In the book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News From the Revolutionary War to The War On Terror, authors Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong assert that “The mainstream corporate media is one of the chief propagators of American exceptionalism and innocence...the narratives of American exceptionalism and American innocence work together to serve white supremacy, empire, capitalism, and the US war machine.” Jacqueline Luqman talks to author Danny Haiphong about what this means in relation to real life issues and policy today.

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https://therealnews.com/stories/american-exceptionalism-and-american-inn...

Assange was due to be released from Belmarsh maximum security prison in London on Sunday, but a judge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court told the 48-year-old on Friday there are “substantial grounds” to believe he would “abscond again.”

Anderson, the former playboy model turned activist, who has been a long term advocate for Assange’s release, told ITV’s Good Morning Britain show on Monday that her “dear friend” was right to seek asylum because his “life is at risk.”

I visited him in Belmarsh and it’s not a place you want to go visit… I care a great deal about Julian and he’s been psychologically tortured, that’s been talked about in the UN.

WikiLeaks and Assange’s mother Christine criticized Friday’s court proceedings, saying the judge had refused bail before the defense team had a chance to even request it.After her recent visit, Anderson claims the Australian looks “unhealthy.”

Assange was arrested in April at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he spent seven years under asylum, fearing extradition for publishing US government secrets. He was sentenced in May to 50 weeks in jail, ostensibly for skipping bail in 2012.

The extradition hearing will start on February 25, 2020, after British Home Secretary Sajid Javid signed off on the US request in June.

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https://www.rt.com/news/469411-anderson-assange-life-risk/

Julian Assange, the founding editor of Wikileaks, is being detained in a British top-security prison indefinitely. But in the view of his distraught father, the incarceration of Assange has a deliberate purpose – to kill him.

John Shipton flew to Britain from Sydney, Australia, earlier this month in the hope of seeing his 48-year-old son released from jail. Assange was due for release this week on September 22 because his sentence for a bail infringement had been served out on that date.

Instead, a British judge ruled on September 13 that Assange must remain in prison, claiming that he was likely to “abscond”. He will be held in remand while hearings are made next year for an extradition request by the American government to the British authorities.

Meanwhile, Assange’s health is rapidly deteriorating. His body weight has shrunk by 15 kgs, according to his father. He is also being denied proper access to his legal team in order to prepare a defence case against extradition.

A UN special rapporteur on torture visited the prisoner back in May and concluded then that Assange was showing the signs of psychological torture. The UN report called for his immediate release.

“They are trying to murder my son,” said Assange’s father, John Shipton, in an interview with this author. He added that the British judges are acting with “insouciant malice” in a deliberate attempt to destroy the mental and bodily health of the Australian-born publisher.

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https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201909241076880259-assange-destroyed-...

Despite what you might read in the millions of stories written on Julian Assange’s alleged crimes against women, some of the people genuinely harmed by his arbitrary detention have been rape survivors. Dr Lissa Johnson explains.

On Friday 13th September, a Westminster Magistrates court ruled that Julian Assange should remain in prison indefinitely, after his sentence of imprisonment came to an end on September 22nd. The judgement is the latest instalment in a long campaign of judicial persecution, harassment and state-sanctioned abuse, as assessed by the Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Nils Melzer. 

The ruling, according to Wikileaks, violated due process on the simple grounds that the hearing was a non-public technical hearing which did not relate to bail. The judge, it seems, issued her decision pre-emptively, before even hearing any evidence from Julian Assange’s lawyers. When the court asked Julian Assange if he understood what was going on, he replied, “Not really”. 

UK MP Chris Williamson tweeted, “Britain is increasingly behaving like a tin-pot dictatorship.”

This act of judicial overreach took place against a backdrop of reports from Julian Assange’s family, friends, and the UN Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, backed by assessments from specialist medical and psychiatric experts, that Julian Assange’s health is deteriorating rapidly under maximum security lockdown in Belmarsh prison, such that he could die as a result. Julian Assange is emaciated, ill and traumatised, stripped of his legal and human rights while held in solitude, suffering the effects of years of arbitrary detention and psychological torture.

To add insult to injury, these abuses are being inflicted based on disingenuous legal concoctions surrounding the already disingenuous Swedish investigation that gave rise to his imprisonment. The bail infringement charge associated with the Swedish investigation, for which Julian Assange was initially imprisoned in Belmarsh, is itself illegal under international law. It was issued in the context of political asylum, which renders the bail infringement null and void. 

In other words, the UK government has been locking Julian Assange up illegally. Which makes the recent decision to extend his incarceration even more alarming, in terms of its wider implications for the rule of law and the right to a fair trial. 

Rather than take Julian Assange’s asylum into account, or describe the background to the disgraceful state of legal affairs imposed upon him, the Westminster judge instead cast Julian Assange’s history of political asylum as “absconding”. Such was her justification for condemning him to indefinite incarceration, with all the potentially lethal consequences that ongoing detention entails.

Either the judge doesn’t know the background to Julian Assange’s case, or she chose to ignore the fact that Julian did not ‘abscond’ from Sweden at any time. Julian Assange was granted permission to leave Sweden in 2010. He always offered to return if Sweden would guarantee protection from onward US extradition. Sweden always refused. 

Like every turn in the Swedish investigation, this latest development is built upon years of misleading and counterfactual public narratives. It serves not only to help deliver Julian Assange into US hands, but to break him psychologically and physically and tar him with baseless smears, as Nils Melzer has detailed. 

The truth is that Sweden has not even charged Julian Assange with anything from which he could abscond. The legal threat hanging over Julian Assange is, and has always been, US retribution for exposing state-corporate crime. Sweden can’t even make up its mind whether it has enough material to keep its investigation alive, after all these years.

Earlier this month, Sweden’s Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, Eva-Marie Persson, announced that she had re-interviewed several witnesses from 2010. Why? Persson said that the interviews would help her “decide how to proceed with the case”. That is, whether to close it or whether to continue conducting further enquiries. 

Nine years on, with the matter still in the initial investigation stage, prosecutors aren’t even sure whether they have grounds for further enquiries, let alone a case, doubling back to square one to start again, trying to scratch up reasons to persist.

This is the paper-thin legal pretext for locking Julian Assange in Belmarsh Supermax and torturing him within an inch of his life. It is as threadbare now as it has always been. 

Given that the stakes involved are a human being’s life and liberty, all of our freedom of speech, and rule of law, the moral elasticity of well-intentioned and well-informed citizens looking on is growing increasingly strained. The confected sugar-coating of ‘Swedish justice’ is wearing transparently thin, giving way to the bitter reality of a brutal political persecution.

On July 28th, Women Against Rape wrote, “Once again women’s fury and frustration at the injustices we face is being manipulated by governments for their own purposes… We cannot condone the way rape allegations against an individual continue to be used to pursue a political agenda intent on hiding rape, torture and murder committed by the state.”

Abuse

The question any self-respecting onlooker must be asking right now is not ‘will Julian Assange abscond?’ or ‘what else can Swedish prosecutors dig up?’. It is ‘does Julian Assange deserve to die in jail while Swedish prosecutors dither like no prosecutors have dithered before, so that war criminals can get away with murder?’ 

Similarly, in response to the latest travesty of justice in a UK court, the pressing question is, ‘why have the litany of legal travesties in Sweden and the UK gone un-investigated since 2010?’ 

The fact is that Julian Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in Britain’s Guantanamo, alongside convicted murderers, based on not only a legally null and void bail infringement, but a bail infringement attached to an investigation whose sole piece of physical evidence against him was an unused condom.

Julian Assange must be the only man in Britain under maximum security lockdown based on the ‘evidence’ of an unused condom. If not, we’re all in trouble. If so, we’re all still in trouble.

The question is not ‘should Julian Assange remain in jail?’ It is ‘why did a court ever accept as evidence something so clearly counterfeit as a condom that no-one had ever worn, laying the groundwork for the inhuman ‘bail-skipping’ and ‘absconding’ punishments that Julian faces now? How could an international arrest warrant have ever been issued on that basis? Why wasn’t someone somewhere grilled over faking evidence?’

And why persist for nine years with an investigation whose only other key piece of ‘evidence’ is an unsigned, unendorsed statement from a woman who insisted that she had not been raped, that she felt “rail-roaded” by police and that the police had “made up” the allegations? 

A likely answer, of course, is that in 2010 Julian Assange was the subject of a multi-agency US manhunt, stemming from his publishing activities, which had exposed prima facie evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the point of view of that manhunt, a Swedish arrest would have been a windfall gain. Just as the latest UK judgement has been.

Among US allies, Sweden is noteworthy for its bilateral treaty with the United States, enabling fast track US extradition, known as ‘temporary surrender’. Sweden also has a history of rendering suspects to the US at the CIA’s request, culminating in the suspects’ torture. In fact, UN committees have warned of Sweden’s “total surrender of power” to US authorities.

That total surrender of power offers at least one hypothesis as to why the Swedish investigation has been so riddled with damning legal irregularities and improprieties that the former Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association described the legal conduct of both Sweden and the UK as “deplorable”, noting that she fears that the investigation has damaged the reputation of the Swedish judicial system.

Since Julian Assange’s arrest in London and imprisonment in Belmarsh prison, the UK judicial system has followed right along behind.

UN Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer adds that the conflagration of legal aberrations amounts to “a relentless campaign of judicial persecution… [involving]abuse of the judicial system in order to try to extradite [Julian Assange] to the US”. 

Stockholm’s former Chief District Prosecutor and Director of the Stockholm Regional Prosecution Authority, along with a retired judge from the Svea Court of Appeals, have similarly denounced the longstanding impropriety of Sweden’s legal and prosecutorial conduct regarding Julian Assange.

In short, the Swedish investigation itself, and everything emanating from it, including Julian Assange’s current incarceration, is an abuse. It is an abuse of power, of political process, of legal process, and of the public emotions and experiences surrounding rape and sexual assault.

Ultimately, it is an abuse of rape survivors themselves. It is survivors’ trauma, pain and plight that has been exploited for political gain, using manufactured crimes in Sweden to provide cover for the actual crimes that Julian Assange exposed, including torture and civilian slaughter.

The decision to arbitrarily extend Julian Assange’s sentence in Belmarsh sits atop that legacy of abuse by reaping the fruits of an endeavour that has weaponised rape myths, and the issue of sexual consent, in order to criminalise journalism at the expense of rape survivors.

In its reliance on an unused condom, the Swedish investigation and UK imprisonment are founded upon not just bogus evidence but dangerous fodder for toxic rape myths: namely that women will fabricate evidence such as unused condoms in order to cry rape. It is the last thing that rape survivors need. Victims and survivors need to be believed and taken seriously. 

Moreover, to get behind the Swedish investigation, and all that it has spawned, is to stand upon ground over which women’s consent, the cornerstone of progressive rape laws, has been well and truly trampled. 

In light of the British courts’ determination to use a bogus ‘rape’ investigation to lock a journalist in jail and throw away the key, it is time for those who know what is going on to set the record straight about the Swedish matter, and all its implications. Women deserve to be angry that so much travesty has been perpetrated in their name. And men alongside them.

read more:

https://newmatilda.com/2019/09/23/weaponising-rape-myths-and-consent-in-...

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Tinpot dictatorship? = NAZI.

Detained in a high-security prison, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange risks being extradited to the United States where he faces jail for disclosure of state secrets. Meanwhile, concerns about his health are mounting. 

Sputnik spoke to Aymeric Monville, a member of WikiJustice, to find out about Julian Assange’s incarceration conditions.

Sputnik: What can you tell us about Julian Assange’s health?

Aymeric Monville: According to his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, since June 14, Julian Assange has been in Belmarsh prison, which has a medical wing. Curiously, no attempts have been made to get Julian out of prison for health reasons, a measure that the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet enjoyed in the United Kingdom. Nils Melzer, UN rapporteur on torture, said in May that Julian Assange’s state of health was absolutely deplorable, that he had been the victim of psychological torture, and that he was likely to die in prison.

Sputnik: Two new witnesses have recently been questioned in Sweden. Julian Assange is charged with a rape allegedly committed in 2010. What’s new in the investigation?

Aymeric Monville: He had been criticised for not using a condom during a sexual relationship, which, according to Julian Assange, was by mutual agreement. At first, prosecutor Eva Finné had closed the case. Then it was reopened without adding any new documents, which is totally illegal. Then it was closed again and opened for the third time at the request of a Swedish lawyer named Claes Borgström. This individual is a partner at the same law firm as Thomas Bodström, former Swedish Minister of Justice involved in one of the worst stories of extradition to secret CIA prisons; he was involved in the cases of Agiza and al-Zreri.

Since 2010, Le Canard Enchaîné has described this process as “insidious old-fashioned machinations” of the special services. According to Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, one of the plaintiffs is part of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an American organisation jointly founded by the Democratic and Republican parties.

This whole Swedish case is extremely suspicious. Just after he had published the famous ‘Collateral Murders’ video, one of the most important proofs of what US imperialism is in Iraq, Julian Assange went to Sweden where he fell into a trap.

Sputnik: Julian Assange’s prison term for “escaping justice” expired on 22 September, but a British judge has decided to keep him in custody. What are the reasons for that?

Aymeric Monville: He should have been released. But they keep him in custody to extradite him to the United States. What both the media and the lawyers don’t comment enough is the fact that Julian Assange can be sent to the United States at any time. Especially before Brexit, this can be done in accordance with European legislation providing for extradition.

Sputnik: What are the deadlines for Julian Assange?

Aymeric Monville: On 11 and 21 October, there will be two very important hearings, preparatory and administrative. We have had confirmation from Polish extradition specialists that these hearings will be aimed at preparing for the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. That’s why it’s essential to get involved, including by going to court because these hearings will be open to the public.

Sputnik: So, you’re calling on Yellow Vests to cross the Channel and support the founder of Wikileaks…

Aymeric Monville: The WikiJustice movement, which I represent, was born in the wake of the Yellow Vests movement, many participants of which want justice for Julian Assange. This case concerns everyone. Julian’s rights are totally violated; his detention is illegal since he is innocent of any crime. We need a popular intervention. The Yellow Vests movement rests a little on the principles of 1789. Let me recall the declaration of human rights and the principle of sovereignty which is essentially based on the nation. It is this nation, hating tyranny, that claims justice. And its citizens are ready to go assert their right to express their position on this matter.

Sputnik: You also ask citizens to write to Julian Assange. How can they do that?

Aymeric Monville: They should note his date of birth, 3 July 1971; then his confinement number, A9379AY. And then they should send all this to Belmarsh prison. The mail had been blocked for a month, and on 24 September, they announced that Julian had access to his correspondence again and that he had received more than a hundred letters. We should continue writing to him to demand proof that he’s alive. WikiJustice has received an SOS from Julian Assange written in Morse and a poem. In another letter, he claimed to be “in a very dark place now.” All this says we need to fight. The WikiJustice committee has become an association and we will get our own lawyers and doctors involved. We also want to rely on the United Nations to have an independent inquiry based on the foundations of international law that are constantly being violated in this case.

The views and opinions expressed by the speaker do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

The views and opinions expressed in the article do reflect those of Mr Leonisky.

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https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201910081076987752-we-received-a-message-in-morse-from-julian-assange---wikijustice-member/

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See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/20269

David Morales, owner of security contracting firm Undercover Global SL, allegedly ordered his employees to keep extensive records on anybody coming to meet with Assange during his nearly seven-year residency at the diplomatic compound, Spanish newspaper El Pais has reported.

Former employees at the firm told El Pais the CIA was also granted access to a web server where those records were stored, which included “profiles” containing all manner of personal information on the individuals. American and Russian visitors were reportedly given the highest priority, especially lawyers and those working in media.

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https://www.rt.com/news/470489-security-firm-embassy-assange/

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