All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
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All right, guys, on the line, I've got Kevin Gostola from Shadowproof and The Dissenter.
That's thedissenter.org.
Brand new and just hit, Assange plans to appeal high court decision backing extradition to the United States.
Welcome back.
How you doing, Kevin?
Hey, thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, so the court ruled that they can't extradite him, but then, so first tell us about that, and then tell us about this appeal here.
Yeah, I just started getting ahead, you know, we got to get a headline out there that's a little different than every other website.
So I, everyone's reporting that the high court ruled against the, or ruled in favor of the United States, and you know, we're actually at a next stage.
You know, Julian Assange is going to appeal this decision.
So the high court said that the diplomatic assurances that were offered about how the U.S. government would treat him if he is in jail or prison were to be accepted and in good faith, to be treated as good faith assurances.
There's nothing to be concerned about here.
They would never, never, ever, ever do wrong by these assurances.
They would offer these and stand by them.
And so we believe these to be good enough, and most importantly, the judge was wrong to rule on the extradition without going to the Crown Prosecution Service, which is representing the United States and asking them, would you like to put forward assurances before I go forward here and rule against the extradition?
So they have directed that this extradition request go back to the lower court, and then that lower court will send it over to the home office, which in Britain is the same department that signs off on an extradition request before it goes to a district court.
So we have a kind of feedback loop here, if you can recognize it.
The home office says this extradition request is a legitimate request.
It goes to the district court.
The district court reviews it, has hearings, and then they sign off on it, and then it goes back to the home office after the district court has checked it, then there's no reason we would expect that the home office would reject this request.
And so now I think the Assange team is in a very awful position today because they're going to go appeal to the Supreme Court, and they have grounds to appeal, I believe, but it's also possible that the Supreme Court could decide they don't want to review it, and they believe that the process has been completely above board, and then there won't be other avenues left for preventing this extradition to the United States.
Yeah.
And so I think I started to watch the YouTube that you had posted there, and you talked about how the judge that had ruled in his favor, surprisingly, originally, she's been promoted now, and so will no longer be, it won't be, it'll go back to her same court, but it won't be her, it'll be a different judge sitting in that place now, is that right?
Yeah, I believe she's a circuit court now, but we aren't even scheduled to have proceedings.
You know, basically it's a formality to send it back to the district court level because what the high court of justice is saying, it's not our job to pass this extradition request on to the home office.
You do that busy work.
So we'll send it back down, and then some bureaucrats at the district court level will pass it on to the home office.
But then because Assange is going to appeal to the Supreme Court, that'll stall this, and it will be delayed, but as I'm saying, the Supreme Court probably will hold a hearing.
I'm not certain though, if they think that everything is fine, they'll just say, we're going to pass.
So I don't know what to say, I guess, what's the reaction over here?
Well, I mean, I guess we'll say, happy Human Rights Day, right?
Because the Biden administration has spent the last 36 to 48 hours celebrating with a summit for democracy.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's streaming live now.
Right.
Talking about all of these issues that we're talking about, but in ways that are totally disingenuous and hard to take seriously.
I mean, I posted a clip of Antony Blinken talking about political prisoners, and he used the words sham trials, Orwellian legal systems.
That was a phrase that he used.
He used climates of fear as well.
And it just, it boggles the mind that anyone in that administration would think those words that they're using have any meaning anymore when they have aggressively pushed for this to back off, trying to extradite Julian Assange, a publisher to the United States.
It was widely condemned.
It was immediate, Scott.
Like within an hour, all the statements were out from Amnesty International, from Reporters Without Borders, which by the way, got a shout from the Biden administration when they were doing their introductory remarks to the summit for democracy.
So we know they're a legit organization to the Biden administration, yet they don't seem to care that Reporters Without Borders is opposed to prosecuting Assange.
We saw condemnation from a half dozen or so other groups that are of global importance.
And in addition to that, you know, there's one or two parliamentarians I saw who are in the UK who actually condemned it.
You're not going to see that from any Congress people here in the United States.
Nobody really seems to care.
I went looking to see if anybody in the last year has said anything.
Apparently Thomas Massey has something going, has tried to speak up for Julian Assange, but that's about all I could find.
There's nothing really that concrete that is out there from anybody in Congress.
And of course, because reporters don't want to waste their questions, they're not asking Biden officials about this anymore because the Biden administration has an official no comment policy.
Yeah, man, I mean, it's going to be cool if humanity survives at all to write the history about how it was the American journalist who, you know, as Glenn Greenwald is constantly pointing out, led the charge on censoring regular people on the Internet for daring to have an opinion or to do independent reporting from anything through their channels.
But then this is the ultimate.
There's support for this prosecution or silence about this prosecution as though they can't tell Kevin that it's their own ass on the line here if he's successfully convicted for this.
Yeah, it's it's got to be more now than the performance that they put on when the indictments were first issued.
I've said numerous times in the past two and a half years that these organizations, their editors in chief, did speak up and say they didn't support what the Justice Department was doing.
But that was a lot easier for them culturally, right?
Because then then Donald Trump was president.
Now to speak up, they have to oppose President Joe Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland, who just, you know, in his demeanor is a lot harder to get angry at.
And I'm referring to superficial reasons, but you just he looks like he's a pretty polite individual.
He's he's a good face for the Justice Department as they're trying to crush somebody's life over in Belmarsh.
So they they don't feel as drawn to opposing him as they did Bill Barr, who had a much different demeanor and was combative as and, you know, did did take strong stands that they didn't agree with.
So now now when it's time to speak up, they're very timid and polite and it's going to be to their detriment.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, I guess it would feel weird for some of them, but this is now the issue for the right.
I mean, so many parts of the left have become bad on free speech and that has pushed people on the right to embrace it as a value, you know, quite a bit more than before, I think.
But what's their grudge against Assange?
That he and Manning told the truth about George Bush's wars?
Well, but the right has already forsaken the Bush legacy and the Bush doctrine in favor of America first populism instead.
And so what's that old grudge worth?
Should be nothing.
By the way, you ought to read those Afghan and Iraq war logs and see how bad those wars really were.
But, you know, we understand why liberals and leftists will not so much left.
Well, I don't know.
I guess I'm leftist, too, but especially liberals.
We understand why they hate him because he helped Vladimir Putin stop Hillary Clinton from becoming, you know, our queen for eight years.
So that makes sense.
But the right wing grudge should have worn off by now.
And this guy really needs somebody's support.
So it's, I think, a good chance for the America first to say, hey, when we say America first, we mean the Bill of Rights.
That's what comes first.
And the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights is the first one.
And for good reason.
And in fact, all of the natural rights that are supposedly protected by the First Amendment.
You know, these are, you know, like you could argue the Fifth and Sixth Amendment.
These are like civil rights process and privileges under the law and all of that.
The First Amendment is your right to say what's on your mind, to associate freely with whoever you feel like, to tell the truth as you know it, et cetera, et cetera, to worship or not worship as you see fit.
These are all natural human rights.
Amendment number one.
And we're going to let the Democrats destroy that so they can get revenge against Julian Assange for helping not the Russians.
The Russians didn't have anything to do with that hack for helping whatever hero leaked those emails to WikiLeaks to help protect humanity from Hillary Clinton for eight years.
We can't let that happen.
So come on, everybody.
Yeah, let's work backward because I think you're right.
President Joe Biden's administration has to be shamed into dropping these charges.
I've said before, I repeated it when I started my live broadcast after this decision was issued.
The only way that Julian's life is going to be spared, the only way a publisher will be saved and the only way an even worse precedent will be set, because by the way, we've already set a precedent.
The idea that these charges can be brought by the Justice Department has already done damage to the First Amendment and to the institution of freedom of the press.
But the only way we're going to spare Julian Assange is if we get President Joe Biden's administration to feel some sort of shame, be unable to basically go any place without being questioned and asked about this.
There has to be confrontation.
It has to come from somewhere.
Now, obviously, I would like it to come from my profession.
I would like it to come from professional colleagues who are members of either these journalist unions or these guilds, these newspaper guilds, or part of these professional organizations that make claims of supporting press freedom and to have them speak up and to stop caring about personality, because it really doesn't matter whether you would want to go hang out with Julian Assange at, I don't know, Martha's Vineyard or whatever, or if you didn't want to go sit with him in the Ecuador embassy.
It doesn't matter.
At this point, it's all about the principles and all about protecting an institution.
But where's the opposition going to come from?
It's not going to come from Democrats.
You're exactly right.
Under a Democratic president, the most probable and most likely place that people could see politicians speaking up is among the right.
I do actually agree with you on that, just because Democrats who may believe that this is wrong aren't going to want to speak up, especially in a 2022 midterm election year.
They are not going to want to speak up for Julian Assange and create an issue that makes their president look bad.
So we'll get silence.
We'll continue to get silence, even from people who know better, even from the progressive wing of the party that knows better, they'll be silent.
And it'll have to be the more libertarian wing of the Republican Party or other people in the Republican Party who have recognized some value to what WikiLeaks published in recent years.
And they're probably not going to find it.
You're right.
They're probably not going to find it from the Chelsea Manning disclosures, the ones that are the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the U.S. state embassy cables that are a wealth of information about how the U.S. pursues superpower around the world.
But it's OK.
If they find something in the last five years, if it's the Vault 7 materials, which led Mike Pompeo, you know, one of their own to decide that he need to seek revenge against Julian Assange, that's acceptable too.
But I think they should wake up and they also should stop deluding themselves.
I don't think President Donald Trump was as much of a supporter of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as some of them still would like to believe or wanted to believe back then.
He was not willing to fight for him.
And if he had been, he could have stopped this.
If he had wanted to stake anything, any part of his presidency on saving the First Amendment, he could have done so on his way out.
And and he didn't because he just, you know, was was more in it for himself than anything else.
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Yeah, man.
It really is a shame that he didn't take advantage of the opportunity to stick his thumb in the eye of his enemies in the FBI and CIA, if nothing else.
You know, it's everything's personal for him.
Go ahead and take some revenge, man.
These are the guys that framed you for treason.
You know, get what you could do is hurt their feelings.
You know, I say you could have shown Mitch McConnell a thing or two, you know, which also goes to how, you know, when we talk about the hope lies in the right wing, we're talking about the proles because we're not talking about the party, because the Republican Party is just absolutely beholden to the FBI and the CIA and the entire national security state.
And the idea of them is just and we've seen this just in the last week with the split over Ukraine, where all the conventional Republican politicians are saying, yeah, we got to fight Russia over Ukraine.
And then the America firsters, the Donald Trump are saying, what in the hell are we talking about?
Why would we do that?
You know, but just the right wing knee jerk is to rally around that flag no matter what, you know.
And so it would be.
They would also have to be really pressured and shamed by right wing people, actual humans, you know, essentially forcing them to change their position because their people have decided that this is the issue that they insist is important right now and that kind of thing, because otherwise you get Ted Cruz, you know, gets up there and, you know, talks about the Constitution for a minute and threatens nuclear war the next.
I will say it's not impossible.
I was connected loosely to an effort back in the second term of President Barack Obama's administration that successfully prevented a sharper escalation of U.S. involvement in the war in Syria.
And there was, I followed and I had some colleagues who were whipping the vote and they asked people, Democrat and Republican, and I think they were particularly successful with progressives and libertarians to come together and oppose all the rising war.
And because that vote was going to fail, President Obama sheepishly said that he was not going to have the vote in Congress.
And this stopped something from getting worse.
So these people can come together.
And you know why they did it was because they were hearing from, as you said, the proles, the people who are treated as the unwashed, you know, the pundits on CNN think that those people are stupid and they don't know anything and they're, they're not, you know, we need to let the more esteemed minds determine the future of policy.
But these people get it.
You know, they actually do.
They're, they're pretty good about understanding that it's wrong for Julian Assange to be brought to the United States and put on trial.
So I think they can understand that.
I think they actually like can probably grasp the fact that he's an Australian citizen.
He's not an American citizen.
So why should an American, sorry, why should an Australian citizen have to follow US law?
I mean, that's absurd.
Nobody here on the right as an American would want to be dumped in China and be expected to follow Chinese law.
Nobody would want to follow, uh, you know, the law, um, in any other country if they were not a citizen of that country, if they had not set up permanent residency.
I think that's something that people on the right can understand.
Yeah.
Seriously.
I mean, and think about it right where you would have American journalists say for the Washington Times or Wall Street Journal reporting about secrets out of Cuba or secrets out of China.
And then the Cuban government or the Chinese government indicts them and says you're in violation of our official secrets act.
And then when you travel overseas, they have you kidnapped and try to arrange extradition.
So you're an American sitting in an American state doing protected by the first amendment doing journalism about a third country.
Now that third country can indict you for breaking its laws without even going there, without even ever being under their jurisdiction, put the shoe on the other foot.
It sounds absolutely absurd.
And yet somehow we're talking about doing this and doing this to a guy who you mentioned this, but it's worth emphasizing has done the most important journalistic work of this century so far.
He's the very best journalist in the world.
It's he's not just a journalist.
He's the guy that published the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the state department cables, and not just those, but a lot more.
But for those things alone, that makes him, you know, the all time, probably greatest journalist ever.
And I've said this before, and I know it's true because I've seen Google tell me that when you Google the WikiLeaks show or state department cables reveal or anything like that, you will get tens of thousands of returns from different news stories from all around the world.
Well, that's assuming Google hasn't crushed all those results out of existence yet.
OK, duck, duck, go or another one.
You will find tens of thousands of stories where if they're not based entirely on the WikiLeaks, one paragraph says that the WikiLeaks documents verify and bolster one point we're making here or something like that, at least thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of stories all across the world came from that leak.
And famously, they'd never been caught getting anything wrong ever, even when the CIA tries to entrap them into publishing some doctored documents or whatever, it doesn't work.
It's never worked.
Not a single time.
Yeah, you won't get 10 year old coverage of these documents that independent reporters like myself put out in those search results, but you'll get CNN, you'll get New York Times, The Washington Post, you'll get The Guardian, some of these organizations that are actually complicit in the prosecution and fueled these rumors of Julian Assange being a Russian plant that were somewhat adopted by the district judge.
But that sort of proves a point, right?
It proves a point because the establishment media covered this journalist, this publisher's documents, covered the revelations from those documents and took them seriously.
And they've used these archives of material to further their work.
It sounds absurd to say it, Scott, but if you told me that The Washington Post put out an article about Ukraine and Russia in the last week, and it was about the conflict, and it's actually a narrative that's pushing for more intervention, but further down in the article, they referenced WikiLeaks documents in order to give it the context that was needed.
I would go, yeah, that makes sense.
Like that sounds exactly right.
That's what they've done.
They've actually used these documents to push an agenda of imperialism.
And so I don't know how they can be so upset about everything because no matter where you come down ideologically, this information has benefited people in some way.
Yeah.
Now back to the hearing here real quick, man.
I wanted to follow up on this point about the judges saying that, listen, we have to take the Americans' assurances at face value here.
I don't really remember, but it must be the case that the last time they had a chance to argue about this, Assange's lawyers said that that can't be true because we know now, we know now that the CIA was plotting to kill Julian Assange, that they were treating him as an enemy to be destroyed rather than even a suspect to be tried and convicted.
And so I wonder if the court commented about that at all or they just ignored that, I guess, huh?
I didn't see anything in the court decision, although there was an afternoon that was spent on the reporting from Yahoo News that added to our understanding of the CIA's war on WikiLeaks, an understanding we already had to some degree because El Pais and the Gray Zone and a couple other outlets, but nothing really that prominent, had done coverage of the private security company in Spain, UC Global, which was spying on Julian Assange, his family, and was involved in these plots, these conspiracies to go after him and his attorneys and to put him on a plane in a rendition or these plans to kidnap him or even kill him.
Those plans were sketched out, if you believe these 30 plus sources, that those were discussed in some serious, in some way they were serious about having these discussions.
But I think the main point to make about the issue of the assurances is they say that there's no reason why we shouldn't believe them and we have to take them on good faith.
And they also point to the fact that the UK and US are such close allies.
So essentially the high court is honestly being what I anticipated.
They're being the court of a client state.
They're saying that if we did not authorize this extradition, our diplomatic relations could be in jeopardy.
It's more important to protect the relationship between the US and the UK, that bond, than it is to protect the institution of freedom of the press.
That's how the high court decided to rule.
And there's a case from 2009 involving a person named David Mendoza Herarta from Spain.
And in this case, diplomatic assurances were given by the US government to Spain.
He was accused of drug trafficking.
He's now out of prison.
He's been talking about his case.
There are documents that were previously classified, which show that similarly, just like in this Assange case, the Spanish court made his extradition conditional on prisoner transfer back to Spain to serve any sentence.
And the US provided those assurances.
But really what they only did was say, we would allow David Mendoza to apply for a prisoner transfer, the application.
They did not say we would grant the application.
They refused David Mendoza's application when he asked to be transferred to serve his time in prison in Spain.
And they basically said that the promise at the time was not that they would guarantee Mendoza would get to go do his sentence in Spain, that he would just be allowed to apply for it.
Think of how absurd this is.
They are saying that this is totally meaningless.
It's not even something that the high court should hear.
It's basically like saying, we promise to show up to court on time before you gavel in the proceedings.
Well, of course we will be there, because if we're not, we're going to look like we don't care about this case.
So the fact that this is taken seriously is really something that people should look at more closely.
And these insurances are going to be the focus of the Assange appeal.
Now, just for those who are Assange supporters, I have to tell you that they are not ignoring the press freedom issues.
They are not ignoring the issues of freedom of speech or the political motivations behind this case that are crucial for us to continue to pay attention.
But the appeal that they lost today, they lost because the high court believes these diplomatic assurances, and they believe that there's no reason why you should doubt the assurances that you should not believe that they are being offered in bad faith.
And so then in that respect, you can bring in political motivations because you can say, this is a country that has been hostile to Julian Assange.
They're going to go back on any promises they make.
And that's what they'll argue before the UK Supreme Court if they get the opportunity.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, check out Kevin Gostola at thedissenter.org and at Shadowproof.
This one will be, in fact, I think it's probably already the top story on Antiwar.com today.
I sent it to the boss a minute ago.
Yep, it's our top story at Antiwar.com.
Assange to appeal high court decision backing extradition to US.
Thanks so much for your time again, Kevin.
Appreciate it.
And thanks for your support.
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.
