Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Charles Glass.
He was ABC News' chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993.
Hmm, I got questions.
His latest book is They Fought Alone, The True Story of the Star Brothers, British Agents in Nazi-occupied France.
And here he's got this piece at the intercept I thought was important.
Julian Assange languishes in prison as his journalistic collaborators brandish their prizes.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Charles?
Good, thank you.
Very good to have you on the show here.
So, first of all, catch us up, if you could, on the latest legal developments in the case of Julian Assange since his arrest in London there a few weeks ago.
Well, after Julian was taken to Belmarsh maximum security prison, he was led before a judge who sentenced him to 50 weeks in prison on the charge of evading bail.
When he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy seven years ago, he was effectively jumping bail in order not to be extradited to Sweden.
He feared that in Sweden he would be rendered, as other people have been, to the United States without any judicial hearing.
That's why he wanted to stay in Britain.
Now he has 50 weeks to serve.
In the meantime, there is an extradition request from the United States for him to come back to the United States and face charges of collaborating with Chelsea Manning to hack U.S. military computers to provide the information that he and Manning provided to the world years ago about American military behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the moment, he's being held in Belmarsh prison in solitary confinement.
He's allowed out of his cell up to one hour a day only.
His visits are restricted and his conditions are not good.
To give you a point of comparison, it's unusual for someone to be sentenced to such a long period for evading bail.
There was a recent case in England of a man who had committed manslaughter and been convicted of it.
He jumped bail and he was only given, as I recall, about six weeks.
So, yeah, I was going to ask you about that, about how unprecedented or how usual that number of weeks is there inside the British system, but it sounds like I have my answer.
I'll take it back.
The man who was convicted of manslaughter and who was brought back in was called Jack Shepard, and he was given six months, so that's 26 weeks.
Julian was given basically twice that, and he has never been convicted of any crime in any country.
In fact, apart from the U.S. extradition request, he's not been charged with any crime anywhere, including in Sweden, where an investigation is proceeding on whether or not to bring any charges against him.
And then, as you say here, this isn't the county lockup.
They put him in the equivalent of the supermax over there, essentially, for a bail jump?
It is the maximum security prison.
It's a newer prison in Britain, and this is unprecedented for a nonviolent offender.
Yeah, but he's a political offender, and that's much worse.
So, well, to the people in charge of the court and jail system, anyway, it's worse.
So, now, here's the thing, too, is you said something there that I'm going to pretend to be a little confused about, I guess, in a Tucker Carlson kind of way.
But, geez, are you sure that none of the charges were about conspiring with Vladimir Putin to turn Donald Trump into a compromised secret agent and steal the election from Hillary Clinton?
Well, the U.S. has not pressed any such charges.
There is a civil suit by the Democratic National Committee against President Trump and his campaign managers and Julian Assange under a racketeering act, which charges them with basically revealing Democratic Party trade secrets.
But that's just a civil suit.
He shouldn't be extradited for a civil suit.
The extradition is purely on this charge of hacking or enabling Chelsea Manning to hack the government computers.
However, and the maximum penalty for that is only five years.
And if he were convicted of that, he could be sentenced to up to five years and theoretically be available for parole before that.
However, there are fears that once he is extradited to the U.S., that the U.S. will bring other charges against him, presumably under the Espionage Act, which carries a death penalty.
If they unsealed indictments on charges along those lines now, Britain, under international treaties, would not be allowed to send him to the U.S. because Britain and no European country will send someone to another country to face the death penalty.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, so a couple of things there.
I mean, first of all, with that civil suit, think about what that means.
If you just change the names, and now it's not Julian Assange, but the New York Times, who publishes some elite DNC emails, that the DNC would have it in their civil suit, that that journalism amounts to some kind of RICO, you know, racketeering infringement on their rights, some kind of thing like that.
That's a huge precedent.
But, you know, just like with the rest of this, it seems to slide and is okay, because instead of applying the New York Times test, they apply the Assange test, which is, we don't like this guy.
Republicans don't like him for the Manning leak.
Democrats don't like him for the DNC leak.
And so the media essentially, there's hardly anyone left to stand up for him.
And so the idea is that we can forsake him to protect ourselves, I guess.
And on the theory that he provided stolen goods to other parties knowingly, then theoretically, they would be accomplices after the fact, and should be charged as well.
And if they were being charged, I think the defense in the media would be much more vigorous than it is now at the moment.
Most of the media have disowned Julian Assange, as if he had never helped them and never provided the information that gave them so many scoops.
Yeah.
And then it's important to what you say about so far, they're not charging him under the Espionage Act.
But part of that, I mean, maybe that is to make it easier to get them extradited, then they come out with a superseding indictment later, that kind of thing.
Like you say, it is a capital offense if they want to push it that far.
It would be much more difficult if they unsealed all of the indictments, which people believe are waiting for him when he gets to the US.
They unsealed them all now.
His lawyers in England would have a much easier time preventing his extradition to the United States.
But at the same time, it's completely bogus, right?
Like even according to their worst accusations about Assange attempting to help Manning, at least so far what they're accusing him of or what we've ever heard leaked to the Washington Post or anything, it's helping, failing, trying but failing to help Manning to disguise her identity by logging in as someone else, but someone else with no greater access to the database than Manning already had.
So it had nothing to do with the, quote-unquote, hacking that his source was doing.
And then, of course, you have no less than Washington Post legend Bob Woodward and everybody else, real reporters, saying, Well, that's a journalist's job, especially on the national security beat.
That's exactly what you do.
You tell your source to do better and get more.
In fact, Edward Snowden tweeted out that Bob Woodward had told him that he would have advised him to stay at the NSA so he could pilfer more stuff, which is essentially exactly what they're accusing Julian Assange of doing here.
Much less than that.
But they're trying to call it espionage, not journalism.
Well, as you know, there's a great deal of hypocrisy around this whole issue and the treatment of Julian Assange has been appalling by the government, by the Democratic Party and by Julian's journalistic colleagues.
And I think it's disgraceful.
And, well, so is it really just partisanship?
Or they just don't like his prematurely white hair?
Or what is it about this guy that...
Because I think he's a hero just judging by his actions.
I don't care about him either way, personally.
You know, I don't know.
He seems like a nice enough guy, too.
I have no reason to throw him under the bus.
What the hell he ever did to me?
To provide me with a lot of great news stories.
He doesn't seem to be a partisan issue because the Republican administration of Donald Trump and the Democratic Party are both going after him.
They seem to...
One of the few things that they agree on is that this man should be put away for revealing government secrets and the government secrets show the government in a very bad light.
But remember, these documents were government documents.
It showed what government employees, military and civilian were doing around the world.
Well, it's kind of partisanship, but it's in the worst way where both sides have a revenge kind of motive against Assange for himself not being a partisan at all and being an equal opportunity reporter on her.
Assange has not only leaked over the years material from the US, but he published the emails of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
He's published government material from Indonesia, from many countries in the world that had nothing to do with the US.
So many of them not even friends of the US.
He's been, I would say, very fair in his release of documents that show what various governments are doing to harm their own and other citizens around the world.
Well, and he's never been shown to publish a fake document.
And he must have been entrapped a hundred times or people must have tried to entrap him a hundred times with fake stuff, but he's never been caught publishing a fake document yet.
To the best of my knowledge, that's right.
I don't know if anyone's tried to pass him bogus documents.
I've never asked him about that, but if I'm ever allowed to visit him, I will.
Yeah, that'd be a good question.
I mean, I'm just assuming and speculating there, but right, they must have.
Every intelligence agency in the world had a reason to try to discredit this guy.
So I am just making that up, but I think it's a safe assumption too.
Intelligence agencies around the world now are doing everything they can to discredit him.
I'm sure that there's a psyops campaign to discredit him.
Many of the things that people read about him and believe about him are simply made up.
Yeah.
Well, one of the biggest made up charges against him lately was that he had met with Paul Manafort.
This was supposed to be the connection to Russia, even though neither of them work for Putin anyway.
But this became a big part of the Russiagate scandal for a couple of weeks there.
And the Ecuadorian embassy book that you have to sign in when you come never showed Manafort's signature.
And apparently Manafort showed his passport and he hadn't even come to Britain.
And of course, as Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept and many others were saying, this is the most heavily surveilled terrain in the world.
They're in London, Embassy Row there.
And there's no way that, and that goes for the Brits, but it goes for the Ecuadorians too.
There's no way this could have happened without them having plenty of 4k footage of it for all of us to look at, you know.
Every room in the Ecuadorian embassy had ceiling cameras.
And every movement that Julian has made all these years is recorded.
Every movement.
When I last saw him, he compared himself to being on The Truman Show.
Yeah, that really is interesting too.
You know, people have always tried to say he's a hypocrite for insisting on having any privacy at all and this kind of thing.
But he really is living the WikiLeaks life in that sense where he's exposing other secrets, but he can't even go to the bathroom without Big Brother watching him.
He's paid a very high price to keep us informed.
Well, and you know, so you talk about that in the article a little bit.
You want to tell us a little bit about your visits with him, how long you've known him and what you think of the guy, what he's like and whatever you want to say.
I first met Julian Assange when he was charged when he was, when the Swedish government prosecutors asked for his extradition to Sweden to answer questions about the alleged molestation charges by two women in Sweden.
And at that time he was under house arrest at the house, the farmhouse in Norfolk of a man called Vaughn Smith, a former British Army officer, combat cameraman and head of the Frontline Club in London.
A man of great integrity.
And Vaughn invited me up to his house, this must be eight, nine years ago, to meet Julian, who was then confined to the house.
And I was able to interview him and visit him fairly often.
And I can say that he's become a friend.
He's someone of, I think, of absolute integrity.
He's not in any way foolish or stupid.
He is an unusual character.
He's not the most sociable person in the world.
And he can put some people off.
His personality can be a bit abrasive, but that doesn't diminish his qualities as a publisher and as a journalist.
He's never lied to me.
He's been very reliable.
He's stuck out this time in the Ecuadorian embassy with great dignity.
I mean, imagine being confined in basically a small apartment, about 65 square meters in all, just a few rooms, never seeing sunlight for seven years under constant surveillance, and also fear of being extradited to the US and maybe spending the rest of his life in a federal maximum securities prison.
And to have survived all that with his sanity in place is miraculous.
I'm not sure many people would do it.
Many would have either given up or gone insane.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I talked to him, I think twice back, you know, in the Arab Spring era and that kind of thing.
And he seems like a decent guy to me.
And I'll tell you what, though, I plead guilty that, you know, and whether it's true or not, I guess, you know, it does matter if it is true.
But, you know, anyway, it's a complicated kind of a matter.
But they succeeded in making him very toxic with these allegations of sexual molestation of these women in Sweden that you referred to there.
They've now reopened that case.
And I read a quote from at least one of them saying she absolutely still stands behind her accusation.
And she's so grateful that the, you know, her local security force is sticking up for her on this and that kind of deal.
So, you know, assuming I don't know exactly what the law is and the statute of limitations and whatever, but all the things being equal, they both deserve their day in court on that, it seems like.
But it sure meant back then once they came out with the accusation, I quit interviewing him and a lot of people quit interviewing him and giving him any credit kind of thing like that really hurt his credibility and stature a lot after that, even on this show, when as far as every other thing goes, I'm his biggest fan and most grateful fan, really, for the stuff that he's published that you described.
Well, it's worth bearing in mind that the Swedish prosecutors simply wanted to interview him.
They had already interviewed him when he was in Sweden.
Remember, he was in Sweden for two weeks beyond the time these charges, the girls or the women brought these charges to the police and answered all their questions at that time.
And the prosecutor told him that there were no charges to answer and he was free to return to London.
He then returned to London and later the Swedish prosecutor demanded his return to Sweden to answer more questions.
And he said that he would answer them in London.
And the Swedes have been, this is on the record, have sent investigators to London and other European countries to interview people who are under suspicion of anything.
And this time they said no, they wouldn't come to London, but he had to go to Sweden.
And it was resisting that return to Sweden where he feared he would be rendered to the US.
They refused to go, but he was always available and his lawyers made this clear.
He was always available to answer all of their questions in the embassy in London, but they refused to take part in that.
And, you know, I've read before, I'm sorry, I wish I had my footnotes better together, but I actually read pretty recently that it's on the record now that the Americans had called and intervened.
And I think there were even direct quotes about, you dummy, you did what?
You let him go?
No, recharge him right now and do some kind of thing.
But this is clearly all about the Manning leak.
And that the Swedes essentially went along with the Americans wishes in finding a pretext to charge him with something that, as you say, they'd already decided not to charge him with.
There were also leaked emails from the British to the Swedish prosecutor advising the Swedish prosecutor not to come to London, but to insist on his return to Sweden.
So everyone was interfering in what's meant to be a legal process, not a political process.
Yeah.
Well, they were really upset about that Manning leak, the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables, the Guantanamo files there.
Hillary Clinton was quoted, possibly half joking, but I don't know, look who we're talking about, saying, why can't we just kill this guy?
The Nixon administration was furious about Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon papers, and they wanted to prosecute him and they wanted to put him in prison forever.
But they didn't, they didn't succeed.
And one of the reasons they didn't succeed was because the New York Times and the Washington Post published these papers, and the Nixon administration made the mistake of prosecuting them as well.
And of course, the Supreme Court stood by freedom of the press and by the Post and the New York Times.
This time, I suppose the Trump administration has learned a lesson, and it's bringing charges only against the one who gave the newspapers the information that they published.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry, we're all out of time here, because I would like to keep interviewing you about this all afternoon, if I could.
But I really appreciate your time on the show and, and your effort in putting this thing out for people to see and keeping their priorities straight about what's right and what's important around here.
Thank you very much.
All right, you guys, that's Charles Glass.
This article is at theintercept.com.
It's called Julian Assange languishes in prison as his journalistic collaborators brandish their prizes.
Oh, and my fault, 100%.
No mention that Manning is now back in jail for telling another grand jury that he will not rat on Julian Assange or testify against Julian Assange.
So recently released and now back in prison, Chelsea Manning too.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
