He uncovered empire as a felony enterprise. He documented its lies, its callous disregard for human life, its rampant corruption, and its innumerable warfare crimes. However, as historical past exhibits, empires kill those that inflict deep wounds.
Allow us to title Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Theresa Could. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis QC, Clair Dobbin QC and Joel Smith. District Decide Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Legal professional within the Japanese District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the director basic of MI5.
Allow us to acknowledge that the aim of those executioners, who mentioned kidnapping and assassinating Assange, has at all times been his annihilation. That Assange, who’s in precarious bodily and psychological well being, and who suffered a stroke throughout courtroom video proceedings on October 27, has been condemned to loss of life mustn’t come as a shock. The 10 years he has been detained, seven within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and almost three within the high-security Belmarsh jail, had been accompanied by a scarcity of daylight and train, and unrelenting threats, stress, anxiousness and stress. “His eyes had been out of sync, his proper eyelid wouldn’t shut, his reminiscence was blurry,” his fiancée Stella Moris stated of the stroke.
His regular deterioration has led to hallucinations and despair. He takes antidepressant remedy and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been noticed pacing his cell till he collapses, punching himself within the face and banging his head towards the wall. He has spent weeks within the medical wing of Belmarsh. Jail authorities discovered “half of a razor blade” hidden underneath his socks. He has repeatedly referred to as the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans as a result of he has thought of killing himself “a whole lot of occasions a day.” The executioners haven’t but accomplished their grim work.
Learn extra
The US will break its assurances on Assange. Right here’s why
Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence motion, the one profitable slave revolt in human historical past, was bodily destroyed in the identical method, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped jail cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and doubtless tuberculosis.
Assange dedicated empire’s biggest sin. He uncovered it as a felony enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable warfare crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It doesn’t matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the identical Satanic songbook. Empires at all times kill those that inflict deep and critical wounds.
Rome’s lengthy persecution of the Carthaginian basic Hannibal, forcing him ultimately to commit suicide, and the razing of Carthage repeats itself in epic after epic. Loopy Horse. Patrice Lumumba. Malcolm X. Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Sukarno. Ngo Dinh Diem. Fred Hampton. Salvador Allende. Should you can’t be purchased off, if you’ll not be intimidated into silence, you’ll be killed.
The obsessive CIA makes an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, which, as a result of none succeeded, have a Keystone Cop incompetence to them, included contracting Sam Giancana, Al Capone’s successor in Chicago, together with Miami mobster Santo Trafficante Jr., to kill the Cuban chief, making an attempt to poison Castro’s cigars with a botulinum toxin, offering Castro with a tubercle bacilli-infected scuba-diving swimsuit, booby-trapping a conch shell on the ocean ground the place he usually dived, slipping botulism-toxin capsules in one among his drinks, and utilizing a pen outfitted with a hypodermic needle to poison him.
The present cabal of assassins hides behind a judicial burlesque overseen in London by portly judges in robes and white horse-hair wigs mouthing authorized Alice-in-Wonderland absurdities. It’s a darkish reprise of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’, with the Lord Excessive Executioner drawing up lists of individuals “who wouldn’t be missed.”
I watched the newest installment of the Assange present trial by way of video hyperlink on Friday. I listened to the studying of the ruling granting the attraction by america to extradite him. Assange’s legal professionals have two weeks to attraction to the Supreme Courtroom, which they’re anticipated to do. I’m not optimistic.
Friday’s ruling was devoid of authorized evaluation. It absolutely accepted the conclusions of the lower-court decide about elevated threat of suicide and inhumane jail circumstances in america. However the ruling argued that US Diplomatic Be aware no. 74, given to the courtroom on February 5, 2021, which supplied “assurances” that Assange can be properly handled, overrode the decrease courtroom’s conclusions. It was a outstanding authorized non sequitur. The ruling wouldn’t have gotten a passing grade in a first-semester regulation faculty course. However authorized erudition will not be the purpose. The judicial railroading of Assange, which has eviscerated one authorized norm after one other, has, as Franz Kafka wrote, turned “mendacity right into a common precept.”
Learn extra
Chris Hedges: The Assange case is crucial battle for press freedom in our time
The choice to grant the extradition was based mostly on 4 “assurances” given to the courtroom by the US authorities. The 2-judge appellate panel dominated that the “assurances” “fully reply the considerations which induced the decide [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” promise that Assange won’t be topic to particular administrative measures (SAMs), which preserve prisoners in excessive isolation and permit the federal government to watch conversations with legal professionals, overruling attorney-client privilege; can, if the federal government in his native Australia agrees, serve out his sentence there; will obtain ample medical and psychological care; and, pre-trial and submit trial, won’t be held within the administrative most facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.
“There isn’t a cause why this courtroom mustn’t settle for the assurances as which means what they are saying,” the judges wrote. “There isn’t a foundation for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good religion.” And, with these rhetorical feints, the judges signed Assange’s loss of life warrant.
Not one of the “assurances” supplied by Biden’s Division of Justice (DoJ) are definitely worth the paper they’re written on. All include escape clauses. None are legally binding. Ought to Assange do “one thing subsequent to the providing of those assurances that meets the assessments for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX,” he will probably be topic to those coercive measures. And you’ll be assured that any incident, irrespective of how trivial, will probably be used, if Assange is extradited, as an excuse to toss him into the mouth of the dragon.
Ought to Australia, which has marched in lockstep with the US within the persecution of their citizen, not comply with his switch, he’ll stay for the remainder of his life in a US jail. However so what? If Australia doesn’t request a switch it “can’t be a trigger for criticism of the USA, or a cause for concerning the assurances as insufficient to satisfy the decide’s considerations,” the ruling learn. And even when that weren’t the case, it will take Assange 10 to 15 years to attraction his sentence all the way in which as much as the Supreme Courtroom, which might be greater than sufficient time for the state assassins to complete him off.
I’m unsure how to answer assurance quantity 4, stating that Assange won’t be held pre-trial in ADX Florence. Nobody is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. However it sounds reassuring, so I assume these within the Biden DoJ who crafted the diplomatic be aware added it.
ADX Florence will not be the one supermax jail in america that may home Assange, in fact. He may very well be shipped out to one among our different Guantanamo-like services. Daniel Hale, the previous US Air Drive intelligence analyst at the moment imprisoned for releasing top-secret paperwork that uncovered widespread civilian casualties brought on by US drone strikes, has been held since October in a communications administration unit (CMU) at USP Marion, a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. CMUs are extremely restrictive cells that replicate the near-total isolation imposed by SAMs.
Learn extra
Assange suffered stroke in UK jail – fiancee
Mockingly, the Excessive Courtroom ruling got here as Secretary of State Antony Blinken introduced on the digital Summit for Democracy that the Biden administration would offer new funding to guard reporters focused due to their work and assist impartial worldwide journalism. Blinken’s “assurances” that the Biden administration would defend a free press, on the very second the administration was demanding Assange’s extradition, is a obvious instance of the rank hypocrisy and lying that makes the Democrats, as journalist Glen Ford used to say, “not the lesser evil, however the more practical evil.”
Assange is charged within the US underneath 17 counts of the Espionage Act and one rely of hacking right into a authorities laptop. The fees may see him sentenced to 175 years in jail, regardless that he isn’t a US citizen and WikiLeaks will not be a US-based publication. If he’s discovered responsible, it’ll successfully criminalize the investigative work of all journalists and publishers, wherever on the earth and of any nationality, who possess categorized paperwork to shine a light-weight on the internal workings of energy. This mortal assault on the press may have been orchestrated, we should not overlook, by a Democratic administration. It should set a authorized precedent that can delight different totalitarian regimes and autocrats who, emboldened by america, will gleefully seize journalists and publishers, irrespective of the place they’re situated, who publish inconvenient truths.
There isn’t a authorized foundation to carry Assange in jail. There isn’t a authorized foundation to strive him, a overseas nationwide, underneath the Espionage Act. The CIA spied on him whereas he was within the Ecuadorian Embassy by way of a Spanish firm, UC World, contracted to offer embassy safety. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his legal professionals. This reality alone invalidates any future trial.
After seven years in a cramped room with out daylight within the embassy, Assange has been held for almost three years in a high-security jail in London. As UN Particular Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer has testified, that’s so the state can proceed the relentless abuse and torture it is aware of will result in his psychological and bodily disintegration. The persecution of Assange is designed to ship a message to anybody who may take into account exposing the corruption, dishonesty and depravity that defines the black coronary heart of our international elites.
Dean Yates can inform you what US “assurances” are value. He was the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad on the morning of July 12, 2007 when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh had been killed, together with 9 different males, by US Military Apache gunships. Two kids had been severely wounded. The US authorities spent three years mendacity to Yates, Reuters, and the remainder of the world concerning the killings, though the military had video proof of the bloodbath taken by the Apaches through the assault. The video, generally known as the Collateral Homicide video, was leaked in 2010 by Chelsea Manning to Assange. For the primary time, right here was proof that these killed weren’t, as the military had repeatedly insisted, engaged in a firefight. It uncovered the lies spun by the US that it couldn’t find the video footage and had by no means tried to cowl up the killings.
Watch my full interview with Yates right here:
The Spanish courts can inform you what US “assurances” are value. Spain was given an assurance that its citizen David Mendoza Herrarte, if extradited to the US to face trial on drug trafficking costs, may serve his jail sentence in his homeland. However, for six years, the DoJ repeatedly refused Spanish switch requests, relenting solely when the Spanish Supreme Courtroom intervened.
The folks in Afghanistan can inform you what US “assurances” are value. US army, intelligence, and diplomatic officers knew for 18 years that the warfare in Afghanistan was a quagmire, but they publicly acknowledged, time and again, that the army intervention was making regular progress.
The folks in Iraq can inform you what US “assurances” are value. They had been invaded and topic to a brutal warfare based mostly on fabricated proof about weapons of mass destruction.
The folks of Iran can inform you what US “assurances” are value. The US, within the 1981 Algiers Accords, promised to not intervene in Iran’s inner affairs after which funded and backed the Individuals’s Mujahedin Group of Iran, a terrorist group based mostly in Iraq and devoted to overthrowing the Iranian regime.
The 1000’s of individuals tortured in US international black websites can inform you what US “assurances” are value. CIA officers, when questioned by the Senate Choose Committee on Intelligence concerning the widespread use of torture, secretly destroyed video tapes of interrogations whereas insisting there had been no “destruction of proof.”
The numbers of treaties, agreements, offers, guarantees, and “assurances” made by the US across the globe and subsequently violated are too quite a few to record. A whole bunch of treaties signed with Native American tribes, alone, have been ignored by the US authorities.
Assange, at great private price, warned us. He gave us the reality. Now the ruling class is crucifying him for this reality. And along with his crucifixion, the dim lights of our democracy go darkish.
