All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Kevin Gostula from shadowproof.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Kevin, how you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
Appreciate you joining us on the show here.
Kevin, of course, has been keeping up with the Julian Assange hearings.
We talked with Joe Loria last Thursday or so.
I think we're current through like day nine, something like that, through Ellsberg's testimony and I guess the rest of that day.
But I know a lot has happened since then, but I don't know what it is.
So please do tell us.
All right, so we're getting deeper into testimony that's very sensitive and probably strays into violating Julian Assange's privacy, but they've got to do it.
They've got to try to present what's going on with him psychologically to the judge.
Also physically, although that hasn't been as big of a thing, but we're hearing from psychiatrists who have examined him while he's at Belmarsh, the maximum security prison in London.
This is day 12 that you're speaking to me, and so we've heard from three different doctors at this point who did their own examinations.
One in particular is probably a crucial part of the Julian Assange defense because he diagnosed Julian Assange with autism or Asperger's syndrome to be more specific.
That's a big deal because there are two cases in which extraditions were blocked or stopped in the UK that the United States government had requested.
They both involved hackers.
One was Gary McKinnon back in 2012 and the other was Lori Love in 2018.
Both of them won their battles to not be extradited because it was determined that because of their autism or their Asperger's syndrome that they would not be treated well and they would in fact stay and be at high risk of suicide in US prisons if they were allowed to be extradited to the United States, so ultimately those were stopped.
In fact, Edward Fitzgerald is on the Assange legal team and he was involved in some capacity with both of those cases, so he has a fair amount of experience in arguing this, bringing doctors forward to present evidence in the court system.
Now, they never won in the lower court.
These were won on appeal, and in fact actually Theresa May who eventually went on to become prime minister, she refused to approve the extradition of Gary McKinnon in the early 2010s.
She refused to approve it.
He was accused of a very massive, one of the largest hacks of US military computers in the history of the United States, and yet she determined that it would violate his human rights to allow the extradition to the US because we simply have horrible incarceration system that can't protect people.
Wow.
I hadn't realized that the British courts had already previously ruled that on two occasions, especially like you're saying, one of these is an extremely important hack of the DOD like that.
That's really something.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Well, I was just going to, so people have the background information, I just want to say that it's a big deal that someone like Gary McKinnon could be stopped from extradited because essentially he was accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over 13 months between 2001, February, and then 2002 in March.
This was done over a period of time and he was essentially attacking the systems and posting notices that essentially, I mean, he said at one point, your security is crap.
So he was making the entire system feel vulnerable for not having good security to protect from outside attacks.
And so it made the US look very vulnerable and defend itself.
So you can see that this is the kind of person that the system would want to retaliate against, go after them.
You know, I mean, also you could say these are crimes and they would have wanted to bring him to the United States and put him on trial.
But ultimately his mental health condition saved him from being sent to the United States.
And then, so this psychiatrist that testified that he's now diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, was there much a reaction from the judge or the rest of the courtroom?
And then I take it this was also, was it the same psychiatrist who diagnosed him with depression or I think he said there were two or three different ones, right?
Yeah.
So this guy, his name is Quinton Dealy and he actually comes, he works for the UK government.
He's a national health service psychiatrist.
And so he's the only one of the doctors that assessed Julian Assange who made this diagnosis.
So I say that just because it may be a hurdle for the defense.
There isn't this consensus that he has Asperger's syndrome.
So the fact that he's the government's doctor is important in that though.
He's not being provided by the defense and being paid as an expert witness or something like this.
True.
Yeah.
And actually the national health service has, is one of the most revered and respected agencies in the UK.
But I'll just say that he said this and the tactic that the prosecutor used, which it wasn't really the first kind of, it wasn't the first time that we've heard this line from the prosecutor, but you know, they, they said, James Lewis said that someone with Asperger's would not be able to handle a question and answer with the like people who were in an audience.
So then we, then they played a clip from this venue called the frontline club where Julian was doing events after the Afghan war logs were released.
And he did several events throughout 2010 and 2011 with the hosts there.
And so they show Julian Assange and he's giving a long answer about releasing the Afghan war log materials.
And then he asked Quinton Dealey, okay, so how could somebody, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but basically the essence was how could somebody with Asperger's do this?
And basically Dealey said, his name, Quinton Dealey said that this is monologuing.
This is this, and this is on knowledge that Julian Assange has, this is, this is easy for him to recall.
It's, it's controlled, it's structured.
The question is put to him by the moderator.
He has no difficulty.
There, there's, there's no informal interactions going on here and nobody's cutting them off.
It isn't a debate.
It's not like he has to, to, to deal with not getting attention.
He's the center of this panel.
He's one of the main reasons why people are there to hear this panel discussion.
And so the issues that you would normally have with socially awkward interactions with, with someone who wasn't able to pick up on social cues, who didn't know how to behave, they don't really come into play because of how to cue.
So he failed.
So this, this tactic fell flat.
I mean, they, they, they cued up the clip.
They thought it was going to be great.
We got the tech working.
We all got to see three or four minutes of Julian Assange speechifying.
And then he turned to the doctor and the doctor says, well, no, that doesn't actually prove what you think.
It doesn't actually mean that someone won't have Asperger's because they can speak at length and participate in forum events.
But then, you know, he, he goes on and he can, he acts like someone with Asperger's couldn't have children.
They start talking like somebody with Asperger's couldn't have relationships with women.
It's very insulting, I think, to like the wider community who are functioning people, but have been diagnosed with these traits.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole thing is characterized by a spectrum, as they call it, in other words, a broad gray scale of, you know, behaviors, you know, a very wide margin of different kinds of people and the way that they are there.
So anyway, so then now what's all this about depression and the other psychiatrists and what they had to say?
So then the depression factored mostly, that was something we, we delved into on day 11.
So before hearing from this doctor, they laid out the foundation.
His name is Michael Koppelman, a very well-respected doctor, in fact, doctor who's referenced in the Lori Love case that I mentioned, who provided testimony about what could happen to somebody if they were extradited.
So he's got a lot of experience.
In fact, I think he's working on a case in which, I think he's being consulted for a case that the prosecutors are working that is separate.
So, you know, we've got people who are working on this from the Crown Prosecution Authority and they're not only involved in putting together the pieces for getting Julian Assange extradited, but there's also other cases, presumably, that that Crown Prosecution Authority is working on.
So they, so we had a really odd beginning here because when Koppelman came into the courtroom, they were pretty friendly.
And they seemed to have a lot of respect for each other.
And then that all fell away as James Lewis started to cross-examine him and ask Michael Koppelman about the diagnosis, which is that Julian Assange had severe depression in November and December of 2019.
And now it's gotten better.
It's more of like a moderate depressive condition that he has.easily regress and be severe again, but they've moved him out of isolating conditions in the hospital unit where he was in Belmarsh.
And also he's been having more opportunity to contact his family, you know, his partner who he's named Stella Morris, who he's now engaged to, if I understand correctly.
And, you know, he can, he can speak to his children and also he can have contact with his lawyers and he's having more opportunity to work on his case.
So all of this is improving his hopefulness about, you know, what might be possible.
I mean, I think it's still extraordinarily bleak for him, but it's gotten better than it was six to eight months ago, although the prison was thrown on lockdown during COVID and that made things really difficult on him.
So they did mention that he backtracked and that affected his psychiatric state.
But the most important takeaway for me from yesterday, which I wrote about in some great detail was that the prosecutor accused Julian Assange of exaggerating his depression, his symptoms of depression.
And this was apparently how he's going to try to beat the extradition request.
And the theory that was, was made, you know, we've got a conspiracy theory, I'll just say within the larger conspiracy theory of this case that they're bringing against Julian Assange.
And the conspiracy theory is that Julian Assange is reading the British medical journal that is available to him at the prison.
There's other magazines, like he reads Nature magazine and so he's got the British medical journal and he's reading it to gain insights on how he can exaggerate his symptoms when he goes to meet with these doctors.
And in fact, he's consulting his legal team before he goes to meet with doctors so that they can also advise him on how to perform for these doctors so they can get the best examination results that'll help him beat the extradition request.
And how'd the defense handle that?
Well, it's ludicrous.
I mean, it's absolutely ludicrous.
There's nothing that that's been found to show that he is, I think they call it malingering.
That's the official medical term.
There's nothing to show that he's just faking it to get by.
All of this is documented extensively.
And none of these doctors are making this up for the benefit of Julian Assange.
And so all we got was James Lewis, the prosecutor, being very flustered that Koppelman would stand his ground.
In fact, a few times he even said to him, you are the lawyer, I'm the psychiatrist, because he was trying to diagnose Julian Assange.
I mean, he was saying things like, you know, if you have severe depression, how could you coordinate a media organization?
How could you be involved in this?
How could you host a chat show?
Julian back in, I think, 2012 hosted this show called The World Tomorrow.
He got eight episodes in a deal with Russia Today.
And this also came up with the Asperger's thing again, like, how can somebody with depression and Asperger's, how can they do a chat show?
And all of this is really ridiculous, because just because you have these diagnoses doesn't mean you can't function and do these kinds of things.
It doesn't really work like that.
And then the fact is that if somebody who has these mental health conditions is put into a prison, and then worse, put into a prison where their communications are restricted, where they're treated like a national security defendant, and I think this is where this starts to get into areas that you tend to cover.
When this starts to become, you know, okay, we think you're a threat to the United States government, and we have to restrict who you can talk to in this prison, and we're going to control your movements, and your recreation can only be in the nighttime, and you're only going to be out of your cell 21 to 20, I mean, you're going to be in your cell 21 to 22 hours.
You can be out of your cell for maybe a half hour to an hour a day.
You're not going to really have the greatest access to any programs or mental health programs or any counseling, or you might get one 15 minute phone call with your family or maybe your lawyer.
Sometimes you have to choose whether to use your phone call on your lawyer or calling your family.
So when you get into that, what's that going to do to somebody with depression or Asperger's?
And then that's when it matters.
It doesn't really matter when he's hosting a live chat show.
Yeah.
And you know, like, yeah, I'm no mental magician or anything, but he seemed like a quirky guy.
I don't know.
I see you have in your tweets here that on Redirect, one of the psychiatrists is being asked, so, you know, you didn't diagnose him with Asperger's syndrome.
What about that?
And the guy says something like, well, yeah, but he does concede that the guy who did diagnose him with it sure is qualified to do so.
And so I'm not really arguing with it.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that guy actually said he has autistic like traits.
So it's it's been conceded, I think, that he at least and and he has his history and it goes back.
And, you know, these are things like.
So there's actually there's there's a there's a woman who has been referenced a lot in the last couple of days.
Her name is Suletta Dreyfus.
She wrote a book called Underground Tales of Hacking Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.
I think this was actually made into a movie, I believe.
There's there's there's an Assange movie that comes from his earlier time when he was in Australia and he was accused of hacking.
And it deals with that earlier part of his life.
And she writes or has detailed what it was like to have a relationship with him.
She was teaching him social skills.
You know, he'd do things that normal people wouldn't do.
We heard this in the court today on the 12th day that he might go somewhere.
If he was in a bar, he might go behind the bar, turn off the music or turn it on or put it on what he wanted to hear.
He might go up to a painting on the wall and take it down and try to look at it.
Well, you probably should leave the paintings hanging just, you know, there were things that normal people know not to do that he just wouldn't respect space.
We heard that when he has conversations, he might, you know, interrupt people because he had a thought and he didn't want to forget it.
And he might have trouble having small talk.
And some of these things like to to a degree, we all have these.
We all do these things when we're talking with people.
But I guess for him, it's it's more pronounced.
And that is the way that people who are on the spectrum tend to behave.
They have a tough time interacting.
And it was even said that he's he's had people who he considers his friends, who he's even told them, you know, I, I want you to help me so that I know how to act.
So how I know how to take in all of what's going on around me.
And I think, you know, this starts to get into why I believe we've we why I believe in 2010 and 2011, when he would do when we heard these stories about what went on with the releases, sometimes, you know, the people who are running The Guardian or The New York Times or some of these other publications that worked with him, some of the more independent people would have issues with him about how he managed WikiLeaks.
And I think, you know, we're starting to get into the area of, you know, his his autistic like traits were things that became difficult for these people to to manage with.
We have, I guess, my the reason why I'm taking us down this road is to say, I don't think this doctor is just coming in from left field here with us.
I think that there's a lot of breadcrumbs along the way that that that he's had this.
I was going to say, you know, at the beginning, I'm like, I don't know, it's a pretty sophisticated guy.
But then the more you make your case, and I've talked to him a couple of times myself, you know, back 10 years ago.
And, you know, I don't know, I could I certainly wouldn't argue against it.
I don't know.
And especially like with those anecdotes about, you know, his girlfriend talking about how weird he is.
And, you know, when he's free in regular life, when he's not being hunted by the CIA or anything, and he's just himself in Australia, and he's, you know, a bit like that.
So yeah, yeah.
Diagnose away.
And then the point being that now you want to lock him in a supermax in Florence, Colorado, which is with the Unabomber and Ramsey Yousef.
And then what will happen to him in there?
Right.
And I guess I just make the point that, you know, you could have that view.
I don't think this diagnosis should alter your, you know, your prior, the way you remember the prior interviews you did, because anybody who has this can be high functioning.
It's just, it's just where I mean, it, you know, it's going to depend on where you function.
And then obviously, after what he's gone through the stress of being in an embassy for seven years with no sunlight, of being under that kind of duress, of having the espionage operation directed at you by UC Global, with the support of the CIA, surviving a pressure campaign from Ecuador, in service to the Trump administration to force him out of the embassy.
So we can kind of get into that.
So back on, this would have been the 10th day or, yeah, this would have been the 10th day.
This was how we started the week.
We had a statement from Cassandra Fairbanks.
I don't know if you know this individual, but we had a statement from her because she went to the embassy and visited with Assange in January and March of 2019.
And in January, she met with Julian Assange to tell him that she was part of a direct message group with people from the Trump administration or with close ties.
And that included Richard Grenell, who was the German ambassador.
He later was the acting director for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
So he was James Clapper for like eight or nine weeks.
And then his communications guy, Arthur Schwartz, who is a wealthy Republican donor, that's how he was described, a kind of fixer.
He has very close ties to Donald Trump Jr.
So they were part of this direct message group.
And she shared something about Julian Assange.
She shared an interview from his mother, Christine, and she was hoping that it would convince people in October 28 that something should be done for Julian to help him get to freedom.
And instead it outraged Arthur Schwartz, and she was contacted.
He was outraged.
According to Fairbanks, he even raised the fact that she had a nine-year-old child, and she took that to be intimidation.
It came up that he said a pardon isn't going to fucking happen and told her to stop advocating for WikiLeaks and Assange.
He knew a lot about what the plans were for the Trump administration and how they were going to go after him in 2019, as it turns out.
In fact, he even said, we're going to go after him.
It won't be for the Vault 7 materials.
It's not going to be anything to do with the DNC.
And also, by the way, we're going to go after Chelsea Manning, too.
This all turned out to be true.
This all happened in 2019.
So when Fairbanks had this information, she had an opportunity to meet with Assange in January and told him all about these details.
Obviously, the embassy's all decked out and still has the gear and ways to try and collect snippets from private conversations.
Then they did the best they could.
So Assange is having these meetings in the embassy, just so people know, where he turns up the white noise machine.
He actually had a white noise machine.
He turns it up, and they would even, people he met with, they would write notes to each other instead of talking about some of these things so that they could throw off the people who were eavesdropping in the embassy.
And then we believe that whatever they were collecting, this is after UC Global, but they're still trying to throw Assange out of the embassy, and that they're just collecting this and then probably passing it on to the U.S. government to keep them appraised of what's going on with Julian Assange.
So she goes on to describe a meeting on March 25th, 2019, which is a couple months later, but you'll notice that date is only a couple weeks before he gets thrown out of the embassy because he was arrested and expelled on April 11th.
And she wrote about this in detail.
She described how visiting him was basically like going to visit somebody in a federal prison, the way she was treated.
I mean, they tried to scan him, and they said you have to meet in this particular room.
There were cameras that were pointed at both of them, surveillance cameras, and they, you know, Julian objected to this, objected to the fact that they were making it difficult for him to meet with a journalist.
He very much seemed to be treated as if he was an inmate, which it was kind of suggested.
A former senior State Department official had told BuzzFeed in January that as far as we're concerned, he's in jail.
So at that point, they were treating him already like he was their inmate, essentially, or their prisoner.
And so she ended up having a lot of difficulty, and they only were able to see each other for eight minutes during a two-hour scheduled visit.
Well, anyways, all of this unfolds.
He gets thrown out of the embassy.
And we come to learn that Richard Grenell, who was the German ambassador, was involved in brokering an agreement with Ecuador on how Julian Assange was going to be handed over to them, or how he was ultimately going to be thrown out of the embassy.
They got a verbal pledge from Grenell that the death penalty would not be sought.
I'm not sure it's in writing.
Theoretically, they could probably go back on that if they want.
But then eventually, you know, so we got this reported in ABC News.
They covered it on April 15th, four days after the arrest.
And then Fairbanks is tweeting about this and telling people, drawing people's attention to Grenell and who he is.
You know, at that time, I think he was up for a possible higher position in the Trump administration.
So he got angry, and he tried to get Cassandra Fairbanks fired from her job at the Gateway Pundit, where she writes, tried to retaliate against her.
And then Schwartz called and was really upset with her.
And then she was also getting messages at one point where Schwartz was saying things like everyone on WikiLeaks deserves the death penalty, and just not, you know, if you believe that the Trump administration isn't going to vengefully go after Assange, everything that he was saying suggested that wasn't true.
And so anyways, this was entered into the record because it's a part of showing that this was a political, this is a political prosecution.
Apparently, what was done with Assange was based on orders from President Trump.
He was very well aware that they were working with Ecuador to force them to hand over Julian Assange.
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And now John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer, was sent to prison over confirming the name of a CIA torturer.
And he recently wrote an article.
I saw that you retweeted it here at Consortium News about what it's like to be in a federal prison these days.
And I wonder whether there was any indication of whether he might be actually called to testify on this, because I think he can certainly contrast his ability to survive in a place like that with someone like Assange.
And also, while being an inmate, being an ex-con on the charge of whistleblowing and being charged under the Espionage Act as well.
Yeah.
Because he wrote a book about how you have to be the toughest SOB and the smartest SOB in the place to get out of there in one piece, basically, right?
Doing time like a spy.
He could give a lot of good testimony, but I think that the defensive has stayed away from people like him.
And another person I would recommend calling is Jeffrey Sterling, who can talk about how he had a heart condition.
And I remember reporting on this story.
This was one of the things that I was in contact with him.
He wrote to me about it, and I helped to advocate for him, because he had a heart condition and he needed to leave the prison.
He needed to go get outside medical care in order to prevent it from getting more severe, in order to basically protect him from dying.
And he was having trouble convincing the doctors there to allow him to go get outside medical care, and he was very close to a severe heart attack.
And that would be something that would be worth sharing with the judge in this case.
But I think for both of them, the problem is that they pled guilty or they were convicted.
And I think that the effort by the prosecutors to attack them, the legal term they would use is impeach, and make it seem like they weren't credible.
It would take up three to four hours of time in the courtroom.
And my sense is that the legal team feels it would be a distraction to call them.
So they're trying to get- Well, and of course, they can get plenty of people from whatever, Human Rights Watch or Amnesty or whatever, you know, kind of liberal prison nonprofit reform group is out there, whatever, you know?
And that's what they're, that's the way they're going to go about it.
And then we haven't gotten to them yet, and I'd be happy to talk with you after they testify.
But we've got at least a couple witnesses probably in the, well, I know that they're going to come in the fourth week.
We have a couple of witnesses that are going to talk about what pre-trial confinement is like.
And we also have one that's going to testify specifically about life in a supermax prison and what Julian Assange can expect.
So- Amazing.
This whole conversation is about the hero that published the Afghan war logs and the Iraq war logs and the State Department cables that have been the source for probably 50,000 important news stories across this planet over the last 10 years.
And even, I like bringing this up, you could have a story that has 75 paragraphs in it, but one of them says State Department cables from back in 2007 confirmed this aspect of this story, right?
Maybe it's not the whole story based on it, but it's an important part of, you couldn't count.
I don't think Google can count how many times.
And all of them, just like Manning always wanted, as we know in his, her express wishes in the chat logs there, that this would be useful for the public, for good journalism and debate and reform and so forth.
I know that was part of the testimony, right, was that the release of the collateral murder actually resulted in the change of the rules of engagement to a degree, right?
This is important stuff.
The idea that we're having this whole conversation about how they're going to bury this guy in the Supermax, very likely, as though he really is a Bond villain, as though he really is a spy and not just the 21st century digital journalist that he is.
It's incredible.
Yeah, I don't know if you want me to catch you up and your listeners up on what happened on would have been the end of the second week, because we got the testimony from.
Yeah, please do go right ahead.
The floor is yours, Kevin.
Go ahead, please.
Yeah.
So I don't.
Khaled al-Masri.
Are you familiar?
Yeah.
Very much so.
Yeah.
So he deserves a lot of credit here, because at great risk to him, being someone who was the target of rendition and torture by the CIA, he entered testimony in support of Julian Assange, and it was read into the record.
They tried to test him, but I guess I don't know if I put this in air quotes or not, but we had technical difficulties and we weren't able to make that happen.
So whether you believe that there are other forces preventing us from being the voice of Khaled al-Masri, I'll leave that up to your listeners.
But he, just so people are completely aware, in 2004, he was in Macedonia and was detained by the authorities there, and then the CIA, a team of 13, abducted and they tortured him.
They put him on an aircraft, spread eagle, he was in a track suit, they put him in a diaper.
It was degrading, dehumanizing.
They sent him to the salt pit in Afghanistan.
There he was for several weeks before they ultimately recognized who they thought, he was not a terrorist.
This is a German citizen, though, that they had in their company, and he went on a hunger strike 34 days into his detention.
They force fed him through the nose, very abusively.
I don't know how much you've talked about the way that we force feed people at Guantanamo, it's like that, shoving the tube down your nose, very aggressively.
It's been a while since we've covered it, but yeah, boy, we covered it.
Yeah, it's pretty awful, and it's not fun to do permanent damage to your nasal passages.
And so he went through that, eventually he was released, by May he was released in 2004, and then he was reverse renditioned.
So they put him on a plane in a blindfold, they gave him a suitcase and clothes.
He got dropped in Albania, now he's from Germany, they drop him in Albania, and he's wandering around and some police find him.
This was his testimony.
They find him, and they're like, who are you, what are you doing here, and you don't have any papers, and he thought he was going to be attacked by these men, who it turned out were police in Albania.
So then he does end up back in Germany, and he spends the rest of his life, until the releases of the cables, trying to get justice, pursuing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the help of the ACLU.
The Inspector General report that we come to find, we come to learn from the Inspector General that he was told that there would be consequences, consequences, if he spoke to the media about what happened to him, or if he went to local authorities in Germany.
So the threat was real.
And he speaks about the suspicious individuals that have approached his children, having strange cars surround him on the motorway, and kind of trap him.
And then he's called the police to complain, say that he believes there are individuals out to get him.
Well, he sounds crazy, so now the police are trying to get him institutionalized.
Those are all things that he's had to deal with in his life.
But the important thing is that, as we talk about WikiLeaks, they exposed that Khaled al-Masri was the victim of an effort by the U.S. to thwart any accountability and justice when it came to his case.
The U.S. government pressured Germany not to prosecute this team, the team of CIA.
This was in the cables, just like it was also in the cables that Spain was pressured not to investigate Bush administration torture.
And so this cable then became a part of a European Court of Human Rights case where he did win damages.
And in that court, they said, they referenced the cable, and then they found that Macedonia was at fault.
It wasn't against the United States.
He still hasn't gotten any acknowledgment from the U.S.
But now in this case, in a case where the U.S. government is trying to bring a journalist to the United States and put him on trial, we have this.
We have this official acknowledgment in the record that torture happened to this person, and the WikiLeaks helped him to get some justice.
And so that was a big deal.
And again, I stress that this is at great risk to him.
The CIA could still come after him and his family today.
Yeah, absolutely.
And take him to the salt pit, which presumably they still control there, north of Kabul, right?
Yeah, I imagine.
We're still in, what are we, in the 20th year, the 19th year of war?
Yeah.
Gul Rahman was left to freeze to death in the middle of the night there.
What a great name for a torture dungeon.
You know, if you have to have a torture dungeon, you should probably call it the salt pit.
You know, that's pretty much perfect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But talking with you and Joe, alternating back and forth here, covering the hearings on the show here over the last couple of weeks, it sounds like the defense is really kicking ass, and that the lawyer is really up against probably more than he thought he bargained for.
But I wonder if you have any kind of read on the judge.
Does she have a YouTube or like a Zoom camera pointed right at her face too, so you can sit there and look at her the whole time while all this is going on?
Or how's that work?
Well, no, I can see her.
She is one constant throughout this.
I can always see the judge.
I can always see the prosecutor.
I can always see the defense attorney.
We've had a few live witnesses actually in the courtroom for this because they're doctors who have treated Assange, and they actually look away from the camera.
We see like the side of their face, but I can see her.
She's, you know, she's ready to go on a beach vacation.
She is trying to get this all to wrap up.
And I think the story, what's going to enter into the story of this case in the next week is how much pressure she's going to put on the defense to cut back their case, to call fewer witnesses so that they can be done in the amount of time that has been given.
I think it's unfair.
I think that it's inappropriate.
It may help them on appeal that the judge was micromanaging in this way.
But we, like as I brought up earlier, and as you've probably talked with Joe too, there's been so much going on with this because of the way it's being conducted that has delayed the proceedings.
I remind you, we were supposed to have this trial in May.
We were supposed to do this many months ago, but the global pandemic moved everything around as it did the entire world.
And so now we don't have every witness coming.
So you've got to figure out what time zone they're in.
Some of them are in Australia.
Some of her in California, like Daniel Ellsberg is in California, so you can't wake him up at 4 a.m. in the morning to testify.
You have to wait until it's 3 o'clock in the UK to bring him on and ask him questions.
And that has slowed things down.
That makes it hard to schedule everybody.
And this isn't the most engaging part of our discussion, but it's important because they're trying to cover all of their bases.
Like you said, they're kicking ass and they've got to keep doing the best they can to give Julian Assange, to put on the best case that they can for Julian Assange.
And she's saying, you got one more week and after that you've got to wrap it up.
And all the issues that we've had with tech, the fact that you lost, the first day they lost one entire day where they weren't able to call witnesses because they're arguing over the fact that the U.S. has entered a new extradition request against Julian Assange.
Like what are they supposed to do with that?
So we're behind that first week.
We only heard from like two or three witnesses out of 40 of them.
So they've got 14 witnesses for next week.
I have no way, I have no idea how they're going to get all of those people and get through them.
But she's not very accommodating.
She wants to, as I say, she wants to go to some posh destination that she has picked out through her favorite travel agency.
And we already know this is a preordained thing.
The law and justice and right and wrong ain't got a damn thing to do with it.
This is about politics and power and she is a servant of the state.
We all know that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm torn because they have to, they have to fight her and they have to get everything into this stage of the case because it's the only way they're going to be able to reference it on appeal.
And they need to expose her and they need to get her to reject it openly.
And then they need to use all of that in their appeal because I think universally, especially among Assange supporters, it's believed that if he's going to survive and beat the United States government, it's going to be in a higher court.
And and in fact, I'll say to you that there are people who know about the justice system in the UK and they say she should have never had this case.
She doesn't understand it.
She's a she's it's early in her career.
She's just going to go along to get along.
She's very bureaucratic.
She's just angling for the, you know, she she's just concerned about her upward career mobility and where she can go next in her life as a judge.
And so she's not going to rock the boat.
I think I told you the stat.
I don't know if you know the stat, but Declassified UK did a piece about her 97% of extraditions.
She's approved.
She's a rubber stamper.
She's a rubber stamper.
So they just need to get past her and then focus on an appeal for Julian.
Yeah.
Well, like you say, going ahead and laying the foundation now is important and it sounds like they really have lined up the very best witnesses to put the best case on so far.
And they already have a list where they say how many more to go, assuming they're allowed to present their full case.
Yeah, that's the number is.
So we've got like two people this week, 14 more witnesses in the fourth week that they want to try to get through.
Some of them may be dropped.
Unfortunately for me and you, Noam Chomsky is no longer taking the stand.
He's just going to submit a statement, which is kind of disappointing.
I wanted to see him deal with the prosecutor the same way Daniel Ellsberg dealt with the prosecutor.
Dan Ellsberg did a fantastic job rebutting everything that the prosecutor had to throw at him.
And I imagined Noam would very coolly and ably handle whatever the prosecutor tried to do as far as tactics might go.
Just as we're wrapping here on the last day of this third week, Patrick Eller is going to take the stand to address the computer crime offense against Julian Assange and Chelsea.
So that'll be involving Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, which is really good to hear.
We haven't, in this extradition trial so far, we haven't talked at all really about this wild allegation about trying to hack a password or get, you know, cloak or help Chelsea be anonymous in the military computers.
I know we talked about it in previous interviews, but it hasn't been the focus of any of the court proceedings really.
And so I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah.
And we already know it's completely debunked in every way.
There's not even one piece of a five piece case there even stands up on its own.
It's all completely ridiculous.
But speaking of Patrick's, what about Patrick Coburn?
Did he ever testify?
Yeah, I don't know what happened to him.
We were going to call him and then his name has not come up since.
So I'm disappointed.
I wanted to hear from him.
I'm actually not sure what he was going to testify on.
He was never a partner with WikiLeaks, but there's got to be something that they were going to try to do, use him as an expert.
I was going to say, I mean, I could argue that it helped end Iraq War II and scuttled the SOFA negotiations there.
But then I could see the lawyers saying no, because they're just going to say that's what caused ISIS, not the CIA war in Syria next door for five years.
And so I could see why maybe they don't want to get into that.
I would challenge this prosecutor on the US government's entire bullshit argument about endangering informants and people because it's a war zone.
Oh, I bet you I know what Patrick was probably going to talk about was how this has helped set off the Arab Spring, that the WikiLeaks in Tunisia, the reports about Ben Ali in there really enraged people leading up to Abu Aziz, how do you say it, Abu Aziz's self-immolation there.
And that really set the stage for the Arab Spring breakout in 2011.
So I know Patrick's talked about that before.
Anyway, sorry you never do that.
Just think of that.
No, it's fine.
I, you know, I think the general point I just wanted to put out there was, you know, any testimony that would make it clear once again, and Daniel Ellsberg did this, that 37 million people have been displaced because of these wars that have destroyed seven countries.
And the people who, you know, they like to invoke these civilians and act like the US government cares.
They don't care at all about these people.
And they're just using them.
They they're talking about WikiLeaks, putting them at risk and people having to flee and upend their lives.
They don't really care about these people.
They're just you.
They're just saying that because they they absolutely despise Julian Assange and want to bring him to the US and string him up.
Right.
Yeah.
I saw that thing, a little bit of that transcript where the prosecutor says, oh, so it's all the government's fault.
And Ellsberg says, yes, they bear primary responsibility.
And he's the smartest 89 year old you got on hand.
And I guarantee.
Now, one more thing.
I'm sorry.
Before we go, I just remembered that I read a short thing, I guess, by his wife talking about how that Hannibal Lecter cage that they keep them in there in the you know, like he's got a suicide belt on him somehow or something that that they keep him in one of those in the van on the way there to he's not even he can't even just sit on a bench like a prisoner in a paddy wagon.
He's got to be in a Hannibal Lecter cage in the back of the van.
Huh.
Did you see that?
I have to catch up on this, but admittedly, there's been some stuff that has come out about his treatment that I haven't completely seen.
It must be an Aaron Maté or a Glenn Greenwald retweet, I bet, because I was looking at Twitter's is.
No, but just just so we're clear, yeah, this so this is his routine.
And by the way, he the she's not she's not just dropping this off because she wants to like play upon the are, you know, all of us would would want to have space in a van when we're transported and not feel like we're in a coffin.
But like he truly does, you know, have psychological issues and have trouble with being put in this van and the claustrophobia of it all.
And they they as she says, he's he's woken up.
I've got the tweet in front of me.
He's woken up at five a.m.
He's handcuffed.
He gets put in a holding cell, then he's stripped naked, then they X-ray him.
It is every single day.
And then he's transported.
And again, yeah, I think this is what some people probably don't understand.
And I maybe should share it more often or repeat it more often in my coverage.
He is transported hour and a half each way every single day.
That means he goes through an hour and a half ride in the van in the morning.
He goes through an hour and a half ride in the van in the evening after court.
And that's how it goes, because the court that they're having these proceedings at is not adjacent.
It's not connected to the courthouse.
So when we had proceedings back in February, he did not have to do this because that courthouse was connected or very close to the prison.
But now, like you say, he's going through this, and he is put in the glass box at the back of the court after he goes through all of this claustrophobic transportation.
I'm sorry, because I don't have it in front of me.
What exactly does she say again about the cage inside the van?
I know it was something.
I don't see anything here about the cage inside the van.
There might be a comment somewhere else.
I might have conflated two things accidentally there, but I was almost certain it was saying that even inside the van, there's a separate little isolation box in there he's got to stand in or something.
Yeah.
I'm not, I'm not really sure.
I'm not really sure.
But I do got what Biden's got.
So disregard me, man.
I'm just the host of the show.
I'm going to stop testifying to facts now because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
So, I mean, the one thing I'll just say is this whole thing of, like, courtroom cages through history, which I'll encourage people to, I don't, maybe you've mentioned it before in your conversations, but, you know, the gray zone did a really good piece.
I think it was Max Blumenthal did a good piece just covering this, this glass box in the back of the room and the kinds of people who are putting this, this is how Adolf Eichmann got treated.
This is how Mikhail Khodorkovsky got treated.
This is how you get treated in Moscow.
This is how Mohamed Morsi was treated in Egypt.
And then again, there were bars in that case, but, but obviously it's about isolating the defendant.
It's about keeping them from their legal team.
And so, you know, we, we've seen these in history.
It typically looks like what dictatorships do with people who are accused of crimes.
And that's how the UK handles their justice.
Yep.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks for staying so long.
I didn't mean to keep you this long, but I really do appreciate you doing the show with us again here, Kevin.
Yeah, you're welcome.
All right, you guys, that's Kevin Gostela.
He's writing at shadowproof.com and on Twitter.
He's keeping, you know, live blog threads here of every day, day 12 now, and all the way through these Assange hearings, the extradition hearings in the UK.
That's K G O S Z T O L A, Kevin Gostela on Twitter and at shadowproof.com where his recent one is about the prosecution's claims that Assange is faking his depression.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
