 2016, thereby lending gravity to Assange\u2019s disclosures; and the desire to kill or seek the publisher\u2019s extradition after the release of the Vault 7 files detailing various espionage tools of the CIA.<\/p>\n With Pompeo\u2019s apoplectic declaration<\/a> that WikiLeaks was a hostile, non-state intelligence service, the avenue was open for a covert targeting of Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.\u00a0 The duly hatched rendition plan led to the prosecution, which proved \u201cselective\u201d in avoiding, for instance, the targeting of newspaper outlets such as Freitag<\/em>, or the website Cryptome.\u00a0 In Summer\u2019s view<\/a>, \u201cThis is not a government acting on good faith pursuing a legal path.\u201d<\/p>\n When it came to discussing the leaks, the judges revealed a deep-welled obliviousness about what Assange and WikiLeaks had actually done in releasing the US State Department cables.\u00a0 For one thing, the old nonsense that the unredacted, or poorly redacted material had resulted in damage was skirted over, not to mention the fact that Assange had himself insisted on a firm redaction policy. \u00a0\u00a0No inquiry has ever shown proof that harm came to any US informant, a central contention of the US Department of Justice.\u00a0 Nor was it evident to the judges that the publication of the cables had first taken place in Cryptome, once it was discovered that reporters from The Guardian<\/em> had injudiciously revealed the password to the unredacted files in their publication.<\/p>\n Two other points also emerged in the defence submission: the whistleblower angle, and that of foreseeability.\u00a0 Consider, Summers argued hypothetically, the situation where Chelsea Manning, whose invaluable disclosures WikiLeaks published, had been considered by the European Court of Human Rights.\u00a0 The European Union\u2019s whistleblower regime, he contended, would have considered the effect of harm done by violating an undertaking of confidentiality with the exposure of abuses of state power.\u00a0 Manning would have likely escaped conviction, while Assange, having not even signed any confidentiality agreements, would have had even better prospects for acquittal.<\/p>\n The issue of foreseeability, outlined in Article 7 of the ECHR, arose because Assange, his team further contends, could not have known that publishing the cables would have triggered a lawsuit under the Espionage Act.\u00a0 That said, a grand jury had refused to indict<\/a> the Chicago Times<\/em> in 1942 for publishing an article citing US naval knowledge of Japanese plans to attack Midway Island.\u00a0 Then came the Pentagon Papers case in 1971.\u00a0 While Summers correctly notes that, \u201cThe New York Times<\/em> was never prosecuted,\u201d this was not for want for trying: a grand jury was empanelled with the purpose of indicting the Times<\/em> reporter Neil Sheehan for his role in receiving classified government material.\u00a0 Once revelations of government tapping of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was revealed, the case collapsed.\u00a0 All that said, Article 7 could provide a further ground for barring extradition.<\/p>\n February 21 gave lawyers for the US the chance to reiterate the various, deeply flawed assertions about Assange\u2019s publication activities connected with Cablegate (the \u201cexposing informants\u201d argument), his supposedly non-journalistic activities and the integrity of diplomatic assurances about his welfare were he to be extradited.\u00a0 The stage for the obscene was duly set.<\/p>The post Identifying Imperial Venality: Day One of Julian Assange\u2019s High Court Appeal<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On February 20, it was clear that things were not going to be made easy for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US imperium, the national security establishment, and a stable of journalists upset that he had cut their ill-tended lawns.\u00a0 He was too ill to attend what may well be the final [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Identifying Imperial Venality: Day One of Julian Assange\u2019s High Court Appeal<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557,72372,117,200,36,74855,205],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514097"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1514209,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514097\/revisions\/1514209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}