The US justice department has filed 17 new charges against Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who is facing extradition from the UK.

The latest charges accuse him of receiving and unlawfully publishing the names of classified sources.

He was previously charged last month with one count of conspiring with ex-intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to gain access to the Pentagon network.

Assange is serving a jail sentence in the UK for jumping bail.

It was while he was on bail facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden that he sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012. He has always denied the accusations.

The 47-year-old was arrested on 11 April after Ecuador abruptly withdrew his asylum, and later jailed for 50 weeks for skipping bail.

The new indictment accuses Assange of violating the US espionage act by publishing classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010. 

It said Assange had "repeatedly encouraged sources with access to classified information to steal and provide it to Wikileaks to disclose".

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48391266

FREE ASSANGE TODAY ! ASSANGE DID NO CRIME BUT TO LET US KNOW WHAT WE NEEDED TO KNOW. The USA show that they are more Nazi Fascist than Hitler ever was or could ever be.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Google and Israeli intelligence enthusiastically cooperated in hopes of overthrowing Syria’s government in efforts that have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, according to a trove of emails recently organized for release by WikiLeaks.

One email stated that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall could lead to a religious war in the region, “which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies.”

The email, as well as a separate one describing a secret high-level effort within Google to assist the State Department in regime change for Syria, is one of the Clinton-linked emails organized by WikiLeaks into a searchable database announced last week.

These help paint a picture of the Democratic front-runner as a zealous advocate of covert activities to overthrow foreign leaders opposed by U.S. elites. Clinton is shown in a file photo as she parried GOP attacks during a House hearing in October on the 2012 killing of U.S. personnel at Benghazi, a process that was easier for her than apparent because she secretly shared certain goals with her interrogators, as described below.

The mainstream media for the most part have ignored the remarkable email revelations from recent days contained in Clinton's emails from 2009 to 2013 as secretary of state.

Only a handful of alternative and mostly web-based commentary sites have covered the story so far. Yet the emails help connect the dots from her 2003 support of the Iraq invasion as a senator to the vast suffering from regime change in Libya and Syria, including such collateral results as the refugee migration to Europe and blowback by terrorists dispersed there.

The de facto news blackout on the stories by United States media suggests also why WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange are so widely reviled by government officials and their allies in the media.

WikiLeaks enables whistleblowers to bypass many control mechanisms to suppress sensitive matters normally covered only in partial fashion by foreign policy decision-makers and their most friendly news outlets, which now include tech giants like Google (the best known subsidiary of the new parent company Alphabet).

Today's column — describing the shocking contents of the recent Clinton emails — builds on the first part of our new WikiLeaks series:  Noted Swedish Journalist, Assange Critic Exposed As Police Agent, published March 20, 2016.

That segment reported how Martin Fredriksson, a prize-winning Swedish journalist known for his left-wing, pro-NATO and anti-WikiLeaks commentary, was revealed this month to have been a paid agent of Säpo, Sweden's security service.

Fredriksson, with roots also in the high-tech community, also advocated against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and urged Sweden's chapter of Amnesty International to avoid supporting Sweden's relentless pursuit of Assange for questioning regarding sex misconduct complaints arising in 2010.

The third part of our series will examine the dubious legality of Sweden's crusade against Assange, which has caused a United Nations panel last month to find that Assange's political asylum in Ecuador's London 

embassy since June 2012 as arbitrary detention as a violation of human rights.

Assange has denied any crime in the sexual complaints.

Also, he has accused Sweden (whose flag is shown at left) of mounting a trumped up probe so it can extradite him to the United States to face reprisal for publishing hacked emails embarrassing to United States and other diplomats. U.S. authorities have not commented on whether they have filed secret charges (as Assange claims) against him and his colleagues working for the pro-transparency site WikiLeaks.

Read more:

https://www.justice-integrity.org/1010-clinton-emails-show-zeal-for-syri...

Some, to their credit, have spoken out against the relentless persecution of the white-haired Australian truth-teller.

But it's nothing compared to the outrage that could and should be stirred. Most journalists in the west have stayed as silent as Trappist monks with sore throats, or actually taken the side of the authorities acting against Assange.

Just imagine, as I discussed here if Julian was a Russian dissident, being treated in the same way by the Russian authorities. Then we'd be seeing column after column in ‘serious newspapers’ urging people to join the ‘Free Assange’ campaign. Celebrities would be falling over themselves to show their support. There'd be calls for yet more sanctions to be imposed on Russia, and to be maintained until the ‘political prisoner’ was released. But who so far has come out in defense of Assange, save for Pamela Anderson and Roger Waters? Where are the great ‘human rights defenders’?

Lest we forget, the dominant neocon/Establishment liberal narrative about Assange was that he was a cowardly creep who fled from ‘rape charges’ to hide in the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Assange's fears about being extradited to the US – the real reason he took refuge in the Embassy – were laughed at.

In 2010 Assange stated: “The big risk, the risk we have always been concerned about, is onwards extradition to the United States. And that seems to be increasingly likely.”

Now that the indictments from the US have come, will those who rubbished Julian's concerns have the good grace to admit they were wrong, and that his flight to the Ecuadorian Embassy was justified?

Among those who owe Assange an apology is Emma Arbuthnot, the senior district judge, who in February 2018 said she did not find Assange's fears of extradition to the US were “reasonable.”

But they were, as yesterday's events prove.

Regarding the Swedish angle, we know from leaked emails the pressure put on the Swedes by the British authorities not to drop the investigation into Assange. “Don't you dare get cold feet!!!” the Swedes were told. 

It's hard to believe that similar exhortations weren't made again following Assange's removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy and lo and behold on Monday it was announced that prosecutors in Sweden have asked the courts to detain Assange in absentia as part of an investigation into rape allegations.

Of course rape allegations are serious. Yet how many ‘liberal’ commentators have been talking or writing of Assange being “charged with rape” or “fleeing rape charges” or even call him “a rapist”- when it wasn't factually correct?  The old legal principle ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is thrown out of the window when Assange is concerned. It's not just a case of ‘guilty as charged’, with Assange it's ‘guilty even though there has been no charge’.

The great ‘crime’ of Julian – and the reason he'll probably never be at liberty again, was to pull back the curtain to show us what was behind it. To reveal what our governments, which we pay for, were doing in our name. He exposed Western war crimes. He showed us what was really going on. He published information which we, as taxpayers, had every right to know. He was Tobermory, the talking cat, in Saki's classic short-story.

Yet while Assange languishes in jail, and faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars, those who planned the most heinous of war crimes, such as the illegal invasion of Iraq which led to the deaths of one million people and the rise of the genocidal death cult Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), go free.

Even if you think the founder of WikiLeaks should face some form of punishment or penalty for publishing leaked documents, you cannot honestly maintain that sentences of up to 175 years in jail are proportionate. Assange is being destroyed to deter others from following in his path.

If journalists and politically-minded ‘celebrities’ stay silent on this great injustice, this crime against the profession they claim to represent, this crime against the truth and against common humanity, then they should kindly spare us their ‘outrage’ on other issues.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/460177-assange-charges-mainstream-journalists-o...

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One could suspect that "news providers" are

A) in the pocket of the authorities

B) annoyed at Assange for showing them how to do their job

C) plain hypocrites.

Assange remains in a UK jail after recently being sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching bail, but the WikiLeaks founder now faces up to 175 years in prison for what the US Department of Justice calls "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States."

Though additional charges against the 47-year-old were expected by those in support of and opposed to Assange, outrage and confusion from individuals, ranging from US politicians to fellow whistleblowers, was heard in response to the DoJ revealing he would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

Referencing the the Act's "US Code § 793," which deals with gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, told Sputnik things could get tricky because "there's no doubt that journalists, all the time — including Assange — obtain, and hold and possess classified information and disseminate it."

Responding to the indictment, WikiLeaks issued a statement, calling the move an "unprecedented attack on the global free press."

READ MORE:

https://sputniknews.com/cartoons/201905251075321542-assange-prosecuted-e...

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Assange’s health had already “significantly deteriorated” during the nearly seven years he spent inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and has continued to get worse over the seven weeks he has spent in Belmarsh, WikiLeaks said in a statement on Wednesday.  

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/460594-wikileaks-assange-prison-hospital/

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, but history would soon intervene. The Nazis were on the rise in his native Germany, and the Jewish-born Einstein was targeted for assassination. He moved to the United States in 1933, and worked at Princeton University in New Jersey for the rest of his days. There he became a central figure in the fight to curtail the use of the atom bomb, and a strong voice against racism and nationalism.

--------------

The Christian Nazis came to power in Australia, in the USA and in the UK. Assange never won the Nobel Prize but who cares? His participation in disseminating the truth about governments is worth far more than ten of those. His ability to penetrate the best encrypted secrets is beyond mere mortal. This is why they are killing this genius — Assange. We salute you, Julian. 

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Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer Per Samuelson has told the press that “Assange’s health situation on Friday was such that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him.”

This jarring revelation has been reported by a small handful of outlets, but only as an aside in relation to Sweden refusing Samuelson’s request for a postponement of a scheduled hearing regarding Assange’s detention en absentia for a preliminary investigation of rape allegations. The fact that the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder is so ill that he can’t converse lucidly is itself far more significant than the postponement refusal, yet headlines mentioning Samuelson’s statement focus on the Swedish case, de-emphasizing the startling news from his lawyer.

As of this writing I’ve been able to find very few news outlets reporting on this at all, the most mainstream being a Reuters article with the very tame headline “Swedish court rejects delay of Assange hearing over ill-health: lawyer”.

The Sydney Morning Herald also covered the story without even mentioning illness in headline, instead going with “Swedish court rejects effort to delay Assange hearing”. The much smaller alternative media outlet World Socialist Website has been the only outlet I’ve found so far which reports on Samuelson’s statement in anything resembling its proper scale, publishing a good article titled “Despite Assange’s ill-health, Swedish court rejects delay to hearing” a few hours ago.

This news has been so under-discussed and under-appreciated as of this writing that I didn’t find out about it until hours after the story broke, and I’m very plugged in to both alternative media commentary and WikiLeaks-related news. A report that Julian Assange was so sick he could barely speak all the way back on Friday and we still have no news about how he’s doing now should be hugely significant for everyone who cares about Assange, press freedom, government transparency or peace activism.

Another part of this story which has gone completely uncovered in all English-language media as of this writing is the news that Assange has actually been transferred to the hospital wing of Belmarsh prison. This was reported by the Swedish outlet Upsala Nya Tidning, a newspaper published in the same district court Assange is scheduled to call in to for his hearing. The report was also based on a statement to the press by Per Samuelson.

The article reports the following, per machine translation:

“Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer wants the arrest hearing on Monday in Uppsala to be postponed. According to the lawyer, who has now visited his client in British prison, Assange is admitted to the medical department and was unable to make a call.

Last Friday, Assange’s Swedish defender, lawyer Per E Samuelson, visited his client in prison. In a letter to Uppsala District Court, the lawyer says that they met for just under two hours. According to the lawyer, Assange’s state of health at the meeting was such that ‘a normal conversation with him was not possible’. Julian Assange is said to have been taken to the prison’s ward, but there is no more detailed information about his state of health.”

This story was picked up from Upsala Nya Tidning by Danish new agency Ritzau and published in the outlet Politiken, with the title (per machine translation) “Weakened Assange hospitalized in London prison: ‘Impossible to have a normal conversation with him’”. These news outlets are to my understanding as reputable as any other mainstream western outlet, yet they remain the only publications I’ve been able to find which are reporting that Assange has been hospitalized. This is absolutely bizarre.

I’ve emailed Per Samuelson with a request to confirm the news that Assange has been hospitalized. I’ll update this article if I hear back.

For Assange’s supporters, one of the many frustrating things about his imprisonment has been the way he’s been cut off from the usual means which used to be used to inform the public about his well being.  It used to be that news reports could be easily confirmed or refuted by people who had consistent access to Assange in some way by sources like the WikiLeaks Twitter account, but the people who operate that account don’t have ready access to him anymore.

Now we’re seeing all sorts of rumors circulating about how Assange is faring in prison, and it gets difficult to sort out fact from fiction. It appears that it would be difficult to find a more reliable source on the state of his health than his own lawyer, however.

It has long been an established fact that Assange was in failing health while trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; doctors who visited him published an article with the Guardian in January 2018 titled “We examined Julian Assange, and he badly needs care — but he can’t get it”. Renata Avila, an activist and author who has worked with and written about WikiLeaks, tweeted in response to the new revelations, “He needed urgent assistance after his expulsion from the Embassy.

Instead, he was not allowed to receive adequate medical treatment. In the case of Emin Huseynov (1 y @ Swiss Embassy) it took at least a month of treatment to go back to normal. Imagine after 7 years! Brutal.”

We have been watching the slow-motion assassination of Julian Assange. They have been choking him to death by tactical psyops, siege tactics, and wilful neglect as surely as if they placed a noose tied around his neck, not just in Belmarsh Prison but in the embassy as well.

The only difference between his execution and someone on death row is the same as the difference between covert and overt warfare, which makes sense because the intelligence, judicial and military agencies who are carrying out his death sentence operate within the same power structure which carries out war. First came the smears (propaganda), then came the siege (sanctions), and they staged their coup (dragged him out of the embassy) and now they’ve got him in their clutches and they can do what they want behind closed doors. That’s how you kill a nation while still looking like a nice guy, and that’s how they’re killing Assange.

Shout this from the rooftops.  Whether this media blackout is self-imposed or perhaps the result of the malicious use of a D-notice, we have to use everything in our power to get this information into the mainstream, and get people asking questions of the press and their local members about what the Dickens is going on in Belmarsh prison right now.  Assange’s life may depend on it.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/05/30/assange-hospitalized-in-belmarsh-pri...

The ABC (Australian Broacasting Corporation) has an article:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-30/julian-assange-misses-court-session-due-to-health-problems/11165794

Nothing on other Australian media.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for News Corp, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Daily Telegraph reader.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

The Australian federal police have raided the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst investigating a leaked plan to allow government spying on Australians.

On Tuesday police executed a warrant investigating the “alleged unauthorised disclosure” of information they claimed “undermines Australia’s national security”.

The warrant from an ACT magistrate gave police authority to search the home, computer and mobile phone of the News Corp Sunday titles’ political editor.

The raid prompted outrage from News Corp Australia, which labelled it a “dangerous act of intimidation” targeted at public interest reporting.

In April 2018 Smethurst reported that the heads of the defence and home affairs ministries had discussed draconian new powers to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on Australian citizens for the first time.

Under the mooted plan, spies would be allowed to secretly access emails, bank accounts and text messages with approval from the defence and home affairs ministers.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/04/federal-police-ra...

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