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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Okay, guys, introducing Charles Glass.
He was ABC News' chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 93, and his latest book is They Fought Alone, the true story of the Starr brothers, British agents in Nazi-occupied France.
That's interesting.
Welcome back to the show, Charles.
How are you doing, sir?
Pretty good, thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show here, and, you know, obviously the subject is your latest piece here in The Intercept, the unprecedented and illegal campaign to eliminate Julian Assange.
Very well said right there, and here on the show, during the extradition hearings the past few weeks, I've been doing everything I can to keep up with it, interviewing Joe Lauria and Kevin Gostula, and also expert witnesses like Patrick Coburn and Andy Worthington and Clive Stafford Smith, and, you know, trying to do everything we can to keep up with the story here at antiwar.com, we're covering it.
But I say all that just to say that this article is really the most important treatment of this story that I've read, because you've really taken all of the outrages during this whole process and categorized them all just so perfectly, delineated them all in such a way as to just drive the point home surely better than I ever could.
And so I'm just really happy to have the opportunity to give you a chance to say this stuff out loud where the people can hear you.
Unfortunately, for reasons of space, I left out a lot of his mistreatment.
For example, the director of public prosecutions persuaded the Swedish government, which wanted to interview him about the sexual misconduct allegations in Sweden, persuaded them not to send investigators to interview him at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but to go on insisting that he had to come to Sweden, when in the past many prosecutors from many countries had come and interviewed people in England, but they didn't want Assange to have that privilege of being interviewed in the embassy.
Also the authorities wouldn't allow him, these are things I left out of the article, again, I say just for reasons of space, but they're just as horrific as the things that are in the article.
They wouldn't allow him safe conduct to go to a dentist.
He had a terrible abscess and broken tooth, which caused him agony and he couldn't get any treatment for it.
And that was, again, just more punishment of a man who hadn't actually committed a crime.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's really the craziest thing about all of this is the pretext where he's wanted for questioning, where he's not even really charged with assaulting these women.
He's just wanted for questioning and that, and then for skipping bail on that.
And then that even pursuit of those pseudo charges was abandoned years ago now, or more than a year ago now.
The Swedes have dropped all the charges.
When Julian Assange was in Sweden and the two women made the allegations, he stayed on for five weeks in Sweden so that they could question him.
And they did question him and then they told him he was free to leave.
And so he left with the assurances that that was the end of the story.
But it turned out that that wasn't the end of the story.
Right.
Because they found their hook.
Right.
They decided this is what we can do to get him trapped up in a legal hell.
Where he's trapped to this day.
Yeah.
All right.
So I guess let's focus on the things that you learned in these hearings and the journalism coming out.
Were you able to watch the hearings yourself?
No, I read the transcripts that were online.
I wasn't able to because I'm not in England.
I see.
Yeah.
I mean, there was a limited number of journalists who were allowed web access to watch.
There were a lot of problems with the access because the technical facilities broke down several times.
And so a lot of the trial that even the witnesses from Amnesty and the journalists couldn't hear.
So there were a lot of problems with the technical as well as legal problems with this hearing.
Right.
All right.
So but now in terms of reading it all, going back over it, was there I mean, and I know you're already a serious expert in this, but was there anything new and or shocking that came out that, you know, especially changed the nature of the case in any way, do you think?
I think it's the cumulative impact of all of the actions that have been taken against Assange by the intelligence services, by military intelligence, by the police, by the judiciary, and even with the cooperation of doctors who are working for the prison service who were not helping him in any way.
But this is the massive collusion among so many different agencies of the British and American governments, plus the Ecuadorian government, is absolutely astounding and unprecedented.
I mean, I called it cruel and unique punishment, not just cruel and unusual punishment.
Well, and also you call it illegal.
And really, that's part of the stunning thing here is that you have, you know, a case at this level.
It's all politics, not law, not really.
But then they don't have any trouble getting all of the different agencies and bureaucracies and players, as you just mentioned, to do their part.
Look, there's this journalist we don't like and we're going to string him up.
Everybody break.
And then they all go along and they do it.
Even though this is the West.
It's clearly illegal in the United States and in Britain for anyone to monitor the conversations of a client with his lawyer or of a patient with his doctor.
And in Julian's case, they monitored all of these conversations with his lawyers and with his doctors.
This is simply illegal in both countries and should on the basis of the Ellsberg decision back in the early 1970s, when the appellate court threw out the espionage case against Daniel Ellsberg because the government had violated his privacy, his private conversations with his psychiatrist.
These are not only illegal, there are precedents, which mean that Julian Assange cannot be prosecuted.
But whether these precedents will be adhered to, I don't know.
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All right, so let's rewind a little bit because you know all this stuff is, we're very familiar, most of the audience is very familiar with all of this stuff, but then again there's always new people coming on and this was 10 years ago, the big Manning leaks.
You have people who were kids at the time who didn't know anything about it or maybe only what their dad thought or something back then, who now have a chance to learn about all of this all over again.
So I wonder if maybe we could start with your assessment of the Manning leak and what happened with WikiLeaks and this entire episode back 10 years ago.
Well, the most dramatic leak is actually some video footage of an American Apache helicopter shooting civilians in the streets of Baghdad, including two journalists who were clearly unarmed and the civilians were clearly unarmed and the conversation, it's worth looking up that video, it tells you something that the Pentagon had been lying about.
They said that the action of the helicopter pilots and gunner were, the actions were perfectly legitimate in self-defense, but they clearly were not because these people were, and you can see it in the video taken by the helicopter itself, that these people were unarmed.
Two Reuters journalists were killed and many civilians were killed and we would never have known the truth of that story if Chelsea Manning had not passed it on to WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks had not made it available to the public.
In addition to that, there are the thousands of cables that tell us what was happening in Iraq and what the U.S. was doing in Iraq, what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan, approving torture, shooting civilians and making life hell for people in both of those countries, which we all know, some of it we suspected, but we all know because these things are there in the words of the culprits themselves.
Without Julian Assange's making these things available to the public, this would have remained secret.
Yeah.
And back then, I think, you know, this part of the story gets lost and there's a lot of good and bad that came out of it, but there's no question that this is part of the story of the start of the Arab Spring, where the State Department cables really helped to finally discredit the last legitimacy of America's sock puppet dictator in Tunisia, Ben Ali.
And he and his family, his wife's family, were all forced to flee to Saudi Arabia with their gold bricks.
And once that revolution happened, that kicked off Egypt and the days of rage and the rest of the history of the 20-teens right there.
It was, the information that was provided was certainly an element in those uprisings.
They might, I mean, some of them might have happened anyway because they were living under such egregious dictatorships that it was hard for them to take it any longer.
What was interesting was the length of time that the U.S. and France, in particular, went in supporting Ben Ali against the popular demonstrations that ultimately overthrew him.
I mean, almost until the last day.
Yeah, same thing with Egypt next door too, where they even wanted to keep Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret police, until they finally even had to give up on that, but only when they had no other choice.
Sadly for Egypt, their countries returned to an even more brutal military dictatorship than they had under Mubarak.
Things didn't work out there.
Right.
Well, and of course, then America and Saudi hijacked the revolutions in Libya and Syria to make matters there that much worse.
So there's a lot of bad that came out of this leak too, unfortunately, but a lot of truth.
I mean, even the Glaspie memo from Iraq War One was leaked.
So there's a lot of important stuff that was in there.
No, I mean, you won't be able to write the history of American interventions in the 20th century and the 21st century, I mean, without the WikiLeaks documents.
In fact, most of the books that you read now are relying on those documents.
And remember also that all of the world's press, from the New York Times on down, relied on those documents for their reporting as well.
It's interesting that only Assange is being prosecuted for publicizing these things, but the others, the major media institutions that also publicized them, thanks to Assange, are not being prosecuted.
Right.
Which is not to say we'd like to see them prosecuted too, in fairness.
Well, actually, I think it would probably be better if Assange had the full backing in court of the New York Times and major American media, he might have a better chance.
Yeah, well, they certainly should be rallying around him right now, but they're not.
Why is that, do you think?
Much of the media has disowned Assange.
And I think it's because he's not part of them.
He's a maverick.
He's an individual very much on his own.
And they simply don't want to have anything to do with him.
And it's not fair.
Many of them have won awards because of information that he supplied.
They didn't supply it.
They simply printed it.
And it's terrible when you rely on a source and you don't protect him.
I mean, Julian himself did everything he could to protect Chelsea Manning.
And Julian himself is still protecting sources.
He still won't say who gave him the Democratic National Committee emails, even when he could have gotten a pardon.
Even if he'd been able to get a bargain for it, because it's a matter of faith for him that he won't name his sources.
And that's why people trust Wikileaks to send them documents and hope that those documents will find their way into the public and maybe make things better in the institutions from which those documents were leaked.
Well, you know, it's interesting that, I mean, as published, I think, in the Washington Post, the Obama government decided we can't do this because of what they called the New York Times problem that there is no way to really split the hairs and parse this and categorize Assange and his Wikileaks as any kind of different organization than the Sulzbergers and their New York Times.
It's the same thing.
Well, that was a correct legal judgment that the Obama Justice Department came up with.
So you would think that the New York Times would see then that, hey, if the Obama government had a New York Times problem with prosecuting Assange, then the New York Times has a prosecute Assange problem right here.
And that they ought to be, and you know, the old saying goes, you don't pick a fight with people who buy their ink by the barrel full.
And I think that cliche is actually about the New York Times specifically, right, because they will completely bury you if they have to.
And here they could be waging full jihad on behalf of freedom and the First Amendment, and instead they're laying down on the job just because it's this one guy that they don't like.
Well, what you say is largely correct.
I mean, Julian doesn't have many defenders.
I mean, he does have a very large following among the public.
Millions of people around the world have signed petitions for him.in Australia and Britain, all over Europe and the U.S. on his behalf.
But public support doesn't carry a lot of weight with the administration in Washington, which is making up the law as it goes along.
Yeah.
Well, OK, so what about that now?
I mean, we had some lawyers testify in this thing and talk about how essentially this, you know, the Trump government doesn't know anything that the Obama government didn't know about this situation.
They are essentially just making this up.
And so at some point, the rule of law is supposed to kick in and prevent this from going forward.
Right?
Well, the Espionage Act should not be applied to anyone but a spy.
It should not be applied to a publisher and a journalist.
Julian was not working for a foreign government.
He was working for the public.
And he brought this to public attention because it was a matter of vital public interest.
The government is now saying that the U.S. government, the U.S. prosecutors are now saying that the Espionage Act applies to Assange, even though he did his publishing outside the United States borders.
It applies to Assange, even though he's not a United States citizen.
However, the same prosecutors are saying that another American law, the First Amendment, does not apply to Assange.
So Espionage Act does, but the First Amendment, with its free speech protections, does not.
So they're doing a pick and mix with law only to suit the case and hope to get a prosecution, which will send him to a federal Ad Max penitentiary for the rest of his life.
Yeah.
All right.
So can you talk a little bit about Assange's treatment as, you know, he's accused here of skipping bail on a charge that's no longer a charge.
And yet they're not just holding him in, you know, terrorism type, you know, I don't know exactly what they call them, precautions or whatever in the in the lockup.
But even they're treating him like Hannibal Lecter, locked in this glass cage away from all the people, like he's this wild beast who's going to start eating people's faces off or something if he's allowed to sit at the table with his defense attorneys.
The whole thing seems just completely surreal.
From the moment the police raided the Ecuadorian embassy to evict him, they would not allow him to take his possessions with him, his legal papers, even his reading glasses.
And when he was then taken to Belmarsh maximum security prison in South London, the U.S. authorities went to the Ecuadorian embassy and seized all of his belongings, which meant they had complete access, which they had already because they'd had microphones and cameras everywhere in the embassy.
But they had every everything that he owned, they had in their possession, including his legal papers.
Then when he was in prison, they wouldn't let him have his his reading glasses for several weeks.
They put him in solitary confinement in a medical wing for months.
When prisoner when the prisoners in Belmarsh actually protested this mistreatment, they put him back with the prison population.
He has restricted access to publications.
He doesn't have Internet.
Very rarely is he allowed to use the telephone.
His solicitor, Jennifer Robinson, was not allowed to see him for six months.
Many of his legal papers that the lawyers sent in for him to peruse did not make their way to Julian.
And when he was finally brought into the tribunal in London, the Old Bailey, the magistrate, Vanessa Baritzer, put him in the glass cage rather than allowing him, as most defendants are allowed to, to sit with his legal counsel so he could discuss testimony with them as it was happening.
So he had to shout from the glass cage was at the back of the courtroom, he had to shout from time to time to someone who could then take take those words to his lawyers.
It's no way to be allowed to conduct a legal case.
And these these precautions that the court imposed on him are the kinds of things you It's for terrorists and very violent offenders, not for a civilian, a journalist, a publisher who has never harmed anyone in his life.
He's never attacked anyone.
He's never planted a bomb anywhere.
He's never shot anyone.
They simply treated him as if he had been one of these master criminals.
Yeah.
You know, this is- And that, of course, affects the whole case because it's very hard for lawyers to conduct a case without proper consultation with their clients.
But also consultations that are not eavesdropped upon by the prosecution.
Right.
But you mentioned earlier about how the military dictatorship in Egypt had canceled the revolution there in 2013 with their, you know, counter coup.
And then the guy who had won the free and fair election, Mohamed Morsi, this is what they did to him in their bogus star chamber trial of him.
And then under the new dictatorship was keep him locked up in a glass cage away from the rest of the court while all this went on around him and he's not even allowed to participate in it.
So- Well, when you're going to railroad a defendant, the tactics that work in Egypt work elsewhere.
Yeah.
It reminds me of Chalmers Johnson says, you give up your empire or you live under it.
And so the more we support dictatorships like Egypt in the world, the more we're like Egypt, you know?
It comes home.
Yeah.
The defeat of America by Spain, like William Graham Sumner, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Anyway, so, yes, it really is something else.
And again, the deafening silence from everyone except the alternative media, but essentially there's nobody in mainstream media that I'm aware of.
You know, you'd think that, like, maybe the editor of the Dallas Morning News would stick his neck out or something.
I don't know.
I'm just making something up.
But no, it's just deafening silence.
To be fair, Patrick Coburn and The Independent has reported very well on it.
The Independent is a mainstream publication.
That's true.
That's that's a rare.
Although Patrick Coburn is Patrick Coburn.
You know, I'd like to see the Independence editorial board say the same thing, you know.
So can you talk a little bit about Nels Milser here, this U.N. official who's reported on Assange and really like his whole set up here?
Well, Nels is the U.N. special rapporteur for torture and inhuman integrating punishment.
And he's visited Julian many times, both at the embassy and at Belmarsh.
And he has come out again and again, clearly calling what has happened to Julian torture.
And he also fears, as Julian psychiatrists do, that this this torture, that this psychological torture that he's enduring will ultimately drive him to suicide, which may well be one of the prosecution's objectives.
Agree.
Yeah, it sure seems like they've probably already calculated that that would be pretty convenient for them if they could drive him to suicide.
You know, he's a very brave man.
I really hope that that doesn't I can't guarantee it won't happen.
I really hope that doesn't happen.
He's a very brave man.
But I have personal experience of isolation.
I was a hostage for a couple of months in Beirut back in the 80s.
And even those couple of months really drove me to despair.
But Julian's been on his own in captivity now, including the embassy for seven or eight years.
He hasn't been out in the daylight for that time.
So he's vitamin deprived.
His health is terrible.
His physical health is terrible.
And he's not getting, as you say, the support of most of his colleagues in the media.
And it's a very demoralizing time for him.
And I am proud to know a person who can endure that and still keep coming back.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, he's facing life in a supermax in America, which is essentially a fate worse than death.
Total isolation.
Twenty three hours a day in a concrete box.
You know, they even pour them as single cells.
There's not even really corners of the cells like curved angles.
It's like a single poured block that you locked in a room the size of a king sized bed basically for twenty three hours a day.
And then when you get to exercise, it's alone in some tiny little strip.
I just and some of those guys who are in there like Ramzi Yousef, you know what?
I really don't mind how miserable Ramzi Yousef is, I guess, but the entire thing shouldn't even exist because it really exists for people like Julian Assange.
You know, this is the the living hell that they, you know, have to hold over everyone's head.
This is what happens if you cross the state in a way that they really mind that they will bury you alive.
It's unconstitutional.
The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishments, and these are both cruel and unusual.
They should they should not be applied.
They should be the people you're referring to, like Ramzi Yousef or the Unabomber and the others who were at the Ad Max in Florence, Colorado.
They should serve life sentences, but not in inhuman degrading conditions.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, seriously, if they're going to execute Ramzi Yousef, I'd have been fine with that.
But, yeah, burying him alive for decades, that ain't fair.
It's not fair to do that to anybody, you know?
And after all, you know, he killed six people, which is horrible, but he failed in knocking one tower over into the other, and, you know, if he'd killed 20,000, then we might be having a different conversation, but he only tried and failed to do so, and that's different.
But anyways, the idea that Julian Assange, of all people, would be locked up with monsters like that is completely crazy.
I mean, that's like saying lock you up for something that you reported that they don't like, right?
You've got the same job as him.
I would not like in his circumstances, that's for sure, and that's why I hope he gets out of it.
I hope his lawyers succeed on appeal in Britain.
I think there is a chance that the appellate court will resist political pressure and find for Julian.
In fact, just on the basis of the law, they have to, but we'll see.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the real trick, isn't it?
Well, the law says one thing, but power wants something else, so who's going to win out?
The Supreme Court in Britain did stand up to a lot of political pressure from the British government from Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he wanted to end Parliament early in violation of the law, and the court said that this is a violation of the law, and he couldn't do it.
They may well stand up to the prosecutors in this case and say that they can't extradite Assange because of all the reasons we've just been discussing.
Yeah.
Well, I sure hope so, and you know, speaking of the great Patrick Coburn, he really admonished me for being pessimistic about this and just dismissing the whole case as political, not legal, and therefore they're going to do whatever they want, and said that that's just not true and it's demoralizing and makes people give up and not fight and be fatalistic about it and all that.
I spoke to one of Julian's barristers who said he doesn't necessarily expect a good outcome from the magistrate in the court at the moment who will give her a verdict on the 4th of January, but he's very confident that on appeal they will win, and I hope he's right.
Yeah, and again, like you're saying, he certainly should because that's the law in England and America.
Well, actually, I mean, I guess they're not really trying to bring up the British Official Secrets Act here because that's not really part of it, right?
They might have him on that if he was being prosecuted.
Well, no, but he's not, no one's charging him with any British crimes at all.
And they're not, I guess, I don't know how it works if they could, like, invoke that as part of his extradition, but it sounds like they didn't try it, so, and it would be different, right?
They don't have a First Amendment in Britain.
He can be tried in Britain and not be extradited.
That's not an issue.
Yeah.
It's funny, I'm surprised they didn't find an angle there to prosecute him for leaking a British secret where they don't have the First Amendment and they do have an Official Secrets Act that is used in a way that they haven't successfully been able to use the Espionage Act in the U.S.
I guess I shouldn't give him any bad ideas, though.
He didn't violate any British secrets that would be justiciable.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, and good, I didn't want to give anybody any avenues of where they could go with that.
Seems like there must be something in the Iraq war logs they could cite.
But anyway, good thing that the authorities in England don't listen to my show.
But listen, I thank you so much, especially for writing this great article for The Intercept, because that means a whole hell of a lot of people are seeing this and there's so much important stuff and your unwillingness to stand for it really bleeds through the thing.
So I really appreciate that.
And again, the article is called The Unprecedented and Illegal Campaign to Eliminate Julian Assange at The Intercept.
And thank you again for your time on the show, Charles.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to talk to you.
The Scott Horton Show and Anti-War Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
