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 scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Kevin Gottsdala.
He is an independent journalist with thedissenter.org, and also shadowproof.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at, I forgot exactly how it is.
It's Kaygastala.
Kaygastala, that's right.
And if you spell it wrong, just put in Google, and Google will figure it out for you.
They'll know who you're talking about.
And here's some keywords you can add to make sure it's Julian Assange, because Kevin is one of the absolutely most dedicated journalists on this story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and all of their great journalism and all of their savage persecution at the hands of the American empire over the last dozen years, since they really broke on the scene in 2009, 2010 era.
So very happy to have you back on the show, Kevin.
How are you doing, sir?
Yep.
Thanks for the introduction.
Yeah, man.
UK Supreme Court slams door on Assange's appeal.
Extradition may be authorized.
This was the last step in the appeals process, obviously.
Supreme means supreme over there in the UK too, right?
Yeah.
The words are not different in the UK lexicon, so yes.
All right.
So that's it.
But now, may be authorized or else not, and by what, a lower court to decide, and then a whole new round of appeals, or is there any kind of window on the other side of this slam door here?
So the reason why the language is a bit vague is because the defense team for Assange has not said if they're going to file their appeal with the high court of justice yet on the press freedom issues.
Now, just to remind your listeners, we're talking about an extradition case that has gone through the British courts for the past two plus years.
We're coming up on the third anniversary, yeah, the third anniversary of Assange when he was arrested and expelled from the Ecuador embassy.
So yeah, over two years, nearly three years that this has been unfolding.
And so the district judge, to remind people, ruled in favor of preventing Assange from being sent to a US prison where he'd likely be driven to commit suicide as a result of mental health issues.
And the United States government came back.
And American prison conditions combined, yeah.
Yeah, yes, right.
And the American government came back after that in January of 2021, and they filed their appeal.
And this is what the issue is that Julian Assange's team was challenging or wanted to challenge before the Supreme Court.
Here's the fact, okay.
After everything had been decided, they basically tried to get a do over by saying, ah, sorry, we take it back.
We won't let him go to a supermax prison.
We also won't put him under special administrative measures, these harsh confinement conditions that Attorney General Merrick Garland, at the time it would have been Bill Barr, but now Attorney General Merrick Garland would be able to impose.
The CIA, by the way, gets input.
These national security agencies get to decide if somebody is kept in these confinement conditions because they could present a quote unquote national security threat.
And also, we're going to make sure he gets a clinical psychiatrist while he's in jail.
And oh, by the way, we have a treaty with Australia, just so you know.
We would be willing to let him apply for a transfer to Australia if he was convicted.
He could serve a sentence in Australia and fill out an application for that.
And they take this in, the high court does, and they say, all right, all the issues are resolved.
We believe that if the judge had these diplomatic assurances, by the way, this came from the US State Department.
We believe if they had these assurances, the judge wouldn't have ruled the way she did.
So we're going to overturn it.
And so now Assange had to appeal and ask the Supreme Court for a review.
But here's the thing that I find most bizarre about all of this, Scott, is that in the UK, you have to ask the high court of justice after they ruled against you for certification of the issues so that you can proceed with an appeal before the Supreme Court.
There's no analog in our system for that.
If you lose your appeal, you automatically get to go file with the American Supreme Court.
You don't have to get permission from the appeals court that just ruled against you in order to file an appeal before the Supreme Court.
That doesn't make any sense.
So then the chief justice is the one that authored the decision in favor of the US government.
And it went before the Supreme Court.
And I'm not entirely stunned that the British Supreme Court doesn't want to question that chief justice and the conclusions that they came to in this lower case.
So basically, there's a whole lot of legal issues that lawyers that are not myself could spend hours upon hours discussing.
Fundamentally, I think for people who listen to your show, this case just illustrates how much of a client state the United Kingdom is to the US government and just how willing they are to serve our interests.
You see it in the Assange case.
You see it in the way, without going into these issues, but you see this running parallel, how willing the UK has been to launder intelligence and disinformation related to Russia and Ukraine over the last few months.
And it's just so abundantly clear when you look at this, that the only reason why Julian Assange is unlikely to be saved here is because the UK is doing the bidding of the US government.
Yeah.
Well, that's why Orwell called the entire United Kingdom Airstrip One, forward airbase of the United States empire.
That's it.
Yeah.
Man.
So, ah, what a travesty and tragedy, but it sounds like, I mean, you're saying we're, do I understand you right?
We're roadblocked at the point where the judge who told him no, we're like waiting to find out whether that same judge will now allow him to appeal his bad decision.
So she's no longer in that court.
Vanessa Barretzer did her, she did what was asked of her and then she got a promotion and she's in another court.
So but that court will refer it to the home office and that secretary is Priti Patel.
And to tell people who are your listeners about Priti Patel, Priti Patel is currently a notorious for a number of reasons, but primarily she is behind the push to expand the official secrets acts in the United Kingdom in ways that would allow for a harsher sentences against whistleblowers and journalists to be issued if they publish a quote unquote state secrets.
So for example, you know, they're looking at when the Guardian was publishing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks and saying, we don't want this to ever happen again to GCHQ, the partner spy agency of the NSA.
And you know, there are other examples in the last 10 years, we want to be able to go after people who publish these stories and here's what we're going to do.
They're going to give the government more powers to prosecute.
So knowing that she gets to make the final decision about Julian Assange and his bait, I'm not exactly confident about what we have right now from Julian Assange's team is an explanation that they have about four weeks after the Westminster magistrates court refers the extradition to her office.
And she then has to accept their own arguments for why Julian Assange should not be extradited.
It's a political issue.
This is going to be a political decision in the home office.
So the legal team is going to be public about it.
They won't be private.
We'll know what they're making their case, what their case will be.
I can come back and talk to you about it if you want me to.
They're going to make their case to the British home office.
But you know, if she doesn't accept their arguments and stop this, then they still have this one arrow that they can pull out and fire, which is they haven't done the appeal of the core press freedom issues.
And so I, again, the reason why I'm a little confusing to talk to today is because we don't know what the legal team is going to do and in what order.
So right now it's possible that they're going to take a chance and see what the home office will do with the case.
And then if she says we're going to put a stamp on it, an extradite, maybe they go to the Westminster magistrate court, this district court, and they say that they are going to seek permission to appeal to the high court of justice.
That's the appeals court.
So again, for people who might be having trouble following, you know, in the U.S. you have the district court, the appeals court, and then you have the U.S. Supreme court.
It's similar there.
They have the district court, then they have the high court of justice, which is the appeals court, and then they have the British Supreme court.
So I don't really know what their plan is, but they are, I'm confident in saying to you that Julian Assange isn't going to be extradited to the United States before the end of March or April.
But right now we're on this really unfortunate trajectory where it is possible that he could be brought to the U.S. before the end of the year.
And now obviously there's no chance whatsoever at any bail during this time.
Is he being held in solitary confinement still?
No.
I mean, so everything's pursuant to whatever conditions might still be in existence due to the pandemic.
But I know that most of the world has eased up on some of that.
So I believe he's been visiting with Stella and his two children.
They're about to get married.
Stella and Julian are going to get married in the prison.
It's really sad that they don't get to do that outside of the prison.
But this was one of the small victories they won because, in fact, the prison was going to block them from getting married or wanted to, and they almost had to file a lawsuit.
And then that frightened the authorities.
So they were like, fine, we'll just let you get married.
I mean, we're already giving you a slow death, so just get married to whoever you would like.
And so that's going to happen.
And I think he's had some better conditions.
He is in general population or has access to general population.
But then he's still getting that constant medical care that he needs for his physical as well as his mental health.
Kevin, you know, it's remarkable.
I think people who are late to this story, maybe we should revisit the fact that the issue being appealed on the first round here anyway, is, as you said before, the ruling of the initial lower court that this guy is a suicide risk because he's suicidal and because prison conditions in the United States under the special administrative measures, under supermax conditions, et cetera, would surely drive a man on the edge to kill himself, which is a huge step for the British court to say that.
That's the kind of thing you would expect for them to say about, I don't know, a prison in Turkey or something like that.
And that was the British ruling that in as a reason to not extradite the most wanted political prisoner in the West to their number one partner, the Americans.
And that's a pretty big deal in the first place, I think, you know, kind of remarkable signposts on the road of imperial collapse.
Yeah.
So this ADX Florence, the supermax prison in Colorado, has a H unit notorious.
There's been stories written by people who were involved in the administration of this part of the facility where they describe what prisoners, you know, many of them are guilty of really heinous acts, violent crimes.
These are terrorists, but still describe how they are driven psychotic and mad in this unit and want so badly to get out that they'll even go so far as to ingest shards of glass in order to be sent to the hospital so that they can get a break from these confinement conditions that are destroying them, causing them to completely lose their minds.
And that's the potential future that had been presented to the judge.
It's important to remind everyone that when we had the hearing, the defense got to put on the record all these sorts of allegations against the U.S. prison system.
They had to bring experts to talk about how people are treated and the government had to respond to those claims.
And at no point did they say to the judge, we will not put Julian Assange in a supermax prison because if they had, it would have removed a whole bunch of arguments the defense were presenting.
If they had just said, we're not going to send them to ADX Florence, well, that takes that away.
So they didn't.
But they did after they realized that that was why they had lost their case.
And so again, we have an issue here where what is supposed to be the natural order of justice or what is supposed to be fairness in a justice system has not played out because they've basically allowed the rules to be rewritten so that the United States can go back and make promises that they weren't willing to make because they really didn't think that the judge was going to care how U.S. prisons treat people.
They figured they'd still get Julian Assange.
The same reason they figure they'll still get whoever, whatever terrorists they're trying to extradite to the U.S. from the U.K. in the future because they just figure the courts are going to go, oh, that guy's a bad dude.
He was involved in committing violence and no judge is going to let how he might be abused in our prison system get in the way of allowing him to come to the United States.
But this judge actually did care.
And so that is why, that's what we've been seeing unfold for the last two years.
And I'll just close my answer here by reading what Stella Morris said in her statement, because this describes the way in which the courts have treated Julian Assange and his legal case.
Whether Julian is extradited or not, which is the same as saying whether he lives or dies, is being decided through a process of legal avoidance, avoiding to hear arguments that challenge the U.K. court's deference to unenforceable and caveated claims regarding his treatment made by the United States, the country that plotted to murder him, the country whose atrocities he brought into the public domain.
Julian is the key witness, the principal indicter, and the cause of enormous embarrassment to successive U.S. governments.
And yeah, just a reminder to everyone that we do have the reporting confirmed from Yahoo News, some reporting from the Grayzone as well, that points to the fact that the CIA under Mike Pompeo was involved in plotting, had secret war plans, as they said, to kidnap, poison.
They even contemplated whether they could assassinate Julian Assange while he was in the embassy.
He was put under a massive espionage operation.
It targeted his family and went after his lawyers, went after doctors that were providing him treatment, and they did so because of the obsession that Pompeo had to pursue revenge after these Vault 7 materials were published in 2017.
And that was the catalyst for working with Ecuador in a pressure campaign to drive him out of the embassy.
And it's why they designated WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence agency and changed the language, removed the label of media organization, journalistic organization, and made it one in which they could treat it as any other intelligence agency in the world that the CIA might challenge.
Yeah.
So which really gets to the heart of the thing here, which is just how much damage Julian Assange did to America with all of this spying that he did.
And he must have committed treason against the United States and killed a bunch of people and stuff like that.
Right, Kevin?
Yeah, I wish.
In fact, one of the only examples they could try to come up with during Chelsea Manning's court-martial, the judge ended up catching them in a lie.
I believe I've told this story on your program before, but I'll just repeat it, that there was a brigadier general who came before the military court at Fort Meade and was asked, you know, how many people did the Taliban kill?
Were there any people you could connect to when the Afghanistan war logs were disclosed who were murdered because their names were in the war logs?
And he said, well, there is one.
And the defense team for Manning objected.
And then the judge asked some questions.
There was some back and forth.
And they said, actually, the name wasn't in the cable or in the war log.
In fact, they, or sorry, they didn't get the name from the war log.
They went and killed this person.
And then after the fact, they tried to link it to a document.
So the document played absolutely no role in their decision to murder this person.
They were always going to be the Taliban and murder this person, regardless of whether WikiLeaks had put out a document with that person's name in the document.
And so then the judge got very angry.
And she had that stricken from the record and forbid the military prosecutors from raising it again during the trial.
So yeah, anytime that they've been asked to come up with actual people who have been killed, they never come up with any of them.
And in fact, what you also get is the inverse.
When they're confronted with examples of Julian Assange being concerned about the names of people in the cables or even the war logs, when they're confronted with evidence that he had really strict security to take care of the documents, they brush it aside because it's entirely inconvenient to what they've said about WikiLeaks.
Isn't it part of the story that some of the reason that the New York Times and the Guardian and these partners that were working with WikiLeaks on releasing all this information was that they were in a hurry and he was so stubborn.
And as they say, like a cliche, so autistic that he's going through there with his black magic marker, erasing any name of anybody who one could get hurt or to make WikiLeaks look really bad for getting somebody hurt.
And they were telling him, hurry the hell up.
But is there actual data to back up my recollection there, sir?
Yeah, I think what you're recalling is, and this is very similar, that as they were working on the stories, he wanted to spend some more time on the documents.
The New York Times and the Guardian were like, well, we've got our stories.
We know what documents we want to cover.
We've got to go.
And he said, well, there's more stuff we want to do to prepare these for publication on our website too, because they're going to do the curation of the, they're going to have the database that will be available for everyone to read all the documents.
And they don't want these major newspapers to go and publish their stories until they're ready with their database of documents.
And essentially they're saying, yeah, we're going to go forward.
And again, I'll remind people the reason why there was a quarter of a million U.S. state embassy cables with people's names in them that were available on the internet, because David Lee, the editor, one of the editors at the Guardian, in his book with Luke Harding, published a chapter where the chapter title was the password for an encrypted file that contained a quarter of a million cables.
And they included all the uncensored cables, none of the names in them had been removed in order to take care of potentially vulnerable people, which led Julian Assange to have one of the most bizarre phone calls he's probably had, where he was calling the State Department and asking to get Hillary Clinton on the phone so that he could warn her that something had to be done because the State Department wasn't doing anything to save these people and they didn't know the threat.
So he's notifying the State Department of the threat immediately and trying to give them the awareness so that they can start to protect whoever would be attacked, if they were informants or if they were people who were activists, human rights activists, or anyone who said anything bad about some of these dictatorial governments, which we often tend to have pretty cozy relationships with, then they could be taken care of before they were arrested, or worse, killed.
Give me just a minute here.
Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors, and who wants to stand in line all day at the post office?
But Stamps.com?
Sorry, but their website is a total disaster.
I couldn't spend another minute on it.
But I don't have to either, because there's EasyShip.com.
EasyShip.com is like Stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible.
Go to ScottHorton.org slash EasyShip.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
You know, the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books.
Mine, Fool's Errand, Enough Already, and The Great Ron Paul, two by our executive editor Sheldon Richman, Coming to Palestine, and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
And of course, No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late, great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute.
Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent Voluntarist Handbook, edited by Keith Knight, a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons, one more collection of essays by Will Grigg, and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagenen and Brad Hoff and his co-author, Zachary Wingard.
That's LibertarianInstitute.org slash books.
All right, now, I must be making a category error, so please help me understand.
It seems like if Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are working as partners with The New York Times and The Guardian to publish these documents and news stories with them and that they are publishing this leak that they received from someone in the U.S. Army together, that everybody at The New York Times involved in this story is exactly as guilty as Julian Assange is of espionage, since they all really are leakees.
He's not the source.
He also is a leakee, just like they are.
It's Bradley Manning.
Now, Chelsea Manning is the leaker, or I must have my facts confused.
So please help me understand what I got wrong there, Kevin.
Well, as far as the law goes, you're exactly correct.
As far as the politics and how our government approaches The New York Times versus The Guardian versus WikiLeaks, they are treated as different.
And that's the sham of all of this, is that because The New York Times, particularly former executive editor Bill Keller, gets to say, no, we don't see WikiLeaks as a partner.
We see WikiLeaks as a source.
Well, that is not how that word works.
The word source means that that person is the originator of the documents.
The source, as you were saying earlier, the leaker, is Chelsea Manning.
That's just amazing.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but just on that point, we have to dwell on that for a moment here.
The deputizing of the editor of The New York Times to declare the category error for us.
Now, I refuse to accept WikiLeaks as a fellow publisher, just with words, just because I say so.
They're a source now, which simply is throwing them under the bus in service of the empire, presumably to protect himself or just because he's that close of a fellow traveler with the persecutors here, that he's happy to do it.
It's just really a pretty incredible thing in its own right there.
It won't even, though.
It won't even protect them because, as I've said before, if politics shifts in Washington, D.C., and any one of these reporters at The Washington Post or The New York Times is publishing information about the U.S. military or any national security agencies, it may be that they're doing it to further democratic politics.
It could be that they're doing it to further Republican politics.
It could be because they're actually found a backbone and they're going to expose some war crimes that have been committed by the United States in the Middle East.
Or it may be that they get some information that's highly sensitive about something going on in the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Biden administration decides that they don't like that that got disclosed.
Maybe their Justice Department is going to have to respond to outrage in Congress from these warmongers, and they're going to have to threaten to retaliate against someone at The New York Times or The Washington Post who's actually done some fairly good journalistic work.
And in that instance, it's not going to matter these distinctions they tried to draw between them and WikiLeaks.
The law is going to be exactly the same for them as it is for Julian Assange, which is to say the prosecutors in the Justice Department are going to be able to look at them and treat them the same way that they've treated Julian Assange.
Having blazed this ground, having issued these indictments and started this new way of dealing with publishers by way of pioneering Espionage Act prosecutions in a manner that goes beyond the leaker to include the publisher, it will be available to the Justice Department to threaten to prosecute.
They can at least subpoena.
Maybe they don't actually go ahead and bring criminal cases, but we know how the justice system can work.
It doesn't always have to involve cases.
You can just issue the threat, and then you'll get what you want.
You get people to clam up and give up being engaged in investigative journalism.
Yeah, exactly right.
You have people, boy, I think I'm going to pass on that story.
That one sounds a little too spicy for me now that we don't have that legal shield anymore.
And by the way, you know, this, like pretty much everything evil and wrong with the world is Woodrow Wilson's fault.
It's that Espionage Act from World War I, which is written broadly enough to include you and me talking on the podcast about what's in those documents.
And the thing is, it's never been treated like that.
It's only ever been the leakers.
And even then, only in the last 50 years really, or maybe there was some way back then, but for a long time, there was a lull in the beginning with Daniel Ellsberg's luckily failed prosecution.
And then especially beginning then again, I don't think Clinton did it, but with W.
Bush and Barack Obama going crazy using the Espionage Act against leakers who are leaking the truth about crimes.
It's not like they're just trying to hurt the United States, exposing the names of all our spies in Russia to be rolled up and killed by the KGB or whatever kind of thing like that, like the old days.
It's not even like that.
It's all guys telling us, hey, you know, the government is in your email box and you have the right to know and things like that.
But it's been essentially, if I understand it right, correct me if I'm wrong, sir, that it's merely been tradition that has kept the Department of Justice from prosecuting New York Times.
Even at times, there have been New York Times reporters who pissed them off enough that they might've liked to.
They never went that far to prosecute the publishers.
I guess they had threatened to before, but anyway, if they succeeded in that, that would be the first day of the rest of the life of every national security beat reporter in America forever.
It'd be a whole new day.
It'd be like having the Official Secrets Act in England.
Yeah, yeah.
Clinton vetoed a state secrets law that would have made it a felony to leak.
He did this in November of 2000.
Another thing, just to get in here as we're wrapping, is that all of these documents, according to the US government, if you go to them, they will claim that all of these documents are still classified.
All the ones that we've been reading for over a decade now that are on the WikiLeaks website, these agencies, the State Department, the US military, or Pentagon, and any of these other smaller agencies that have these documents, they're still classified.
Someone who is a low-level private, like Manning right now, who is reading these documents online, who does not have a security clearance, is technically committing a violation of their, I call them the general rules of good order and discipline in the military.
They could end up being discharged if they were found to be reading WikiLeaks documents online.
We have a system that is enforcing ignorance on people who are in our military and also federal government employees, enforced ignorance.
They're not supposed to know that this is out there.
They might be actually educational in their job.
They're not supposed to read them and have that knowledge to do better in their work.
We say that if you read them, you are actually committing an offense against the empire.
That's the state of things.
We also saw that reflected in the state secrets ruling that was issued by the Supreme Court recently, which Gorsuch dissented against, but it basically was an effort to say that Abu Zubaydah, who was tortured by our government, needed to, that that information should not be treated as state secrets.
It should be declassified so he could use it before the European Court of Human Rights in order to challenge Poland's involvement in CIA rendition.
The great retiring Justice Stephen Breyer ended up authoring the opinion to enforce our ignorance and pretend like it isn't public knowledge that Poland hosted a black site prison for the CIA during the war on terrorism.
We're supposed to just continue on like it isn't real, that we haven't actually read this information from our government.
We have a government enforcing ignorance and it benefits nobody except them, but it makes it easier for the New York Times and the Washington Post to coast through all of these issues without actually conducting any investigations, and then it makes it easier for them to prosecute Julian Assange without people actually knowing who, why they're crushing him.
Yeah.
Interesting too, it's a Republican appointee who wrote the good dissent and a bunch of good center-left liberals just completely shedding the last of the legacy of the Nixon era and that kind of anti-government New Left to just go along with that.
It's just amazing.
I'm not a torture site in the former Soviet bloc.
Like really guys, you're making me look bad over here, you know, just for being an American.
It's just incredible.
Listen, I have to ask you one more thing before I let you go here.
I think a lot of people listening might think that Julian Assange is being prosecuted for helping Putin rig the election for Donald Trump, or at least they've heard that and they don't know what's the truth of it, maybe something like that.
So can you give us an honest take here?
You keep talking about this Bradley Manning leak that everyone celebrates as the greatest leak ever.
The Iraq and Afghan war logs, the State Department cables and the Guantanamo files, are you kidding me?
As annoying as Chelsea Manning is, man, that was the awesomest leak ever.
And it was just heroic work that WikiLeaks did there.
So I guess no wonder he's being prosecuted for that, for the wonderfulness of it all.
And I really strongly encourage people to dig through those files.
They're still at WikiLeaks.org right now.
But also I think the reason a lot of people who might want to take Julian Assange's side since he did such a good job exposing W. Bush's wars, instead hate him because he helped the Russians commit this horrible scam and rig the election and the rest of the thing.
So could you please address that, sir?
Yes.
So the fact of the matter is that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, when conducting the investigation and putting together the report, the final report did not draw definitive conclusions that proved that WikiLeaks was in fact working as some kind of an asset of the Russian government or for President Vladimir Putin.
And they've only been able to piece together circumstantial evidence and make claims.
Everything you read has those weasel words that suggest that they don't actually know.
They weren't able to find any proof.
So it's all just about the fog of suspicion, which is typical in these kinds of political cases.
You say, like, you know, we'll say we believe or it appears or it seems or it's possible that somebody, they talk about how somebody might have brought them a thumb drive and delivered it to the embassy at some point so that they could get the Clinton campaign emails and that it came from a cutout with ties to the Russian government.
They don't really know.
They have no idea.
What all we know is what Julian Assange said before he was tossed out of the Ecuador embassy and was able to give a clear rebuttal to the claims that were being made by these intelligence agencies, which are actually at this point entirely compromised when it comes to the matter of Russiagate.
These people like John Brennan and James Clapper, who were angling for positions in a Hillary Clinton administration and were willing to engage in acts of corruption when they found out that they were not going to be able to have these leadership positions in a Trump administration.
And so it's important for people to recognize now, though, that it is very difficult for the legal team politically.
I'm glad that you raised this issue because I've only now been talking about it openly since it hit me that the fact that this ruling came down from the Supreme Court after Putin's invasion of Ukraine is terrible for Julian Assange because this is a political case.
And if you're trying to get pressure on the Justice Department to drop the charges, you're trying to apply pressure to the Home Office in the UK to not authorize extradition.
You need a geopolitical backdrop that doesn't favor the U.S. and this NATO military alliance against Russia.
But what has happened with this invasion from Putin, and it's a tremendous overreach in my view, is that it has reinforced all the worst and most despicable think tank ideologies.
It's made them believe that everything they're doing is just and true and that they must continue to pursue it viciously.
And they're going to leave Julian Assange in a jail cell.
And I think they're even going to take this step to bring him to the United States simply because this narrative has been crafted by them and CNN, The Guardian.
By the way, the CNN and Guardian are referenced in the district court decision because when the defense, I'll conclude with this, when the defense raised the issue of the spying allegations, they said, well, we've got this CNN report that suggests that the Ecuador embassy was turned by Julian Assange into an election meddling outpost.
And so that suggests to me that the CIA had a good reason to be interested in Julian Assange.
And so I don't actually think that this was a violation of his rights.
And I don't think that this was nefarious behavior by the U.S. government.
So I'm going to look the other way.
And that's not one reason why I believe Julian Assange's extradition should be blocked.
So everything that the CIA has done to Julian Assange is justified under this narrative that he was helping Russia meddle in the election.
And again, there's no proof.
There's no evidence.
There's been things that were said.
It's also obviously a bunch of crap.
Sorry, but there's no reason in the world to believe that it's true, other than a bunch of paid liars claim so.
That's all they got.
Yeah.
They've.
Well, and again, just to.
Sorry, but that issue happens to really piss me off a lot.
Go ahead.
It pisses me off a lot, too.
It's also these these liberals who would admit openly that they don't believe a single word out of the mouth of Donald J. Trump or Roger Stone consistently invoke them because they had direct messages to WikiLeaks about when the Clinton campaign emails were going to be published and they were asking them.
But the thing is, in this narrative, there's never any information shared from WikiLeaks to give them inside information on when the next emails are going to be published.
So they try to pretend like there was coordination with the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks and there isn't.
There isn't even that, you know, like they make that up to try and suggest there was meddling on behalf of Russia.
And again, like I look, I'm in the camp.
I'll say this openly.
I have no problem with saying this openly.
I'm in the camp that believes we are worse off today because we let a bunch of liberals go around saying on MSNBC day in and day out that Donald Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin and we got pushed away from having realism in foreign policy where you had to taunt with Russia.
And now not only are we paying it in our global economy, we're paying for it in the way the war is playing out in Ukraine, but we're paying for it because it's going to affect freedom of expression and press freedom around the world.
It's not only making our democracy and our ability to share journalism and disseminate the work that we do harder here in the United States, but obviously we've been following it in Russia as well, but this is all connected.
It's all like a tit for tat.
In a cold war, which is now a hot war, but in, in, in a, in a, in this, in this cold war that is very much a hot war, you see all of these governments coming down on journalists.
This is not a good environment for us to work in.
And this is when these political cases are at their worst.
So not only do I expect that Julian Assange will be extradited to the United States if nothing changes as far as the politics go, but I also expect Vladimir Putin and his government might find a Western journalist that they can put on trial and say, Hey, you know what?
We get to do this because you're putting Julian Assange on trial in the United States.
This is a huge thing.
I'm glad that we're going over time here.
It's fine with me as long as you got it, but if you got to go, that's fine.
But this is such a huge point about, you're talking about, you might as well be talking about a guy in Nigeria, breaking a Mexican law in Thailand, being prosecuted in Canada.
This is all just made up crap.
You can't even do that, but they're just doing it anyway.
Yes.
Yeah.
That, that, that is, that is what they're doing.
And I, you know, I explained this to someone in my family and I, I, I walked them through it cause they didn't really know the Julian Assange's case very well.
I just told them, like, here's some basic facts.
Julian Assange is an Australian citizen.
Julian Assange is an Australian citizen.
Okay.
Well, therefore Julian Assange as an Australian citizen, doesn't have to follow US government law, does not have to also does not have to follow US government politics.
It is shameful that people treat him like a traitor because he didn't want to vote for Hillary Clinton.
He's not voting in the election.
He's not an American.
It doesn't matter, you know, when he's making his choices or when he's giving his political analysis of the US, it's all about who at the time he thinks is going to benefit him the most.
Okay.
Hillary Clinton was in the state department that he leaked against and she openly talked about droning him.
So why is he going to tell people that Hillary Clinton being elected in 2020 would help his issues go away?
Why is he going to act like his case is going to suddenly disappear?
Oh, sorry.
In 2016, if Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016, he's no longer going to have to stay in the embassy and under political asylum.
He's going to take a chance on Donald Trump.
He's going to take a chance on him and see what this unknown entity might do because it presented something completely different in politics that nobody had ever seen.
And you know what?
I don't really have a reason to doubt him, Kevin, when he said, I'm almost certain he said something either on Twitter or out loud about how, well, if somebody gave me a bunch of stuff about Donald Trump, I'd post that.
They just didn't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, he got some, but it was just low quality.
It was not, it was not the kind of documents that would be anything.
I mean, he was willing to publish Donald Trump's tax returns that Rachel Maddow keep going on and on about every single day of her show.
So yeah, they, look, they've, they've published stuff about every country in the world that WikiLeaks has ever been claimed to be cozy with, or sorry, that the US government ever said WikiLeaks was cozy with.
I mean, if you really believe that he's working for Russia, then go, go figure out a way to answer to me why they've left a cable up on their site for the last 10 years that says Russia is a mafia state.
It says that because that's what the US State Department wrote about it.
They documented the kleptocracy in Russia, the patronage system and the way the oligarchs there pay themselves off of the government in Russia.
It documented these mafia types in Russia and it's there.
It was one of the more popular cables that was published by WikiLeaks in 2010 and they get no credit for it.
So now I think to me it's really important for everyone to, I'll just, I'll just repeat it.
Everyone has to recognize that this is a moment in which everything that you support in the US when it comes to clamping down on disinformation or journalism, you don't want Russian media in your country or you don't want Russian disinformation and misinformation for whatever reason.
You want the social media companies to put labels.
You want people to censor your ability to get access to WikiLeaks and anyone who might have been linked to the Russian government.
What you're doing is putting out a roadmap for Russian government and the Chinese government and any other powerful government to imitate and they're going to do it.
I expect them to do it because in the way that geopolitics are rapidly shifting as a result of what we've seen in the last month, we see Russia and China moving closer together to counter the US empire.
I expect that before, it won't be long, in the next year or two, I mean, I say on the show, if it happens, you can have me back to discuss it.
Someone who works for a media outlet in the UK or the United States or let's say France or some part of Europe is going to find themselves on trial in Russia or maybe even China for spreading fake news or disinformation.
That's what I predict.
I predict that somebody is going to be put on trial and when they have to justify it to the world, they're going to say Julian Assange has been in jail.
He's been put on trial.
That's why we get to attack the freedom of the press in our country as well.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I will let you go, but I really appreciate your journalism and your time as always, Kevin.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
All right, you guys.
I'm Kevin Costola.
He is at thedissenter.org and at shadowproof.com.
This one is called UK Supreme Court Slams Door on Assange Appeal.
Extradition May Be Authorized.
