Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/8/24 Kevin Gosztola on the Final Assange Extradition Trial

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Kevin Gosztola was on Antiwar Radio this week to talk about Julian Assange’s final extradition trial in the UK, which is days away. He and Scott discuss the details of the case and the level of support he has across journalists, activists and governments in the West. Discussed on the show: Countdown to X Series Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.” He is the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. Follow him on Twitter @kgosztola. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, February the 15th, 2004, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive. More than 6,000 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.

And no point follow me on Twitter anymore. I quit again to focus on my book at Scott Horton Show. No, provoked is what it's going to be called. All right, you guys, next up on the show is the great Kevin Gostola. He runs the dissenter.org. and he is the author of the new book, just came out last year, Guilty of Journalism, the political case against Julian Assange. And speaking of which, he has a massive series here at the dissenter on Julian Assange,

the countdown to day X it's called. Welcome back to the show, Kevin. How are you doing? Hey, it's good to be with you again. All right. Great to have you here. And, of course, the subject is Julian Assange, the founder. and former operator of WikiLeaks who is in prison in Britain right now. And the question is, will he be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges? And so, first of all, I believe the news is his hearing is coming up later this month.

Is that correct? And this is the very last shot at the entire appeals process in the UK, Kevin. Yeah, on February 20th and 21st of next week, We have a two-day hearing in which Assange and his team will have their first chance to basically lay out some appeal arguments. They're asking the British High Court of Justice an appeals court to overturn the lower court's decision, which was passed on to the UK government one and a half years ago. And the British government already authorized his extradition to the United States. And that's what they're appealing. Right.

Okay, so exactly at issue in this case is not just Julian Assange and the U.S. government's vendetta against him, but there's apparently a huge consensus finally now at this late date, but coming together now among major news organizations and human rights groups, etc., that free speech itself in the West in the United States is in jeopardy. Now, is that just a bunch of hyperbole? Because after all, we're talking about a guy that people love to hate. Maybe they'll just get him. No, we finally got quite a number of groups standing on principle. As I speak to you in the last 24 hours, we saw a letter put out by over 35 law professors that the Freedom of the Press Foundation put together to send to Attorney General Merrick Garland to make their position known that this would mean that in the future, any presidential administration

could charge journalists with a felony. Because when you're charged with an espionage act offense, you're facing a felony conviction potentially. So, you know, this is a big deal. This is a big deal going forward. We're seeing people stand up. And also in Australia, I should note that in the last day or two, we saw a vote in their parliament that basically took a stand and said, we oppose the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, and the Australian government is an ally, a close ally of the United States. Right. Yeah, it's about time that they finally stood up, but they have been for the last year or so, right? So does it look like that's having any kind of effect? There's been a lot of consternation on the part of Assange supporters in Australia

because they feel that the prime minister and other officials who have power to pressure Biden won't do it. And there's a lot of foreign policy reasons, I think, for why they're very careful about how far they go. So they're doing the bare minimum, but it's more than we can say about anybody in the U.S. government. They're really doing a poor job. It's extremely disappointing that there is a resolution in the House, right? now that was put forward to say that if you believe in principles of freedom of the press, then you need to support an end to this case against Julian Assange. And there's only like 10 representatives out of 435 that have put their name to it.

It's awful. Yeah, man, that really is something. Although at least it's good to see that such a resolution even exists, but it's also, as you say, at the same time, a shame how many people are. willing to put their name to it all right well it's anti-war radio i'm scott horton talking with kevin got stola from the dissenter that's the dissenter dot org and he's got this huge multi-part series going on about asanj and the persecution thereof so okay uh can you give us a little bit of a 101 here about why it is that uh genocide joe is going after this guy so bad here i don't know why jo's

so intent to put him on trial but assandre was indicted for the liberal listeners by President Donald Trump. So it's been said to try and get some of the Democrats on his side that if you oppose Donald Trump, then you have to oppose the indictment of Julian Assange. All right, so we can play partisan politics for a moment there. Sure. Now, principally, what we're looking at here is the fact that the U.S. government is saying they can enforce a secrecy law against people who aren't even from this country. Julian Assange is an Australian citizen. Why should he have to, one, pledge allegiance to the United States, but also why should he have to worry about any of the U.S. government's

national security interests? And why should anybody have to follow these laws again to your liberal listeners? They wouldn't accept this from the Russian government, from Vladimir Putin. And in fact, we have a very similar case playing out right now where Evan Gerskovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, is being kept in detention. And Tucker Carlson, who I know your liberal listeners, if they're here listening, they hate him, but he did ask at the end of a two-hour interview three times, when are you going to release Evan Gerskiewicz from detention? And Putin maintains that Gerskiewicz was going around collecting state secrets and was engaged in espionage. collecting secrets is journalism, and Julian Assange was engaged in journalism. So if Gerskiewicz should

be freed, then Assange should be freed as well. It's anti-war radio talking with Kevin Gotstola about the plight of Julian Assange. And look, he's facing essentially a life sentence here, right? How many decades in prison if he's convicted on all these espionage charges in court in Virginia, Kevin? We just saw Joshua Schulte, who is the leaker or was convicted of leaking the Vault 7. materials to WikiLeaks get a 33 and a half year sentence to prison. So it's entirely possible that Julian Assange could get 10, 15, 20 years. He's 52 right now. And after what he's gone through, he's been in some form of arbitrary detention for 10 to 15 years now. It's unlikely that he would survive a U.S. prison sentence. Yeah. Hey, you guys. Did you know that I don't just

write books? I publish them. Well, the Institute does, and I'm the director, so yeah. Thirteen of them now, including my four. We published five more in 2023. Lori Calhoun and Tom Woods' books about the COVID regime, Joe Solis Mullin on the fake China threat, Jim Bovard's latest, last rights, and our managing editor, Keith Knight's domestic imperialism.

And we've got more great titles coming in 2024. Check them out at Libertarian Institute.org slash books and help support our anti-government efforts at Libertarian Institute.org donate. And thank you. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them.

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to encompass really even you and I talking about what we read on WikiLeaks on the radio. At the same time they've never imprisoned anyone under this interpretation of the Espionage Act, or I guess in fact they're just twisting the facts

in this case to fit the other more narrow definition of espionage. They're claiming he didn't just receive it. He conspired to take it somehow and that's what makes him different than the new york times kevin is that right yeah there's this concept they've made up of responsible journalism and you can see it that the district court judge the british judge bought this idea but i don't see that in our constitution it doesn't say freedom

of the responsible press it says freedom of the press in the constitution and so that's an editorial issue that's something for you to discuss internally with a media organization. People can criticize. We could sit here on our social media platforms going after people for publishing something and attack them. But it's not a crime. It's not illegal. And in fact, they're trying to nail him because there were the names of informants in diplomatic cables that were published. Well, guess what? It's not a crime to publish the names of informants. Not for you or me. I never had a security clearance. I didn't sign a secrecy agreement to become an agent of the government or to work as an analyst and have access to databases so I can do

whatever if I have the name of an informant guess what I could tell somebody especially if I thought they did something and it was in the public interest Joe Lieberman considered passing legislation in 2010 after WikiLeaks published information and they did not pass this law we do not have a law that criminalizes wholesale the publication of classified documents right And they do have that in Britain. Is that supposed, the Official Secrets Act there? Is that supposed to play into their decision-making? Or they're just supposed to take American law into account?

Or how does that work? This starts to get into the legal weeds. But basically, the Official Secrets Act, according to Assange's legal team, has never been used to punish somebody who was a journalist that obtained leaked information and published leaked information. It's gone after people who were like former MI5 agents, former British security agents. And there's a famous case of David Shaler back in the late 90s that has been influential on some of the outcome of this.

But it's not exactly the same. One of the issues here is that they're looking at the Official Secrets Act and saying it's exactly like the Espionage Act. But no, it's not because the Espionage Act was not passed to control the dissemination of classified information. it was passed to go after, and this is not a concept in extradition law. It goes after political offenses. So it goes after actions that are targeted at the government. So it was for treason or sedition or espionage. That's what the Espionage Act was going after. It was going after people who, well, I mean, it was used to go after people who were dissenting against World War I. But it wasn't used to control the classification system and make it so that people were punished if they leaked.

But the Official Secrets Act is set up to do that. And then can you tell us real quickly, is it true, as in your headline here, that the CIA plotted to kidnap and murder Julian Assange, Kevin? It's true if you believe over 30 sources that these three reporters, Michael Isikoff, Sean Naylor, and Zach Dorfman, they worked on this,

and they talked to the, Trump administration officials and intelligence officials, some I think with links to the CIA and found that Mike Pompeo, as CIA director, was putting together sketches of plans to kill or poison or rendition Julian Assange to the United States. It got the Justice Department in a panic and ultimately, I believe that's why he was charged when he was charged because they were afraid he was going to arrive in the U.S. and they were going to be caught with their pants down with no indictment against him. All right. Well, I don't know. Is there anything anybody can do?

Hop on a plane, go to England and protest outside next week, or what's going on here? Yeah. So you can go there if you want and protest. You can also be prepared for what looks like an inevitability. To be there in D.C. if he is brought to Alexandria, Virginia and put on trial. I mean, it's going to be important to take a stand against this unprecedented attack on journalism. It is. It's just unbelievable. And that's it. I'm sorry. We're all. out of time, but thank you so much for your time and all of your great journalism on this, Kevin. Your dedication is really important and inspiring. Thank you.

All right you guys, that's Kevin Gotstola. He's at the DeCenter.org. He wrote this book, Guilty of Journalism, the political case against Julian Assange. And over there at the DeCenter.org, he's got a massive, I think, 10-part already series on the countdown to Day X and this final extradition hearing. So I'll urge you guys to go and look at that.

And that's it for Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm at Scott Horton.org, and I quit Twitter again so I can write my book. You can find 6,000-something interviews at Scott Horton.org, and I am here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.