Sunday, March 31, 2024
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massive widespread vaccination, masking and lockdowns seem to be overkill, from what knowledge we do have. Back when we made choices about risk, crazy people said 'let's lock up HIV positive people in a quarantine kind of situation. Let's make sure that they're not intimate with other people". Instead, every single person had to assess risk, very serious risk, for him, her or themselves and we did.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Excellent, accurate summary of what's going on - Prof. Marjorie Cohn: The Politicized Prosecution of Julian Assange
Prof. of Law, Marjorie Cohn on Assange
Julian Assange is charged with 17 counts
of alleged, violations of the Espionage
Act, based on obtaining, receiving,
possessing and publishing National Defense
information. He's accused of recruiting
sources and soliciting confidential
documents just by maintaining the
Wikileaks website that stated that it
accepted these materials. Assange is
also charged with one count of
conspiracy to commit computer intrusion
with intent to facilitate whistleblower
Chelsea Manning's acquisition and
transmission of classified information
related to the National Defense of the
United States. The basis for the indictment
Assange's lawyers told the two judge
panel of the high court on February 20th,
is WikiLeaks exposure of criminality on
the part of the US Government on an
unprecedented scale.
Assange is charged for revealing war crimes.
committed by the United States in Iraq Afghanistan
and Guantanamo Bay. The indictment has
nothing to do with Hillary Clinton and
the 2016 election or with Swedish
allegations of sexual misconduct which
have been dropped. Wikileaks revealed the Iraq War
logs which were 400,000 field reports including 15,000
unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians as
well as systematic rape torture and
murder, after US forces handed over
detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture
Squad. The Revelations also included the
Afghan war diary, 990,000 reports of more
civilian casualties by Coalition forces
than the US military had reported.
In addition Wikileaks revealed
the Guantanamo files, 779 secret reports with evidence that
150 innocent people had been held at
Guantanamo Bay for years and 800 men and
boys had been tortured and abused in
violation of the Geneva conventions and
the convention Against torture and other
cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.
Wikileaks also revealed the notorious
2007 collateral murder video, in which a
US Army Apache attack helicopter
targeted and killed 11 unarmed civilians
in Baghdad including two Reuters
journalists and a man who came to rescue
the wounded. Two children were injured
and that video contains evidence of war
crimes prohibited by the Geneva
conventions.
And Wikileaks exposed cable-gate which were
251,000 confidential US state department
cables that disclosed corruption,
diplomatic scandals and spy affairs
on an international scale. According to
the New York Times, they told the
“... unvarnished story of how the Government
makes its biggest decisions, the
decisions that cost the country most
heavily in lives and money.”
These were the most important
revelations of criminal US state
behaviour in history.
Assange attorney Mark Summers
argued to the high court panel:
“Julian Assange is asking the UK
high court to review issues of treaty
obligations, human rights violations and
political persecution”. So let's look at
some of these appellate issues that
Julian Assange wants the high court to
review. First of all, Article 4 sub one,
of the extradition treaty between the US
and the UK, does not allow extradition
for political offenses. Espionage is the
quintessential political offense. Assange’s
Attorney, Edward Fitzgerald told the
panel, “The gravamen and defining legal
characteristic of each of the charges is
thus an alleged intention to obtain or
disclose US state secrets in a manner
that was damaging to the security of the
US state, which makes them political
offenses.” Assange's lawyers wrote.
The defense claims it was an abuse of
process for the United States to pursue
extradition of Assange for a political
offense.
The US argued that the UK
extradition act, does not contain an
explicit exception for political
offenses. But the defense said that the
political offense exclusion, is an age old
prohibition, found in virtually every
US extradition treaty. It is included in
UK treaties with 156 out of 158 countries.
Fitzgerald said you can't infer a deliberate
intention to forbid extradition for political
offenses, just from the absence of a
explicit language in the extradition act
and since the exception for political
offenses is not specifically included in
the extradition act. UK District Judge
Vanessa Baraitser didn't fully consider
that issue in her ruling after Assange's
extradition hearing and I should say
that Baraitser denied extradition but not
based on the political offense issue,
rather it was based on the likelihood
that Assange would commit suicide
because of his frail mental health, if he
were extradited to the United States and
held in really egregious isolated
conditions.
Article 4 sub 3 of the extradition treaty
forbids extradition if the request is
politically motivated and not made in good faith.
Assange's lawyers wrote that “this prosecution is
motivated by matters other than the
proper and usual pursuit of Criminal
Justice. It is motivated instead by a
concerted intent to destroy or inhibit
the publishers of evidence of state
criminal ability and thereby put a stop
to the process of investigating
Prosecuting and preventing such
International crimes in the
future. “ One of the judges on the panel
asked the defense for more information
on this point, they seemed very
interested in it. Attorney Summers argued
to the panel that although the Wikileaks
revelations at issue, in the indictment
occurred in 2010 to 2011.
Assange wasn't indicted until 2018
to 2019. There was a secret indictment
during the Trump Administration in 2018
and then it became public in
2019. And that was because Wikileaks
revealed CIA spying Tools in 2017 known
as Vault 7, which enabled the CIA to tap
into people's cell phones and smart TVs,
turning them into listening devices. Those
revelations of the CIA spying program
infuriated Trump's CIA director Mike Pompeo,
who denounced Wikileaks as a :
“Hostile Non-State Intelligence Service”.
That designation would allow the CIA to act without the
knowledge of Congress, it was a way to
circumvent Congress. US officials drew up
plans to kidnap and or kill Assange, as Kevin
mentioned.
The justice department expedited the
indictment of Assange to facilitate prosecution
once he was sent by ‘extraordinary’ rendition
to the United States. ‘Extraordinary’
rendition involves sending an individual
to another country without legal process,
usually for purposes of torture.
“This prosecution only emerged
because of that rendition plan”, Summers
said. In addition, extradition based on
‘political opinion’ is forbidden under the
1985 supplementary treaty. The judicial
branch, the courts, have the authority
to consider whether an extradition
request is motivated by a desire to
punish a person for his or her political
opinion. Exposing state criminality is a
political act / opinion.
Assange's legal team wrote in its renewal,
skeleton for the appeal, “It is acknowledged by
courts globally that prosecution for
exposing and challenging state level
pervasive criminality amounts to
persecution for reasons of political
opinion.” They wrote, “publicly calling out
a state for human rights abuses can also
constitute an act of political decent, a
political opinion. As his defense team wrote in its
closing submissions, “Assange’s political
opinions that led to his indictment
included his exposure of crimes against
humanity and accountability for such
crimes as well as his belief in
political transparency, as a means to
accomplish Democratic
accountability and his anti-war
anti-imperialism beliefs.
Inditing Assange after Wikileaks
expose of Vault 7 in 2016, six years after
Wikileaks 2010, 2011 revelations of war crimes, is further
evidence that Assange was charged for his political opinions.
“The collateral murder video is
the most important revelation since Abu
Ghraib.” Summers told the panel and of course
Abu Ghraib was that notorious prison in
Baghdad where US military and CIA forces,
tortured Iraqis and when those gruesome
photographs were leaked it became public
all over the world and so Summers says
that the collateral murder video is the
most important revelation since Abu
Ghraib. The cables Assange published
disclosed extrajudicial assassinations,
that means without out any legal process
at all, illegal basically. Extrajudicial assassinations.
rendition, torture, dark prisons and drone killings.
Summers said the Guantanamo files revealed a colossal
criminal act. The defense pointed out
that Wikileaks revelations actually
saved lives. After Wikileaks published
evidence of Iraqi torture centers
established by the United States States,
the Iraqi government refused President
Barack Obama's request to grant immunity
to US troops who committed criminal and
civil offenses there. As a result Obama
had to withdraw US forces from Iraq. So
Julian Assange and Wikileaks actually,
did a major service, by preventing more
killing in Iraq.
Marjorie Cohn, a Professor of Law Emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is Dean of the People's Academy of International Law and a member of the National Advisory Board of Assange Defense. She is co-host of the nationally broadcast Law and Disorder radio show and writes a regular column for Truthout.
