A London court ruled Friday in favour of a US government appeal to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, overruling an earlier decision by a lower court to bar him from being sent to the United States amid fears that the mentally distressed journalist and activist may try to take his own life in a US jail.

The Justice Department is delighted by London High Court Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde's ruling in favour of the US government's appeal to undo a lower court's push to stop Julian Assange from being extradited.

 

"We are pleased by the decision," a Justice Department spokesperson told Sputnik. The spokesperson declined to elaborate.

 

Holroyde announced at a hearing Friday that the 50-year-old WikiLeaks founder could be extradited to the United States, reversing a January decision by UK district court judge Vanessa Baraitser that it would be "oppressive" to extradite him, saying that he might try to take his own life if imprisoned in America amid concerns over his mental health.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/20211210/us-justice-department-pleased-by-ruling-on-assange-extradition-1091423168.html

 

 

Free JULIAN NOW !!!!!

 

BREAKING: High Court decision “Grave miscarriage of justice,” says Julian Assange’s fiancée, as a UK court overturns an earlier decision blocking the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States | @StellaMoris1 #FreeAssangeNOW #AssangeCasepic.twitter.com/Jc98oAfvuP

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 10, 2021

 

Well, at least Julian looks a bit healthier.

RT:

The UK High Court has granted the US government’s appeal over the refusal to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, opening the door for his eventual trial on American soil on espionage charges.

In January, a district court denied the US extradition request, citing the vulnerable mental state of the publisher and the possibility that he would take his own life if subjected to brutal prison conditions in the US.

The High Court’s ruling is not final since it can be appealed. Assange’s fiancee, Stella Moris, called the decision “a grave miscarriage of justice.” The case has been remitted to the Westminster Magistrates Court.

The High Court said it was satisfied with the US lawyer’s assurances that the so-called Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) would not be applied to Assange when in US custody. An earlier refusal to extradite him was partially justified by the fact that he could be subjected to SAMs. The US team argued during appeal hearings that if the American side knew it was an issue, they would have offered assurances to the contrary during the original process.

SAMs are special restrictions that the US prison system may order for inmates deemed to be dangerous. They include isolation from other prisoners at a maximum security facility. Critics say they are dehumanizing and in some cases may amount to psychological torture.

Of course it’s all torture. Even putting the word “psychological” is false. There are easily measurable PHYSICAL effects of solitary confinement. It actually shrinks the brain. That’s a fact and it’s the reason the US government does it to people they hate. Julian Assange is a “threat” how? He’s going to stab someone with a shank?

 

There was never any question about this extradition. We live in a democracy, which means that the opinions or desires of the people are completely untethered from the actions of the government.

The UK is a proxy state of the US, which is itself a proxy state of international Jewry.

Justice does not exist because our nations are run by criminals.

It’s all just absolute kookery. The clown world meme is NOT overused.

Worldwide, more than 350 journalists are currently imprisoned for their work–including American journalist Austin Tice, who is detained in Syria. We must be relentless in shining a spotlight on attacks on journalists, demand accountability, & work to return the unjustly detained.

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) December 8, 2021

 

Jew Blinken tweeted that while his Jew-run government had an army of Jew lawyers in the UK finalizing the extradition of Julian Assange to face a lifetime of torture in our Jew justice system – for doing journalism.

Meanwhile, just go ahead and skim Austin Tice’s Wiki bio – he’s a Georgetown-educated former marine who snuck into Syria to issue reports supporting ISIS and promoting various Assad atrocity hoaxes. There is effectively a zero percent chance he’s not a CIA agent – and yet, you can guarantee he’s experiencing better treatment than Assange, and is likely to get a much fairer trial.

Everything that happens on this gay earth makes you want to smash your head against a brick wall.

(But don’t do that – stay calm, and read the Stormer. We’re going to keep you grounded in reality, no matter how bad the clowning gets.)

America is a satanic country and they will always embrace the most satanic option available.

 

Satanism is, above all else, an inversion of everything.

Right is wrong, good is evil, up is down, journalists are terrorists and terrorists are journalists.

Remember: this plan to throw Julian in solitary for the rest of his life for doing journalism is about outlawing journalism, and creating a chilling effect to make sure that there is not another Assange.

But it’s also about Julian himself. He’s only 50 years old. There is a lot of damage he could still do to ZOG if he was ever allowed on the loose.

 

 

 

https://www.unz.com/aanglin/shock-as-uk-sides-with-us-on-assange-extradition-and-torture-for-anti-establishment-journalist/

 

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free Julian Assange now....

The federal government has “raised the situation” of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s confinement with the UK and US, but has stopped short of calling for the Australian to be released.

The 50-year-old is wanted in the US over the publishing of thousands of secret US diplomatic and military files, some of which revealed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange is also accused of trying to recruit hackers to provide WikiLeaks with classified US information. If found guilty he could face up to 175 years’ imprisonment.

 

In the UK the High Court ruled on Friday he could be extradited to face 17 charges, after a lower court ruled Assange shouldn’t be sent to the US due to a real and “oppressive” risk of suicide in January.

Senior judges ruled that risk was mitigated by assurances from US authorities that the father of two wouldn’t be held in highly restrictive prison conditions.

Assange’s lawyers intend to challenge the court’s ruling with another appeal, this time in the UK’s Supreme Court.

Federal Independent MP Andrew Wilkie is calling on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to “end this lunacy” and demand the US and UK allow Assange to be released.

‘A hero, not a villain’

“Mr Assange should be looking forward to spending Christmas with his two young boys and his fiancee, but instead he’s facing a 175-year jail sentence and the very real possibility of living out his final days behind bars,” he said in a statement.

“He is a hero, not a villain, and journalism is not a crime.

“Again the United Kingdom proves it’s a lackey of the United States and that Australia is delighted to go along for the ride.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it respected the UK legal process and Australia was not a party to the case.

 

DFAT said it was monitoring Assange’s case, had offered him consular assistance and sought his consent to discuss his health situation with UK prison officials, but he hadn’t responded.

The department did not comment on Mr Wilkie’s call for the government to demand Assange be released.

 

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/people/2021/12/11/australia-assange-britain-america/

 

 

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free Julian Assange now....

 

 

 

BY GLENN GREENWALD

 

In a London courtroom on Friday morning, Julian Assange suffered a devastating blow to his quest for freedom. A two-judge appellate panel of the United Kingdom's High Court ruled that the U.S.'s request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial on espionage charges is legally valid. 

As a result, that extradition request will now be sent to British Home Secretary Prita Patel, who technically must approve all extradition requests but, given the U.K. Government's long-time subservience to the U.S. security state, is all but certain to rubber-stamp it. Assange's representatives, including his fiancee Stella Morris, have vowed to appeal the ruling, but today's victory for the U.S. means that Assange's freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances.

In endorsing the U.S. extradition request, the High Court overturned a lower court's ruling from January which had concluded that the conditions of U.S. prison — particularly for those accused of national security crimes — are so harsh and oppressive that there is a high likelihood that Assange would commit suicide. In January's ruling, Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected all of Assange's arguments that the U.S. was seeking to punish him not for crimes but for political offenses. But in rejecting the extradition request, she cited the numerous attestations from Assange's doctors that his physical and mental health had deteriorated greatly after seven years of confinement in the small Ecuadorian Embassy where he had obtained asylum, followed by his indefinite incarceration in the U.K. 

In response to that January victory for Assange, the Biden DOJ appealed the ruling and convinced Judge Baraitser to deny Assange bail and ordered him imprisoned pending appeal. The U.S. then offered multiple assurances that Assange would be treated "humanely" in U.S. prison once he was extradited and convicted. They guaranteed that he would not be held in the most repressive "supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado — whose conditions are so repressive that it has been condemned and declared illegal by numerous human rights groups around the world — nor, vowed U.S. prosecutors, would he be subjected to the most extreme regimen of restrictions and isolation called Special Administrative Measures ("SAMs”) unless subsequent behavior by Assange justified it. American prosecutors also agreed that they would consent to any request from Assange that, once convicted, he could serve his prison term in his home country of Australia rather than the U.S. Those guarantees, ruled the High Court this morning, rendered the U.S. extradition request legal under British law.

What makes the High Court's faith in these guarantees from the U.S. Government particularly striking is that it comes less than two months after Yahoo News reported that the CIA and other U.S. security state agencies hate Assange so much that they plotted to kidnap or even assassinate him during the time he had asylum protection from Ecuador. Despite all that, Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde announced today that “the court is satisfied that these assurances” will serve to protect Assange's physical and mental health. 

The effective detention by the U.S. and British governments of Assange is just months shy of a full decade. Ecuador granted Assange asylum in August 2012 on the ground that his human rights were imperiled by U.S. attempts to imprison him for his journalism. For the next seven years, Assange remained in that embassy — which is really a tiny apartment in central London — with no outdoor space other than a tiny balcony, which he typically feared using due to the possibility of assassination. Ecuador withdrew its asylum in 2019 after its sovereignty-protective president Rafael Correa was succeeded in office by the meek and submissive Lenin Moreno. Trump officials led by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Richard Grenell persuaded and coerced the new Ecuadorian president to withdraw Assange's asylum protection, clearing the way for London police to enter the building and arrest him on April 11, 2019. Ever since, Assange has been imprisoned in the high-security Belmarsh prison, described in the BBC in 2004 as “Britain's Guantanamo Bay.” He has thus spent close to seven years inside the embassy and two years and eight months inside Belmarsh: just five months shy of a decade with no freedom.

The British government justified Assange's 2019 arrest by pointing to pending charges of “bail-jumping": meaning that he sought and obtained legal asylum from Ecuador in 2012 rather than attend a scheduled hearing in a British court over whether he should be extradited to Sweden to be questioned about claims of sexual assault made by two Swedish women. Swedish prosecutors closed that investigation in 2017, citing the time that had elapsed. But once he was arrested, Assange was sentenced by a British judge on the bail-jumping charges to 50 weeks in prison, close to the maximum punishment allowed by law (one year). With the Swedish case closed, Assange was set to finally be free after he served that 50-week jail term.

Knowing Assange's release was finally imminent, the U.S. Government quickly acted to ensure he remained in prison indefinitely. In May 2019, it unveiled an 18-count felony indictmentagainst him for espionage charges, based on the role he played in WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables, which revealed multiple war crimes by the U.S. and U.K. as well as rampant corruption by numerous U.S. allies throughout the world. Even though major newspapers around the world published the same documents in partnership with WikiLeaks — including The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais and others — the DOJ claimed that Assange went further than those newspapers by encouraging WikiLeaks’ source, Chelsea Manning, to obtain more documents and by trying to help her evade detection: something all journalists have not only the right but the duty to their sourcesto do.

Because the acts of Assange that serve as the basis of the U.S. indictment are acts in which investigative journalists routinely engage with their sources, press freedom and civil liberties groups throughout the West vehemently condemned the Assange indictment as one of the gravest threats to press freedoms in years. In February, following Assange's victory in court, “a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups urged the Biden administration to drop efforts to extradite” Assange, as The New York Times put it. 

That coalition — which includes the ACLU, Amnesty International, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Committee to Protect Journalists — warned that the Biden DOJ's ongoing attempt to extradite and prosecute Assange is “a grave threat to press freedom,” adding that “much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.” Kenneth Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times that “most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day.” Shortly after the indictment was issued, I explained in a Washington Post op-ed why the theory on which the indictment was based “would make journalism a felony” (and indeed, just eight months after I wrote that op-ed warning of the dangers to all journalists, the Brazilian government copied the U.S. indictment of Assange and the theories it embraced in its unsuccessful effort to prosecute me for the reporting I did that exposed corruption by senior Brazilian security officials and prosecutors). “Brazil’s Attack on Greenwald Mirrors the US case against Assange,” was the headline used by the Columbia Journalism Review to condemn the charges against me as a blatant retaliatory act against my reporting.

But the Biden administration — led by officials who, during the Trump years, flamboyantly trumpeted the vital importance of press freedoms — ignored those pleas from this coalition of groups and instead aggressively pressed ahead with the prosecution of Assange. The Obama DOJ had spent years trying to concoct charges against Assange using a Grand Jury investigation, but ultimately concluded back in 2013 that prosecuting him would pose too great a threat to press freedom. But the Biden administration appears to have no such qualms, and The New York Times made clear exactly why they are so eager to see Assange in prison:

 

Democrats like the new Biden team are no fan of Mr. Assange, whose publication in 2016 of Democratic emails stolen by Russia aided Donald J. Trump’s narrow victory over Hillary Clinton.

 

In other words, the Biden administration is eager to see Assange punished and silenced for life not out of any national security concerns but instead due to a thirst for vengeance over the role he played in publishing documents during the 2016 election that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Those documents published by WikiLeaks revealed widespread corruption at the DNC, specifically revealing how they cheated in order to help Clinton stave off a surprisingly robust primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). WikiLeaks’ reporting led to the resignation of the top five DNC officials, including its then-Chair, Rep. Debbie Wassserman Schultz (D-FL). Democratic luminaries such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Al Gore's 2000 campaign chair Donna Brazile both said, in the wake of WikiLeak's reporting, that the DNC cheated to help Clinton.

Press freedom groups expressed indignation this morning over the U.K.'s ruling approving Assange's extradition. Rebecca Vincent, Director of International Campaigns and UK Bureau Director for the international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, said: “This is an utterly shameful development that has alarming implications not only for Assange’s mental health, but also for journalism and press freedom around the world.” The organizational statement issued this morning from Reporters Without Borders went further:

We condemn today’s decision, which will prove historic for all the wrong reasons. We fully believe that Julian Assange has been targeted for his contributions to journalism, and we defend this case because of its dangerous implications for the future of journalism and press freedom around the world. It is time to put a stop to this more than decade-long persecution once and for all. It is time to free Assange.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose Board I sit) issued a statement this morning which described the ruling as “an alarming setback for press freedom in the United States and around the world.” The group's Executive Director, Trevor Timm, said that “these proceedings, and today's ruling, are a black mark on the history of press freedom,” adding: "That United States prosecutors continued to push for this outcome is a betrayal of the journalistic principles the Biden administration has taken credit for celebrating.”

It is difficult at this point to avoid the conclusion that Julian Assange is not only imprisoned for the crime of journalism which exposed serious crimes and lies by the west's most powerful security state agencies, but he is also a classic political prisoner. When the Obama DOJ was first pursuing the possibility of prosecution, media outlets and liberal advocacy groups were vocal in their opposition. One thing and only one thing has changed since then: in the interim, Assange published documents that were incriminating of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and Democrats, as part of their long list of villains who they blamed for Clinton's defeat (essentially everyone in the world except Clinton and the Democratic Party itself), viewed WikiLeaks' reporting as a major factor in Trump's victory. 

That is why they and their liberal allies in corporate media harbor so much bloodlust to see Assange imprisoned. Julian Assange is a pioneer of modern journalism, a visionary who was the first to see that a major vulnerability of corrupt power centers in the digital age was mass data leaks that could expose their misconduct. Based on that prescient recognition, he created a technological and journalistic system to enable noble sources to safely blow the whistle on corrupt institutions by protecting their anonymity: a system now copied and implemented by major news organizations around the world. 

Assange, over the last fifteen years, has broken more major stories and done more consequential journalism than all the corporate journalists who hate him combined. He is not being imprisoned despite his pioneering journalism and dissent from the hegemony of the U.S. security state. He is imprisoned precisely because of that. The accumulated hostility toward Assange from employees of media corporations who hate him due to professional jealousy and the belief that he undermined the Democratic Party, and from the U.S. security state apparatus which hates him for exposing its crimes and refusing to bow to its dictates, has created a climate where the Biden administration and their British servants feel perfectly comfortable imprisoning arguably the most consequential journalist of his generation even as they continue to lecture the rest of the world about the importance of press freedoms and democratic values.

No matter the outcome of further proceedings in this case, today's ruling means that the U.S. has succeeded in ensuring that Assange remains imprisoned, hidden and silenced into the foreseeable future. If they have not yet permanently broken him, they are undoubtedly close to doing so. His own physicians and family members have warned of this repeatedly. Citizens of the U.S. and subjects of the British Crown are inculcated from birth to believe that we are blessed to live under a benevolent and freedom-protecting government, and that tyranny only resides in enemy states. Today's judicial approval by the U.K. High Court of the U.S.'s attack on core press freedom demonstrates yet again the fundamental lie at the heart of this mythology.

 

READ MORE:

 https://greenwald.substack.com/p/julian-assange-loses-appeal-british

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞!!!

The United States has imposed extensive human rights-related sanctions on dozens of people and entities tied to China, Myanmar, North Korea and Bangladesh, also adding Chinese artificial intelligence company SenseTime Group to an investment blacklist.

Canada and the United Kingdom joined the US on Friday in imposing sanctions related to human rights abuses in Myanmar, while Washington also imposed the first new sanctions on North Korea under President Joe Biden’s administration and targeted Myanmar military entities, among others, in action marking Human Rights Day.

“Our actions today, particularly those in partnership with the United Kingdom and Canada, send a message that democracies around the world will act against those who abuse the power of the state to inflict suffering and repression,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement.

 

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https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/us-news/2021/12/11/us-sanction-against-china/

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞!!!

 

 

The former Ecuadorian president, who hosted a show on RT Spanish, said that those going after Julian Assange want to discourage others from exposing war crimes. The prosecution is a total sham, he argued.

“It’s such a paradox that on the International Human Rights Day a tremendous attack was committed on the human rights of a journalist – for the sin of having told the truth,” Rafael Correa, who ruled Ecuador between 2007 and 2017, told in an interview to RT Spanish, where he hosted a talk show. 

A British High Court ruled on Friday that the WikiLeaks co-founder could be extradited to the US, where he is wanted on espionage charges.

Under Assange’s helm, WikiLeaks published troves of classified materials about US’ war in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a harrowing video of American helicopters gunning down civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

“War criminals are persecuting the one who denounced them,” Correa said, dismissing the case against Assange as “total hypocrisy.”

If Assange would have exposed the secrets of China, Russia or left-wing Latin American governments, including my government, he would have been praised by the international press, honored by US Congress and the British parliament. But because his actions were against the interests of the US, the hegemonic country, he was labeled a criminal.

Correa said that the goal of the prosecution was to scare others so that “nobody else dares to denounce the secrets of great powers.” He argued that war crimes should not be treated as protected state secrets. “The whole world must know about them. Such crimes must be punished.”

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/542890-rafael-correa-assange-case/

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞!!!

Australian opposition lawmakers have urged Prime Minister Scott Morrison to “end [the] lunacy” over Julian Assange’s imprisonment on alleged espionage charges and demand the US and UK release the WikiLeaks founder.

After a British court ruled on Friday that Assange could be extradited to the US, parliamentarians have called on Canberra, and Morrison in particular, to intervene during what Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt described to The Guardian as a “critical moment in the fight against suppression of press freedom.”

Assange’s persecution and our government’s inaction are chilling, and should worry everyone who cares about a free press or thinks that governments should protect their citizens.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) said the country was not a party to the case and would respect the British legal process. An unnamed DFAT spokesperson told the Australian Associated Press that the government had “raised the situation” with the US and UK regarding its “expectations of due process, humane and fair treatment, access to proper medical and other care, and access to [Assange’s] legal team.”

 

But Bandt told The Guardian that the government was “[sitting] on its hands and [doing] nothing” while an Australian citizen was “being prosecuted for publishing details of war crimes.”

The US wants Assange, 50, extradited to stand trial over an alleged conspiracy to obtain and publish classified information following WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the country’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If convicted, he faces a 175-year prison sentence.

Meanwhile, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie described Assange as a “hero” and called on Morrison to “end this lunacy” since “journalism is not a crime.” He criticized the UK for being a “lackey of the US” and blasted Canberra as being “delighted to go along for the ride.”

Tweeting that a “political response” was needed to get “justice”for Assange, Greens senator Janet Rice urged Foreign Minister Marise Payne to tell her US counterparts to “drop these absurd charges and end Assange’s torture.”

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/542911-mps-australian-government-inaction-julian-assange/

 

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞!!!