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, on the line, I've got Kevin Gatsdola.
And you know, it ain't often I wake up on a Monday morning with absolutely fantastic news to start my day.
But things are going pretty good today.
How are you, Kevin?
It's pretty good.
What a start to the year.
Yeah, man, I'll tell you what.
Let me say real quick that you write at Shadowproof.
And everybody can look that up on the internet and you've got a great piece there.
It's the top headline, of course, at antiwar.com.
And you've got great Twitter feed threads all about it and all this stuff.
People look it up.
Kevin Gatsdola.
It sounds spelled just like it sounds, but throw a Z in there somewhere, you'll find it.
Google correct your spelling.
Kevin Gatsdola, Shadowproof.
Julian Assange.
Go ahead.
Tell us everything you know.
Yeah.
So, you know, I did just a basic get out this news.
It's breaking.
Everybody should hear this because it defies all of our expectations.
I mean, all along, I had prepared for Judge Vanessa Barretzer to grant this extradition request against Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
And yet she found a way to justify denying the extradition request by the U.S. government.
And it is rather incredible.
I mean, everything we've said negatively about her can still be true because I think there's a kind of weaselly way in which she went about making this decision.
We'll get into more details.
But the thing that matters most to Julian Assange and his family is that there is a potential that he is going to be set free from the Belmarsh high security prison this week.
And that is huge.
He beat the U.S. government because the U.S. government and its mass incarceration system is just so brutal that the judge was unwilling to take the risk that somebody like Assange with deteriorating mental health would be extradited to the United States and put in a supermax prison and try to commit suicide.
And the U.S. prison system wouldn't stop him from committing suicide.
They wouldn't give him any mental health assistance.
And so he would die.
And she didn't want to be responsible for an extradition that ended in his death.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
There's so many different amazing things.
So first of all, the first amazing thing is she ruled in his favor and he's not going to be extradited.
And so rubber meets the road.
Yeah.
Like you say, he might even get bailed out.
Of course, the bad guys are going to appeal here.
If you're thinking this appeal and they're just going to find a way to keep him in prison and come back at him and then the extradition is going to be live again and he's going to definitely be sent to the United States.
So I tell you, the thing that's nice about what she did is although it doesn't answer or resolve any of the big, huge issues that made this case dangerous as an attack on press freedom, the fact that she didn't discount any of the criminal allegations against him means that that's not why they lost.
No, the reason why they lost is because the mass incarceration system is so brutal.
So in order for you to win on appeal, you have to prove to an appeals court that the mass incarceration system isn't too brutal.
And I mean, I am going to be eager to follow these appeal proceedings and hear the rationalizations of how we treat people in our prisons.
And I mean, I'm sure they're going to try everything they can to spin it.
But good luck.
It's going to be really difficult.
Yeah, man.
I mean, that's really something else.
And I saw a guy responded to your tweet saying, well, they'll just say that they'll make special provisions for Assange and take good, good care of him and that will be enough.
But I think you're right that it's going to be a higher hurdle than that.
And there's certainly no reforming the federal prison system between now and the next time they rule on this in any major way there.
I mean, the people who are locked in the supermax are in a living hell.
There's no question about that.
Some of them really deserve it.
Like Ramzi Youssef.
I don't care what happens to him.
But this guy, the not just, you know, would be Australian and American hero, but the global hero.
One of the greatest truth telling journalists of our entire lifetimes.
I mean, this guy, Julian Assange, he's the best of us to think that he would be locked in a dungeon like that is just absolutely sickening.
And you're right that it's just great that she decided the right thing.
And I want to say here, too, real quick that Patrick Coburn wrapped my knuckles when I interviewed him and I said, yeah, you know, they're going to it's going to be the worst case scenario here.
And he said, hey, you don't know that.
You know, we got to have hope here.
We got to keep doing the right thing.
Of course, he testified in Assange's behalf.
They wouldn't let him testify in person, but he submitted written testimony.
And he was saying, you know, there's something like a rule of law in Great Britain, sort of kind of where something like this could go our way.
It's not decided yet.
And don't you be too pessimistic.
And so how's that for the very best of us with the right mindset to about how to approach these things?
And yeah, it's just it's such great news, you know.
And then so you can say whatever you want here, but please work in something about how they actually she actually ruled really poorly on all the facts, except the one good thing about letting him go over the danger that he would kill himself.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the fact is, I mean, this is about Julian Assange, right?
This case has always been about Julian Assange, and it's always been about how the United States government wants to eliminate Julian Assange.
And we can expand that out to the war that's been waged against WikiLeaks for the past 10 years and going after it for publishing all sorts of documents.
Just to make sure we're clear, anybody who's tuning into your show, the documents at issue in this case were the state embassy cables, the diplomatic cables, as well as the military incident reports from Iraq and Afghanistan that were called the war log documents.
There's a collateral murder video, although actually in this case they didn't charge anything related to the video specifically, but that's something they revealed that was big.
And then there's the Podesta emails, which again, not an issue in this case, but something about the WikiLeaks history.
And there's the Vault 7 materials, which I think really made the CIA decide that they needed to ensure the Justice Department pursued a prosecution against Julian Assange.
And then there's revelations about eavesdropping and NSA targeting of officials in European governments.
We can go down the list.
There's all kinds of stuff.
There's stuff with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and that free trade agreement.
And also stuff that's not just related to the American empire, but stuff about corruption and well, it's hard to exclude the American empire.
The government of Somalia is an American client puppet regime thing.
But he published all kinds of documents about human rights abuses and things going on in Somalia.
And even for the hawks out there, he even published stuff that made Assad and Vladimir Putin look bad on at least a few occasions.
You know?
Well, no.
I mean, with one of the biggest cables he revealed was about Russia being a mafia state.
And so if he's really a puppet, why hasn't Putin made him take that down yet?
So that's still up on the WikiLeaks website.
So all of these documents have been released and there was this war.
It's always been about the individual Julian Assange.
And so the judge's ruling is all about Julian Assange.
It cares nothing about what damage this prosecution and this precedent will make, the kind of damage that it will cause to journalism because the judge didn't rebut the allegations that were put forward by the U.S. government.
She accepted them all.
She thought that it was entirely reasonable how they were going about pursuing Julian Assange.
And I think that's why, you know, I think that's why we had warned all along, not just, you know, the handful of few journalists that have been working on this daily and have been there at every proceeding, but there's also press freedom organizations like Reporters Without Borders.
Even Amnesty International, to their credit, have actually been out there.
And you know, there's the Knight First Amendment Institute with Jamil Jaffer, who's got a background in the ACLU, who's been outspoken.
And you know, people like us who have been saying, you know, put aside everything you think about Julian Assange as an individual.
Think about what it's just going to mean for journalism if the judge rules.
And, you know, I think we have to put it this way, I've seen others put it this way, if Julian Assange had not been, if he was not suffering from mental health issues, if he was not struggling in this way, then he definitely would be in line to be put on a jet plane and sent to the United States for a trial.
Man, that's really amazing, isn't it?
And it's only because that they have essentially, you know, no touch tortured him through this isolation in that horrible Belmarsh prison in the first place, that they've driven him so mad that now they can't send him someplace worse, because they're afraid that he'll cut his own wrist.
Well, so, you know, 10 years of arbitrary detention with the United Nations, the Special Rapporteur on Torture being, you know, Niels Meltzer has been one of his best advocates in the world, to point out the way in which, you know, he had been abused while he was in the Ecuador embassy, and also to call attention to the character assassination and the kind of public mobbing that's gone on worldwide, with all these lies and defamatory statements spread.
Let me stop you right there, because it sounds like you're going to move on real quick.
That's a statement in between commas.
But I want to mention real quick, because this is so important, that this guy, Niels Meltzer, the UN rapporteur or whatever you say for torture there, that he has this massive write-up, I don't know what, 10,000 word write-up or something, explaining exactly how, essentially, in my words, they framed up Assange over this sexual abuse claim in Sweden in order to do this the way they did it.
And there's no journalism in the world that compares to what that guy wrote up about that.
And it is just absolutely mind-blowing stuff.
Everyone should really look at that.
Yeah, I mean, as a human rights official, he stood up against this kind of conventional wisdom, for lack of a better word, that said, well, okay, he's accused of sexual allegations.
We need to just let this happen.
And we need to believe women.
And no, he said, well, look, I'm not saying that we need to say that the women are wrong.
But I'm saying, look closely at the Swedish prosecutors and see how much they are abusing their power in going after Julian Assange and how there are so many irregularities that need to be looked at and examined.
Because just to be clear, they started and stopped this case against Julian Assange when it came to the sexual allegations three times.
And that's just not normal.
And also, they never got to the point where they actually charged him.
They were always in the phase of, oh, we're digging around and we're going to see if we can find something that would justify bringing some kind of charge and we'd really like to talk to him.
It's just highly irregular.
But that contributed to the 10 years of arbitrary detention in Assange's case.
And then, you know, like you're pointing to, Belmarsh, it hasn't been rosy.
It hasn't been awesome to be in this facility.
This is where Britain sends their terrorism suspects.
I mean, it's pretty much equivalent to a supermax, right, 23 hours a day segregation from all your other cellmates.
You don't even have cellmates, right?
Everybody has their own concrete cell separate from each other, this kind of thing, right?
Well, I think it's been called British Gitmo or something like that in the UK.
It's viewed as a very harsh facility, even if you're in general population.
I think there is a general population section, and I believe he has been in that.
And also, I think because of his condition, he's kind of gotten special medical assistance, but it's all relative.
And so in the Belmarsh facility, there are things that he has that the judge says he would lose or acknowledges he would lose if he was brought to the United States.
Because of that, that's why he's likely to be set free.
So that's a big deal.
But I don't think we should get lulled into this sense that the Belmarsh facility is a cushy place for anybody to go do prison time.
Right.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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When I was looking at your Twitter feed this morning, you were going through in real time what she's saying, and it was looking pretty bad there.
They had us in the first half in that meme, right?
She gets good at the end.
I think you called her out for a few kind of improprieties here.
In one case, just taking for granted the word of an expert who never testified and wasn't cross-examined, and ignoring all the contrary evidence that actually had been submitted in the court, and along the lines, right, of free speech, and free press, and this kind of thing?
What was that?
Yes.
The thing that stood out ...
There's multiple things, and I'll give them to you.
I'll give them to you for our conversation here, but the thing that you're referring to is she accepted all of the ...
Well, I mean, he's submitting them, and he believes they're true, but there's no way to contest them.
All these statements came from Gordon Cromberg, who's the assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.
This is where Julian Assange would be put on trial if he was ever brought to the United States.
He puts together this packet.
It's got the prosecution's argument, and he gives all these reasons why he believes the charges against Julian Assange are justified.
Those are treated as truth, and almost like you can't challenge these at all during the entire extradition trial.
Anything that the Assange legal team tries to say about them, well, they're made to feel uncomfortable.
How dare you question Gordon Cromberg, assistant US state attorney?
Then she treats them as factual, but he never takes the stand.
Gordon Cromberg was never called as a witness during the extradition trial, and the legal team for Assange never had an opportunity to say to him, we don't believe you.
I mean, one of the most important things, since we're talking about the cruelty of the US prison system, one of the things that was totally absurd about what Gordon Cromberg argued is that if Julian Assange was put in the Alexandria detention center and put in pretrial detention, that he would be able to talk through the steel doors of his prison wall, of his prison, of the walls of his prison door.
He'd be able to talk to other people in this solitary confinement unit.
It was ludicrous.
It's absolutely nonsense.
There's no way anybody could carry a conversation.
You'd be screaming at the top of your lungs.
Right.
That's the whole point of the cell is so that you can't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
And he starts talking about like, uh, they make all these claims about people he could interact with when the whole point is to keep him from being able to interact with people.
It's so absurd.
And, you know, he was, he's another one of those people who would deny that he would be treated specially.
And I like, I think one of the biggest things about this ruling, aside from the fact that she just didn't authorize the extradition request is the fact that she accepted he would be put in special administrative measures because all throughout the extradition trial, the prosecutors kept pretending like the justice department would never make an extraordinary designation of Julian Assange that would put him play, that would have him placed in highly restrictive prison conditions.
And they, they acted like this in spite of the fact that as I can't believe this, I'm referencing Vanessa Barretzer in a positive manner.
I didn't think I was going to be doing this when we got the decision and I talked about this, but she says, Mike Pompeo singled out WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service.
So we have to believe that the intelligence agencies are going to tell the justice department that he has to be designated for Sam's if he is brought to the United States, they're going to treat him like an enemy of the state would be treated if he was brought to the United States.
Yep.
Which is quite a, you know, condemnation here, a British court talking about the United States, like you know, he's going to die in a Turkish prison kind of a thing, you know, where the, everybody knows that the Americans are just barbarians.
We cannot turn him over to a situation like that.
And then go ahead and give us a paragraph on what's a special administrative measure.
It sounds either completely innocuous or like something straight out of Nazi Germany.
Well, so Sam's are the, the, the sort of measures that are imposed on you in addition to the fact that like you're already going to probably be in a medium or a high security facility.
And these are things like you only get two phone calls during a month or it's things like, oh, well, oh, and then those phone calls might only be 15 minutes a piece.
Or it's saying like you could only contact these family members, it'd be your immediate family.
You can't talk to anybody else.
And you could probably talk to your lawyer.
And it says that you can only have this amount of time outside of your cell versus, you know, if you weren't under these measures, you would be allowed out for a longer time.
And it just adds a whole nother layer of security restrictions to the way that you are treated.
So it's sort of like additional punishment on top of the punishment, right?
Because if you're accused of a crime, you go to prison and you're serving time in a facility and just about any prison is going to have its harsh qualities.
But then they say, well, we need to add an extra layer of punishment to you.
We're going to designate you for SAMS.
That's basically what we're talking about here, that the general cruelty becomes intensified because they're looking at Julian Assange as an individual and they're looking at the nature of his crime and they're reading into things.
So they're considering how, you know, he could be a hacker.
What if he tried to do a hack while he's in a U.S. prison?
We need to put him under SAMS so we can prevent him from hacking any part of our facility.
Things of that nature.
Right.
And I think it's absolutely clear as you're saying that, oh, these measures would be applied to him.
That quote from Pompeo is all you need to know because, I mean, they do this to animal rights activists and stuff and, you know, they commit crimes, but they're not really a danger to society or other people and they treat them like this is the kingpin from Egyptian Islamic jihad and we've got to prevent him from talking to his people when it's just not true.
You know, it couldn't possibly be true, but then, you know, they invent the special administrative measures for the blind sheik, right?
And then they end up getting applied to any old buddy, including heroes like Assange or whoever they can get their hands on.
Yeah.
And this is all up to the attorney general, by the way, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has a really good report.
I recommend this to people who want, if they're hearing this for the first time, special administrative measures.
I don't know what this is.
Go read The Darkest Corner.
It's the report that the Center for Constitutional Rights did.
And of course, on this day, because I'm so saddened that Michael Ratner isn't around to appreciate this moment, because he would have been so elated that Julian Assange could go free and he would've been digging in with stuff along with us.
He would have been upset that there wasn't a stronger ruling in defense of press freedom and that he would have been disappointed that she didn't engage with that at all and gave the U.S. government everything they wanted in that respect.
Yeah.
I'm glad you mentioned here.
He was such a great guy.
I don't know how many times I interviewed him, you know, 10 or 20 or something, but he was just great.
But this report, it points out that the attorney general has a sole discretion and you can remain under these conditions indefinitely.
It's almost impossible to get them changed and adjusted.
Yeah, they're administrative measures, right?
That means you can't even ask the judge to look at them.
No, no.
The judge would be deferential to the national security state, basically, to say, oh, well, there must be something special about you.
I can't do anything about this.
You're going to be like this.
And, you know, it's in in their report.
I'll close on this by saying that in the report they mentioned that this kind of creates a bit of like learned helplessness in the way that the CIA imposed the torture of isolation on war on terrorism detainees.
And so that is a feature of the Sam's of basically turning you, you know, they they want to suck out your individuality.
So you just become completely institutionalized in the facility and you go where you're told and you do what you're you're told and you listen to them and you nod your head and you you don't talk back and they never have to deal with you at all in the facility.
Um, man, again, Mary, old England, a judge in a I guess, am I right?
With the little white wig saying we can't was not wearing one.
No wig.
Oh, man, that sucks.
Still, though, everybody imagine the wig because it's funnier that way.
In Mary, old England, the judge says we can't turn this guy over to the Americans because they'll essentially torture him into killing himself, you know, through the way that they treat people over there.
Sorry to be redundant, but I just yeah, something special about that in a way.
And I think I saw oh, that was what it was.
I was going to say earlier, I think I saw that this is the third time that the Brits have ruled this, that we can't extradite someone to the U.S. because of how harsh their treatment of prisoners is.
And this is the kind of thing that you would expect to hear that they would say about Turkey or Saudi Arabia or something like that.
Right.
But it's the United States of America.
And then so here I want to if we can and I'm sure you have 100 interviews to do today, but I'm really curious.
I mean, I know there's only we can't go into like the fullest detail about all the charges in the hacking and all that.
But I wish you could get into the charges a little bit and explain about how they're trying to use these hacking charges to punish journalism here.
And then I wonder, too, if the fact that they have seen in America, we have this espionage act that has all this stuff in it about actually it would apply to The New York Times if you really applied is just traditionally we've never done that.
Right.
But in England, they have the Official Secrets Act where they do apply that all the time.
And they don't have, you know, our tradition or our First Amendment that protects the right of journalists to publish official secrets.
So they have all of these rules.
And I wonder whether it seemed like the judge was kind of taking the English law into account over the American law or, you know, whether it mattered or did she mention at all that in America they they don't have a precedent of using the espionage act against a publisher.
Yeah, so it's a little technical, but just to inform your listeners, if the judge is looking at the allegations, what she has to do is see what they're alleging under the U.S. criminal code.
And then she has to find a comparable and almost identical crime in the UK criminal code in order to make that stick in the extradition case.
So everything that was alleged against Julian Assange, she had to find was a crime in the United Kingdom.
So Julian Assange had done it in the United Kingdom.
He would still be prosecuted is basically what I'm saying.
And so she's looking at it closely.
And yet in the Official Secrets Act, she says that he violated the Official Secrets Act.
I don't think the Official Secrets Act is comparable to the Espionage Act.
However, I will say the Justice Department treats it like an Official Secrets Act.
So it's interesting that those are treated as the similar.
That's how she judged whether the charges against publication were reasonable.
And, you know, by the way, just to be clear, she's not saying that the government proved Julian Assange committed these offenses, just to be fair.
She's saying that under trial, they would likely have evidence that could be compelling.
I mean, we'd have to the jury to decide whether he did any of this stuff.
But in any case, she did say that the Official Secrets Act was something that Julian Assange had violated.
That's in her decision.
And I find that highly debatable.
But she also in her decision spent a lot of time.
I remember talking to you.
We we talked about Patrick Eller and the password cracking conspiracy.
And she she really believed all of the fabricated aspects of this charge against Julian involving conspiring with Manning to help Chelsea Manning get access to the Pentagon computers so she could release documents and so she could do so anonymously and continuously continue to release these documents to WikiLeaks.
It's just so absurd.
I have to restate.
So everyone knows she had access to these files.
She has a security clearance.
When when she was a soldier who was an intelligence analyst, she could download any of these files to CDs.
She could put them on hard drives.
She could do anything she wanted.
She could put them on her own laptop.
It was part of her regular work as a U.S. soldier.
So I don't know why she would have ever had to be.
Anonymous on the system and they never provided any evidence.
We heard the evidence on the record from this computer crime expert that what was alleged against Assange was basically impossible at the time.
Manning could never have cracked that password.
And so it's just really absurd that she bought all of this.
And that's in the ruling.
She believed it.
I think we need to be concerned about it.
She also criminalized his speech.
She criminalized his speech because she believed that everything they said about stuff that he was talking about at these hacker or computer conferences were things that were that that made him dangerous.
And I just say, for example, one of the things that she points out is that he found like a small vulnerability in the system or like the website that was posting congressional research service reports.
I don't know if you know anything about these, but there's these like CRS reports.
And only in the last year or two are these reports made public to everybody.
But they're really good reports.
In fact, members of Congress rely on them in order to develop policy and they should be available to us all.
But in fact, before Julian Assange and WikiLeaks posted a ton of these reports, like almost about 10 years ago, before they posted all of these reports, it was one of those things where you could basically like embezzle these reports.
You could like tuck them in under your shoulders and then you can go off to some company or some nonprofit organization or whatever.
They could pay you a huge salary and you come walking in the door with like a hundred or a thousand of these reports that were supposed to be secret that weren't released to the public yet.
And and so he forced.
He forced transparency on congressional research.
This is taxpayer funded research that's for policymaking that we should all be able to read.
He forced transparency.
And because of that, she's saying he's a dangerous hacker.
It's nuts.
In other words, she doesn't know anything about this stuff.
And she it sounds like all those weeks that you covered this stuff where the defense attorneys and their witnesses just killed it up there.
She wasn't listening or couldn't understand a word they said or had already decided that she was going to take the government's position on all of these things and not try to dispute it.
I think this is why we didn't want to just have her read it later.
I mean, there was a push to get these witnesses to to testify for longer hours.
And she said, oh, no, I've got it written down here.
I'll look at it later.
But no, Vanessa wasn't going to look at it later.
She was she's going to decide things just based on looking at what the prosecutors had to tell her.
And the only thing the prosecutors were able to satisfy is that he would be treated fairly in a U.S. prison.
And so that's what it comes down to.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I got to tell you what, I appreciate your journalism on this issue so much, as you know, for the last 10 years straight and especially today.
What a good day.
Thank you, Kevin.
Yeah, thank you.
All right, you guys, that is Kevin Gatsdala.
He is at Shadow Proof dot com, and this one is the top headline, as I'm saying this anyway, at Antiwar dot com.
Assange decision, British judge rejects U.S. extradition request.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
