All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, again, introducing Kevin Gostela from shadowproof.com and also twitter.com slash KGostela.
He is doing great coverage of the Julian Assange extradition hearings over there in the UK, which are all being broadcast over live streaming.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin.
How are you doing?
Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to have you here, and I won't keep you too long.
You know, we kind of talked all about the whole case and all these sorts of things a week ago or so when you were on the show, but certainly I would like to get an update on what's been going on in these court hearings.
I guess I'm impressed that the judge is allowing all these great witnesses to even be called.
It seems like they would have found a loophole to close that down, but the defense keeps putting on great witness after great witness, is that right?
They have a pretty good lineup.
I mean, I'd say they picked some really good people.
I mean, maybe if I was going to have one gripe, which I suppose I'm entitled to as a journalist, I might think that they could have come up with a couple of better witnesses on U.S. prison conditions.
There are some people I know that I'm kind of surprised they didn't choose to consult who have been really good in their work before, but that's really the only nit I would pick.
I mean, everything about what they have in their lineup is really good, and you're speaking to me a day before day seven when Daniel Ellsberg is likely to testify, or we're expecting to talk to him, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower.
I mean, that's a huge person to have back you and be involved in giving testimony, particularly in this case.
All of these people that they're calling are playing a crucial role in blowing apart some of the key aspects of the prosecution's case and trying to show that there's a lot of misrepresentation of facts and the prosecutors.
As I've said, I didn't really say this to you last time I talked, but I said most of the case that they're bringing against Julian Assange is based around a conspiracy theory that I don't think they're going to be able to ever prove.
Say what you mean by that particularly.
Well, what I mean by that is this idea that Chelsea Manning was essentially working for Julian Assange on behalf of WikiLeaks, and that while she was inside the U.S. military's computer system, that she was somehow recruited and acting as some kind of a spy for WikiLeaks.
We emphasize, or at least I do when I talk about this case, that Mike Pompeo, when he was with the CIA, and then now it hasn't changed.
I'm sure Gina Haspel feels the same way as CIA director.
We emphasize that that agency has pushed this idea that WikiLeaks is not a media organization, but a non-state hostile intelligence agency, and so WikiLeaks tried to make this a positive.
When they branded what they did, Julian talked about being an intelligence agency of the people, and they flipped that around and turned it into a negative, and they've spent a lot of time, the U.S. government has in the last decade, making it seem like WikiLeaks is out to undermine the national security, attack the well-being of the U.S. government.
Anyway, I suppose to a certain extent that's true.
I mean, it makes it harder for the U.S. to get away with some of the activities that it tries to get away with when WikiLeaks is exposing them to scrutiny and embarrassment, In this case, what they claim is that Chelsea Manning was effectively working for WikiLeaks, and that it wasn't an independent act, that Chelsea didn't decide on her own to release the material to WikiLeaks, and then Julian Assange and others there went, oh, we're getting this amazing information.
We should probably get to work on this and get it published, which is what journalists would do.
I mean, a journalist can solicit leaks, but in this case, there's no evidence that Julian Assange ever picked out or singled out Chelsea Manning and said, could you get us information from the United States government?
She just passed that along to them because the New York Times wouldn't respond to her request to provide information, the Washington Post wouldn't.
She was afraid to go down to the Politico's office.
This is all stuff from the court martial.
And so ultimately, she went with the anonymous submission system of WikiLeaks.
And so I just don't think, you know, they can't really prove this conspiracy that they're concocting around Julian Assange.
Yeah.
Well, I think you just said it perfectly.
This is already provably false.
It's already a matter of the official record from Manning's court martial, as you just said that first, she tried to go to the Times and the Post, and then I'm not exactly sure the particulars of what happened with Politico there, but that the Times and the Post completely ignored the leak.
So Manning sat there and said, well, I guess I'll give it to Assange then.
So just in terms of chronology, it couldn't be that Assange said, hey, I need you to do this for me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that somehow Assange would be necessary to manipulate her access.
She's got a security clearance.
She's working as an all source military intelligence analyst in the middle of Baghdad and talked about how she was involved in helping the military go after high value targets, which is the word we usually would describe as, you know, I guess you would say crudely drone bait or people who were being attacked by military drones in these areas or people who were the targets of killer capture missions.
And she's helping to find those people for the military and collect intelligence and providing information that can help the Iraqi military forces round up individuals and send them to detention camps that the U.S. military was managing.
And so she doesn't need any help from WikiLeaks to get around the computers.
Right.
And also, as far as the motive, you know, this story was 10 years ago.
A lot of people maybe don't know this part of the story and what have you.
But there was a rat named Adrian Lamo who told Manning that, listen, I'm a minister and a journalist, so I double extra have security to protect you and never repeat anything you tell me.
You can trust me.
And Manning told him the whole story.
And then Lamo was the rat that turned Manning over to the FBI.
And after he started working for the FBI, he then said to Manning, hey, Manning, why don't you sell these secrets to Russia or China?
I bet you can make a bunch of money trying to entrap her into this.
And Manning said, no, don't you get it?
I'm not interested in benefiting myself here.
This is the truth about crimes and bad policies that are going on.
And it's straight out of, you know, the very best of Thomas Jefferson talking about the reason to have free speech and this kind of thing.
In a democracy, you need an informed adult population so that they can make the best decisions about how to implement reforms.
And this is, you couldn't make this stuff up.
And there it is right there.
When the FBI tried to entrap Manning into treason, Manning said, no, I'm doing this because I love my country.
He doesn't have anything like, oh, I'm fed up with my supervisor.
She doesn't think that I'm ever going to go anywhere.
And I need to stick it to them and show them that I can be somebody.
Right.
Or I have a big crush on Julian Assange and I wonder if I could get his attention this way or.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Give me a break.
The whole thing.
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Uh, he's looking at, um, you know, both of them have said the Mac have acknowledged the maximum could be 175 years if he got the maximum for each and every charge, but then they break it down and they go through the different details and they say that, uh, you essentially, if you added in sentencing enhancements, I can go into more detail if you're interested, but if you, if you add in the enhancements that a, uh, prosecutor could ask for and that the judge might grant, then Julian Assange would easily be looking at a 30 to 40 year sentence.
So that would mean you would essentially be in prison for the rest of his life.
He's 49 years old right now.
Completely crazy.
And all the while they got them locked in this cage, in this weird glass box, like he's Hannibal Lecter from a silence of the lambs or something.
He's going to spit AIDS juice all over everyone.
Or he's got a suicide bomb stitched into his abdomen that he's somehow going to hurt everyone with or something.
Or like he's a Saddam Hussein and we were putting them on trial for being a dictator or something like that.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what they chanted when they hang him in a barn.
Um, anyways, um, yeah, well, that was one of the wars that Julian Assange, uh, did, and Manning did such a great job of covering.
So there's our relevant tangent.
Um, but yeah, man, so, uh, you know what I want to hear about too is Trevor Tim's testimony.
Cause I read on your tweets and, uh, Joe Lauria talked about it.
Nobody said Trevor killed it.
And then I couldn't get him on the show cause he went on vacation.
Oh, okay.
But I love Trevor Tim and I want to know about him slaying the, uh, prosecutor there on a redirect.
Yeah.
So that was, um, that was excellent because, okay.
So just so people know, Trevor is the executive director for the freedom of the press foundation.
And what makes this a really important organization for people to know about is the fact that he's done this work to help more than 70 media organizations around the world, including ones that we might love to hate, like the New York times, the USA today, Bloomberg news, corporate outlets, wall street journal to help these outlets get submission systems so that they could accept material from sources.
And then they could have, they could take this stuff confidentially without, uh, when they received them, they wouldn't be exposing them to any, you know, hopefully, I mean, obviously we have us intelligence agents, agencies that are committed to cracking these kinds of systems, but on the other end, these are people that have done good work in developing systems that can try to protect, uh, on some level, our privacy when we're engaged in journalism.
And so these, these organizations are using these to accept secure communications.
And, uh, and so he took the stand to, to talk about this work, to talk about his work, following the case closely, um, to standing up for press freedom and, um, how, how he sees this as a part of the war on journalism, the larger war on journalism.
And so as if, as a, when the prosecutor had a chance to get a crack at him, he essentially was in the same spot that witnesses in the, the, the day or two before had been and had struggled, um, because they weren't quite sure what to say.
So for example, one of the things was one thing he beat back really well was Julian Assange is not a journalist.
And Trevor says, well, it really doesn't matter whether the U S government considers Julian Assange a journalist or not, because, um, it's not like the New York times is, uh, is in need of the government to issue a press pass in order for them to have first amendment rights.
Plus it's beside the point because fixing fixating on this idea of whether someone is a journalist or not, it, it, that's not how the first amendment works.
It's about whether or not someone engaged in first amendment activities.
So, you know, as much as these elites in our country like to go around being like, they're the best and biggest and brightest journalists, really, honestly, you and me, anyone in our family could be engaged in journalism on any day of the week and they would be protected by the first amendment.
Yeah.
And if you just want to go by accuracy, alternative media types like you and me at shadow proof and anti-war.com are far superior and can prove it in every way.
When it comes to these things, we spent five years promoting Al Qaeda in Syria, calling a moderate rebels.
And we pushed this Russiagate hoax on the American people for now four years and counting and on and on and on.
In fact, famously one time Alex Jones was interviewed on CNN and they said to him, how can you deal in such falsehoods all the time?
And he goes like that time you lied us into war in Iraq.
And it's like, actually, you know what?
They do have less credibility than him.
They really do.
That's who they are.
He never got a million people killed.
Sure.
So the other thing that Trevor did a good job of going after was the way the prosecutors are trying to deliberately misinterpret their own indictment against Julian Assange.
Suddenly they want us all to believe that the charges against him do not criminalize all the documents that were published.
And this might be news to you as somebody who's been following this case.
And you thought, I mean, this is squarely an attack on journalism.
What are you talking about?
Well, they keep saying that this prosecutor named James Lewis, who is a part of the Crown Prosecution Authority working on behalf of the U.S. government, continuously says that they're only charging documents that expose the names of informants who were working for the U.S. military or people who were human intelligence sources for the State Department.
So I would understand that, and you probably would too, as people in civil society or from these activist organizations who were supposed to, as they would put it in quotes, promote democracy, but they're really fomenting coups or destabilizing parts of those countries and doing things that are going to get the governments angry with them.
And they're providing information on those governments that the U.S. can use to go, and this would probably be particularly the case in like Venezuela and other countries like that, where we are up to that kind of thing.
And Trevor says, no, actually your indictment, yes, there are three charges that are just about specific documents, but then you've got general charges, conspiracy to publish this information, conspiracy to do this and that, and that involves all the information.
It involves every single document that WikiLeaks ever published from Chelsea Manning.
In other words, he smacked the prosecutor down with the prosecutor's own paperwork and said, what you are claiming now is not a fact because it says right there in your indictment.
Yeah, and I would say the reason why the prosecutor wants to say this to the judge is because he knows that they are doing something they should not be doing, and he's got to deceive the judge into believing that it is much more focused and targeted.
I mean, if they had a case, this is a kind of a tangent, I'll get back, there's one more point I want to make about Trevor Tim.
But if they did actually charge Julian on only documents that they claimed that exposed informant's names, well, first off, I would tell you that I believe they're using the wrong law.
We have something called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
And I think if they wanted to go after Julian Assange under that law, it would be much harder to defend him just because we have such a lack of solidarity already among people in media.
And, you know, even though it's not a crime, I must be clear with you, it's not a crime to publish the names of informants in the United States.
It's actually protected.
Yeah, the First Amendment would still protect that anyway, but you're just saying it would, it should be easier for them to get away with that kind of illegal persecution than this one.
Yeah, but they, you know, they want to have it all.
They want the entire footlong sub if they can.
So then the other thing that I would say is that Trevor got into a conversation about what's responsible journalism, what isn't responsible journalism, which is kind of like, really a bogus way in which they like to talk about all of this.
And he got into this issue of publishing informants.
And, you know, he said very clearly that that's not a crime, as I just said to you.
I mean, he mentioned, and this was I think this was one of the big blows that was landed, which was, hey, listen, if if the government had wanted to criminalize this, it would have happened after WikiLeaks published all this material, because in fact, there was something called the Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination Act or the S.H.I.E.L.D.
Act that was supposed to amend the Espionage Act.
And guess who wanted to pass that law?
Joe Lieberman.
And Joe Lieberman was involved with some other people.
I believe Jeff Sessions even supported this.
And he was the attorney general at one point in the Trump administration before he got completely embarrassed by Donald Trump.
And then they had this as a consideration.
The whole idea of this legislation was to make it a federal crime to publish the name of a U.S. intelligence source.
And it would have been used exactly like the Espionage Act is used against whistleblowers.
If I did this, I would be committing a crime.
It wouldn't matter why I did it.
It just would be a crime to publish the name.
And that was a response to WikiLeaks.
But it never passed Congress.
And it never passed Congress is because it probably would not have survived a First Amendment challenge.
So this to me is like one big, you know, one big punch back at the prosecutor showing them that you really don't have grounds for a lot of this case.
Right.
I mean, that really says two major things there, right?
That one, it wasn't already illegal because they went and scrambled to put together a new law to make it illegal.
And then they decided that actually we can't do that because our constitution forbids laws that do that.
So.
Yeah, that constitution gets in the way of a lot of things, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good old Trevor Tim.
You know, I read a bit of that where he was saying, you know, they're going the way the prosecutor frames it.
Do you approve of publishing the names of informants?
And he says the question is whether it's illegal or not.
And the answer is no.
You're asking me about a publisher's opinion.
That's totally different than what's a crime.
And, you know, you can't put one over on Trevor Tim.
Dude, that guy's sharp as a razor.
Oh, yeah.
And I actually know him.
I, you know, we go back and as long as I've been covering this case, he's been covering this as well.
Me too.
I mean, I've interviewed him for a decade on it as well.
Yeah.
I mean, because he is as good as they come.
So he's and another good exchange.
This is my last thing that I really want to get in on here on Trevor was he was asked by the prosecutor, why should your opinion be preferred over the opinion of courts in the United States?
And he just, you know, without skipping a beat goes, my opinion is in line with previous court opinions.
There's never been a publisher charged in this matter before.
And he said, Supreme Court president is almost wholly on the side of Mr. Assange in this case.
So, boom.
Blam.
Done.
Yep.
And he didn't even have to rehearse that or he wasn't nervous or nothing.
You know, he just knows he knows.
No.
Good old him.
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All right.
So you can say whatever you want.
But the one thing I wanted to bring up before I forget was Joe Lori was saying that the prosecutor got in a fight with the judge about being cut off short or early, even though he clearly was not being cut off early and that the judge seemed to be mad.
And this kind of sounds trivial, but mad judges, you know, these things count for a lot.
You know, like that thing about if you're, if the judge has got to decide, make sure and get a continuance past lunchtime because you're three times more likely to get convicted at 1115 than at 130.
You know, I like that.
So I think this is actually more of an issue than it might appear to someone who's just a passive observer, who isn't looking at this as closely as me, but the way I understand it, this outburst that happened on the part of James Lewis, which, by the way, didn't get the same kind of media attention that Julian Assange got for interrupting.
That's a surprise there.
But maybe James Lewis should have.
I mean, in fact, he was embarrassed.
He came back after break and apologized to the judge because he felt like he had lost control of himself.
So, I mean, to me, I mean, what I don't know what Joe told you, but I do think it was rather out of line.
So he was characterizing time limits for witnesses as the guillotine, which is just ridiculous.
You know, you're asked to have a limit to how far you're going to go with each witness so we can schedule.
And we have to be able to do case management.
I mean, I'm a journalist trying to cover this, and there has to be a boundary for how long these witnesses are going to be on the stand.
There are like 40 of these people we need to get through in order to finish this.
And it was only planned to be a three to four week hearing.
And it certainly looks like it's going to end up being five to six weeks or maybe longer that we're dealing with this, all because this prosecutor has now insisted that for all of these defense witnesses that he get around, you know, he get unlimited time basically to decide what he wants.
But the defense only has a half hour for the person they bring.
And then they're not even allowed to read their witness statement into the record, like what we might see in a congressional hearing.
You know, they're not even able to give an opening statement, the witness.
So as journalists covering this, you don't immediately know why this witness is important.
They don't start off on anything.
And that's what the defense is doing is trying to steer us to figure out like, at least as public observers and as far as the judge that's following along, why did these witnesses matter?
But then they have to leave and let the prosecutor take over the courtroom for the next two to three hours and basically bully the witness into saying things that they want to hear.
And then when they're done, the defense gets some time to come back and reset and, you know, remind the judge that everything you just heard shouldn't matter and this is what matters.
And then they're done with the witness.
But it's just so much time that he gets and for him to complain about the guillotine, like, please give me a break.
Well, I hope that really annoys her.
And it's at least, you know, on the margin could make a difference if she's starting to maybe lean one way.
I mean, on one hand, I want to just say, you know, this is all a foregone conclusion.
There's no law at stake here, only politics and power.
And we already know what's going to happen.
But at the same time, it really is up to her to decide.
And she doesn't really have to do anything.
And frankly, this is a pretty humongous and unprecedented case in the history of Anglo-American law, where you're having the Americans demand the extradition of an Australian from Britain to America to face charges over journalism.
What in the hell?
So, I don't know.
Well, it seems like maybe there's a way that maybe there's like a wall she'll come up against where she actually doesn't really have a choice but to set him free.
Yeah.
Well, then that's why you have European politicians demanding access to it.
I mean, they've been they've been effectively locked out and they're asking for video access or they're saying, you know, you make room in the courthouse so that we can see a video feed and they don't feel like they're able to follow something that's of international importance.
The other thing that's happened that's I find hilarious because I have to.
It's the easiest way to deal with is that this prosecutor doesn't know how to ask questions of witnesses.
So because he doesn't know how to ask his questions or handle a witness, he keeps pausing and trying to get the judge to bail him out and save him and help him.
I'll give you an example.
I can sympathize with that.
I know every listener to this show right now is like, hey, I know a guy like that can't figure out how to put a question in an interview.
Go ahead.
Well, so the whole idea is that he doesn't want them to go on and give speeches when he asks a question.
He wants to get a quick and easy answer.
So he keeps trying to box these witnesses in and he wants them to give a yes or no answer or like one sentence.
But the way he's asking it, he's trying to hide details from the judge.
Or he's trying to ask it in a way where you feel like if you're the witness, you'd feel like you're being trapped, like they're trying to pull one over on me.
It'd be kind of like, so do you agree that Julian Assange should not be involved in hacking?
And you're like, well, but I can go yes, but then there's more that I need to add to that because I can't just say that hacking into a computer is a crime.
I need to say that he didn't actually hack into a computer and I have to go on and address what you're trying to do here.
So the witness goes on and rambles and then James Lewis throws a fit and he's like, judge, make him stop talking.
And she's, well, I can't do it.
You ask the questions.
If you ask a question like that, he's going to answer it.
Yeah.
I don't know, man, I guess.
I should tune into one of these things and try to take the temperature of the personalities there because it really does count for a lot, right?
That sounds like she's not showing total deference to this guy.
At least I'm mildly and pleasantly surprised by that, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, I'd say that while I don't think we should read too much into it and say that this means there's going to be a favorable outcome for Assange, what is clear is, you know, the defense is going to be able to put all the witnesses they want to on a witness stand and they're going to be able to collect the testimony that they would like for the case.
And likewise, the prosecutor is going to have unlimited amount of time to challenge these witnesses.
And so, you know, all we can say, what I can say for certain is, you know, even if it's a foregone conclusion that the extradition is going to be authorized, when we get done with this, we will have heard about every single angle you could possibly imagine related to this case.
I'm confident of that.
I mean, I think that by the time we're done, we will have come at this in all different directions and maybe even directions we didn't think we could come at when talking about Julian Assange.
Yeah.
And you know what?
I mean, obviously, I think it should be sprung immediately, but the circus of an American trial on this might be worth seeing, actually.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I mean, that's a whole other issue just because one thing that's really good about what we're seeing in the extradition hearing is, and I don't know if we might have picked up on this in the last interview we did, but you said something to me about how we were talking about U.S. war crimes and torture in the courtroom, and I think you're kind of stunned that that was something that would come up.
Yeah.
In fact, I interviewed Clive Stafford Smith about his testimony there and everything.
That's excellent.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry I haven't heard that interview, but he's an excellent guy.
And the stuff that he was saying, and also he deserves some credit because if I had to rank the witnesses that were able to take on what the prosecutor was doing, Clive comes in as a runner up in challenging this prosecutor because the prosecutor was ...
Clive actually told the prosecutor, I don't think you know how U.S. cases are litigated.
And so it was pretty nice to just call him out and say, you're acting incompetently.
And so all of this stuff related to torture and war crimes is still, most of it classified in the United States.
And I don't think we would hear it in a public trial against Julian Assange.
There would be closed sessions in which it could be brought up.
But then we also deal with the fact that the prosecutors would disqualify it as irrelevant.
They would challenge it before the judge and say it has nothing to do with the charges against Julian Assange.
So we don't need to talk about the torture or the war crimes that were exposed by WikiLeaks.
It doesn't have any bearing on whether he was involved in these acts.
And so I think this is really great.
If we think of what's happening right now in the UK, this is the time to really follow along and dig into what the U.S. government is doing, because they're going to be able to engage in much more of a covert prosecution when they put him on trial in the United States if he's brought here.
Right.
And yeah, this is sort of a backhanded way of going ahead and mounting his defense now.
And like you're saying, I was reading here on your tweets, 20 more witnesses on the list and weeks and weeks more of this because, all importantly, and this is so important to reiterate for people to understand, and this is someone was interviewing me the other day and asking me about Snowden and being stranded in Russia and all that.
Oh, I know what it was.
I was being interviewed and it was like an ask me anything thing.
And one of the people said, should Snowden come home?
If he's pardoned, should he come home or just stay there or something?
Well, he always said he wanted to come home.
And he even said he'd be happy to face trial in Virginia because he did break the law.
And he's happy to say that, like, OK, yeah, I did break the law.
So you got me on.
At least you have a right to put me on trial.
I recognize that.
But I want the right to be able to tell the jury why I did it.
And right now, the Espionage Act forbids the I did it for a really important reason defense.
And then so therefore, like you're saying, the prosecutors would have the judge completely disallowed that testimony from ever even being delivered in the court.
The defense would be, you know, no more allowed to, you know, play big top peewee for the jury or anything else.
It'd be deemed completely irrelevant and and disqualified.
And so that's the same thing that Julian Assange would be facing, too, that he's absolutely unable to even explain himself.
And then, of course, there's the fact that his jury would be all federal government, national security state employees from Virginia.
And it would be the furthest thing from a fair trial at that point anyway.
But.
Yeah, or their family members or friends of those family members and they're there, you know, they're all in these cliques that come from these different this DC culture.
And so, yeah, I mean, it just wouldn't be good.
But but make the let me wouldn't be fair at all.
It would be completely contrary to any Americans, you know, basic conception of justice and a fair trial.
Can I get a word up from the Matlock fans out there?
That is not how this is supposed to be.
Yeah, well, so, Mike, my example that I think is hugely relevant to what we've all been following closely in the last five years is that you would never allow an entire jury in a case where a police officer was accused of killing an unarmed black man.
You would never allow the entire jury to be police officers.
And yet we might see in Julian Assange's case a jury that's mostly intelligence agency personnel deciding whether it's OK for a journalist to publish U.S. classified documents.
It's absolutely absurd.
And the way the Espionage Act is in is applied.
You know, we all understand that the whistleblowers or the leakers, however you come down on them, can't talk about what they've disclosed and defend it, as you were saying very well and eloquently that that Edward Snowden can't speak about why he did the thing he did.
And he signed a nondisclosure agreement.
So he's got a contract with the government.
And Julian Assange never signed anything.
He has no contract with the government.
He's not even a U.S. citizen.
So he doesn't really have to worry about protecting U.S. secrets, except that's what the government is trying to say with this prosecution.
So they would like to drag him into a courtroom in the United States and make it so that they can't so that he can't speak about this.
And basically they're saying, even though this classified information is something that any journalist or editor can talk about, but you in particular, you can't talk about it because we're prosecuting you.
And the way we go about this is by essentially gagging the person we prosecute and saying they can't talk about any of this.
Right.
You know, I wonder if any of the lawyers have talked yet or if they're going to talk about what a huge precedent this would be for international law that, as you're just saying, this is an Australian who's being held in Britain and extradited then or possibly extradited then to this third country, America.
Well, WikiLeaks has put out stuff about all different kinds of countries from Somalia to Israel to Russia to Syria to whoever.
Do they all have a claim on prosecuting him for publishing their secrets, which is, after all, against the law in Russia and China and all these other places?
And then if that's true, is it he's just the one big scapegoat that they all get to prosecute and take turns imprisoning?
Or that means that all journalists anywhere in the world are fair game to be prosecuted by third countries where they are not and maybe have never been, but for publishing documents from the governments of those countries?
Yeah.
So there's actually a really good hour long documentary that was just put out by a German public broadcaster, ARD, that did this hour long thing on the USA versus Assange.
And Stella Morris, who is Julian Assange's partner, is in it.
His family's in it.
They go into a lot of detail into the UC Global operation that targeted Assange.
And in it, Edward Snowden's interviewed, and he makes that exact point that you just did, which is basically this idea that the world needs to wake up.
And if we don't do something to stop this, then the entire world might be losing an element of press freedom that they have possibly taken for granted for too long.
I mean, his idea is that if we're not going to stand up and try to stop this, then maybe we don't deserve the kind of freedom of the press or freedom of expression that we've been enjoying for the last decades.
Because it could completely be gone tomorrow if they're successful.
And like you say, any country with power, I mean, a lot of it's going to depend on how powerful those countries are.
But I can, in my head, name the countries that would be able to throw their weight around.
So we already took care of the US.
They're going after Assange.
China?
What if China wants to go after somebody?
With the Russian government?
Maybe Turkey?
What about Israeli?
The Israeli government?
Maybe Saudi Arabia wants to?
I mean, I can see Saudi Arabia deciding they want to protect their information.
Secrets go after somebody who's...
What if they...
Cut my man's head off.
Yeah, they might chop off somebody's head.
What if they get away from just classified documents?
What if it starts off as we're just going to protect our secrets, but then they go, oh, we can go after somebody who's leaking our information and publishing it?
What if we also just...
What if we just target dissidents?
What if we just target activists we don't like and go extradite them from far off parts of the globe?
I mean, where does it end?
I mean, the slippery slope argument is just so persuasive here that people need to do something to stand up to this.
And has that come up on the stand yet in the actual defense here?
No, it has not.
But I will say that the defense attorneys have made statements about this before and spoken to this fact.
And I had a chance to go on Sky News Australia and do a segment for them.
And specifically, they asked me, has there been any conversation about what Australia can do to help Julian Assange?
And I said, no, not yet.
There hasn't been.
And obviously, I think the government isn't doing much at all to protect one of their citizens.
They really could do a whole lot more to stand up for Julian Assange.
But I think if you were in Australia and a journalist, you should be working overtime to try to save Julian Assange.
Because basically, what this is saying is if you ever got US secrets and you publish them in Australian media, that the government of the United States might come after and try to extradite you from Australia.
So I think you need to stand up.
And a lot of people, you know, I don't like doing these qualifiers because I just think it's not appropriate.
But everyone likes to say, well, no matter what you think of Julian Assange, you should at least this.
And so in this case, I would say, no matter what you think of Julian Assange, if you believe in journalism and freedom of the press and you have your own self-interest and you want to be able to continue to do this work, then you should stand up.
I think, you know, and we talk about how we're better because we're alternative and independent media journalists that haven't fallen for wars that are fought on false pretenses and lies and treating groups in Syria like their liberation armies when in fact they're jihadist militias.
You know, I think that, you know, the fact that we are doing this work is important.
But if they want to be considered legitimate and credible, then they have to stand up.
And by not fighting for this case to be dropped against Julian Assange, they basically out themselves as journalists and media organizations that don't deserve the public support.
Yep.
They're showing exactly who they really are.
It's just like when you're talking on the phone with the customer service rep at some company you have to deal with the guy that you're on the phone with.
Is he trying to take your side and figure out how we can work this out?
Or is he just sitting there going, sorry, sir, the company line is screw you.
No, no, no.
Right.
It's pretty easy to tell.
Right.
Whose side are you on?
And this is just like that.
It's as simple as that.
These guys are the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Beast and the name all of them.
You all know all the TV channels who they'd be happy to see Julian Assange burn.
And that's because they are essentially, you know, like deputized agents of the state.
You know, they're not official, but they're part of the posse and they are against us.
And if they weren't, they would be good on this.
You know, Anthony Gregory said in 2010, if you're bad on Manning, you are a bad person.
That's it.
And it is.
It's as simple as that.
Which side are you on in this?
And if you're on the government side, then, yeah, that's about all we need to know about you.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't really know where this is going to go.
I'm not quite sure what the next witnesses are going to be that are going to be called forward.
As I said, I mentioned Daniel Ellsberg.
We've got some journalists that are going to be called to the witness stand who have worked with Julian Assange.
And that'll be great because we'll finally get to deal with some of the myths and the lies about how he doesn't care about people who are named in the documents and how he's not a journalist and how he actually did take a lot of care and protect the security of the documents so they weren't compromised in the process of working with the documents.
So you can see that, you know, this isn't some guy who's just, you know, doesn't really care about what he's doing.
And we've still got Noam Chomsky to take the stand.
Patrick Coburn is yet to take the stand.
So, you know, as we as we began here, really good lineup of people that are trying to help Julian Assange not be extradited to the United States.
And again, I think I end on this bleak point, which is if he is brought to the United States, it's a very good likelihood that he's going to get somewhere around 30 to 40 years of a sentence.
I mean, it's just, it's just, it's, I mean, I, it just, it adds up so easily and I don't usually fall for it.
Sometimes I've thought it was like, I usually kind of feel it's kind of hyperbolic when defense attorneys take what the maximum possible sentence is and use it to try to build support for their, you know, the person who's being prosecuted, because most of the time when you do get sentenced, it's going to be way less every single time.
So it's clearly just a way of trying to get people to see that you're being persecuted.
Okay.
And I understand that's the game, but in this instance, everything that was said by these witnesses in the last day or two just is so, I mean, I can just see the U.S. government salivating and ready to go to work and make it happen.
I mean, this idea, so if you're sentencing somebody, you could use an enhancement that says, if you have a special skill and you use that to commit a crime, we can increase the amount of time that you're going to be sentenced.
Well, Julian's got quite a technical proficiency was what this guy, Eric Lewis, the U.S. defense lawyer said.
And so yeah, let's jack it up a little bit.
Well, they name a guy who was a teenager in Iceland, who's actually a pedophile who was involved in embezzling money from the WikiLeaks store.
His name is Ziggy.
He was 17 years old at the time.
He's a minor.
Well, you involve minor in your crimes.
That's an enhancement.
Just crank up the sentence.
All of this information, they say, was published and they would probably argue that it put U.S. embassy staff in danger and they could have been hurt or killed, severely hurt or killed.
That can add to the sentence.
So just very quickly, you see how this gets into a realm where he's, you know, we're talking about putting Julian Assange behind bars for the rest of his life.
Yeah.
You really got to wonder too, whether, you know, the courts would let that go through.
I mean, we don't have an official secret sack.
This isn't England, thank God.
And, and, you know, like even during W. Bush, man, they pushed it and they got away with a hell of a lot.
But you still had what you call it, Rasul and Boumediene.
And then they backed down on José Padilla.
They sat there and pretended like they thought that they could get away with treating him like a foreign enemy combatant and all these things.
And then when it was about to go to the Supreme Court, well, the Supreme Court ducked it on a cheap shot the first time.
But on the second time, when it was about to go to the Supreme Court, Bush just backed down and indicted him because they knew they couldn't get away with that.
And I don't know, at some point, I'm not saying I have faith in the system or anything like that, but the law is the law, damn it.
And I just can't, you know, you look at all the people that Obama prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalism.
They were the sources, not the publishers.
This is a whole, and that was a horrible thing.
That was more than all of the Espionage Act prosecutions of journalists sources in history combined under Obama.
But this is just a whole other level of crazy and illegal and unconstitutional.
And I just, like I say, I almost do want to see it take place here and see this fight and let it be shown once and for all that in fact, no matter how much you don't like it, he's got the right to do this and you can't do nothing about it because this is America that still means something.
Yeah, yeah.
So just, I'm going to need to take off here.
But I'll leave you with one thing that came up in this, I'm going to pull it up for you just because I want to get the quote right.
And I think you'll like adding this into your show.
So the first amendment has come up multiple times in this case, as it should, we would be completely undermining it.
And so James Lewis just flat out said to a witness today, I challenge you to provide to this court one single precedent that says publishers cannot be prosecuted.
And I mean, I find that to be one of the more alarming things I've heard in this court proceeding for over the last week or two, because I think of the lack of a precedent as something that's a good feature of our democratic republic, the fact that there isn't any time in the history that the Supreme Court has given the US government the green light to target a journalist like this, because it's never gone that far before.
Yeah, I think, but I think that's a good thing.
And James Lewis was working for the US government and everyone in the Trump administration apparently sees this as like a mountain to conquer.
Well, I'll be like, let's, let's go take that mountain and let's, let's blow it up.
And then maybe in the, in the, in the style of, of, of the US empire, let's take the resources inside it and extract the precious minerals.
Let's make it, let's make it our own.
And let's, let's make it so that, you know, there's this whole future where they're always going to be able to go after journalists who have this information.
Yeah.
All right.
One last thing here, before I let you go, I really want to see Dan Ellsberg and Patrick Coburn's testimony.
How can I stream this?
And by the way, is this stuff archived on YouTube somewhere, or, or at least how can we watch it live?
Well, so the problem here is that in the United Kingdom, they're not as free as us.
It's at a basic, as far as their court system goes.
They don't like, they, they have law against live streaming court proceedings.
And so they've managed to make an exception, mostly because it's still accepted that there's a global pandemic going on.
Although I won't, I won't get into the, to the issues around that.
But the fact that that is in the backdrop, they've allowed people to get on this video link.
And the video link is not something that I'm able to share if, if I had other people, and I mean, I'd love to, but if other people were getting into it, I'd probably have my access revoked right away.
So I don't know how people could follow it live.
The only thing that people have is the, the reporting of myself, the reporting from Consortium News, people like Juan Passarelli, who's doing good tweeting and some of the other journalists.
So unfortunately, I don't know that anybody's ever going to see Patrick Coburn or Noam Chomsky live, although that's some incredible, but you know, you're, you could probably, I don't know.
I don't think they'll credential anybody else, but if you wanted to, you know, you could, you could try to find the court's email address and see if they'd put you on a list, but I don't know what I'm just going to read your tweets, but you know what, do me a favor though, put out a good tweet where, where you link to the other best coverage by Lauria and the guy that you just said, who I've never heard of before Juan something or other.
Yeah, Juan Passarelli.
I'll, at some point I'll boost some of the other people.
And yeah, Juan's a filmmaker and he's been, he's been filming WikiLeaks since he goes all the way back to 2010.
He'd be a good guest.
He's out there if you want to.
Well, I don't know anything about him, but if he's been good on this since 2010, I like him.
He's a friend of Julian Assange's.
And so he was actually going to the embassy and being targeted by the UC Global private security company.
Wow.
Okay.
And you know what?
I haven't interviewed Dan or Patrick in too long, so I'll just wait until they testify and then I'll interview them about that.
And Patrick's got a new book out, War and the Age of Trump, that I got to read and interview him about too.
So it all is working out.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your great work on this and sharing so much time with me on the show here today, Kevin.
Excellent.
Thanks.
I'll talk to you later.
Yep.
All right, you guys, that is Kevin Gostela.
He is over there at shadowproof.com, shadowproof.com and find him on Twitter at KGostela, that's K-G-O-S-Z-T-O-L-A for his long Twitter threads of all of his basically live blogging of the Julian Assange extradition hearings.
