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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Hey guys, on the line, I've got Kevin Gostola from shadowproof.com, and that's not the article I wanted to click on.
It was this other one that he wrote for thedissenter.org, and it is called Assange Extradition, UK High Court Grants Limited Appeal to the United States.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Kevin?
Yeah, thanks for having me.
And just to clarify, this thing is a project of Shadowproof.
It's a newsletter that we send out to people who want these kinds of stories.
Oh, great.
Hmm.
That's confusing, but okay.
It's not much of a shell game, but I know it seems like one.
Yeah, well, I'm totally lost, but now I'm found again, so it's all right.
Yeah, no, this is really important stuff.
So, shadowproof.com and thedissenter.org there.
Assange Extradition.
So, take us back to where we were in the last few court cases.
The judge refused to extradite him but kept him locked up, right?
Yeah.
So, to bring people up to the latest development, in January, the judge, Vanessa Barretzer, extraordinarily, because I didn't expect it, rejected the US government's request for extradition and did so on the grounds that if he was sent to a US prison, he would likely commit harm or try to kill himself because of his mental health.
And based upon diagnoses that came from at least one particular doctor who testified during the extradition trial in September 2020.
And so then, of course, the US was going to appeal.
So, what she did is, as a service to the US government, she basically refused to grant Julian Assange bail, even though he won at the district court level and kept him in Belmarsh High Security Prison with murderers and rapists and other violent criminals.
And he's been languishing there for the last six months.
They're about waiting for the appeal court, the High Court of Justice, to issue a determination that they would allow the US government to appeal the extradition decision.
So, this isn't about what we're talking about here today isn't, oh, they granted the appeal.
It's been overturned and Julian Assange lost.
It's that we're now going to have a hearing in the future in September or October where the US government gets to make their case or let's actually put a face on it.
Joe Biden's administration, his Justice Department, Merrick Garland, Attorney General, can send his people with being represented by the Crown Prosecution Service.
They'll go before the High Court of Justice and they'll claim that Julian Assange actually should have been authorized for extradition.
And now, I don't guess in the recent hearing, were they allowed to bring up the new journalism that said that, Your Highness, your decision was based on witness statements that the witness now admits were all made up?
Yeah, so this was done by written submissions to the High Court of Justice.
There wasn't any hearing for anybody, so nobody should feel like they missed out on anything because nothing formal has happened yet.
The way that they do it in the UK is if they don't take the appeal, then you're really not supposed to make public the request because it could be, you know, there might be information in there that could be incriminating to people.
And if they're actually exonerated, then there's no reason for that to be out in the public.
So they authorize it.
Now that the appeal is authorized, I can dig into what was submitted to the court in the appeal from the US government.
And yeah, the US government says nothing really about Ziggy Thordarson, which has gotten a lot of attention.
I know you did a really good interview with Bjarkemaer Andersen of Stünden, and none of that has really factored into this.
That's because the very focused part of the appeal that the US will get to bring is that they can challenge the judge on how she ruled based upon whether it would be oppressive for mental health to send him to the United States.
And so now, you know, what might be of interest to your listeners is out of the blue, because this case is falling apart, we get these assurances.
I don't know if you've heard about these insurances.
Some of them have made headlines because the newspapers are, they like to do press releases for the government that make it seem like they're actually not being cruel and that they are following the rules.
But that misses the point, which is that now we're hearing these things like, oh, if he is sentenced to prison after this trial, he could do his sentence in Australia.
Or we're hearing things like, oh, the Justice Department is now saying they won't put him in special administrative measures, or they won't send them to ADX Florence, Colorado, which is a superbax.
And, you know, there's a lot of things I could say about this.
But the most important point to make about these assurances is I followed every single day of the extradition trial as a journalist.
And they had plenty of time to put these before the court before they lost their case.
And so now they are trying to get the high court, this appealed court, to overturn the victory that Assange won by offering these assurances.
Assurances that, by the way, are empty when you get down to them and look at them closely.
But most importantly, there's no way for Assange's attorneys to contest them because this is improper.
There's no point for them to actually bring witnesses forward and challenge what the Justice Department is saying here.
Because when we go to the appeal court hearing, you can't introduce new evidence.
You can't call witnesses.
You can only make arguments about process, which usually are the kind of things that turn people off and bore people.
But that's what appeals are about.
It's about, did the judge make an error in her decision making?
And if she didn't, then Julian Assange should be free.
Right.
Hey, y'all, check out our great stuff at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
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The ravings of William Norman Grigg, our institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us.
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And no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
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I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else.
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Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
But now if the other side are the ones introducing these statements, then is there not a basis for some kind of cross-examination or introduction of a witness who can testify to the fact that their Justice Department changes their mind all the time, and they break deals all the time, and just because they say that they assure this court of this or that doesn't make it so?
Because they're the ones bringing it up, right?
Yeah, this should be prohibited.
And what you're getting at is the key issue here.
The defense team for Julian Assange cannot go before the high court and call people as witnesses.
We already had the trial.
So you can't have the trial again.
I mean, it kind of gets into elements of double jeopardy, I guess, if you could compare it to that.
You can't get somebody for murder twice in a row unless there was some kind of mistrial or a hung jury or something.
So Julian Assange won at the district court level, and now they're going to say, she should have actually allowed it because we won't put him in this supermax prison that is a hellhole.
And we also make sure that we don't have the attorney general do the bidding of the CIA and NSA and put him under these special administrative measures so he can't talk to anybody, including his lawyers, except for maybe 15 minutes twice a month.
So it would have been nice to hear that before she authorized the extradition.
It's very clear that they are saying this because it is the only thing they have to fall back on in salvaging their case.
Because clearly, Judge Vanessa Barretzer had all the grounds to reject this extradition request.
Now, there's another outstanding issue, which is whether the High Court of Justice is going to allow a cross-appeal from Assange's legal team.
We don't know.
But we do remember that back in January, if you were following her decision, it sounded like she was attacking Julian Assange for being a journalist and entertaining just about everything that the U.S. Justice Department has to say about him.
And so the attorneys decided that they would like to appeal those grounds and try to clear his name before the High Court of Justice.
We do not know if they're going to allow it.
It seems fairly unusual for cross-appeals to happen, especially in this instance where it just seems like it's a fairly unusual process.
So we don't know if the High Court is going to grant that.
And so as far as the witness and his recanting and all that, that's got to be a whole separate set of hearings and processes.
And do you know if the Assange's legal team is trying to make something out of that or what?
I don't know what sort of avenues they have to challenge it in courts.
And I say, especially since they are on the winning side of this extradition case, it almost doesn't matter because the burden is entirely on the U.S. to prove that they should be able to put Julian Assange in a prison.
At the same time, though, I mean, as you said, the judge's decision in her decision, she accepted just about every one of the Justice Department's claims and then said, yeah, but I'm afraid that he'll kill himself if I set him loose into an American term, not loose, but over to the Americans to lock in one of their notorious dungeons where people often kill themselves.
So but it just seems like at least there's got to be a way to bring it to her attention that, by the way, because if they're trying to get her overruled here, it should be brought to her attention or the higher court's attention that the previous decision wasn't really right, that even these claims are true.
Apparently they are not.
Yes.
So on the cross appeal, they could definitely raise the fabrications and the lies behind the hacking allegations.
And since we know that that colored her view of Julian Assange in her decision, she his team would be able to point to all this as a witness who should have been impeached, who everything he was saying here, you know, that's part of the cross appeal.
Actually, they do raise the allegations that were added in this third indictment that was imposed against Julian Assange in it was June 2020, just months before the extradition trial.
They sprung this on the team and they didn't have any time to prepare witnesses and have any time to really prepare arguments in response to this.
And so that is a matter that definitely deserves the appeal.
Now, I will say that one thing people should know, one final thing people should know is that this is unlimited ground.
In fact, there were grounds for appeal that were rejected by the high court of justice.
One of the things that the U.S. government wanted to do is argue that the judge should have disqualified this defense psychiatrist named Professor Michael Kopelman, who gave very important testimony in the extradition trial and involved, you know, his diagnoses of his mental state.
But also, this is where we get the Asperger's diagnosis, that it could be critical in saving him from being extradited, much like, well, there was this case involving a hacker named Lori Love, who was blocked from extradition because Lori, he has Asperger's, he's got elements of Asperger's.
And so this doctor, they wanted to say, should have been discredited and not allowed to give testimony.
She should have seen him as not being credible because he, they alleged, covered up the identity of Stella Morris, who is Julian Assange's fiance or partner.
And they had children together when he was in the Ecuador embassy.
And she wanted her privacy protected.
She's working with the legal team and she didn't they didn't want to out her as being Assange's partner.
So he gave her some privacy in something that was a court document.
So they say because he did that, he's not a fair and impartial expert who should have been given credibility by the judge.
And the High Court of Justice just took that and they threw it in the garbage.
They said, we're not going to have anything to do.
We're not going to go down that route at all.
And so that was completely foreclosed, which is a very good thing.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years, and I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War?
Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American War there in, say, 1964 through 1974.
But how did we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson, available now.
So anything else on Assange here before I change the subject?
No, go ahead.
All right, tell us an update if you can.
Give us an update on Daniel Hale, the great drone whistleblower.
Yeah, so we're in July.
On July 27th, we're going to have the sentencing hearing for Daniel Hale.
You know, the biggest thing that I've covered in the last month or so was that his basically a psychiatrist, as he was seeing, that was appointed by the pretrial services ratted him out to the court.
This pretrial services ratted him out.
And so that's why he's actually in detention.
People need to know that this whistleblower, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale, who provided documents to Jeremy Scahill at the Intercept for his work on what was called the drone papers that later was a part of a book called The Assassination Complex.
And Daniel Hale actually ghost wrote a chapter that was part of when he pled guilty.
He confessed to ghost writing a chapter.
I say confessed like it was a crime.
I'm proud of him for authoring this chapter.
So he is in jail right now at the Alexandria Detention Center, which is actually the same facility they're trying to send Julian Assange to if he is extradited.
That's where he would be held in the eastern district of Virginia while awaiting trial.
And he was put in solitary confinement for two weeks.
Then he was released to general population because it's part of pandemic protocol right now in the prison system.
And so it's been harsh.
He deals with his own mental health problems and stress from being a former JSOC person who was involved in the drone program.
And, you know, it's not connected to Assange, but it kind of is because we're talking about what Daniel Hale is going through in the moments leading up to his sentencing.
And these are conditions that Julian Assange would have to deal with.
And you see these assurances that I say are empty and the Justice Department will make claims about its facilities and how it takes care of its people.
And yet back in May, there was a person who committed suicide in this very facility.
So this facility that they want to claim is safe and can take care of defendants and can make sure that they survive and get to trial.
Saw a nuclear engineer who was accused of carjacking and armed bank robbery.
He had very severe mental health problems.
He was bipolar.
There was a request put in to send them to a federal prison hospital in North Carolina.
And basically, they refused.
It was refused.
And so he was denied the transfer by officials at that federal prison hospital.
And because of that, he ended up killing himself and didn't even make it to trial.
Who knows if he actually did these crimes or not, but he never got to have a day in court because he was so mentally ill.
And that's what could happen with Julian Assange.
It's also the kind of thing that feasibly could happen with Daniel Hale, although I doubt it because he already pled guilty and he's had plenty of time to think about this.
And he's more far along in the process than Julian Assange.
But Julian being brought to the United States could very well be this kind of tragedy that he commits suicide before he even gets to trial.
Man.
And all just for telling the truth and think about what we're doing right now this week.
The president, he wouldn't dare say it this way, but he's admitting that we never should have fought this war in Afghanistan at all.
We lost it.
And that means if we quit 10 years ago, it would have been fine.
If we quit five or 10 years before that would have been OK, too.
It wasn't worth it at all.
So the drone war that Daniel Hale squealed about, told the truth about to the American people.
In leaking this stuff, it was all about essentially war crimes.
Dropping Hellfire missiles and 500 pound bombs on people who should not have had bombs dropped on them.
And so telling the truth about what you kind of have to admit if if even the Pentagon themselves admit now that they lost, they won't say it, but they're leaving their enemies taken over the country and somehow they still get to sacrifice this guy.
They still get to punish him when all he did was tell the truth about it to us back when it mattered, when we could have used it to do something about it.
Right.
Yeah.
2010, when the Afghanistan war logs were published, I'll be very quick here.
When those were published and Chelsea Manning made that disclosure to WikiLeaks, we had one of the most complete records of the war.
These were military incident reports where you could see what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan and you could glean a lot of important details about how we were losing the war.
I mean, it was well known by the commanders and everyone then that we were losing that war.
You know, whether we should have fought it or not, I guess that's a separate issue.
But that reflected that we were losing the Afghanistan where we've known for more than a decade now that we were losing this war in Afghanistan.
Commanders have known we were losing the war in Afghanistan.
And obviously, you know, you've done a lot of work on this.
And Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning and other people simply have been punished for bringing this to our attention.
Yeah.
The whole thing is crazy.
It's just like with John Kiriakou.
I was going to bring him up a second ago because, you know, the Intercept rightfully gets a lot of blame for getting their sources compromised.
But John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer, told me and he was burned by a guy who works at the Intercept now, Matt Cole.
But he said in this case, Daniel Hale, he took his own risks.
It wasn't Scahill's fault that he got caught.
He was being quite blatant about, you know, he was even in the documentary National Bird and was being quite blatant about his role in this.
So there was that.
But then the other point about Kiriakou is, yeah, he's the CIA officer who went to prison for torture, not for torturing anybody.
He didn't torture anybody.
He went to prison for confirming to Matt Cole that he had the names right of some guys who tortured some people from some CIA officers.
And he's the one who went to prison and none of them did.
It is so upside down because we have it backward.
You know, you have Donald Rumsfeld dying in the last week and he's not, you know, condemned as a war criminal for what he was involved in.
And then you simultaneously have somebody like Mike Gravel, who did more than any senator of his time to end the Vietnam War by introducing the Pentagon Papers into the record, the congressional record, and eventually put him and his people at risk trying to get the Pentagon Papers into book form so that the American people could read what Daniel Ellsberg had exposed.
And yet he can't even get a solid obituary paying tribute to him and his work as an anti-war senator.
They joke about him or they demean him as an intention getter in the New York Times and the liberal New York Times.
They have a guy who died three years ago on the byline.
I don't know if you knew that.
But yeah, the obituary for Senator Mike Gravel that was published was authored by someone who died three years ago.
So they posted his obituary after the fact.
They couldn't even give it to somebody at the Times right now who is still alive.
So this is where society and government are, our media and government, I don't say society.
There's a lot of good people out there at the grassroots, a lot of people who tune into this show.
I don't want to demean them.
But people in establishment media and politics as well as these national security institutions are simply so craven and beholden to the military industrial complex and warfare state.
And that's why we're talking about these horrible stories.
It really is amazing too.
I mean, you know, not to defend them, but from their point of view, who even heard of Daniel Hale?
But Julian Assange, man, you know, Hale was a source.
Assange is the recipient of a leak and a publisher.
And it's not really even asking for principle at all.
Forget principle.
But how about just naked, bare, unenlightened self-interest that there is a New York Times problem here, David Sanger, Charlie Savage, that if they can do this to Assange, they can do it to you.
And now it probably wouldn't be Sanger and Savage, but it could be their friends who end up getting in real trouble for publishing something true.
And it would be the Assange case that sets the precedent that it's not sources like Kiriakou and Hale who get punished under the Espionage Act, but it's somebody who receives a leak from a government employee, in this case, Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning, gave this stuff to Assange, who then published it online in cooperation with the New York Times themselves.
Well, it could actually be them who are hauled before a court and prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
If we ever have anything in our future that's like President Pompeo's administration, President Mike Pompeo would probably cross that line and cite the Assange precedent and try to haul David Sanger before a judge and put him on trial.
All right, stop trying to talk me into this.
No, I'm just saying.
I know, I'm just saying, I hate that guy.
Go ahead.
And I guess it's a warning to, you know, a lot of these people fashion themselves as like resistance liberals in the Trump era, but it's just a warning to them that they shouldn't act so comfy and safe under Joe Biden while this continues to unfold, because at any moment, you know, we've seen how speckless Democrats can be at any moment.
Authoritarianism can rise in its intensity again.
And also, you know, this marks the uptrend of authoritarianism in our government.
But we also can look to places like the UK and see what they're trying to do.
And that, to me, also marks a future for our country.
I'm hearing from journalists who do work there.
There's a really good journalist, Matt Kennard, who's with Declassified UK, who's warning me about the fact that they want to criminalize the handling of classified information in Britain.
What does that mean?
That means even if you don't publish those documents, just the mere fact that you obtain them and have them in your possession, nobody ever sees them.
But that could be a crime just to be handling classified information from the British government.
So I can see people like James Clapper, the James Clappers.
I can see the John Brennan's.
I can see the Jeff Sessions and the prosecutors and everything.
I can see them salivating here in the U.S. saying, you know, we don't just need something that blocks people from leaking.
We need something that blocks people from handling classified information because they really want to what they really want us to do is not talk about these issues.
Well, you know, look, remember, Obama's government went after that Fox News reporter for receiving a leak about Korea.
So it ain't just the Republicans who abuse this kind of stuff.
Yeah.
And that would reflect the politics, because that was a liberal Democrat.
They were willing to target a conservative reporter who was saying that there needed to be more done to go after North Korea.
Yeah.
And then you have, you know, right now with the Biden government surveilling Tucker Carlson.
Or maybe it was under Trump that the NSA was doing that.
Well, they seem to think that it is acceptable to spy on a news show host who wants to arrange an interview with a world leader.
And that, to me, is pretty despicable.
We wouldn't allow that under Trump.
I don't think we should allow it under Joe Biden.
Yeah, that's completely crazy.
And then.
But, you know, it's all personality, politics and everything.
So unless you're a Tucker Carlson guy, this isn't supposed to bother you.
What are you, a Tucker Carlson guy, Kevin?
Yeah, well, I'll let the people who are going to show up in my Twitter feed and deal with that afterward in an interview, you know?
There you go.
All right.
Well, listen, man, you do such great work and always sticking up for the whistleblowers and for the publishers of the whistleblowers, which is such an important beat.
And you do such a great job.
And so thank you so much, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
Kevin Gotstola.
He's at Shadowproof.com.
And their new subscription newsletter is The Dissenter.
That's at TheDissenter.org.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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