Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/12/21 Joe Lauria Explains Julian Assange’s Situation

Episode Date: November 20, 2021

Scott is joined by Joe Lauria of Consortium News. Lauria gives us a detailed account of Assange’s eventful past year. A British judge, who despite agreeing that Assange had violated the Espionage Act by publishing secrets handed to him, refused to extradite him to the U.S. out of concern for his safety. Lauria explains all of this and puts these events in a broader context.   Discussed on the show: “What’s next for Julian Assange?” (NewAge) Joe Lauria is the editor-in-chief at Consortium News. He is a former UN correspondent and wrote at the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal. You can follow him on Twitter @unjoe. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scott horton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing jo loria editor of consortium news dot com welcome back sir thank you very much scott good to be back with you happy to have you here what's next for julian

asange that's not just a question it's the name of your latest piece. So do tell, please. Well, I sketch out here five scenarios that could result from the high court hearing on 27 and 28 October. As your listeners know, the district judge Vanessa Baratza in January 4th of this year, judge that Assange should not be extradited to the United States. She legally discharged him, but then put him back in Belmarsh prison denying him bail, saying he was a flight risk. She discharged him on the basis of Article 91 of the U.S. U.S. U.K. extradition treaty, which says that a person should not be extradited from the U.K. to the U.S. if it would be oppressive to do so, and the law lays out that one person being requested who's overly or too dangerously suicidal and would be going to harsh prison conditions would result most likely in Assange taking his life.

life. So she said that that would probably happen. She accepted the testimony of the defense psychological experts in his September 20 extradition hearing, and that was supposed to be the matter, but the U.S. of course, filed an appeal. This was the Trump administration, which did it just a few days before Donald Trump left office. The Biden administration had every opportunity to drop this appeal in this case, but they have decided to go ahead with it. So the hearing was held on those two days at the end of October, and we're waiting the decision of the high court, two high court judges. There are five different possibilities. They can, of course, uphold the first court's decision of the district judge Baratza and dismiss the U.S. appeal, in which case

the U.S. would very likely go to ask the Supreme Court to look at it, or they could drop the case. We'll get into that. The high court can allow the U.S. appeal and overturn the order. not to extradite, which would probably mean that Assange's team would go to the U.K. Supreme Court. The high court can send the case back to magistrate's court with instructions on how to follow the law. This is interesting and a very likely possibility. It becomes more interesting. And as we know that the judge that decided not to extradite Assange has been promoted. She's no longer on the case.

So there would be a whole new judge there, which could bring a different outcome. because Baraitz actually still been there, could again decide not to extradite him. The court could also change something in the ruling but not affect its decision. And there's a fifth possibility that the two judges won't agree and they'll have to be a new high court panel

that would reconvene and re-hear the U.S. appeal. Yeah. All right now, so Joe, I mean, I think you hit on something really important there. This barrister, barrister, has been promoted, huh? Isn't that convenient? Very much so. It's very fishy.

The judge who recommended, there were two judges who recommended her promotion to the queen. And one of them is the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Ian Burnett. And Judge Burnett is one of the high court judges that has to make this decision. So he was involved in moving berates out of this case altogether. which opened up a whole new situation for Assange because there was every possibility that Beretsa would rehear evidence or re-examine it and come to the same conclusion not to extradite him.

But now we have a new judge. We have no idea who it's going to be. There are actually 51 district judges in London. It could be any one of those. It could possibly be the chief magistrate who is Paul Goldspring. That's his name. If he took it on, again, it would be a whole new set of eyes

and another judge, and it could come out the U.S. way this time. So it's very, very convenient to have gotten rid of Baraita by moving her on and promoting her to the circuit court. Of course, there's no proof it had anything to do with the Assange case, but one cannot help but wonder. Yeah. Well, I mean, I got to say, I was surprised that she ruled the way she ruled in the first place because even though her logic clearly follows and the expert testimony backs up her decision

and all of that, that it's such a political thing that it seems like all the pressure is to go ahead and hand him over. And yet she said, listen, I'm afraid that if I hand this guy over, that conditions in the American prison system are so harsh that he's going to slit his wrist. absolutely that's if you read her judgment it's quite disturbing the 99% of the way down there because she's or most of it because she's essentially agreeing with everything having to do with the espionage act indictment of assange and that in fact a journalist can be prosecuted for simply passively accepting documents and publishing them and this is very troubling and it has a very bad precedent that was set. But then towards the end, she's decided that based on the testimony of the defense

experts, the psychological witness, experts that Assange was not healthy enough to go, and that the American courts, there was a lot of testimony about the condition of sorry of American prisons, that they were too harsh. If you would put into special administrative measures, an extreme regime of isolation, that he would very likely commit suicide. So she, just followed the law 91 of the extradition act and said that she couldn't send him. It was a surprise that she did that, and it's not a surprise the U.S. appealed. Now, what the judges have to decide, these two high court judges, if they come to an agreement, they've got to decide to whether they, A, believe that Assange is too ill and too prone to suicide,

to be extradited, and then they have to believe American promises or assurances that they gave to the court after Baratza's judgment that Assange will not be put into extreme isolation in the U.S. prison. He will not be put into special administrative measures. He will receive health care and the U.S. prosecutor, James

Lewis, said in court that the United States has never broken a diplomatic assurance it's ever given in its history, which made a lot of people kind of raise their eyebrows. Therefore, the U.S.

should win. Lewis argued because the testimony of the main psychological witness for the defense was tainted because he'd withheld some information from the court, so it should be thrown out on a technicality. And two, we promise the Americans do that we won't throw a sergeant to these harsh prisons. So the court, the high court judges have to decide whether they believe that he is too ill, whether the testimony of the psychological expert should be thrown out on this technicality, whether they should also take into account other experts that the defense put up that said he was to will. It wasn't just this one Dr. Michael Coppulman.

There was Dr. Dealey, who was actually the biggest expert when it came to autism spectrum and Asperger's, which puts a person nine times more likely to commit suicide. And even the two defense expert witnesses, psychologists, testified that there was probably, he was probably on the artistic spectrum, maybe at the low end. So even the defense experts didn't disagree completely, although the Americans are trying to portray that, that there's a big difference between the testimonies of the two. And there certainly was. But even the defense witnesses agreed that he was on the artistic spectrum. So he's got psychological problems. The issue is whether they're strong enough and serious enough that he would commit suicide.

The Americans are trying to portray Assange as a malingerer, and he really isn't suicidal. He isn't that ill, and he has to go back, and we're not going to put him in extreme measures. And, of course, this is what the high court judges have to decide whether to believe the Americans or not. I'm sorry, this just sounds so much like some do. good or liberal activists saying in an American court setting that we can't send this guy back to Sudan? We don't

you know what their human rights record is like or something like that right but this is how the English talk about us Joe well they have a clear view it seems like especially when you do look at the US prison system and these

extreme measures like Sam's oh I'm not mocking them I'm mocking us it's just a hell of a truth man I hate it you know Yeah, it takes a lot for an extreme ally like Britain to say something like that. So she wouldn't berates or go against anything in the Espinage Act. In fact, at one point, and this came up in the High Court, too, the whole story of the plot to kill or kidnap Assange.

That came up in September 2020, testimony from UC Global, the Spanish security firm, hired by the Ecuador Embassy to protect Assange, and then contracted and co-opted by the CIA to actually spy on Assange to the point where they eventually got 24-7 live stream out of the embassy. Everything Assange did was being watched. Those employees, former employees of that company testified in the Spanish court against the CEO of that company who was being charged with violating Assange's rights, but their testimony was read in Assange's courtroom in September 2020. So this was already part of the Assange case in the lower court. way before Yahoo story came out at the end of August, which gave all of that to detail about how the CIA seriously discussed these plots.

We knew about him already, but it was fleshed out by Yahoo. That was mentioned in the High Court case. That could have been considered new evidence or additional evidence to what had already been introduced. In any case, the judges at the High Court know about these plots. This is another way to show that Assange should not be sent back to Sudan, because if you sent him back to Sudan, they were trying to kill him from Sudan. They were trying to kill him. So to use your analogy, the U.S. seriously thought about killing him or kidnapping him, renditioning him.

And this is an argument, obviously, for the defense, a strong one. The fact is they spied on his lawyers' discussions with him, his privileged conversations. This should have been thrown out a long time ago. any normal case it would have been. It shows just how far Britain is bending backwards the courts to accommodate the United States, which is not surprising when you know about the relationship between these two countries that she decided not to extradite him for medical reasons was a bit surprising, but she did the right thing.

It seems like the American States, she didn't. They're trying to overturn it. Yeah. Well, so this guy must have done something really bad for the government to want to get their hands on. Did he help Vladimir Putin overthrow Hillary Clinton or something like that, Joe? No, he did initially, and he was never charged with anything to do with the 2016 election, but he revealed U.S. war crimes and misconduct and corruption of other governments as well, not just the United States.

This is a very dangerous man to people who are committing these types of acts. criminals obviously commit crimes in secret if you're going to commit a war crime it's got to remain a secret you can't have some journalists coming around exposing that that brings down the entire edifice and undermines the legitimacy of the entire u.s. project imperial project their power you can't this guy is very very dangerous to the powerful interests that run the united states the people who were behind that war and they need to get him make an example of him but just to shut down WikiLeaks and to destroy him personally. And basically, they're doing that because he's still been in jail since April 2019

in a high security prison. And right now he's only on remand waiting for the decision on the extradition. He's not serving any sentence. He's not been convicted of any crime. He's been charged under the Espion Act. And on the Computer Intrusion Act, the conspiracy that commit computer intrusion, which was based on. testimony, false testimony of an Icelandic FBI informant who came forward in June of this year

to tell Icelandic magazine that he lied about it. So here's the decision the U.S. would have to make if they lose. And this is the most interesting scenario for me. If the judges at the high court say, we uphold the lower court decision, Assange's discharge. The U.S. has a decision to make right then. Do they decide go to the Supreme Court, keep this appeal going, or do they say, okay, we've lost, let's drop this. Now, I believe Joe Biden, if he continued to think the way he did when he was vice president, he would drop the case. Why do I say that? Because in December 2010, Biden was on Meet the Press. He was asked about Assange. He said, unless we can catch him red-handed stealing government documents, we really can't indict him. And that means they wouldn't

use the espionage act against him, but only intrusion into a computer. Guess what? The Obama administration never indicted Assange, meaning they did not have the evidence that he stole the documents. He only passively received them, as any journalist does, who gets stolen government material, classified, material, defense information. This is technically can be charged under the Espionage Act, but it's clearly a violation or a conflict anyway of the First Amendment, which is why nobody before Assange, no journalist had ever been indicted under the Espionage Act for publishing. So the Obama administration did not. not do it, the Obama and Biden administration.

Trump administration, driven by first by Pompeo, the CIA director initially of Trump, who was upset about the release of Vault 7, the largest leak of CIA materials in its history by WikiLeaks that which drove him to consider seriously killing him or kidnapping him. that they took the legal path to Trump administration rather than that extra-judicial one and they indicted Assange. That's why he's in the messy is right now. So now Biden would have to decide the Biden, Department of Justice, if they lose this appeal, do we continue this or do we drop it? And if, as I say, if they go along with what Biden's thinking was back in 2010, they'd have to drop it because they never had evidence of him stealing the documents. But, the Biden administration had a chance to drop this appeal, and they have not.

And that tells me to one thing, Scottner has to do what you just said about Putin. Assange has only been charged with publications in 2010, Iraq and Afghan war diaries, nothing to do with the 2016 election. However, politically, the 2016 election changes everything, because as the head of the Democratic Party, if Biden were to drop the case against Assange, if they lose the U.S. in the high court. He's the head of the party. It would be heresy for the fanatic members of the Democratic Party who continued to blame Assange for Trump,

who continued to blame Assange for colluding with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton and destroy her candidacy. When, in fact, all Assange did was published accurate, true information that led to the resignations of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other top DNC officials. So the documents were true It doesn't matter who gave them to WikiLeaks because they were true. It could have been Russia.

It could have been. And this doesn't matter because the documents were true. And Assange says and WikiLeaks says they never got anything on Trump, except some materials that had already been published. I do not believe WikiLeaks would have withheld Trump material to get Trump elected. And there was plenty of dirt on Trump already that came out. Some of it was true. A lot of it was in this phony, which all opposition research mostly is.

is phony dossier. So it wasn't as if Trump was out there without any negative publicity, and it was all weaklyaks that got him elected. But that's why Biden is under pressure from the Democratic Party, and he's also under pressure, no doubt, still from the CIA, who were still upset about the vault seven releases. So he would have to withstand intelligence and party pressure to not drop the case against Assange. And he could very easily say, look, I don't want interfere in the Department of Justice. I vowed that there will be no White House influence, so it's up to Merrick Garland, and I could very well be what this is about. It could come down to the Attorney General alone, deciding whether to continue with this case or not. And, of course,

he would have Democratic Party and intelligence service pressures on him. So the scenario of the U.S. losing is the most interesting because what exactly would the U.S. do? If the U.S. wins, U.S. lawyers have already said they're going to Supreme Court. The third. The The third scenario is the one we briefly mentioned. It goes back to the magistrates court, and now the new judge. There could be new evidence maybe introduced again about the CIA. It could be the whole thing to be reheard, and we're going back to square one. That's the third possibility.

Yeah. Okay, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott here for easyship.com. Man, who wants to use stamps.com? They're terrible. Their website is a disaster. I've been sending out tons of signed books to donors and friends lately, and it's clear. The only real alternative to standing in line for the 1990s technology at the post office is easyship.com.

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Now that you pissed him off, come at the king and miss and all of that, imagine the kind of damage that he could do in a good way, I mean, as a journalist. Were he to be a free man again to run WikiLeaks as he will? I mean, he, and now he's pissed, you know, presumably. You thought he was good at this job before. How about when vendetta time comes due, you know, I could see why they would figure that, well, as long as they've got them where they've got them, they'll do anything they can to just, you know, the punishment is the process. Sorry, Your Honor, we're just going to keep appealing this thing. Meanwhile, he's serving a sentence this whole time, you know?

Absolutely. He's in very bad health physically, too. And the thing is, that's another possibility, Scott, that the U.S. loses the whole thing. But this is not a guilty or innocent. This case, this is an extradition case. So therefore, there's no double jeopardy involved. Let's say the U.S. loses completely and Assange's discharge. James Lewis, the prosecutor for the U.S., said we could introduce a new extradition request. Keep it going.

They could put them again and get them arrested again, perhaps, or never have them released. They could immediately put in a new extradition request. The conservative government of Boris Johnson could say, yes, we accept this. and they start the ball rolling again. However, that would start to appear to be an improperly motivated extradition because he'd won one already completely gone through all the courts. Let's say the UK Supreme Court clears him to start this over again. And they are basically going after him if the judges will accept that

because of the revenge factor that we saw because of the Yahoo story, because of the Vault 7 releases. It's not for any crime that he was actually charged. with, which are only the 2010 releases. So if it can be shown that they're really just getting revenge against him for all of his releases, but also especially the DeVault 7 one is what started this revenge, then he's not being charged for, he's not being really asked for extradition for a crime that he committed. And they, a high, that's the lower court or a high court could say, okay, that's enough.

You can't keep asking for extradition. But why would they do that? As you just said, Scott, to keep him in prison until he, expires. Keep right now they're winning because he's not doing his job. He's not physically able to do it, not only because he's locked up, but because of his condition, his physical and mental condition. Weakleaks is also diverted almost all of its attention and resources to this case, to these cases, to paying the lawyers, to focusing on the legal strategy so that weak leaks has not been publishing documents at the rate that they were when it was run by

Assange. So right now the U.S. is winning. It's a winning strategy. All they want him to be is imprisoned and not working, as you say. And this, by the way, was envisioned by WikiLeaks released by Stratfor and some years ago in which they said, just keep hounding Assange from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, keep him in the legal morass. And this is what they're doing. They're going to try to tie this up in the courts just to keep him imprisoned. In fact, they may not want him at all. for him to stay in Britain, maybe to die in jail there, than to go to Alexandria, Virginia, to the Eastern District of Virginia court, where there would be a trial and the media would have to make a decision, the American major media, because the day he was arrested, they

said, well, we can't stand the guy, but, you know, you can't put a journalist in jail for publishing because that can come after us, some other administration someday. So that issue will come up again. If he's now on U.S. soil, in a court in Virginia, there will be more. attention on the case than there has been on this appeal in the American mainstream media, and then that would become a media circus and possibly a real problem for the U.S., so I think they'd prefer to stay in the jail in Britain. Yeah.

All right now, so, well, I don't want to undercut, you know, the actual allies that he does have, but isn't there a real problem with not just the mainstream media, but even in the alternative media people are afraid to defend this guy for whatever reason they refuse to yeah for whatever reason um fear i don't know fear will be except that some high level sources they no longer have access to um they just feel that uh if they're entrenched with the establishment their whole career i'm talking about journalists now careers are dependent on being an establishment journalism and staying close to the narratives of the establishment and never really challenging things such as the U.S. is not really spreading democracy around the world, but they're actually

committing these kinds of crimes that Assange revealed for economic and strategic purposes and that it's a vicious and vindictive foreign policy of the United States. If you start going down that road, you're out of a job pretty soon. And everybody knows that. I worked quarter of a century in big U.S. media, as you know, and I know what the pressure was. You just don't pitch these stories. And if you do, you've got to be careful and you can argue and, you know, you do it once in a while, not consistently. And you're going to most likely have those articles spiked. So it's not in the interest of mainstream journalists to be on the side of Assange, who was on the side of exposing the House of Cards that the entire establishment is in terms of the crimes that

they've committed that he's revealed. So you don't want to do that if you're, in the mainstream media. And number two years, maybe some professional jealousy there because he actually has done the job that the mainstream reporters have not done, which is to pull the curtain down from the U.S. behavior around the world instead of covering it up by niceties like the U.S. is going to war to liberate people, not for any other selfish reasons. We don't do that. We're not imperialists.

We don't have an empire, this type of thing. So there's a real, and there's also, of course, the Democratic media particularly hates him because, again, they still think he was responsible for Donald Trump. And there's the Me Too movement and others who believe that he was really a rapist, even though he was never charged with rape. He was the only wanted for questioning in Sweden that was dropped three separate times, once a few days after the women went to the police who actually only wanted him to get

the SDT test because the condom had broken and never really charged him with anything. In fact, Nils Melser, the UN Reporteur for Torture, has done an analysis of the Swedish police reports. He's fluent in Swedish and shows that they actually enhanced the statement of both women, and one of them refused to sign the police statement because they made it sound like it was a rape. And that's not what the women initially went there to report. But yet he's considered a rapist. He's considered, they focused on his personality, obviously, and smeared him.

And it doesn't matter what kind of a human being, Julian Assange is. It matters that he's a, he worked as a journalist. He published explosive revelations that were true that have not been proven to be false or not even been denied. And yet, and they're trying to put him away or kill him for the. rest of his life behind bars where he could die. So this is the choice that a journalist has to make. Do I defend the establishment that tried to kill another journalist for exposing their crimes? Or do I defend journalism because of the principle involved here?

Because if he goes down, we could go down or journalists in the future could now be subject to the same type of Espionage Act indictment. It's a very, very delicate thing. It shouldn't be. It should be an open-shut case. It is for us, a consortium news. We think this is a massively important story, going way beyond the human drama of one individual falsely being held and being accused.

It's all about the preservation of the freedom of the press. It really is. Can't be exaggerated. And ultimately, democracy here. That's why we've given the coverage to it that we have. And particularly since it's not being covered by the mainstream media, to the extent that it should be. well and really they have to lie in order to get away with this right and pretend that somehow he helped manning break into something as a co-conspirator in the actual liberation of the documents making him a leaker and not just a leaky and yet that's stupid right on the face of it they don't really make a case for that they claim it but they don't really make a case that's compelling at all in that indictment or the superseding indictment do they they make no case for it in the first indictment

nor the superseded indictment. Because had they had a case, the Obama administration would have charged him, as I go back again to that very important Biden appearance on meet the press in December 2010, if they were looking into charging Assange at that time. And he said, if we can't catch him red-handed stealing this stuff, then we really can't do anything because then he acted like a journalist and passively accepting documents. Well, they didn't indict him, which means they didn't get the red-handed evidence that they needed.

But here comes the Trump administration. If you read that indictment, it clearly says Chelsea Manning, the source four-week leaks of the Afghan-Iraq war logs and the State Department cables, had legal access to all of these documents. She had security clearance as an intelligence analyst. So they didn't need it. She did not need help from Assange to break in. Plus, at that time when this chat was held supposedly between Assange and Manning, that talked about helping her crack a hash tag in order to get in to protect her identity. This is what the indictment says, not to steal the documents.

Assange had already received from Manning almost everything at that point. Because that's why he made that remark in that chat. You know, I want more crying eyes to never run dry. So they made a big deal out of that, that he was encouraging and egging her on to give more, which means he already had almost everything from her. So even before this alleged attempt to help her break a password, he'd already received all the documents, 99% pretty much. And he was asking her to give her more, which is our founder, Robert Perry, of Consortive News, wrote back in 2010 December, same time Biden made those remarks, that that's what he did as an investigative journalist at AP and then at Newsweek, that he would even encourage his sources to break the law if by getting, in other words, stealing government. documents, because if that was done, it might prevent a larger crime from being committed.

And he also said he encouraged them to give them more. He always egged on his sources, but he always, of course, protected absolutely their identity, which Assange also was doing here. But the actual request to Manning was apparently, according to his lawyers, to get video games and music videos because those were denied serving U.S. personnel, and Manning had a way to get those, and then she was able to get them for her mates there in her unit, because they weren't allowed to have these things. This is really what the Assange Lurie said he was wanting to hide her identity for, but

she'd already gotten all the documents that given him to Assange. Just to sum up, what you said is true. There was no case. And then when Trump had to go to this guy, Sigador Thorntzen, there. This convicted pedophile for Rochester in Iceland to use him. In fact, the Obama administration used him, which is interesting. In 2011, in 2010 in Iceland, he was an FBI informant for the Obama FBI. And he apparently then didn't come up with enough goods to charge him.

Now, why did they need this guy, Thornton? Because they had him say that Assange ordered hacking, not the hacking necessarily of the U.S. government, but hacking in general. They have to portray him as a hacker. Again, going back to what Biden said, he's stealing the documents. So they got this Thornton in 2010 and 11 to try to get this evidence, and the Obama administration didn't have it. But what happened? He became an FBI informant. The Iceland threw FBI out of there because they realized it was a sting operation against Assange. But fast forward to the Trump administration, they got involved with him again. They got more testimony from him. And then they put

this in the superseding indictment. Teenager is the name of this Thorntonson in the indictment. And they tried to build this whole case that Assange ordered hacking operations. And that was what was in the superseding indictment. So where the Obama administration didn't believe this guy, the Trump administration went back to him and got more or the same stuff and used that to try to prove Assange is a hacker, except this guy Thorndonson in June and Stundon magazine in Iceland came clean and said he made it all up. He lied.

he's on the record saying that if that hasn't collapsed this case they don't have any evidence of Assange being a hacker or stealing any information but he's purely a publisher and they are indicting him on the Espionage Act for publishing and this

should alarm any journalist anywhere in the world especially in the United States yeah I mean hey you either have a First Amendment or you don't the fact that they haven't been able to do this to anybody else before means that they can't Or at least they couldn't, now they're seeing if they can really say, well, something's changed.

Now we can. National security, it's so important, Joe. Well, that's the other thing about the assurances to not put him in extreme measures in the U.S. There's a caveat there. There's a condition. If he does something, the document from the U.S. says, then does something to threaten national security. We can then throw him in the way. So once they have their hands on him, they can pretty much make up any reason.

they want to put them in extreme measures. And these high court judges have to see this. They cannot believe the American assurances. Amnesty International said they are inherently unreliable, such diplomatic assurances. The ones that James Lewis, the prosecutor said were rock-sol of the U.S. had never broken a diplomatic vow. Amnesty says they're unreliable inherently. And the judges have to decide to believe this promise and to not,

believe the expert testimony that led Baratza to not extradite him because he's too sick, too prone to suicide, to go to these prisons. This is the decision that has to be made by the high court, and we're not going to get this until the end of December, maybe into January. Yeah. All right, man. Well, on behalf of a lot of people, too, I can't tell you how much I appreciate consortium news.com staying good on this and staying on this story. There are very few others. of course Kevin Gostola and Susie Dawson and some of those but

it's sad to say a pretty marginal kind of a avocation here people making sure to care enough about this to keep writing about it and keep trying to bring attention to it it's uh you know it's just like the war in Yemen

the silence compared to the importance of the issue the ratio there is just off but anyway I appreciate you doing your part, man. Thank you, Scott. All right, you guys. That's the great Joe, Loria.

He's editor over there at consortium news.com. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-P-FK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.