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.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, again, I've got the great Kevin Gostula on the line covering the Julian Assange hearings in Britain.
Up next, Patrick Cockburn and Andy Worthington are going to talk about their at least submitted not spoken testimony, but we have so many things to talk about with Kevin in the next half hour here.
First of all, you guys are doing a big live event on Saturday, but I don't know anything else about it, so please tell us everything about it.
Well, yeah, so, you know, I just wanted to support all of the independent journalists who are doing work that the corporate and establishment outlets aren't doing.
Many of these people are doing this work on thin budgets, and they don't have a lot of money, and yet they still are doing this day in and day out, some of them at the courthouse, which hasn't really been the most accommodating place to try to do their work.
So we're going to have, I'm doing this, it's hosted by Shadowproof, it's scheduled so that it happens globally where anyone in the UK, Australia, and the United States would be able to tune in.
So unfortunately that means it's really early in the US, it means it's really late in Australia, it's actually in the right time, it's in the mid-afternoon for the UK, but that makes sense because that's where the extradition trial was taking place.
So I'm co-hosting with Juan Passarelli, the filmmaker, who just put together a half hour documentary that's really good on Julian Assange's and the war on journalism.
And then, you know, this panelist is going to be filled with people like Richard Medhurst and Mary Kostikidis from Sydney, and Tara Khadad, who's in London, and Mohamed Almazi, and Joe Lauria of Consortium News, and Taylor Hudak, who works for Activism Munich, and just, it's going to be fantastic to get everyone together and talk to them about this trial.
Cool.
Did you try to get Craig Murray?
Because, man, he's been writing some really great stuff too.
Yeah, I mean, he's doing good, but, you know, I put together this panel with these people and, you know, I don't think Craig is hard up with finding a platform to share his work, and I wanted to highlight these people who, you know, just to me, like, I wanted to get them together and have a panel with them.
So, at some point, you know, maybe Craig might be invited to do a panel, but there wasn't really any decision to include or not include him.
It's just eight people is a lot together, but I started with these people.
Some of these are new friends of mine that I've been able to meet over the course of doing this work, and we've never actually been in the same, even just the virtual space, together.
Okay, so this event, people can tune in at Shadowproof's YouTube channel.
It's Saturday, the 3rd of October, at 8 o'clock in the morning, Eastern Time.
So with your breakfast, hosted by Kevin and Juan Pasarely, and again, you can find all of that at Shadowproof.com.
Okay, now, so next subject.
We got three big ones.
I'll let you choose the order here.
We got the UC Global employees information here.
We have the article that you wrote about how it's very likely the US government is lying to the British court in order to win extradition and the possible consequences of that.
And then, a very important testimony, essentially the American criminal justice system and imprisonment system is on trial in the UK.
And this is, I mean, what shame, just even think of that, that America's criminal justice system is so unfair and barbaric that the English are having a real argument in court about whether we're too barbaric to extradite somebody to this country to be prosecuted.
Like we were talking about Turkey, or China, or Iran, or some terrible place like that.
Yes, so let's take the US prison system first, which absolutely is a matter in any extradition case between the United States and the UK.
The Supermax prison in particular has been one that has made it frustrating for the US government when they want to extradite people who are accused of terrorism offenses.
Because in British law, they do take it somewhat seriously, at least up until the most recent decade, they took it very seriously, the fact that they should not let the US get their hands on somebody who would in turn be subject to cruel and inhuman treatment in violation of a human rights charter that is actually part of their law.
They mandate basically that people are not to be tortured if they're handed over to the United States.
That's been something that has come up in many extradition cases, and then in particular, that is why we've heard so much evidence about the US prison system.
I suppose to start from there, at that point, we heard from attorney Lindsay Lewis, who gave testimony on, in the US, he's apparently called Mostafa Kamal Mostafa, and he's actually well known to people because in the UK, he's known as Abu Hamza, and that's how I'm going to refer to him.
I'll call him Abu Hamza because that's how I think most of the world knows about him.
He is clearly implicated and was convicted in the United States of committing terrorism offenses, but the issue here that we need to focus on is not, this is how the prosecutor tried to deflect and distract.
We shouldn't be focused on what he may have done that was terrorism.
We should be focused on the representation that was made to the British court in this case that came from a warden who was working at the Supermax prison, ADX Florence in Colorado.
He essentially told the court that he did not think Abu Hamza would ever be in the Supermax facility for a lengthy, indefinite period because of his health.
This is a man who's actually a double amputee, and in fact, most of the pictures I remember, if you saw him, you would recognize him because he's missing his eye, and he's had a hook as a hand.
Yeah, a little hook hand.
We call him at antiwar.com since way back.
Yeah, and he's got so bad physical ailments, and then he struggles with some mental issues as well, but I don't know that they are ...
We're not talking about him in the same way we talk about Julian Assange's mental health issues, so I don't think they're identical.
His problems are mostly physical, and he has diabetes.
They said if he went to the Supermax, he would probably receive a mental health evaluation or a medical evaluation, and then after that, he would be moved to a medical center, and he wouldn't be kept under special administrative measures the way that they treat national security defendants and restrict their communications.
We've talked about this in our interviews, and it was said that he wouldn't be held in those kinds of harsh conditions indefinitely that would impact his health, and so then he gets to the United States, and he is put in pretrial confinement under SAMS, and then he's convicted in 2014, and for the last five to six years now, he's been at Florence, and he's been under the exact same conditions that the U.S. government told these courts he would not be held under, and Lindsay Lewis makes this point.
She's representing him as he challenges his confinement conditions and how he's abused and mistreated in this facility, and she gave a ton of evidence that basically shows if Julian Assange was in his same predicament in the Supermax, it would be nearly impossible for him to improve his living conditions, to get any of these restrictions lifted, to end the inhumane treatment that he would be experiencing.
And she also showed, through her testimony to the court, how this claim that started at the lower court followed Abu Hamza all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights.
At every stage, the judges would say almost exactly, this is a paraphrase, but it's exactly what they would say.
Well, I wouldn't want Abu Hamza to go to the Supermax.
I think it's abominable.
It rises to the level of torture, what we've heard about what happens in there.
But since the U.S. government is saying that they're not going to keep him there indefinitely, I see no reason not to let him out, let him into the U.S. custody, and then the U.S. can have him, because then they're going to do what they said they would do, and they're going to put him in a medical center.
It didn't happen that way.
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All right, now, I'm sorry, we're short on time, so I think we better switch to the next subject here, which is the most important- Get in some UC Global before we're done.
Yeah, exactly, the UC Global.
What is UC Global?
Tell us everything about what you've learned about what's going on with this thing here, because this is just stranger than fiction, and fun, and crazy, and horrible.
This elevates this trial to the level of a conspiracy thriller, honestly.
We heard evidence about this Spanish security company from the two anonymous witnesses, who by the way are in Spain living under armed protection, because the man who's the founder of this security company has heavy ties to U.S. intelligence.
He's got an association with a man named Zohar Lahav, who handles security for the Las Vegas Sands, which is the casino that Sheldon Adelson is involved in managing, or- Owns it.
Owns it, yeah.
They're living in fear for their life, and yet providing this testimony against David Morales that could send him to prison in Spain for what he did, because this company, its contract started with the Ecuador embassy, and they were tasked with doing security for Rafael Correa and his family.
It was fairly standard security, and then at some point he was, well actually I know when, in 2016 he makes the trip to Las Vegas for a security trade fair, but he also knows that he's going to meet with people who are associated with Sheldon Adelson, like Lahav, and eventually they come up with an agreement to spy on the embassy and send back intelligence to, I believe the CIA, this is what we strongly believe, although he only calls them my American friends or our American friends, and he gets this deal, and under the guise of we're going to provide security for Sheldon Adelson's yacht or boat, but they already have security, so there's no, it doesn't make any sense to, one of the witnesses says it makes no sense to us because Adelson already had security on his boat.
And apparently UC Global was hired to do security if they were in Mediterranean waters, they would take care of his boat there.
So he comes back, and then it's, you know, let's turn this into a full panopticon.
What can we do?
And this witness number two, in very vivid detail, I encourage you to go read my report, UC Global employee thwarted plan to massively bug Ecuador embassy for spying on Assange, because he describes how there were multiple ideas brought to him, and two in particular.
David Morales comes and says, after they've outfitted these cameras with audio capabilities, which had not been done before, they were just standard CCTV cameras that showed images, like most security cameras, and now they're taking in audio and eavesdropping on people in the embassy.
And then the next thing is, can we get streaming capabilities?
And he tries to say, no, that would be illegal.
And then he says, I don't know how to do that.
That's not technically possible.
Well, David Morales comes back with a PowerPoint that clearly came from a US intelligence agency because it's in English, and says, here, this is how you would do it.
And so then this witness, who's an IT expert, has to say, don't do it.
Julian Assange would figure it out.
Your whole operation will be blown.
So I think they passed on streaming capabilities.
But then the next thing was, we need to put a bug, we need to put a microphone in every room.
And also, here are some decorative objects.
We need to turn those into spy objects.
So we're going to put plant microphones in these, and there's pictures of the objects that they could embed microphones in.
And he says, that would be a crazy act.
Obviously, Julian Assange would stumble upon one of these bugs, and your whole operation would be blown, too.
So we hear all about this, and they are gathering intelligence on Baltazar Garzón, Spanish former judge who's part of the team.
They were instructed to follow.
They made Assange's legal team priority targets.
So it's all about compromising whatever case he might be able to bring in his defense.
It's about what can they learn that's private, so that they can use it to prosecute him.
Baltazar Garzón was followed, and then in a matter of weeks later, he actually had his own legal office broken into by men who were in balaclavas.
We don't know if that was UC Global, but it was certainly suspected by at least witness number two that it could be linked.
So this happened, this unfolded.
2015 to 2018, they had the contract, and they were spying on Assange, and they were part of this pressure campaign, and right now there's a criminal case unfolding in Spain that could have implications on the extradition case, depending on how it unfolds.
And I suppose the bit of news that we need to make sure we work in here is that we know when the decision is going to come now, January 4th, 2021.
We expect the decision on the extradition request.
I hate to say, you know, I presume it's a foregone conclusion for the worst here, but as we've discussed before, there's still appeals.
We're getting all this great stuff on the record here.
And so, you know, it's not all the way over yet.
But you know, I keep thinking of Daniel Ellsberg while you're talking there, and how this is actually what helped secure his freedom.
And he was the leaker, not the receiver.
So it's not a parallel exactly.
He's more comparable to Manning in this situation, Assange is the New York Times.
But anyway, part of how he got away with it was that Nixon was breaking the law to persecute him and had his psychiatrist's office broken into, and even had ordered Cuban hitmen to murder him, although they couldn't get a clear shot.
And then especially, I think the thing that really did it was they tried to bribe the judge.
Hey, you ever wanted to be on the Supreme Court?
And he was like, oh, man, you guys are just killing me here.
I can't do this now and dismiss the case, essentially, with that going too far.
And but so I wonder if kind of there's hints of that in this case, too, where they have so persecuted this guy and crossed the line and violated his rights in so many ways when he's supposed to be, you know, being granted asylum in this embassy at the time, and whether that actually really seemed to play into it in the proceeding that, you know, in a not exactly, but, you know, as a metaphor, like the exclusionary rule kind of a thing or like, you know, if a guy if the deputy torture somebody, usually they drop the resisting arrest charge from previous, you know, that kind of thing.
Yeah, no, I had the opportunity to interview Dan and ask him these questions.
And, you know, he also I knew about this because it came out in February of 2020.
But what happened was in the past week, this UC Global evidence that was presented in the extradition trial made headlines in some of the mainstream British press, like The Guardian and The Telegraph, they ran with the U.S. intelligence operatives or U.S. intelligence sources had plans to kidnap or poison Assange.
And that's certainly very similar to what you're describing with Ellsberg.
And for the purposes of how they're trying to prosecute Assange, it's actually not that different.
It's almost identical to the way they went after Ellsberg.
So in effect, Assange should be able to get off and be acquitted and have this case dismissed with prejudice, like Ellsberg did, because of the way he's been treated.
You know, in addition to the spying, very quickly, we heard from his attorney, Gareth Pierce, about how legally privileged materials were seized from the embassy.
All these documents, all these private confidential documents, I think there's a manuscript for a book he was writing.
There's also an archive of material that was being kept or an inventory of material that WikiLeaks had in its possession that was taken from the embassy, confiscated, handed over to the FBI in the U.K.
That was in the possession of the U.S. government, available for intelligence agencies to go over, available for the Justice Department to use against Julian Assange.
And there was no protection given to him by Ecuador.
They just allowed this to be taken.
And it completely compromises and makes this unfair.
And obviously, in my view, should be dismissed immediately for violating Julian Assange's rights.
But you know, what I think and what the U.S. government thinks are a world apart.
And obviously, you know, I think these are things, these abuses are things, though, that are going to be very useful in trying to win an appeal.
Right.
Well, they certainly should be.
And now, can you give us one more comment here about the bizarre nature of this Sheldon Adelson connection?
This is the probably single most influential Republican donor on behalf of Zionist causes and has committed, what, $250 million to the Republicans since 2016.
I'm estimating.
But that's, you know, about $100 million in 2016 and 2018 and another $50 million at least this time for Donald Trump and his casino security company.
Are the cutouts for the CIA here?
Yeah, that's what it looks like.
And in fact, Zohar Lahav, what I'm mentioning, people should.
So I actually haven't been the leading reporter on this aspect of the Assange trial or on this aspect.
Max Blumenthal over at the Grayzone has the best work on this.
And the Spanish judge there has requested that they probe this guy's role, Zohar Lahav, in what was done.
So it's almost like they're trying to subpoena him.
But really, because he's in the U.S., they don't have a lot of power to bring him forward and force him to comply with the court.
But they would like to get his testimony and determine his relationship with Morales.
I'm reading from Blumenthal's article, and Max says why they want him.
They want to know why they were meeting in the U.S. and Spain, why David Morales and Lahav were meeting.
They want to know about the communications regarding illegally obtained information.
They also want to know if his superiors in Las Vegas Sands, like Sheldon Adelson and another individual named Brian Nagel, if they had access to the alleged illegally obtained information under investigation.
So how much were they involved in this conspiracy by U.S. intelligence to target Assange?
And yeah, so it's clear they were cutouts.
They were doing this.
We know that much.
But what exact role were they playing?
We also know that the Spanish court has asked for information from the U.S. government.
And very, very crudely, the response from them has been, yes, we'll cooperate, but you, your witnesses, we need to know their identities.
And so you basically, they have to give up their cover if the U.S. government is going to cooperate with this investigation.
Which is, of course, is an outrageous request to make of the court.
All right, guys, that's Kevin Gastola.
It's KGastola on Twitter, and he keeps running threads of all of this stuff every day, every morning covering the Assange hearings there.
And then he's writing them all up in article form and doing video podcast interviews and all kinds of things over at shadowproof.com.
And for example, you see global employee thwarted plan to massively bug Ecuador embassy to spy on Assange.
Thanks very much again, Kevin, for your time on the show, but I appreciate it.
Yep.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
