Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/22/22 Kevin Gosztola on the Next Steps in the Assange Extradition

Episode Date: April 24, 2022

Keven Gosztola returns to the show to give an update on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s legal situation. The British magistrate's court recently ordered Assange to be extradited to the United States. Gosztola walks us through how we arrived at this point and what the expected next steps are. Notably, the Assange legal team will get to appeal the U.S. government's near-certain acceptance of the extradition. The appeal will present Assange and his lawyers the opportunity to bring up a whole range of important issues that have so far gone unexamined. Chief among those issues is the concern for journalism and press freedom. Gosztola ends with an observation that even some organizations friendly to the U.S. national security establishment are beginning to express worry about the precedence this case may set.  Discussed on the show: “Dark Day for Press Freedom as British Court Orders Assange Extradition” (Shadowproof) “Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks” (Yahoo! News) Vault 7 Leaks Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.” Follow him on Twitter @kgosztola. 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; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt 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 antire war.com, author of the book, Fools 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 than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey guys on the line i've got the great kevin gustola to talk about the latest developments in the julian assange case welcome back to the show kevin how you doing it's good to talk to you all right dark day for press freedom. British court orders Assange extradition. Read me the right act here, kid.

Yeah, as Stella Assange, Julian Assange's wife had to say, she's a good advocate for him. This was a formality. We knew that this court would sign off on the extradition request, or that is to say they would order the extradition, and it would be sent to a British secretary who will get to. But it's a tremendously dark development because it makes it very real. It is the, I suppose, cherry on the top of this Sunday, if you want to call it that, I don't know where to go with this metaphor. But it is this cherry on top of everything that the U.S. government and U.K. have been doing in their conspiracy to ensure that Julian Assange is brought to trial here in the United States and that WikiLeaks cannot function as a media

organization anymore and that they have this precedent that they'll be able to use in order to control national security journalism to influence and prevent independent journalism that may challenge the U.S. security agencies or U.S. military, and they've been tremendously successful. And this order is now in the hands of Home Secretary Pretty Patel for review. Yeah. And now, so what are the chances that that person is going to do the right thing here? Any? I 110% expect her to sign her name to it and say that this is a fair extradition request because Pretty Patel is a figure who believes in and has endorsed an expansion of the Official Secrets Act's laws in the UK.

And this is something that here in the U.S., we may struggle with, although we have have seen our freedoms evaporate over the last few decades, we still have a First Amendment and the UK does not, and they don't claim to operate with one either. And they actually have a law that says it's a crime to publish classified information, which we don't, even though the Justice Department likes to use the Espionage Act as if it is such a law. But they want penalties to be increased against whistleblowers and journalists who may act out and depart from the narrative like Julian Assange did, and those penalties could be as severe as 14 years in jail if you are put on trial and found guilty.

This is Pretty Patel's in endorsing this. Pretty Patel is also, according to a report from the classified UK, this small group of people there that have done some excellent reporting on the UK security services and their links to the United States, also their foreign policy objectives as well in Britain, highlighted the fact that Pretty Patel was on the advisory council for the Henry Jackson Society, which has been a lead society against Julian Assange, very outspoken in pushing smears, joining in what what Niels Meltzer calls the public mobbing campaign. James Wolsey, former CIA director, has been a part of this society.

And now, for people who aren't familiar, or maybe for people who are familiar to connect a couple of dots here, Henry Jackson was known as Scoop. He was the senator from Boeing, aka Washington State, but that's what they call them, the senator from Boeing, and he was a Truman Cold Warrior Democrat, and when the neocons started moving to the right from Trotskyism to Reaganism, they stopped by Scoop Jackson's office where Richard Pearl and Douglas Fyth and Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libyans, Zalmea Khalil sod, and I'm not exactly sure who all, but many of the very worst of W. Bush's neocons worked for Scoop Jackson. So that's why it's named after him. And Jim Woolsey, who was CIA director

under Bill Clinton, is a car carrying member of the neo-conservative cult as well. yeah yeah so she's she's got her uh her past here she's she's no longer on that council while she is home secretary but you never really leave behind this ideology and uh so um and we're seeing it play out um where she uh you know like a lot of other officials right now is in hot water over issues involving asylum seekers or refugees coming into the UK. And so she's just a figure that we can expect to oppose everything that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks represents. And she is going to send that extradition request back to the district court. Now, what happens next is that finally, many of us who have been anxious,

waiting for a moment where the legal team could challenge the things that we dislike the most about Judge Beretser's decision. And this is the decision that came just to refresh people's memory. This has been a long saga. If you go back to January 4th, 2021, this is when we were all stunned as she read this decision that was horrible in every respect when it came to statements about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks's conduct, including embracing the idea that they're a criminal enterprise. But then at the end, she said, but I don't want to send him to the United States because he has mental health problems.

He has physical issues as well. And if he is sent to the United States, I believe that he would try to take his own life in a U.S. prison. And the U.S. prison system would not prevent him. from committing suicide. Therefore, I believe it would be oppressive for mental health reasons to extraditum to the United States, and I deny the extradition request from the U.S. And so then we saw an appeal filed by the U.S. government, technically speaking,

although they like to claim that they're not interfering in the case. The U.S. government did interfere in the case because it didn't come from the Justice Department but these quote unquote diplomatic assurances, which are not evidence, but are just very empty claims that they would be good to Julian Assange if he was in their custody, those were passed on to the British government by the U.S. State Department, by Secretary of State Antony Blinken as the point person, so to speak, you know, the face of who was passing on these assurances. And those then became the way in which the U.S. was able to defeat the decision by Beretser that spared Julian Assange and then set us on this path where we are now, where we are back

at the place that this extradition, these extradition proceedings started at the district court level. And we expect that after the review by Pretty Patel, there will be an appeal from Julian Assange's legal team related to a whole array of issues, including but not limited to the fact that the U.S. U.S. U.K. extradition treaty, in their view, has not been applied correctly. Because we are talking about, you know, if you look at the allegations, we are talking about an allegation of espionage. And it is widely considered around the world, and as I know you recognize, Scott, that espionage is. is a political offense. What's espionage to Russia will not be necessarily a crime in the United

States. What's espionage in China probably isn't going to get you in trouble in the United States. What's espionage in the United States probably isn't that big of a deal to Russia or China. And so, even though to be clear here, Assange is not actually accused of what we would say is straight up espionage. He gave documents, or he didn't give documents. He published documents as a journalist. He didn't even go to a foreign power. He didn't go to a terrorist organization. He didn't go to a Russian intelligence agency. And he didn't kill for the damn secrets either. No. He didn't steal them. And he never signed a non-disclosure agreement. He never took a secrecy oath. He never did anything. Be that as it may, this is a political offense.

Right. So now what's this about his lawyer saying they have some new evidence that they would like to introduce, I guess it's too late for that. Do you know anything about what they're referring to there? Well, I think that refers to the fact that when these proceedings went before Vanessa Beretser, we didn't have the Yahoo News report yet, which crystallized for everyone who isn't familiar. It crystallized that there was this campaign within the CIA that went beyond simply We knew that there was a spy operation

by the private security company UC Global and it was a contractor that the Ecuador government had providing security at the Ecuador embassy especially when President Raphael Correa and his family

were to come to the London embassy they would be given a security detail from UC Global, and then also the people there, they handled the checkpoint in which guests that were visiting Julian Assange went through, it came in and out. And so then the Yahoo News report shows that it wasn't just, okay, maybe they're passing on video and audio as they're spying on Julian Assange to the CIA. No, there was a campaign in which they were considering kidnapping Julian Assange, having

people come in and snatch him and take him out of the embassy. contemplated poisoning Julian Assange. They had war plans that were sketched out that were different methods of assassination or different ways they could go about neutralizing Julian Assange. And they were fueling a pressure campaign that Ecuador was a part of in order to force him out of the embassy. And this was something that was really alarming to the Justice Department. They were worried, this is a big part of the Yahoo News report, they were worried that he might wind up in the U.S. suddenly, I guess much like other terrorism suspects under the war on terror. You know, they'd be, he'd be rendered to the United States.

There would be no charges against him yet. And the U.S. government would be caught with his pants down and trying to figure out what to do because they did not indict Julian Assange. and he actually should not be in the U.S. yet. And so the Justice Department scurried to piece together some kind of an argument or some kind of an indictment that they could put forward. But it was under the pressure from the CIA because they were intent on targeting Julian Assange. Sorry, hang on just one second.

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Yeah. Now, well, and for destruction, you know, I think Peter Van Buren, he was admittedly speculating at the time. But he says, you know, as we find more and more about the origins of Russiagate here coming out in these filings by Durham, it really raises the question of how much of Assange's persecution at this point is just to keep him unavailable so that he cannot prove that Russia was not the organization that brought him the Hillary Clinton emails, that it was somebody else. This is a major part of their Russia gate hoax. And he, as we know from the Mueller report, they have no chain of custody to Assange. And he always denied that he got this stuff from the Russians. And Craig Murray told me himself that he knows who was the source for the DNC emails and the Podesta emails. Two different sources, both Americans, neither of them conceivably having the slightest thing to do with the Russians at all.

And so, you know, I wonder if maybe that really is a big part of this charade is, you know, they're pretending to be upset about the Manning leak when that's not what it's about at all. It's about perpetuating the Russiagate hoax, or at least even though that's kind of over now, he's still the collateral damage from it. They had to keep him out of the way. Well, yeah, so you're getting into an area where I've speculated that, you know, these documents were not probably what they wanted to charge him for publishing, but they fell back on it because they had this grand jury that was impaneled in Alexandria, Virginia, in the Eastern

district. Going back to 2010, it started right away after the diplomatic cables were first published by WikiLeaks. There had already been the publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs, and they're just building on this work, because Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder never shut this down, even though they didn't charge Julian Assange. So it was available for Donald Trump's administration to revive. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions is very much a fierce opponent of leaks with somebody who's very open about continuing the crackdown. He had a lot of common cause with President Obama and his zeal for going after leakers. And then, of course, we also heard statements from Donald Trump about how, you know,

he vengefully wanted to go after and figure out who in his administration was talking to CNN and MSNBC and trying to bring down his administration, frustration that, you know, you can understand where it was coming from, but also it was giving the, this FBI counterintelligence unit that was formed when Trump came into office a green light to go and and piece together these cases and pursue whistleblowers and to go after Julian Assange. And so they proceeded to do that. And you look that during the time that Donald Trump was in office, well, and then also when you had the 2016 campaign, you know that there's the Vault 7 materials, which were details

about the CIA's cyber warfare capabilities, including the fact that the CIA can apparently give their attacks or give their warfare fingerprints so it looks like it's coming from China or Russia. And that's just worth putting out there as we remember things that were alleged about the Podesta emails and what happened around RussiGate. But these were really highly, highly classified and. sensitive documents, but I think they did not charge Assange for these materials because then they would have to declassify some of these documents in order to charge Julian Assange.

And then the fact is that those materials, then they have to do discovery and they have to open up the files to Julian Assange's legal team. And so they're worried about gray mail. And so they're avoiding it. So the CIA wants to avoid the Vault 7 episode. as much as they can. It's also hugely embarrassing. This is in the Yahoo News report that's that Mike Pompeo was embarrassed and ashamed to have to go to Donald Trump and tell him that they had lost custody of these documents and had actually bragged. They'd made fun of the State Department

and even the Pentagon for losing control of their files to Chelsea Manning. And, uh, and now, uh, here they were. They were compromised. And the Podesta emails, they don't want to get into that. Donald Trump didn't want to because then that would feed into the Mueller investigation. So they went with going after him for the 2010 documents, which both political parties always opposed. I can find you the most incredible, extraordinary statements from Democratic senators, as much as you can find fierce, vicious anger from Republican senators. Well, now listen, I'm sorry. One other point here. that you bring up is that his lawyers are kind of complaining that they only ever got to make

half their argument because the original judge was so taken by their argument about his mental health and the cruelty of the American penal system and so forth that it would lead to his suicide, that they never really got to make freedom of speech arguments. And as you said, there is no First Amendment in Britain. And they have their Official Secrets Act, which goes probably even further than Wilson's espionage act goes, even though the espionage act here has never been enforced in this way. Over there, it sure is all the time. But is that really right? So they only got to make half their argument and they would like a chance to make the other half of their argument to the home secretary now? Is there any chance of that? Well, so the issue, well, yes.

So the answer to that last question is yes, they can make those arguments to Home Secretary Pretty Patel. And they will because the full extradition request and all the issues and political problems that come with it or all the reasons why it should be opposed, those are on the table. But when the appeal was moving through the courts, it was very narrow. It was about Julian Assange's mental health, whether he would be tortured and abused in a U.S. prison and all of these things that ended up being inserted because the U.S. State Department stepped in to say things like, oh, he could be transferred to Australia if he wanted to. He could apply for a prisoner transfer.

He could get a clinical psychiatrist. Oh, we won't keep him in special administrative measures or put him in a supermax prison. But by the way, here's a little loophole for you. If he did do anything that would offend this or that thing that we don't want them to do, then maybe we would put them in these conditions. But by and large, we're really not planning to abuse and mistreat Julian Assange. And so then it really put the legal team for Assange in a hard position because they, you know, they won. This isn't evidence. So they weren't able to argue and put new evidence into the record that would help them show why a judge or a court should not believe what the U.S. government is saying.

And because the U.S. abused the process and did not say that they would treat Julian in a certain manner during the main extradition hearing back in September 2020, before Beretser made her decision, then they were now able to make uncontested claims about what they would do with Assange that were accepted at face value because these judges who are captors, they're captives of the United States, didn't want to jeopardize diplomatic relations. And the analog here is much like what we found in the cables when it came to investigations in Spain or Germany or France or Poland as they were trying to go after the CIA and agents that were involved in renditions and torture against people who were kidnapped from their own soil.

And this happened in a number of European countries that had partnerships with the CIA. And then when they got caught and their judiciary started investigating, there was pressure to have prosecutions. And we learned in the diplomatic cables, the sort of backroom dealing and arm twisting that was going on to make sure that those judiciaries bent to the will of the United States and did not put people who had been involved in rendition and torture on trial and just to ensure that no one was extradited from the U.S. to those European countries and to just make sure that there was no justice for those who were abused.

And so, yeah, to get to your thing, all of these things that were not part of the narrow appeal are now free to be raised once it comes back to the district court. And so going forward, they get to contest all of the ways that Beretser mischaracterized Julian Assange and WikiLeaks because she embraced all of the character attacks on Julian Assange, all of the false ideas, all the worst things you've read in the media, which come from the U.S. or come from the media, and then have been picked up. by U.S. prosecutors, that gets to be challenged by requesting an appeal. And so Julian Assange won't be extradited immediately after the decision comes from Pretty Patel or the home

secretary back to the district court. It will still be several months before we have any kind of resolution. We may be just pushing off something that's inevitable, but there are key questions that I don't think are settled, which the legal team is very eager to bring before this appeals court and say, you know, this isn't right what the judiciary has been doing to Julian Assange. Yeah. Now, you mentioned before, too, about how all these free speech groups and press groups across the world are all unanimous about this. Can you talk a little bit more about that because I think people might have just, you know, seen on Twitter that he's a bad guy and he's in on it with Putin and he's against us and we should hate him and all our favorite

liberal Democrat heroes hate him and want us to something. I don't know. And yet somehow every free press group in the world thinks that what this is about is the right of journalists to do journalism. And so it seems kind of important since, you know, they certainly don't talk about that aspect on TV or anything like that. Yeah. So, you know, even a group like the Human Rights Organization Amnesty International, which contend to make sure that its campaigns for human rights fit into narratives that do not conflict with U.S. goals for hegemony and dominance.

throughout the globe, even they are outspoken and opposed to this and have been pretty strong in condemning it from a human rights standpoint as well as the press freedom angle. Their statement from their Secretary General was that the UK has an obligation not to send any person to a place where their life for safety is at risk and the government must not abdicate that responsibility. The U.S. authorities have flatly stated they will change the terms of Assange's imprisonment in a federal facility whenever they see fit. This admission places Julian Assange at great risk of prison conditions that could result in irreversible harm to his physical and psychological well-being. So again, basically saying, you know, despite how the court ruled, they didn't really resolve the issues because we shouldn't trust what the U.S. is saying. And then continued to make a statement that Secretary General did that Julian Assange would,

also be, would also, it would be a devastation for press freedom and for the public who have a right to know what their governments are doing in their name. Publishing information in the public interest is a cornerstone of media freedom. Extraditing Julian Assange to face allegations of espionage for publishing classified information would set a dangerous precedent and leave journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders. And that kind of a statement is very common when you go group to group. There's another group that's done really good work, reporters without borders, and they've been there even fighting to get a representative into the courtroom on some days. They weren't really able to get good access. And they've been very strong. And ACLU, even this committee to protect

journalists, which I go after, because they refuse to label Julian Assange a jailed journalist. and include him in their index, even they are opposed to the prosecution. Yeah, that's good. Hey, listen, I'm sorry, we're out of time, and that's kind of a clumsy place to end it, but it's all my fault. But thank you so much for all your great work, as always, Kevin. Really heroic stuff, and we're all counting on you, so appreciate it. All right, it's good to talk to you.

All right, you guys, that is Kevin Gotzola. He's at the decenter.org, also shadowproof.com, the decenter.org for this one. Dark day for press freedom. British court orders Assange extradition. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.