Up to 2,000 gather for ‘last chance’ to stop disgraced US case allowed so far by courts – but system seems stacked against Wikileaks founder, press freedom and public’s right to know

Protestors outside the court on Tuesday

Up to two thousand protesters gathered to demonstrate outside the Royal Courts of Justice today in London, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his legal team are fighting in what may be their last chance to avoid his extradition to the US, where the Biden administration wants to lock him in a high-security prison for the rest of his life for the ‘crime’ of exposing the actions of the US military.

Wikileaks embarrassed the US by revealing the wanton slaughter of Iraqi civilians – and the US wants its vengeance. To the UK’s shame, successive UK governments and courts have been all too eager to let the Americans have their way, despite the US case collapsing in disgrace when its main witness to Assange’s supposed ‘hacking’ of US systems admitted he had been lying the whole time – and plots by senior US officials to assassinate him. The admission should have seen the US laughed out of court, but UK judges granted its request anyway.

Protesters massed to show their solidarity with the Australian journalist, who has been imprisoned in Belmarsh prison since 2019 after a long effective incarceration in the Ecuadorian embassy while the UK and US governments conspired against him and even bugged supposedly sacrosanct meetings with his lawyers:

Wikileaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson gave the protest crowd a lunchtime update on the ‘absurd’ proceedings, which kept observers down to a handful despite the importance of the case, preventing even human rights groups from attending:

As with all the hearings so far, the case against Julian Assange appears to be stacked. After the farce of the collapsed US case being granted anyway, Assange’s appeal was denied by a judge with deep security service connections.

In the current case, one of the two judges was a lawyer for the Secret Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Defence, with clearance for access to ‘top secret’ information – and the other judge is the twin sister of right-wing former BBC chair Richard Sharpe, who resigned after an inquiry into his arrangement of an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson before his appointment.

Activist Steve Price, who represented Skwawkbox at the demo, summarised the day:

On a cold day thousands gathered to lobby the court and raise public awareness of this situation. This morning at the RCJ, the chant of the day was “There’s only one decision – no extradition!” The demo was noisy, very colourful, with a visible but low-key police presence and many passing drivers honking horns in solidarity.

Speakers included three Labour MPs – Richard Burgon, Zara Sultana and Apsana Begum, alongside Chris Hedges, Andrew Feinstein, Stella Assange and Julian’s brother and father, as well as lawyers, Reporters without Borders (RwB) and Wikileaks’ editor-in-chief. John Pilger, the great Australian journalist, was remembered with great affection.

Julian’s brother said the Australian Parliament voted by two thirds criticising the UK and USA and demanding he be released and returned to his home country. Two of the lawyers, as well as RwB noted that this case has enormous implications for freedom of the press globally and there are obvious parallels with how journalists have been deliberately targeted by Israel in Gaza.

The magistrate back in January 2021 decided Julian should be released solely on the grounds that he might kill himself, but this was overturned by the Home Secretary. There are a number of legal grounds his team will advocate for refusing the extradition. He has been detained in Belmarsh (in solitary confinement) for nearly 5 years, spent 7 years before that confined in the Ecuadorian Embassy. His health has deteriorated, it’s a form of torture, they’re slowly killing him. He is believed to be too ill to attend court today?

They want to extradite him for the crime of journalism, for exposing their hypocrisy, their dirty secrets, their war crimes.

Keir Starmer, the ‘human rights lawyer’, as he never tires of reminding everyone, has never spoken in Assange’s defence. As Director of Public Prosecutions, his actions are murky – because the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) destroyed its records of them and destroyed notes of what it destroyed. However, it is known that in the case of another extradition the US wanted – that of autistic hacker Gary McKinnon – Starmer flew in a rage to the US to apologise to his US government contacts as soon as then-PM Theresa May quashed the extradition on humanitarian grounds. The CPS and Sweden also destroyed records of their communications when the CPS was pressuring Sweden to continue to pursue Assange’s extradition there – no doubt a stepping stone to getting him to the US – on discredited rape allegations. Despite the destruction of evidence, it is known that the CPS told Swedish counterparts not to ‘dare’ drop its request and refused Sweden’s offer to come and interview Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Assange’s family and team have asked everyone who can make it to the court to continue demonstrating throughout the duration of the hearing to try to keep up pressure on the authorities. The Establishment’s relentless assault on Julian Assange is a war not just against him, but against press freedom and the right of the public to know what its supposed representatives are doing and to hold them to account.

The UK justice system has a last chance to show it is fit for purpose. If it happens, it looks as though justice will have to be wrung out of it. Absolute solidarity with Julian Assange and all persecuted journalists everywhere.

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The wife of Julian Assange fears for the WikiLeaks founder’s life if he is extradited to the US as a hearing on charges of espionage looms.

Ahead of the hearing on 20 February, Assange's wife, Stella Assange, told Byline Times of her fears that he "will be sent to the very country that plotted to assassinate him in the UK" and "once extradited, he would be placed in some form of solitary confinement, conditions that would drive any person to take their life". 

She said: “There is no prospect for a fair trial because he will be put on trial for exercising the democratic duty of informing the public of state-sanctioned criminality. The threat to his life is clear and present. 

“Julian will be tried in the Eastern District of Virginia where the majority of jury pools either work or have relatives who work for government agencies, such as the FBI CIA NSA – the very agencies implicated in the plans to assassinate him.” 

The Australian journalist has been imprisoned at Belmarsh prison in south-east London since April 2019. Depending on the hearing's outcome, he may be handed a 175-year sentence in the US if deported for exposing war crimes in the Afghan and Iraq Wars. 

Assange is accused of publishing material provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning revealing torture, assassinations, the list of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and the US rules for air strikes.

Manning was pardoned by President Barack Obama and released in May 2017 after serving seven years in prison. The Obama administration decided not to pursue charges against Assange due to “the New York Times problem”. The advice was that there was no distinction between the publishing activities of WikiLeaks and that of the New York Times. Charges were then revived under President Donald Trump.

Since then, the 52-year-old has been confined to a high-security block in Belmarsh, separated from his wife – who he married in 2022 – and his two young children.

Previously, Assange was living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after being granted asylum to avoid extradition to America. There was an order to extricate him to Sweden, where he faced sexual assault accusations, but he was never charged and the case has since been dropped. Assange’s legal team feared that he would be inwardly extradited to the US if he went to Sweden.

He was then arrested in April 2019 by UK police at the embassy.

Stella Assange is alarmed by the conditions her husband faces if deported to the United States.

She told Byline Times: “No family can prepare for such a thing. The conditions under which he would be held in the USA amount to torture. The newly appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture recently put out a statement calling on the UK to release Julian and block extradition.

“Julian has been detained in one form or another since 2010. The US case carries a 175 years sentence. The message is: publish evidence of war crimes and corruption at the highest levels and you will be hounded and imprisoned.

"Julian is a strong man but he is not superhuman. What is being done to him is unworthy of any democracy.”

Assange has made an application to attend the hearing in person so he can communicate with his legal team but his wife said they have still not been informed if it will be granted.

His legal team argues that the case for extradition is politically motivated and has cited media reports of plans by the CIA to assassinate and kidnap Assange. It has also exposed the security firm previously employed to guard him as he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy for spying on him on behalf of the CIA and the illegal removal of Assange’s legal files from the embassy.

The two-day hearing is likely to be the final chance for Assange to escape deportation to America, where he will be committed to a high-security prison awaiting trial. There are fears that the extradition treaty it has with the UK could allow the US to add or amend charges which may expose Julian Assange to the death penalty. 

“This is the last step in the UK courts," his wife said. "It will determine if Julian can have his appeal heard in the UK or if it is the end of the road in this country. If appeal is denied, he will attempt to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights. There is, however, a great worry concerning the climate around the UK Government’s adherence to the ECtHR.”

Supporters are calling the event ‘Global Day X: It’s Now or Never’ and are urging people to protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice. Demonstrations by civil society organisations in different parts of the country and in other parts of the world are also planned.

If it is successful, the US will have successfully used its 1917 Espionage Act against a journalist and publisher for the first time, prosecuted for obtaining or publishing US state secrets. Lawyers for Assange say that extradition would cross a new legal frontier and expose him to an unforeseeable extension of the criminal law.

Speaking from the European Parliament in Strasbourg, at the launch of an exhibition to highlight her husband’s status as the most awarded journalist on earth, Stella Assange added: “This case is an unprecedented abuse of the law to jail a journalist for committing journalism. Julian is being prosecuted for all the same reasons he has been awarded so many journalistic accolades. He is the most awarded journalist in history. The only way forward is for the charges to be dropped.”

The consequences for investigative journalism could be chilling and far-reaching, the WikiLeaks founder’s team argue. It believes it "will pose an existential threat to the free press as other countries will be able to argue that they too should be allowed to extradite journalists and publishers from the United Kingdom for breaking their censorship or secrecy laws”.

In the US, as a non-national, Assange would be ineligible to use the First Amendment (free speech) protection normally afforded to defendants.

“This is an unprecedented prosecution in relation to protected speech, which is a grave violation of freedom of speech under Article 10 of the ECHR and should stop the extradition,” his team has said.

“ECHR case law recognises the vital role that publishing state secrets can play in a democratic society and that criminal prosecution and conviction for such publications will deter the press from playing this ‘public watchdog’ role.”

Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin proved to be a storm in a teacup. The Russian leader used the conversation with the former Fox News host to repeat his well-known empty phrases, and yet again justify his decision to invade Ukraine. But why did the controversial American TV shock jock give Putin an outlet for his propaganda points?

Among the Russian President's rambling and fact-free talking points was the extraordinary allegation that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sabotaged a potential peace deal discussed in Istanbul in the early stages of the latest invasion.

Ever since Carlson arrived in Moscow on 1 February, and was spotted attending the Bolshoi Theater in the capital, Russian media have started hailing the American conservative pundit as a celebrity. Carlson was on the front page of Evening Moscow, the newspaper handed out for free to commuters every day on the Moscow Metro, while Russian pro-Kremlin media and Telegram channels reportedly mentioned the US journalist approximately 2,050 times over the past week.

All that, as well as Putin’s decision to speak with Carlson, clearly shows that many Russians – including the ruling elite – still have an inferiority complex in regard to the West. Although pro-Kremlin propaganda will almost certainly attempt to portray “the biggest interview of 2024” as Putin’s “brilliant victory over the West”, in reality, his reliance on endorsement by a US TV shock jock represents a serious weakness.

That, however, is unlikely to have an impact on the outcome of the upcoming Russian presidential election, scheduled for March 15-17. As Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in August 2023, the Russian presidential poll “is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy”, which means that the interview was broadcast mainly for the Western audience. But how effective was this kind of propaganda?

While Tucker Carlson undoubtedly has a serious influence on conservative Americans, his interview with Putin will not force the United States’ policy makers to change their approach regarding Russia, at least as long as Joe Biden is in office. But even if Donald Trump wins the election in November, that does not necessarily mean that Washington will fundamentally change its geopolitical course and stop supporting Ukraine, which is what many in the Kremlin reportedly hope for.

Thus, Carlson yet again echoed Moscow’s ambitions, without posing any challenging questions to Putin. He allowed the Russian leader to spend almost half an hour talking about Russian history, and about the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations. Putin essentially repeated what he wrote in his 2021 article ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“, claiming that significant parts of modern Ukraine are “historic Russian lands”.

But when asked why he did not invade “historic Russian lands” when he came to power more than 20 years ago, Putin started talking about the history of the Soviet Union, and blamed his predecessor Boris Yeltsin for the collapse of the USSR. He then once again admitted that he wanted Russia to join NATO in 1999 and 2000, but the former US President Bill Clinton reportedly told him that “it was not possible”. Thus, from Putin’s perspective, Russia has the right to join NATO, but if Ukraine seeks to become a member of the US-dominated alliance, it represents a “threat for the Russian national security”.

For Putin, Ukrainian national identity is also quite “problematic”, which is why he still aims to “de-Nazify” the country. Although Carlson did not bring the heat to the Russian leader, he did ask some very specific and practical questions that Putin refused to directly answer. Instead, he used his old mantras of his Western partners “deceiving him” and “leading him by the nose”.

It was a rhetoric for his domestic audience, as Putin seems to enjoy playing the role of a naïve charlatan who constantly “gets fooled” by his Western and Ukrainian partners. Since everything about Putin is a publicity stunt, he is likely deliberately portraying himself as a “good but naïve” leader, given that significant parts of the Russian audience still buy such a narrative.

Putin also blamed the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for “sabotaging” the 2022 negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul to end the war in its early stages. But according to Putin’s ally Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul sought to agree on the “lease” of Crimea, while Oleksiy Arestovych, the former advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that, from Kyiv’s perspective, the negotiations were so successful that the Ukrainian delegation “opened the champagne bottle”.

Could it be that Boris Johnson actually prevented Russia from signing a de facto capitulation in Istanbul?

For Putin, however, it is Western leaders, rather than he himself, who are responsible for the war continuing. He also blames them for the Euromaidan of 2014, which resulted in the overthrow of allegedly pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Putin told Tucker that the “CIA orchestrated a coup d'etat in Kyiv”. He, however, refused to mention his role in that process, and how he, at the request of the United States, effectively betrayed Yanukovych, pressuring him not to use force against Western-backed protesters.

Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, seems to know very little about those events, or about Russian-Ukrainian relations in general. Still, he gave Putin a chance to reach a potentially sympathetic audience in the United States.

“You have issues on your border, issues with migration, issues with national debt at $33 trillion. You have nothing better to do than fight in Ukraine?”, Putin said during the interview.

It was a message to Donald Trump supporters and American isolationists, as certain factions within the Russian elite hope that, if such a political option comes to power in the United States, Washington will stop funding Ukraine and allow Putin to achieve his goals in the Eastern European country. That is why the interview might have been mutually beneficial for both Putin and Carlson.

Dozens of journalists are currently imprisoned in Russia for their work, and they are unlikely to be released anytime soon. Putin, however, hinted that he might free Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who has been jailed for almost a year on espionage charges. But if he releases the American citizen Gershkovich as a “goodwill gesture”, without swapping him for any Russian spies being imprisoned in the West, he will yet again demonstrate a serious weakness that his propaganda will portray as another “geopolitical victory”.

Although many Western news outlets had requested to interview Putin, the Kremlin chose Tucker Carlson because his position, according to Peskov, “contrasts with that of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media”. It is not a secret that Putin, who does not seem capable of answering unpleasant questions, avoids debating not only with most Western reporters, but also with Russian journalists who do not agree with the official Kremlin narrative.

One thing is for sure – what Putin avoids to mention in his bureaucrat-style interviews is always more important than what he emphasizes. That is why he will remain the king of empty rhetoric, and rather boring speeches.

Cockerell posts video of Campbell’s speech after WMD ‘dodgy dossier’ architect tries to deflect criticism

Alastair Campbell during his speech

A journalist has shredded former Blair adviser Alastair Campbell’s denial that he derided young people outraged at Keir Starmer’s support for Israel’s war crimes – by the simple step of posting video of his speech.

Campbell had taken exception to a post by left activist @ToryFibs pointing out his mockery of young people:

But Claudia Cockerell, who authored the article to which ToryFibs had referred, politely shot down Campbell by posting the video of the section of his speech in which he said young voters should ‘get off their high horse and vote’ for the so-called ‘Labour leader’ whose only unbroken promise has been his support for Israel even when it is buys slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in its genocide in Gaza:

And the article in full
https://t.co/huaW936FRg

— Claudia Cockerell (@claudcockerell) February 6, 2024

In fact, Cockerell’s comments didn’t go far enough. Campbell, the architect of the false ‘weapons of mass destruction’ claims under Blair that led to the deaths of a hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, claimed that Keir Starmer was right to refuse to call for a ceasefire – when hundreds are being added daily to the 100,000+ people, mostly women and children, murdered and maimed by Israel – because he should save his ‘political capital’ and that’s why young people should ‘get off their high horse’.

There are much pithier things that could be said in response to that kind of cynical, sneering nonsense.

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