WikiLeaks: Julian Assange Hearings - Day 9
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-galle... https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/john-pilger-stalinist-trial-julian-assa... https://english.elpais.com/spanish_news/2020-09-10/us-demands-hinder-spanish... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-toughest-federal... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI3LcmyZSWE with Juan Passarelli https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzG7rBjrMeo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46MffND9aBg https://mobile.twitter.com/defendassange https://mobile.twitter.com/stellamorris1 https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks https://mobile.twitter.com/lawyers4assange https://mobile.twitter.com/deacampaign https://mobile.twitter.com/khrafnsson " 40 individuals including MEPs/ NGO representaatives and international political observers said last night that they had been denied access as observers to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition hearing at the Old Bailey. " " Things became not merely dramatic in the Assange courtroom today, but spiteful and nasty. There were two real issues, the evidence and the procedure. On the evidence, there were stark details of the dreadful regime Assange will face in US jails if extradited. On the procedure, we saw behaviour from the prosecution QC that went well beyond normal cross examination and was a real attempt to denigrate and even humiliate the witness. I hope to prove that to you by a straightforward exposition of what happened today in court, after which I shall add further comment. " " When I first met Julian Assange more than ten years ago, I asked him why he had started WikiLeaks. He replied: “Transparency and accountability are moral issues that must be the essence of public life and journalism.” I had never heard a publisher or an editor invoke morality in this way. Assange believes that journalists are the agents of people, not power: that we, the people, have a right to know about the darkest secrets of those who claim to act in our name. If the powerful lie to us, we have the right to know. If they say one thing in private and the opposite in public, we have the right to know. If they conspire against us, as Bush and Blair did over Iraq, then pretend to be democrats, we have the right to know. It is this morality of purpose that so threatens the collusion of powers that want to plunge much of the world into war and wants to bury Julian alive " " Freedom of the press now rests with the honourable few: the exceptions, the dissidents on the internet who belong to no club, who are neither rich nor laden with Pulitzers, but produce fine, disobedient, moral journalism — those like Julian Assange. Meanwhile, it is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still believe that freedom is possible. I salute him. " " This was really hard to sit through silently for me; goodness knows what it was like for Julian. The mainstream media are turning a blind eye. There were three reporters in the press gallery, one of them an intern and one representing the NUJ. Public access continues to be restricted and major NGOs, including Amnesty, PEN and Reporters Without Borders, continue to be excluded both physically and from watching online. It has taken me literally all night to write this up – it is now 8.54am – and I have to finish off and get back into court. The six of us allowed in the public gallery, incidentally, have to climb 132 steps to get there, several times a day. As you know, I have a very dodgy ticker; I am with Julian’s dad John who is 78; and another of us has a pacemaker. I do not in the least discount the gallant efforts of others when I explain that I feel obliged to write this up, and in this detail, because otherwise the vital basic facts of the most important trial this century, and how it is being conducted, would pass almost completely unknown to the public. If it were a genuine process, they would want people to see it, not completely minimise attendance both physically and online. " https://www.aklagare.se/en/news-and-press/media/the-assange-matter/kan-assan... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-charged-computer-hacking-co... https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HDrbQE0Hc74/XK-6RER5buI/AAAAAAAAFqQ/uB094S4ChbAnF... 80c11049faebf441d524fb3c4cd5351c Fuck all that. #FreeAssange Collateral Murder Apparent Somali assassination order Guantanamo Bay procedures Daniel arap Moi Tibetan Unrest videos Scientology materials Sarah Palin Emails Killings by the Kenyan police BNP membership Congressional Research Service reports Norm Coleman Climategate 1 and 2 Barclays Bank tax avoidance Internet censorship lists Bilderberg Group meeting reports 2008 Peru oil scandal Nuclear accident in Iran Toxic dumping in Africa: The Minton report Kaupthing Bank Joint Services Protocol 440 9/11 pager messages U.S. Intelligence report on WikiLeaks Baghdad airstrike video Afghan War Diary Love Parade documents Iraq War logs State Department diplomatic cables release Guantanamo Bay files The Spy Files Stratfor email leak Syria Files Prosecution and prison documents for Anakata Draft Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement IP Charter and later TPP Investment Chapter Trade in Services Agreement chapter draft Australian bribery case suppression order Sony archives Trident Nuclear Weapons System The Saudi Cables DNC email leak Podesta emails Yemen files German BND-NSA Inquiry Turkish AK Party emails CIA espionage orders Vault 7 Spy Files Russia ICE Patrol corrupted broker in France-UAE arms deal Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_and_Muhammad_al-Ze... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rasmussen_Hjelmen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Trials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD_troika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/09/why-are-amnesty-international... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24542352 Assange’s lawyers began with a request that the alleged evidence in a new indictment handed down in June be excluded from consideration given that it came so late. The Judge denied this. In the afternoon session, the lawyers requested an adjournment until next year to give his lawyers time to respond to the US prosecutor’s new indictment. They said they had been given insufficient time to examine the new allegations, especially since they had only “limited access” to the imprisoned Assange. Indeed, this most recent hearing was the first time in more than six months that Julian Assange had been able to meet with his lawyers. The judge rejected this request. Amnesty International had requested access to the court for a trial monitor to observe the hearings, but the court denied us a designated seat in court. Our monitor initially did get permission to access the technology to monitor remotely, but the morning the hearing started he received an email informing us that the Judge had revoked Amnesty International’s remote access. We applied again for access to the proceedings on Tuesday 8 September, setting out the importance of monitoring and Amnesty International’s vast experience of observing trials in even some of the most repressive countries. The judge wrote back expressing her "regret" at her decision and saying: “I fully recognise that justice should be administered in public". Despite her regret and her recognition that scrutiny is a vital component of open justice, the judge did not change her mind. “I’m here today for the same reason I was in Iraq. Because I believe in justice and I believe in peace,” he tells me. “Julian Assange is not really wanted for espionage. He is wanted for making America look like war criminals.” Indeed, it is ironic that no one responsible for possible war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan has been prosecuted, let alone punished. And yet the publisher who exposed their crimes is the one in the dock facing a lifetime in jail. #FreeAssange
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/julian-assange-trial-us-trump-chelsea-m... Julian Assange is not on trial for his personality – but here’s how the US government made you focus on it By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with his character pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations By Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-galle... https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/21/trump-schwartz-grenell-wikileaks-extradit... https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/21/guide-to-journalists-assange-trial-upset-... https://web.archive.org/web/20110925132344/http:/nigelparry.com/news/guardia... https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/support-this-website/ Monday was a frustrating day as the Assange Hearing drifted deep into a fantasy land where nobody knows or is allowed to say that people were tortured in Guantanamo Bay and under extraordinary rendition. The willingness of Judge Baraitser to accept American red lines on what witnesses can and cannot say has combined with a joint and openly stated desire by both judge and prosecution to close this case down quickly by limiting the number of witnesses, the length of their evidence, and the time allowed for closing arguments. '[Prosecutor] Lewis: You have as a journalist merely been the passive recipient of official information. Presumably you have never done anything criminal to obtain government information? '[Journalist] Hager: You said “passive”. That is not the way we work. Journalists not only actively work our sources. We go out and find our sources. The information might come in documents. It might come on a memory stick. In most cases our sources are breaking the law. Our duty is to help protect them from being caught. We actively help them cover their backs sometimes.' Summers asked whether Cryptome was a minor website. Grothoff replied not at all, it was a long established platform for leaked or confidential material and was especially used by journalists. The document showed this had been via a torrent from Pirate Bay. Wikileaks had made the unredacted cables available on 2 September, after they were already widely available. They had already passed the point where “they could not be stopped”. Which brings us to a very crucial point. The next witness, Andy Worthington, was at court and ready to give evidence, but was prevented from doing so. The United States government objected to his evidence, about his work on the Guantanamo Detainee files, being heard because it contained allegations of inmates being tortured at Guantanamo. What the defence should have said at this moment is “Madam, the dogs in the street know that people were tortured in Guantanamo Bay. In the real world, it is not a disputed fact. If Mr Lewis’s instructions were to deny that the earth is round, would our witnesses have to accommodate that? The truth of these matters plainly goes to the Article 10 Defence, and by pandering to the denial of a notorious and plain fact, this court will be held up to mockery. We will not discuss such ludicrous censorship with Mr Lewis. If you wish to rule that there must be no mention of torture in evidence, then so be it.” The defence did not say any of that, but as instructed entered a process with the prosecution lawyers of agreeing the shortening and editing of evidence, a process which took all day and with which Julian showed plain signs of being uncomfortable. I am very concerned about the obvious collusion of the prosecution and the judge to close this case down. The extraordinary conflation of “time management” and excluding evidence which the US Government does not want heard in public is plainly illegitimate. The continual chivvying and interruption of defence counsel in examination when prosecution counsel are allowed endless repetition amounting to harassment and bullying is illegitimate. Some extraordinarily long prosecution cross-examinations, such as that of Carey Shenkman the lawyer, have every appearance of deliberate time wasting and distraction. Tuesday’s witness is Professor Michael Kopelman, the eminent psychiatrist, and the prosecution have indicated they wish to cross-examine him for an extraordinary four hours, which Baraitser agreed against defence objections. Her obsession with time management is distinctly subjective.
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