Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/17/22 Kevin Gosztola: Julian Assange Extradition Approved by the UK

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Kevin Gosztola joined Scott on Antiwar Radio to discuss the most recent developments in the Julian Assange Case. Gosztola presents a primer on who Julian Assange is for those who are unfamiliar with him or who only know of the Collateral Murder video and 2016 election leaks. He then clarifies the charges brought against him. Last week, the UK approved Assange’s extradition to the United States. This is a step in the wrong direction, though it will give Assange’s team the opportunity to appeal and finally present some of their best arguments against his imprisonment.  Discussed on the show: “‘Another Dark Day’: UK Government Approves Assange’s Extradition to United States” (The Dissenter) ABC Documentary on Assange 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

For Pacifica Radio, June 19th, 2022, 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 and the War on Paris. You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org

and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. And it's fun drive time, so go and pledge and help support the station in this show at KPFK.org. Now introducing our guest, Kevin Gostola,

from The Dicenter. That's the Dicenter. dot org and also from shadow proof as well. His article is called Another Dark Day. UK government approves Assange's extradition to the United States. And he has a forthcoming book coming out about America's persecution of Julian Assange as well. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, Kevin? Hey, it's good to talk to you, Scott. I appreciate your great journalism as always. And what's the name of the book you're working on about this case? Guilty of Journalism. the political case against Julian Assange.

The political case, very good. And he is absolutely guilty as hell as charged of journalism. No question about that, which is, I guess, why they indicted him for espionage, which is completely farcical. They might as well have indicted him for any old made-up thing at that point. I mean, he is actually accused of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which sounds like something completely made up already. so wait is that separate from the espionage charges or that's instead of the espionage charges no no it's it's within it's

basically a part of that made up password hacking charge oh i see so that's the espionage charges are next to those charges yeah there's so there's so there's 17 just to refresh your listeners memory we've got 17 espionage act offenses which are the things that make people the most angry and then you've got this one conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion offense that is about violating a computer law, but also they've thrown in a section of this conspiracy law, and they've accused him of defrauding the United States. You know, it occurs to me that there's a lot of new people in and out all the time, not just tuning in the radio, but a lot of new people to politics every day. A lot of people really don't know anything about this. A lot of left-leaning people possibly in the

Pacifica radio audience who believe that maybe Assange is being prosecuted for colluding with Russia to put Trump in power or something like that. What exactly is the trouble here in the first place? The trouble is, in my opinion, that Julian Assange upset people within our security agencies and military branches of government. When, well, first off, he published the disclosures from Chelsea Manning that expose the Iraq war, exposed the Afghanistan war, that there's torture. There were execution squads in Afghanistan. Then there's the cables, but the State Department probably wasn't going to really do this. I mean, let's be honest, the reason why people were upset is because he got in the way of endless wars that were being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They even successfully, with one of the cables, made it so that Iraq, went. back on the immunity that they grant our U.S. troops. I don't know if you remember this communications log, but I actually played a role in finding this when these cables were first published, but this one communications log that documented a raid in which multinational forces had executed a family at a compound. And then that was something in which the Iraqi government said to President Barack Obama and his White House, that you know, if you want to extend the status of forces agreement, if you want to modify anything and leave an occupation, you're going to have to allow our

government to be able to prosecute U.S. soldiers or multinational forces from these coalition troops. And he said, no, we're not going to do that. So that is why the war ultimately came to the end that had already been etched by President George W. Bush, through his negotiations and then you go forward and you have something like the Vault 7 materials published by WikiLeaks

and it exposes a huge volume of information it shows that the CIA is not protecting its networks and it's really embarrassing and they're out for revenge and then that's when you started to hear Mike Pompeo saying things

in retaliation because they didn't And like that, everyone was talking about the CIA's offensive cyber warfare tools and their capabilities. And so he calls WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence agency. And he's ramping up a disruption campaign. This is according to a Yahoo News report that made quite a splash. And he's even considering secret plans to poison or kill Julian Assange. And then that puts pressure on actually charging him.

within the Justice Department because when you go back to Obama's White House in their administration, they actually punted. They passed on charging Julian Assange after they charged Chelsea Manning. And then the viewpoint changed. They're not happy that WikiLeaks assisted Edward Snowden in leaving Hong Kong. They weren't happy with the Clinton campaign emails. You mentioned your progressive or left-leaning audience here and how many of them may be somewhat confused. a lot of the way that people view Julian Assange has been colored by the 2016 election, but that has nothing to do with anything in this case, except for the fact that because of the now bipartisan animosity that technically existed from the very beginning, but because it hardened

among Democrats after 2016 and all human rights principles went out the window as far as Julian Assange is concerned, that is why you haven't been able to get the charges dropped. That's why Biden won't continue and uphold a standard that I suppose we could say was set by Obama, if you want to call it that. But I understand that's subject to debate. And that's why we are here having this discussion today. That's why we have this dark day where an extradition request has been authorized. Right. Now, I want to get back to the judicial process and all that. here in a minute. But even though Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act from 1917 is written

broadly enough to probably include you and me and Julian Assange and anybody else, it's never been treated that way. For example, they indicted Daniel Ellsberg and threatened him with life in prison for leaking the Pentagon Papers. They did not indict the reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the rest who finally published those documents. That was considered fair game. The leakers, government employees who leak,

they can get in a lot of trouble for that. But American publishers and journalists who report are in no legal jeopardy whatsoever and have not been for decades until now. And then if this works and they actually convict him, then they face what even the Obama's, people said we're really throwing the entire freedom of the press in America in jeopardy in a way that they just weren't willing to do. And maybe because they're friends of the New York Times beg them not to. Maybe that's why they called it the New York Times problem. But this is a real

watershed on the way to tyranny while our empire collapses, seems like. Yeah, I would agree. What we see with this government is that they are appointing themselves the power to decide who is and is not a journalist. And people need to consider that. They are saying that Julian Assange does not have First Amendment rights, not because they don't think the First Amendment should apply to someone like Julian Assange. And let's just pause for a moment. I always want to make sure we're clear with people who are listening.

Julian Assange has no ties whatsoever to the U.S. He's not lived in the United States. He's not from the United States. He's from Australia. He's an Australian citizen. He's an Australian journalist who's done a lot of his work in the UK and also did some work in Iceland. But he's never done any of this journalism from within the United States. And that's important because the U.S. is extraterritorially applying its law to Julian Assange.

They're saying that they can come and snatch him from the UK and bring him to the U.S. and put him on trial because they just said so. They're just going to. They're going to go do that. And so they've appointed themselves this authority to look at all of the actions that he engaged in when working with these classified documents from the U.S. government. And to be able to say, no, we don't think that's journalism. No, we think when he had this communication, he stepped over a line. No, we don't think that if he uses privacy tools, he is within, it's clear that if he's doing that, he's trying to hide his tracks, he's trying to cover it up. Oh, we believe that he knew that if he released this information, he would endanger. He would put U.S. informants at risk. You know what puts U.S. informants at risk? U.S. wars put U.S. informants at risk.

They put them at risk because of the actions that are being engaged in by people who are involved because conflicts put these people at risk all the time. And, you know, it's just crazy. This transparency gets turned against Julian Assange. They say Julian Assange is responsible and WikiLeaks is responsible. They have blood on their hands. It's not the generals that have blood on their hands. It's not the people who are ordering these kill.

these kill teams to go into action, these drone strikes that you're describing, these different aspects of our targeted assassination complex that's been developed. It's not the people who are engaged in the torture or these renditions that have the blood on their hands from whatever brutal methods they've been using and trying to force confessions, which by the way, almost all the time turn out to be false. No, in fact, it's Julian Assange who has blood on his hands because this information could be collected by authoritarian governments and could be used to then round those people up, which becomes a way to cover up and conceal and get away with basically reinforcing totalitarian regimes.

You know, that's how they can get away with reinforcing Saudi Arabia, who Biden's cozying up to now after, I thought liberals were opposed to Muhammad bin Salman because he, he, he, he, He ordered a hit. He ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a contributor for the Washington Post. But now that goes out the window because we need them to help us lower oil prices so we can keep fighting the war in Ukraine. So all of these things go out the window. They don't matter. And you see right here, this case is basically at the nexus of the devolution, the decline of,

the U.S. American Empire, basically, like everything that the U.S. stands for, what it says and claims are liberal values of human rights. They don't mean a thing because they are saying that they have the power to decide who is and is not a journalist. And it is a recent development. You're right. Historically, when they had threatened journalists and media organizations, they hadn't gone through with it. And the last thing I'll say on this point is recently in the past week, we had some released memos from the Nixon administration that showed the pressure that the Justice Department was putting their lawyers under or the advocacy that they were promoting in order to stop the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers,

that they were advocating that, in fact, those media organizations and individual reporters could be hit with criminal charges. It sounds exactly like what we're seeing with this case today. There was a member of the Office of Legal Counsel who worked under John Dean, who everyone knows now because he's always on CNN talking about Trump and Russia. But there was a guy in that office who said he believed that individual reporters could be prosecuted under this statute prohibiting unlawful possession and transmission of national defense information. That's the espionage act saying it would cover newspapers and that they could

support additional criminal charges against the New York Times for, and here it is, conspiring in or encouraging the theft of the Pentagon papers. And that's what they've accused Julian Assange of doing, of conspiring to steal these documents from the U.S. government. In other words, being involved in taking material from a source and publishing it and exposing war crimes so that we could know what our government was doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right. Give me just a minute here. Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending

out tons of books and other things to our donors. And who wants to stand in line all day at the post office? But stamps.com? Sorry, but their website is a total disaster. I couldn't spend another minute on it. But I don't have to either, because there's easyship.com. EasyShip.com is like Stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible. Go to Scott Horton.org slash Easy Ship.

Hey, y'all Scott here. You know the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books. Mine, Bulls Arrind, enough already, and the great Ron Paul. Two by our executive editor, Sheldon Richmond, coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And of course, no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late-great co-fell founder and managing editor at the Institute. Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent voluntarious handbook,

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hatred proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses see the roses only in theaters august 29th get tickets now and by the way all right listen it's anti-war radio i'm scott horton i'm talking with Kevin Gostola, he's done such a great job for a decade straight now and more, covering the saga of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and especially the Manning League, but all the rest of this stuff, too, and of course his legal persecution. And it's anti-warb radio, and I'm on KPFK here because you guys support it. So I don't want to take up too much of your time here. No you, no station. Simple as that. It's 818-985-5735. 818985 5735 to pledge your support and anyone who donate $75 or more to KPFK will get a copy of my book enough already. Time to end the war

on terrorism. So stop by kpfk.org or call 818985 5735. Okay, now back to the great Kevin Gostola. He is again, his primary focus of his journalism is on Julian Assange and the case of WikiLeaks and all that. So let's

get back a little bit to the trouble this man is in. He's been a couple questions here. First of all, how long has it been since they kidnapped him out of the embassy and got him sitting in solitary here and going through this process? And then secondly, how many appeals does he have left before this really is a done deal? He was thrown out of the embassy by an operation called Operation Pelican, in case you wanted to know the name that was inside the UK government. And they were able to work with Ecuador and pressure everyone in order to toss him out, have his asylum revoked. Eventually, he lost his citizenship. They had made him an Ecuadorian citizen.

And then he was put in Belmar's high security prison. He's been there. He was in some solitary confinement. He's also been in general population. He was kept in isolation too for the fact that his mental and physical health had degraded. But I don't think he's as isolated as he was early in his detention. That being said, he's there, even though it's understood that this kind of jailing is really bad for his health. And now they have the ability to appeal.

They plan to appeal. They plan to fight this. There's a lot that's happened in the last, it's been three years that this has been unfolding, this extradition case. not to mention that this whole thing that we're describing here goes all the way back to 2010, as I mentioned earlier. And he's had legal battles, and he's been fighting in Sweden and with trying to get to Ecuador since 2012. And so now, with this appeal, they can go to the High Court of Justice. They can do their cross-appeal, which they had been wanting to do.

That means that people get to hear them challenge the core issues. We're not just going to talk about, is Julian Assange crazy? and would he take his life in a U.S. prison? It's going to be on the fundamental matters that we've been talking about here, the freedom of speech issues, the freedom of expression issues, the fact that people should be allowed to be a journalist without having their privacy rights violated, things of that nature. Oh, it's worth mentioning. I don't know if you knew this, but the U.K. admitted that they had violated the privacy rights

and violated the right to confidential journalistic material that one of Julian's attorneys had, Jennifer Robinson, a WikiLeaks attorney, a longtime attorney for Assangean WikiLeaks, as was in the European Court of Human Rights. And they said that it was, you know, recognized that her rights had been violated because of a decision that came as a result of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, because they had this decision where organizations had challenged the bulk collection that's done with a partnership between the NSA and GCHQ. So they had to admit that they had violated a WikiLeaks attorney's rights. So this is going on in this case, and they'll get to challenge the political nature of the case.

They'll get to bring up the plots to kill or poison Julian Assange. They'll get to say that they believe the extradition law was interpreted incorrectly by the district court, interpreted incorrectly by the home office by Priddy Patel, who's a big anti-leaks hawk. And this is something that they'll do with the high court. And if the high court says no, they'll go to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court says no, they can go to the European Court of human rights. And then what's your read, your political temperature taken on those courts in this matter? Do you have one yet?

We need to remember that he already lost at the High Court of Justice because the Chief Justice is compromised. He's best buds with a guy who was in government and was a part of this operation to remove Julian Assange, from the Ecuador embassy. And so I don't know they'll fare too well as possible. The High Court may not even review or hear the appeal just based upon the fact that the UK government made a decision. They might say that these are not open questions. We think they're settled.

That's what they did when it came to the idea that was challenged so his attorneys put forward the fact that they believed he would be cruelly or inhumanely treated in a U.S. prison and that the assurances, the diplomatic assurances put forward by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in the State Department that those were not something that should be accepted given the fact that they weren't part of the proceedings before the district court judge had ruled in his favor. And they said, no, we disagree. We overturn the lower court's decision. And then it went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court absolutely refused to give Julian Assange even a day in court, even a hearing to review the matter. And so it's possible that

they could just be brushed aside. But I do think that these are fundamental issues that are going to be raised. It'll be really hard for them not to at least give them a day or two in court and then to issue some kind of a ruling. So if you're asking me, I know you're probably interested and know your listeners are probably interested, what kind of timeline are we looking at here? When might we see Julian Assange and it's going to be awful? But when are we going to see him in the Eastern District of Virginia arraigned, and when will it be a reality that he's going to be put on trial in the United States? And I don't think we get to that point until 2023. Yeah. I don't know if there's any direct evidence or credible, indirect evidence of this.

It's just my wild speculation, but it ain't that wild. Seems like they are perfectly happy to just drag this thing out and hope that he dies of some kind of deprivation in that solitary confinement. Or I guess they let him out of solitary. Is that right? But they'd like to see him die of TB in there, something instead of having to deal with this any further. He's already had a mini-stroke. So we already know that he's got some kind of condition that has to be watched closely.

Part of why he wasn't granted bail is actually because he's been getting pretty good medical services in the prison. So they figured, you know, it's not like he needs to be set free and be on house arrest. He can get this around-the-clock care at Belmarsh. That's not how our U.S. prisons work, by the way.

We do not have that kind of care. Anybody in there can tell you. And whistleblowers like Jeffrey Sterling and John Kyriaku can tell you that you have to beg, shout, and scream while you are in the middle of a heart attack to even get a nurse or a doctor to see you. And then they may not treat you and you may have to get an outside practitioner.

You have to be shackled and put on a prison van and taken to a clinic outside of the prison facility to take care of you because they aren't going to give you medical care. So I do believe that you're right. I think that Pretty Patel, those in the UK government, I think Joe Biden, Merrick Garland,

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell as well, all of them are fine with this legal limbo, and they would welcome the news that Julian Assange had died in prison or jail because it would be a relief. They'd no longer have to defend. They don't defend this. The last thing that is worth working in here is there's no statement from the Home Secretary Pretty Patel asserting why it was just and appropriate and had to be done,

why they had to authorize it. an unnamed spokesperson, we don't get a face, put out a statement to the press and just basically paraphrased the law that was supposedly followed if you can believe that. And I don't really think it matters whether they think there's legal criteria for extradition or not. The fact is that there's a host of issues that were ignored and have been sidelined by this office. And there are all kinds of concerns raised by human rights.

and press freedom organizations that have never been addressed by anybody in power in the UK or in the U.S. government, and they hide, they're cowards, they don't address any of the concerns people have, and so I think it would free them. You know, it would free them from the Julian Assange case if he died, because then they don't ever have to worry about being asked again if they uphold human rights and if they support democracy and then they won't ever have to hear Russia or China or anyone talk about it except I suppose that that's not really true because if he dies in their custody they're never going to live it down it'll always be the example of how they don't truly uphold

human rights and democracy and again I guess what we're getting at here as we as we wind down is that this is all just a delusion this is all just kind of a figment you know the human rights are basically in this era it would seem given this Assange case what we're learning is they're made up by the U.S. government and they'll take them away and they'll give them to whoever they choose. Yeah. Now, obviously, you know, the media in America are just traitors to the First Amendment on this issue and turning their back on Assange and WikiLeaks in the way that they have. But do you have any indication of whether the media in Great Britain is taking this any more seriously?

Well, I'm seeing a lot of condemnation from more and more people today than I have on any other given day. There have been multiple columns or op-eds published in newspapers over the last few days, and also even Australia. And there's been Australia Broadcasting Corporation actually just aired a documentary that was produced with Julian Assange's brother, Gabriel, and his father, John Shepton, who are actually doing a tour right now in the United States. And so I'm seeing, at least in the UK and Australia, an openness to media coverage that

is opposed to what the U.S. government is doing to Assange. There really isn't anything here. In the U.S., we don't really get anything at all. And, you know, then, you know, we won't get into it. worth mentioning that Pretty Patel has her own scandal unfolding right now with a waste of taxpayer dollars that involves deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. And that hasn't helped her in making the decision today because, and then Boris Johnson's been in a lot of hot water when it comes to his handling of government.

And so I do think that Julian Assange is benefiting from this general attitude of disgust toward the UK government right now. However, that doesn't mean he's going to be spared. There's very, very few parliamentarians who are speaking up for Julian Assange. I've seen some letters, and, you know, the Guardian's against this, and I don't know about the Telegraph, and my grasp of media is limited to the Guardian telegraph in BBC. I don't think the BBC is doing a whole lot, but there's Channel 4 News, and they were a partner on some of the WikiLeaks publications. And I think there's been some people on

their network that are outspoken against the Assange case. But I just don't think a lot of this translates. I mean, here, the thing is, the sad fact is that all of these people could speak up and they should speak up and shame on them if they don't speak up. But Pretty Patel and other officials in the UK government, just like here in the U.S., have decided that they really do not care at all if people are opposed to it. Because they're just going to be silent and they're going to hide and they're going to do this because the U.K. is a client state. And I think what we've seen is a continuation of a partnership that became even more solidified when Tony Blair served President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and came out there and said, we're going to be with you

and be side by side with you as you push for this invasion of Iraq. And we're going to tell the same lies that you're telling. And we're going to help you build this coalition of the willing. And even though we know it's going to be weak in the end because we've got some pretty good opposition in Europe, we're going to be there with you because there's a benefit. We're your client state and you're going to give us what we want and when we need it. And so we'll be there to serve you. And they're there to serve us now with our extradition treaty in returning, well, not returning, but in getting Julian Assange to the U.S. for a trial. They're going to put a journalist on trial in the U.S. risk everything that they've ever built up as far as credibility

on media freedom, because their relationship with us, the U.S. government, is more important than anything they've ever said about democracy or human rights. Sorry that we're just way over time and have to go here, but it's the great Kevin Gostola. He does all of this wonderful work sticking up for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at the dissenter.org and at Shadowproof. And he's got a book coming out, guilty of journalism, the political prosecution of Julian Assange. Thanks very much for your time, Kevin.

Thank you. And that's it for anti-war radio for this morning. Again, everybody, stop by KPFK.org or call 818985-5735 to help support this show and this station. $75 or more in donations. And you'll get my book enough already as a premium. It's really good. And that's it for anti-war radio for this morning. I'm here every Sunday morning from 9 to 930 on KPFK, 90.

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