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.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line is Kevin Gostola from thedissenter.org, and also Shatter, not Shatterproof, that's different, Shadowproof.
I think Verizon has a special thing called Shatterproof.
Oh, really?
Yeah, they do.
Is that where they answer a general warrant on the entire population of the United States and turn over everything on us?
Yeah.
That's cool.
They need a cool name for that, you know?
Shatterproof, yeah.
Shatterpoint, that's terrible old Star Wars fan fiction.
All right, appeal hearing.
CIA's war on Assange, their most prominent critic takes center stage.
Oh, wait, this is day two.
Day one was prosecutor bashes judge for blocking Assange extradition, and both of these are at the dissenter, and thank goodness for you, man.
You've been watching, I guess, the live stream from, is it just two days and they're done for now of these hearings?
Oh, yeah, mercifully.
I mean, it's grueling, and also just the way they talk about Julian Assange and the arguments in this case.
They're actually rather maddening at this point.
Yeah, I could see that for sure.
All right, so I guess I want to make sure and mention before we go on that everybody can check out your kind of live blogging threads there on Twitter as well.
It's KGOTSTOLA and it's SZGOTSTOLA, and on Twitter you can find both days' worth of tweet threads, which go into much greater detail than these articles, which are extremely detailed.
But okay, so first of all, can you just give us the background?
The judge ruled that the British government may not extradite Julian Assange to the United States.
When and on what basis?
Yes, so back on January 4th, we had this stunning decision because she accepted a lot about Julian Assange that was, we'll say character assassination on the part of prosecutors, that he's not a journalist.
She'd not uphold his human rights as a journalist or his liberty as a journalist.
And essentially, though, when she was moving through her decision came to this point where she applied a test and she was going through that test with us and said, I believe if he was extradited to the United States, it would be oppressive for mental health reasons, that he would not be able to resist the impulse to commit suicide because of his mental health issues.
And so therefore, I deny the extradition.
And then she discharged him.
Of course, two days later, she denied him bail and that kept him in Belmarsh high security prison.
And yeah, I know this is baffling.
It doesn't really make sense.
He is so psychotic.
They can't be extradited to the United States, but he's not psychotic enough to have to free from a prison where you're holding terrorists.
That's considered a kind of Guantanamo in Britain.
But anyway, it already he's already in a supermax, right?
Yeah, he's in like really, really restrictive conditions, probably the highest restrictive conditions in Britain, which I suppose if you were to compare to the U.S. is probably like a medium security prison in the United States because our carceral state is just so much more severe.
But that being said, but I mean, isn't it like 23 hours a day solitary and that kind of thing?
Just like in Florence?
No, I don't think it's like that.
He's in general population.
He gets to interact with prisoners.
It's not it's not that last year he was in solitary.
And so for a while he was on a hospital wing and isolated because he was getting like round the clock attention and did not get to mix with other prisoners.
And then, of course, because of the pandemic, they impose these conditions on people where they can have social visits and all kinds of things.
And that that ends up being very similar to the supermax conditions, just in the way that that is applied by the wardens of these institutions.
So yeah, so he so you get this decision and then the U.S. government appeals it.
And I think the biggest thing to talk about in terms of this appeal from the U.S. government are these, quote unquote, assurances that we're hearing about from the big headline in the mass media on day one was Julian Assange could serve his prison sentence in Australia as if like that's somehow supposed to make it all better.
They're trying to get around the inhumanity of the incarceration system in the United States and say, well, we'll let them apply for a prison transfer under this agreement we have with Australia.
But the problem is that Australia has to approve it like the it's a political decision.
The politicians in Australia have to agree to let him come back and serve his sentence in Australia.
And the other issue is if they think that he got a disproportionate sentence for a crime and it's not fair, then they may not want to be a party to that and allow him to be in prison.
Like they may say to the United States, well, if he comes here, we will want to release him and then they can't honor the commitment.
So he's not going to be sent to Australia to serve that sentence.
These are the couple of points that his legal team made about what's wrong with this assurance.
In other words, the Australians have not given their assurance that sure, we'll go along with whatever the Americans want in this case or anything like that yet.
Yeah, yeah.
It could be really bad for their reputation to keep this journalist behind bars.
I mean, they have their David Hicks was released from Guantanamo Bay.
They let him go.
They were supposed to hold him for a while, but they didn't.
Yeah.
So I just want to say that I don't do a whole lot on Australian politics, but they do have their own problem as far as the war on journalists.
You know, they raided the offices of the Australia Broadcasting Corporation that published files on Afghanistan war crimes.
And some of the information came from a whistleblower named David McBride, who's actually a really good guy.
If you're ever looking for somebody to interview and you're oh, I've talked to him before.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
He's a he's a real stand up person facing his own whistleblower prosecution against him.
You know, the Australian government is coming after him and he's a supporter of Assange.
And and so like they may not want to put Julian Assange behind bars because they have to be concerned about the the scandal that they could be embroiled in if they put him in a prison.
So that's just something to consider.
I mean, I don't know that it actually would play out like that, but you always have to think about what the government is going to want to do for its image.
I mean, I know that hasn't affected the US so far.
They're still keeping Assange in this British jail, despite all of the condemnation from press freedom organizations and human rights organizations.
Now, on this assurance thing, as far as sending him to Australia, they haven't promised that they would send him to Australia, right?
They've given an assurance that they would consider sending him to Australia if he's convicted or what exactly is the language there?
Well, what it means is he's allowed to apply as you apply for a prisoner transfer.
No promises whatsoever that they would let him go.
It's not like a solid commitment.
All of these all of these assurances, these quote unquote assurances, it's worth going through each of these.
But all of these have their caveats.
All of them, and they're not quite disclaimers, but all of them have that, like, read the fine print and you see that they're not really even commitments that they would have to honor.
So we're talking about the Australian assurance and how that could be violated, so to speak.
Then there's the Supermax, the CMUs and the SAMs.
So can you get into what they promised along those lines?
Right.
So the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado was absolutely, I'm just going to say this because the prosecution's tried to rewrite history, was absolutely left as a possibility.
The assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia where Julian Assange would be put on trial, his name is Gordon Kronberg.
He told the court, the district court, before the ruling was blocked, that it was possible Julian Assange could go to ADX Florence in Colorado after trial if he was convicted.
And now they want to pretend like it was never something that was on the table.
So they're telling the high court, we will not put Julian Assange in ADX Florence.
But the problem with that is that if you look at the fine print, it says if he commits a future act, if he commits any sort of future act, then they would be able to put him in ADX Florence.
If that is something that someone committing like a breach of national security, it would make them eligible to be put in those conditions.
So I'll get to it, but let me handle that one along with the special administrative measures because there's a point I want to make that applies to both of those assurances.
The special administrative measures are authorized by the attorney general.
You can say that someone presents a national security threat and put them under restrictive confinement conditions.
That's what's going on to the alleged source of the Vault 7 materials.
These CIA documents that had details of CIA cyber warfare tools.
He's in Sam's right now in a prison in New York, which by the way, I just want to mention is a temporarily shut down, but they refuse to move out prisoners who have ongoing cases.
So this could happen.
So they say, no, we're taking Sam's off the table.
We're not going to put him under special administrative measures.
But if you were to commit a future act, if Assange were to commit a future act that was a breach of national security, then we would be in our right in order to put him under Sam's.
And the problem with ADX Florence and Sam's, these assurances are with that loophole that's available to them, that they're saying they're going to leave open.
You have to believe that the CIA isn't going to advise or recommend to the attorney general that he put him in these prison conditions, that they apply these confinement restrictions to Julian Assange.
You have to believe that this agency that has been reported to have planned to put together these sketches, these outlines of scenarios that they could employ to poison or assassinate Assange, they contemplated how they could kidnap or put him on a rendition flight and bring him back to the United States.
They wanted to break into the Ecuador embassy and bring him here.
You have to believe that that agency doesn't still have hostility to Assange to the extent that they would go to the attorney general if he was brought here and say, we want him to be kept in these harsh conditions.
It's just not believable.
Right.
And now, so, uh, help me understand the thing about the, um, the CMU, a CMU is just a place where SAMs are enforced.
Is that right?
Or it's a whole different regime.
It's a whole different way of handling prisoners.
Well, let's talk, um, in, uh, I'll use an actual example because I've, I've been covering Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower, and, uh, and this also involves an assurance.
So the story of Daniel Hale took a turn, a dark turn, uh, not that it wasn't already grim, but it took a darker turn in the first week of October.
He was told that he would be put in a medical center in North Carolina called, uh, Butner.
And it's one of the largest medical centers, prison medical centers in the United States.
He was told he would be sent there because he has post-traumatic stress.
He's one of those veterans who has moral injury from being involved in the targeted killing program, uh, you know, having a role in, uh, basically vaporizing civilians that aren't on the kill list.
So, so he, uh, adds this on his conscience and it played a role in his decision to blow the whistle and give documents to Jeremy Scahill.
Then he was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
He pled guilty so that he could get less time in prison.
And he's doing 45 months in federal prison and he was supposed to go to Butner.
Now he finds, uh, he's transferred to Marion, which is a state penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.
And it has a communications management unit.
He arrives there and he finds he's designated for a CMU.
He has no notice.
There's no nothing given to him beforehand.
He has no ability to challenge his designation.
He's just put there.
His attorneys aren't even told why he is being put there.
Uh, and so he is now in these conditions and what it means is he's not allowed, uh, so, so he's limited to somewhere around, um, I think it's like three, two or three phone calls a week.
That's, that's how much, uh, 15 minute phone calls.
They have to be scheduled when an FBI agent can be available to monitor that phone call.
Uh, he has non-contact visits.
So any, it's a good thing he's not married.
It's a good thing he doesn't have children.
And obviously this is something that we need to think about when it comes to Julian Assange who has kids.
You're not allowed to hug, kiss your family.
You can't, um, hold hands.
You're not allowed to be with them.
You speak to them through a partition while you are doing the visit.
There's no security reason for this.
This is just what the Bureau of Prisons does to prisoners.
Um, it's worse.
This actually doesn't happen with Sam's.
This is what happens with people in a CMU and, uh, he was told he was put in a CMU because his crime involved communications.
So, um, that's, uh, why he's there and Julian Assange's alleged crimes involved communication.
So I really think it's likely that he would be put in a communication management unit.
And so this, this, this jumps to the front here of places Julian Assange is likely to go if he's brought here and convicted.
And I think, uh, something people really need to consider.
There's not all, there's not really a good place for people to do recreation.
You're imprisoned in a CMU wing.
You're only with prisoners that are in the CMU wing.
You're not in general population.
Um, so you do get some interaction.
It's not quite solitary, but you are isolated.
You're isolated from prisoners and there are efforts to cut you off from the outside world.
Every bit of mail that you receive gets inspected, uh, and there are really draconian guidelines that people who send you mail have to follow in order to get that mail to you.
And you can't, um, you, there's phone calls.
You mostly are only allowed to talk to immediate family.
So there are people on Daniel Hale's list who he was talking to from jail, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Lisa Ling's a drone whistleblower that's a friend.
These are close, uh, mentors who were advising him as he went through this prosecution and they aren't on the list right now.
I don't know that they're going to be allowed to talk with him until he's released from prison, uh, two or three years from now.
So they can do this to Assange and cut him off from his support network.
If he's put in a CMU, it's very appealing to the US government to hold someone like Julian Assange in these kind of conditions.
Are these, uh, the CMUs and the SAMs, is this all just from the terror war era or is this from before?
Yeah.
So CMU, CMU is being challenged by the center for constitutional rights.
They have a lawsuit that is actually before the DC circuit court of appeals right now.
Uh, they're waiting on it to be ruled upon.
But, uh, there, these are 60 to 70% of people in CMUs are Muslim prisoners.
They're people who, um, you know, they, uh, either they did actually commit violent crimes or they're being religiously profiled and sent there, uh, for their perceived extremism.
And then they occasionally do a thing in order to, uh, they call them balancers.
It's kind of sick.
You know, you think about diversity and the way diversity can be used in a pernicious way.
Someone like Daniel Hale is called a balancer because he's white.
So when human rights organizations criticize how it's disproportionately targeting Muslim people, the Bureau of Prisons likes to point to someone like Daniel and say, no, we have a white prisoner.
We have like actually a half dozen or so white prisoners.
So it's not totally all about punishing Muslims.
Right.
Yeah.
That's exactly how cops think.
You know, we're, we're pulling over too many black people on the New Jersey turnpike.
Let's start pulling over more white people and searching them too.
Instead of backing off and let people go about their business and no, we'll just have to, you know, make sure to persecute some Koreans and some Mexicans and some Anglos and figure out how to balance.
I love it.
Um, yeah.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right now, God dang.
So now back to the assurances, the, the us lawyer is telling the British judge what is giving them what degree of assurance that Assange would not be transferred.
I guess you already said they can change their mind on the, um, on the Sam's and the, um, super max if they feel like it.
If they claim something new happened, they heard him mumbling under his breath or something.
And so now they can do that.
Is that the same thing with the CMU's too?
That they can, well, yeah, they're all basically tissue paper thin promises.
They've made no assurance on CMU's.
That's not even there.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So it's Sam's and Florence.
And so then you go, well, he could be sent to a CMU.
There's there's that there.
That's one way around all of all of this.
And then they, they'd be content with putting him in a CMU in one of these, you know, they've journalists have called these facilities like little Gwent Guantanamo's.
There's really good reporting from a nation magazine and other outlets have documented treatment in these facilities.
And uh, and yeah, and if you're even caught talking to a journalist, they'll put you in solitary confinement.
Um, cause uh, yeah, there's a, there's a one prisoner in Terre Haute named Marty Gossfeld, um, kind of a cause celeb, um, on the right cause of, uh, you know, he was accused of, of a hacking of, of hacking into a hospital.
It's complicated case, but anyways, he's in a CMU and, uh, he talked, uh, his wife talked to RT and RT published an article and then the prison goes, oh no, you can't be talking to journalists.
They throw them in solitary confinement.
That could happen to Julian Assange if anything he says to his family, makes it into the press.
Uh, so, uh, there's no assurances on any of this, nothing being put forward in the last assurance that I want to make sure I cover before we move on to any other areas here is the fact that they say, okay, if he's put in a prison, we will, or a jail, we'll make sure that the, um, clinician that's on staff, the, the, the doctor, um, recommends any kind of medical care that he might need, uh, that we'll make sure that they issue the recommendation to, uh, provide any care that he might need.
Well, there's, if you read between the lines, there is a bit of a caveat there, which is if the doctor decides that he does not need to recommend, then he's just going to be out of luck.
He's just going to be sitting there deteriorating mentally.
And uh, it's, I'm not, I'm actually not just making this up because the Bureau of Prisons in the last few years made this public policy that they were going to do more to take care of people who needed mental health care in their facilities, but they did not hire staff who could provide it, which means without having doctors on staff to do that work, most of the staff wanted to reduce their caseload by simply refusing to acknowledge that prisoners needed treatment.
So I don't think it's a done, uh, I don't think it's certain that Assange just because he's high profile gets mental health care because they assured a high court that they would take care of him.
Right now.
So what about this stuff about, geez, your honor, you know, there's a very good chance that Assange's lawyers could just invoke speedy trial, um, in the fifth amendment or sixth amendment, I forget.
And, and the first amendment right of the press to publish things, hell, he might be free to go.
We probably won't even be able to prosecute him because our prosecution here is obviously against two amendments in the bill of rights.
And so what's the risk that he could even be convicted at all?
You're raising one of the most baffling moments of the appeal hearing for me because it just showed, and the fact that the high courts, the high court justices let a prosecutor talk like this without recognizing that it was so disconnected from reality, uh, I believe that that's probably one of the more unsettling aspects of, of that moment.
But, uh, just to recap what went down there, the high court justice says to James Lewis, who is a prosecutor for the crown prosecution service that is doing this on behalf of the U S government, arguing this case, uh, the high court justice asks, Oh, well, you know, maybe he might not go to 80 X Florence if he's acquitted.
And that's true.
Um, but it doesn't seem that likely given what I know about espionage act cases in the United States.
Right.
And that's not the question we're arguing of whether he would be free to go if he was acquitted or not.
The question was what would happen to him if they would convict him?
That's the question in the first place.
So he basically gives James Lewis, uh, something to run with happily, gleefully.
And he starts talking about all of these rosy, but implausible things that could take place.
Like Julian Assange could apply for speedy trial.
I don't know what he's talking about.
Uh, attorneys for whistleblowers who have been involved in these cases say you waive your speedy trial rights when you go through this because, uh, they can't give you a speedy trial.
The classified information is so cumbersome and what they have to do with all the security agencies that are involved takes year, maybe two years before they can bring you to trial.
I mean, just take Daniel Hell's case, who we talked about in May, 2019, and they weren't ready to put him on trial until March, 2020.
That's more than, that's almost a year.
Um, so, and you're saying because of the way the intelligence agencies and police agencies behave, his lawyers have to say that, okay, well we waive the right to a speedy trial because it takes them so long to keep up with everything that the agencies give them as they dribble it out over the course of that year.
Well, yeah, there's like all the, there's something called classification, classified information procedures that they have to follow.
Um, and also like when preparing the case, you got to meet in a secure facility.
It's also unlikely that Assange would be allowed to look at all of this information, which, so then you're going to have, you're going to have preliminary hearings before you get to the trial where you challenge, you'll have pretrial motions that'll drag it out for at least a year, if not two years.
Um, so speedy trial, no, that's, that's not realistic.
Okay.
So if you're going to challenge it on first amendment grounds, I mean that clearly demonstrates you have no idea about the case law, the history of espionage act prosecutions because people have tried to say it is unconstitutional because it's overbroad or it's vague.
You know, the espionage act doesn't give you appropriate notice that you are committing a crime.
So like you don't know, like you can release this information, but not really know that you've just committed an espionage act offense because of the way it's written.
I mean it wasn't supposed to be applied to journalists in this manner.
We've been over this before, but I'll just reiterate that this was supposed to be about spies about people who think cold war are turning into traitors and going to pass on state secrets to the Soviet Union.
Right.
And that's really what it was about, you know, it was about rooting out communists.
It was about going after people who, um, and, and they use this law to some extent against anti-war people who were against being involved in world war one, um, that they went after thousands and thousands of people who were against, um, being involved in war.
But they also, the politicians who passed this wanted to stop real actual espionage, not, oh, this is published in a newspaper and we're going to shut this down by punishing you.
Uh, so there's been no successful challenges.
The idea that you succeed on first amendment grounds and then Julian Assange just walks free because even if you did succeed, succeed on a first amendment ground, I'm not exactly a lawyer.
I'm not, I am definitely not a lawyer, but it seems to me that then they would appeal that if you were the U S government, because they wouldn't want that to set a precedent, uh, that the espionage act was unconstitutional.
So that we'll take that up to the Supreme court level.
Um, and, and if they could do that, um, if that's a finding from the judge.
So, uh, no, this is completely out of touch with reality.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and the thing is too, you're completely right, obviously that there, we all know beforehand that there's no way his lawyers could succeed in making a first amendment defense.
Even though what we're talking about here, we're not talking about the prosecution of somebody like Thomas Drake or Chelsea Manning.
We're talking about the leaky, not the leaker.
Um, but so I agree with you though, that, um, even still, it's not like his lawyers would be able to succeed in that, but it seems like the more important point is that the American lawyer is conceding that he knows what he's doing is wrong.
He knows that Julian Assange or at least not Assange is right.
He's not a us person, but that as well under their jurisdiction, he is that they have no right to prosecute anybody for publishing anything because this is America.
So for him to be able to say to the judge, it's like, he's, um, you know, it's like he's slipping.
It's like a Freudian thing where, geez, I didn't kind of mean to say that, but it is one of my best arguments is that our case against this guy is obviously on its face unconstitutional and it's very likely he'll get away your honor, even though he knows that that part's not right.
The first part sure is.
And then what does that say about the whole thing?
Like, what are we even talking about here?
Yeah.
The, uh, the British prosecutor, um, has heard that, uh, the team for Assange complained about how the Trump justice department had said, uh, and also Mike Pompeo, CIA director, you know, he said, Julian Assange does not have first amendment rights.
Uh, so they've heard this and, uh, this was something that the district judge just brushed aside and was like, oh, that's, that's, that's not really how courts would handle it.
They, they wouldn't just throw out the constitution.
Uh, you haven't followed every single case in America closely.
Have you?
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really, uh, the, the, the gears of justice can grind in a way that actually whittle away on our civil liberties.
It's actually, it's possible if you, depending on the case, they can find, they find the right defendants.
They can throw out any of these, whether we're talking privacy protections, whether we're talking about due process rights or even free speech rights.
If you get the right defendant and Julian Assange just might be the right defendant, you can set precedent that whittle away, that whittles away at our civil liberties.
Yeah.
Well, and this is a huge one and that's, you know, this is sort of a parenthetical to your, you know, focus on exactly what's happening in the case here.
But how about the fact they're trying to set a precedent that they can criminalize any and all national security reporting?
I mean, they're conflating the guy who received the leak with the person who leaked the government employee who is bound by agreement and by law to not reveal these secrets right or wrong.
It's being conflated with the person who received the secrets and published them.
And geez, I mean, the, the Obama government wanted so bad to prosecute this guy, but they said, geez, if we do, we'll have to prosecute our pet David Sanger and Charlie Savage.
Yep.
I want to bring in the issue of the CIA and I'll tie it into what you just said there because you know, this idea that Julian Assange is not a journalist, which has been the focus has been the agreement between media organizations in the US and the British press that he is not a journalist.
That's damaging.
That's, that's why he wouldn't succeed on first amendment grounds, first of all, because the political class and people in our media have succeeded in convincing so many people that Julian Assange is not a journalist and they'll reference articles from these media institutions to make their case.
Now they'll refer to, let's say former New York times executive editor, Bill Keller, and they'll say, well, he said, Julian Assange is not a journalist.
So that makes it so.
And you'll hear from senators who will, when they heard that Julian Assange was indicted under the espionage act, they were troubled by it, but they also refused to call Julian Assange a journalist.
And they'd say things like, I don't think Julian Assange is a journalist, but I don't think we should be, uh, the government should not be in the business of deciding what you can and can't publish.
Well, when you see that, when you, when you say that you don't think Julian Assange is not a journalist, then you're actually doing the work of the CIA because that's exactly what the CIA did.
The CIA redefined Julian Assange as a hostile enemy of the agency so that they could target him.
And then that gets to something that I was glad to see happen.
Took, it took place in the afternoon on the second day, uh, we talked about the Yahoo news report that was sourced to 30 plus people who were in the Trump administration and inside the CIA who were part of these internal discussions about plans for kidnapping or killing Julian Assange.
And, uh, they connected this back to the Spanish evidence related to UC Global, the security company that is facing a criminal case in Spain, but was passing on video and audio to the CIA of what was happening in the embassy.
They were spying on legal, on lawyers, they were spying on his family, uh, but they were going beyond that.
They were doing certain things like we want to steal DNA so we could try and identify whether these children that are being brought into the embassy are Assange kids or not.
Uh, they, I, we, we believe that they may have been behind a burglary, uh, breaking into the office of Baltasar Garzon, who's a renowned Spanish lawyer, uh, tried to, uh, pursue, uh, uh, a novel international legal theory that you could hold war criminals in the United States accountable by prosecuting them in Spanish court.
Uh, it didn't go anywhere because as the US cables revealed the Obama administration and Bush administration were involved in applying pressure so that nobody pursued that.
Uh, but, uh, but, but yeah, uh, this, this finally was part of the extradition case.
So now that was, um, that was kind of a relief.
It was good that that made it into the proceedings.
Yeah.
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So, well, and tell us about that part cause the, um, the bad guys must've objected.
Uh, but they were able to convince the judge to let them not read the whole story there, but cite many important points out of that article, huh?
No, actually, uh, no objection.
Uh, the prosecutor pretended like it wasn't happening.
Uh, the lead prosecutor won't touch this at all.
Uh, you know, after the defense.
So each day, just a little bit of the process each day was the first day.
The prosecution would speak the whole day with the last half hour.
The defense gets to spend 30 minutes complaining or griping about whatever was just said, trying to correct it, however they wanted to spend their half hour.
And then the following day, the defense had the whole day to comment on the U S appeal and make their arguments.
And then, uh, James Lewis, the lead prosecutor got up and just, uh, you know, flew off the handle for a half hour saying how he didn't like what the defense had just said.
And then that was the end of the appeal hearing.
And so in the afternoon there, uh, they get up and they talk about how Julian Assange is, as they put it, the most prominent critic of the CIA.
And they, they, they insist that the high court of justice look at the relationship he has with the CIA, uh, it's not good and that they dig into the way that the CIA has targeted him.
It was, it was kind of, uh, uh, funny the moment high court justice asked, uh, interrupted this lawyer named Mark Summers, who's on the Assange team.
He said to him, well, uh, you know, I'm, I'm not really surprised that the CIA is intensely interested in Assange and Summers had to stop him there and say, well, hold on, let me read you more of this Yahoo story.
I'm not just talking about like the CIA did reports where they documented and like logged what Assange was doing and they were just keeping tabs on him.
Know that they're actually pursuing disruption campaigns and trying to poison or kill my clients.
So let me tell you about this so that you guys actually know that this isn't just, you know, the CIA being a typical security or spy agency.
No, it's, it's, uh, these are active measures.
This is, uh, this is going back to like 1960s and, uh, plots against, uh, leaders in African or Latin American countries.
So, uh, let me tell you, this is what they did to Julian Assange.
And so we heard some of these details, they summarized, they read from that report from Michael Isikoff and other, uh, and the other journalists at Yahoo that dug into, you know, the efforts to steal electronics and divide and, um, all sorts of different tactics that they were willing to employ.
Talked about legally defining WikiLeaks as a hostile intelligence agency.
And again, you have to link this to the work that WikiLeaks was doing, um, because there's the Vault 7, there's the exposing CIA torture and rendition, uh, the cables discuss that, um, open them up to further scrutiny in countries like Italy and Germany and Spain, um, European court of human rights cases able to move forward now because they have diplomatic cables from the CIA.
And uh, so, uh, and there's, uh, there's other examples of documents from the CIA that were put out by WikiLeaks and, uh, that's, you know, that's why they want to go after him.
That's why they wanted revenge.
And now did, did Assange's lawyer or the defense's lawyers here, were they able to say that, you know, uh, essentially harken back to the earlier conversation that on the word of the CIA, they can cancel their assurance that they won't put them in a supermax, that these are the same people we're talking about.
These people who wanted to murder him, these people who were spying on him and his lawyers.
That was their point.
Yep.
They connected it.
They, they showed the high court of justice that the security agencies get to advise the justice department on how to imprison or jail Assange.
So that is crucial.
Right.
Is that because I could see the judge saying, well, what does the CIA have to do anything with anything?
We're talking about the department of justice and the FBI and the court system here, not the CIA.
He would be protected from them by the DOJ presumably or something like that would be the basis that they would be coming from.
So you're saying the lawyers, the good guys, they directly confronted that with this.
Yeah.
They said to the high court, you need to consider whether you can trust what the U S government is saying here.
You need to determine whether you feel there is trustworthiness in these assurances because these people who are in the U S government plotted to kill or poison Assange and they're in the same government that now says to you and wants to be taken as they're doing this in good faith.
Now they are saying, we promise pinky promise that we are not going to put Julian Assange in Sam's or ADX Florence and we're going to allow him to go to Australia if he would like to do his prison time in Australia.
And if you want to believe any of that, then you have to completely ignore and disregard the record of the CIA.
Yeah.
All right.
Now tell me about Dr. Koppelman, Koppelman and the government's attempt to discredit his work here.
It's it's first it's gross because he is a distinguished neuropsychiatrist.
He's been used by this crown prosecution service before in cases as an expert witness.
And what they want to say very basically I'll, I'll, I'll describe this is that Michael Koppelman misled the court when he did not disclose the relationship that Stella Morris had with Assange.
I remember he, uh, she is actually involved in work doing some legal work for the case.
She's not one of the attorneys arguing the case, but she's done work as part of the legal team representing Assange.
And uh, so she did not, uh, sorry, Koppelman did not immediately disclose that Stella had a relationship with Assange and that they had two children, that he fathered two children while in the Ecuador embassy.
And they make a big deal out of this because they want to argue that having two children means there's not a risk that he would commit suicide.
So he would want to live because he wants to see, he would like to see his children grow up.
Uh, so, uh, for the record, let me just tell you, no doctors ever made any assessment and concluded that having children would stop Julian Assange from trying to commit suicide.
Uh, but I'll come back to the issue with Koppelman.
So Koppelman tells the judge, um, later that this, that there is this relationship.
It comes out around a bail application in March, 2020 when they're trying to get, uh, Julian Assange out of Belmarsh and it's, of course it's unsuccessful.
Uh, so then, uh, you know, later on now, having lost the case before the district judge, they're making a big deal out of this, even though the judge herself says she was not misled by Koppelman.
So we heard evidence from the defense attorneys, um, describing the ethical dilemma that Michael Koppelman had as a, as a psychiatrist and why he, he wanted to protect the privacy of Stella Morris and also Assange, um, cause you know, these are, this is his family did this because they, Koppelman did this because at that time there was new information coming out about UC Global and their effort to spy on Assange and his family while they were in the embassy to spy on these people.
And uh, you know, it was, it was a sensitive moment and, uh, he knew that he had a duty to the court.
Uh, he sought legal advice.
He wasn't able to get that advice.
Um, and he just made the decision that he was going to share it with the court later.
And it wasn't because he was trying to hide anything.
Assange did not ask this doctor to do this for him.
Stella Morris did not ask the doctor to do this for him.
The psychiatrist just did this because he thought it would be doing right by his patient.
Yeah.
And I mean, I know it's hard to say, but from what you could tell, that seemed like the judge or judges is a three panel judge or whatever it is.
And three judge panel.
There were two, there were two there.
It'd be nice if I could speak English.
You could probably understand my questions better, but there were two, there were two there.
They seem impressed by this nonsense that this guy kept this highly classified secret that Julian Assange had a wife and kids.
Yeah.
I don't, I don't know if this is going to go anywhere for them.
They didn't seem all that interested.
Uh, so I mean, they didn't really challenge the defense as they made their argument, but they didn't really push the prosecutor either.
Uh, it's, it's hard for me to figure out what the high court is going to do with this case.
The only thing I can say, if there's any tells, if there are any tells, it's that they seem unwilling to set precedent with this case.
That could be bad for Julian Assange.
If they think that it isn't unique enough that this could be a precedent that gets applied to extradition cases in the future, uh, then they're probably going to overturn what the district judge did.
But she made it carefully.
And this is, this is something I'm glad that the defense did and they, they didn't have to, but it's in their interest, even though she got the other 70 to 80% wrong, you know, ultimately they didn't, she didn't sign the extradition request and send it off to the home secretary so that he could be extradited to the U S.
Um, she did do something that so far has saved his life.
So they said, so they told the high court, this was a carefully considered, carefully thought out decision.
She applied the test under extradition law.
I won't go through it.
It's tedious.
But she went through and came to the appropriate conclusion doing all the things, you know, it's, it's really ridiculous because the prosecutors stand there before the high court and they say she didn't do diligence and follow the law.
Meanwhile, you can actually cite paragraphs from this decision where she did exactly that.
I mean, it's as if they don't know that you can grab documents and show them to the high court of justice.
So it's a there and she did what she's supposed to do.
And as I say, with, with the headline for my first report, they just attacked her.
They attacked her integrity.
I think they attacked the work that she did.
I mean, if I was, I don't really care that much about Vanessa Barretta and she's going to be fine professionally.
She's angling for a career where she'll be a judge in the UK court system for a long time.
Although that's, that's what people following the case think.
But she got dragged before this high court of justice.
And I don't think she really deserves it because there's nothing in this decision that looks like she just made the decision to not extradite Assange without giving her reasons.
And they even said, they even put it this way, Fitzgerald said, the prosecution is really angry that she didn't give reasons for giving her reasons.
And that's, that's, that's a good way of putting it.
I mean, they're looking at her reasons and they're saying, we don't accept them.
We wish she would have given us more explanations so that it would be, uh, and that's just a catch.
It's just a gotcha game that they're playing.
Well, and look the way I remember a year ago, you were on this show saying, man, this lady is such a hard ass.
I don't know.
Yeah.
So in other words, it's not like you were on here saying, oh, she seems really nice, Scott.
I think this is going to go real well.
It wasn't like that.
She was absolutely putting Assange's side through the ringer.
And I think the fear was from, from you and others covering it, that this isn't looking very good for him because she is really tough, right?
Am I remembering that correctly?
Yeah.
You've got that correct.
So then, and I think that works in her favor.
I mean, that shows her impartiality or her, I guess I hesitate to use the word here, but objectivity because if she doesn't think he's a journalist, if she doesn't stand on his side and believe that what he did is journalism, but yet she says, look, I'm concerned if I send him to the US, he's going to commit suicide.
And I'll think about the fact that I authorized this tradition.
I think that's to her credit.
I mean, that's, I think that shows that she has, you know, I hate to say it, but it shows that she's doing this professionally.
I disagree with her over 80% of what is in that decision, but it shows that she's actually applying a fair process to, you know, looking over this evidence.
And, uh, and so why that matters at this moment, it wouldn't, it wouldn't matter at all if she had rejected the decision, but before the high court, when the prosecution is trying to discredit this judge's work, then it, then you actually do have to speak in these ways that are difficult for me if I don't actually like what she said about him as a journalist.
Yeah, well, um, you know, I don't know.
Kevin, I'll tell you what, um, it seems like, yeah, I don't know.
I got a good feeling about this.
I think part of what you just said about the way that on the appeal here, the way the government dragged this judge so badly that that probably is not going to impress these two judges, right?
Who are looking at the same opinion that you read and are saying, you know, this doesn't seem so unreasonable to us.
You know what I mean?
Like they, in other words, it doesn't sound like you're describing a real gotcha where, you know, they did seem to really get her on misinterpreting some statute or some kind of thing, right?
They swung and they swung, but it doesn't sound like they really connected on any other major arguments here.
No, no.
And the only thing that saves this is those assurances, which I don't think are worth anything.
But the good news is if the high court says that's good enough to overturn the decision, it's not a done deal for Assange.
I mean, it's awful because it prolongs this.
And I talk about, and so do others, punishment by process, the way they're keeping him in this limbo, which was always, you know, there's the strap for email that reveals that that's kind of the objective of the intelligence agencies of the CIA.
But it goes back to the district court, I think, and they'll have a hearing, which I think he's entitled to have.
So just so we're kind of contemplating where this could go before we conclude our conversation here, you'd have a hearing and his legal team would call witnesses and introduce new evidence so that they can challenge, excuse me, challenge and test those assurances and show a court that you can't trust them based on the past history of the United States.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your journalism on this issue, as always, Kevin.
I really appreciate it.
I know a lot of other people do, too, ma'am.
It was good talking to you.
Oh, yeah.
OK, guys, that is Kevin Gastola.
He is at Shadowproof and at thedissenter.org.
And here we have Appeal Hearing.
Prosecutor attacks judge's decision which blocked U.S. from extraditing Assange.
And at Appeal Hearing, CIA's war on Assange.
Their most prominent critic takes center stage.
And check him out on Twitter, KGastola.
It's S then Z. KGastola.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
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