'Travesty of Justice', De Facto Death Sentence: Julian Assange's Life on the Line Once Again, as UK High Court Accepts US Extradition Request

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Julian Assange has been locked up for nearly a decade now, first isolated in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London which granted him asylum in 2012 when his freedom first came under threat, then after being given up to the imperialists by the Ecuadorian Ambassador in 2019, held behind bars in the UK for the past 2.5 years by British authorities on behalf of the US empire which put him firmly in its crosshairs when Wikileaks began repeatedly publishing evidence in the form of leaked classified documents exposing its war crimes. Ever since being dragged out of the Embassy in handcuffs by British police in April 2019, the US has been desperately seeking his extradition in order to try him on espionage charges and make an example out of him, and, no doubt, to torture him as they so commonly do with such high-value prisoners. So far, the UK Courts had, despite failing to release him on charges of skipping bail over now-dropped, trumped up charges in Sweden, initially denied the US extradition request.

Julian Assange is a political prisoner, targeted and imprisoned for no other reason than exposing US war crimes and government corruption, and is being held indefinitely by the UK on behalf of the US until the US extradition request is finally granted or denied. Now the saga continues as the UK High Court finally ruled on the US appeal of the initial UK ruling denying their request on grounds that US extradition would likely lead to inhumane treatment and ultimately his death in the form of suicide.

As fate would have it, yesterday, on Friday, December 10, a UK high court overturned the lower court ruling blocking the US extradition request for Julian Assange issued in January, in a landmark decision that once again puts this heroic freedom icon's life, and the whole of global press freedom, in imminent danger yet again. Not that the corporate media was particularly focused on the implications for press freedom of this outcome, but they sure are covering the story...

December 10 was, ironically, also international Human Rights Day, a fine day for this victory by the powers of darkness engaging in one of the most egregious assaults on human rights in modern history. At this point, there really are no words left to express the true depth of evil that the ongoing UK imprisonment and US imperial campaign to permanently silence Julian Assange represents, and it is most certainly one of the gravest travesties of justice currently being witnessed on our planet.

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1469251399850598401

- wikileaks

As Glenn Greenwald explains, the British High Court's decision to accept the US extradition request is a major victory for the Biden Department of [In]Justice "toward permanently silencing the pioneering transparency activist," and although the long-standing US extradition request must now be sent to UK Home Secretary Patel for final approval, "given the U.K. Government's long-time subservience to the U.S. security state," Prita Patel "is all but certain to rubber-stamp it."

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1469300299147976707

- ggreenwald

The High Court ruling came in response to the US appeal of the January lower court ruling, which included assurances that Assange as a US prisoner would be treated "humanely." Despite a Yahoo News piece published just months ago on September 26 detailing the US CIA plot to kidnap and assassinate Assange during his asylum stay in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the black robed tyrants of the UK High Court apparently accepted the meaningless US assurances at face value. In 9 minutes flat the hearing was over and the ruling handed down. NINE MINUTES. That's all the time it took for these two judges to decide the fate of a man whose only crime is publishing the truth about western war criminals, a fate that amounts to nothing short of "a living death." That, of course, indicates that they are indeed in the pockets of the US empire, as this twisted saga has already repeatedly demonstrated.

“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” a two-judge panel of the High Court said in its ruling. Apparently the previous US attempt to kidnap and assassinate the man for no other crime than publishing verified truth are not reason enough to doubt US assurances...

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1469790751466921987

- wikileaks

And as Julian's fiance notes, there is nothing right or fair about agreeing to extradite a political prisoner to the very same government that once plotted to kill him...

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1469255937013780482

- wikileaks

There is a very clear reason why Biden's DOJ is so hellbent on extraditing Assange on espionage charges, as Glenn Greenwald points out, which has everything to do with WikiLeaks exposing Hillary Clinton and the DNC back in 2016.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1469303825811058688

- ggreenwald

But nobody should be so naive as to think that this persecution, this witch hunt, this travesty of justice, is a partisan affair, as the criminal CIA plot to permanently silence Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, according to Yahoo News citing a former senior counterintelligence official. Hillary and the DNC are definitely out for blood, but they aren't the only ones, they just so happen to be the ones in power in the White House right now... The truth is that this ongoing, "unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder" was headed up by the Trump appointed CIA director/Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.”

President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”

Where Julian Assange is right now, being held behind bars in the UK on behalf of the US, is a direct result of that campaign, which successfully pressured Ecuadorian authorities into suddenly withdrawing his asylum, as I documented at the time of his 2019 arrest in my post linked below.

Although it was considered, the Obama Administration DOJ ultimately decided it did not have the legal authority to prosecute Assange. This witch hunt was started under the watchful eye of Trump, who, despite issuing a whole host of presidential pardons, failed to pardon Assange. If Trump was the hero for justice his die-hard supporters and the QAnon conspiracy theorists claimed, he would certainly have pardoned Julian Assange. The former President could have ended this entire travesty of justice with a single stroke of a pen, with a single pardon, and yet, despite previously voicing his support for WikiLeaks, nonetheless chose not to. Never forget that. And then remember that Hillary blamed only two people for her loss in the 2016 election, and Julian Assange was one of them.

So what changed between the Obama Administration's decision not to prosecute, and the Biden Administration's decision to pick up this persecution campaign right where the Trump Administration had left off? Wikileaks exposed Hillary, her key role in the US support of terrorists in Libya/Syria, likely cost her the election by exposing how she cheated Bernie in the primaries, and unveiled the nonsensical DNC-sponsored Russia Gate scam so integral to the 4-year demonization of Trump and his supporters...

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1469496772431171595

- ggreenwald

This witch hunt has absolutely nothing to do with illusory 'left' versus 'right' politics; rather, it is about an empire of lies and how it handles those who are courageous enough to publish truth that threatens its power by exposing imperial war crimes and high level government corruption, and as such this is fundamentally about press freedom and whether western society recognizes the right of the press to publish truth that exposes government lies, corruption and crimes against humanity. If Assange and his supporters lose this battle and the imperial forces win, then the terrifying precedent will have been set that not only criminalizes dissent and free speech, but institutes an international norm of extradition of journalists and publishers being held as political prisoners to the criminal regimes their journalism has exposed.

https://twitter.com/GravelInstitute/status/1469440120256450560

- GravelInstitute

If it is a crime to report truth that exposes government crimes, corruption and lies, then we already live under a tyrannical authoritarian rule that rivals all such authoritarian regimes our leaders seek to overthrow in the name of democracy, and the facade of western democracy is already quite dead indeed, if the march of Covid tyranny hadn't made that clear enough already. This is the message being sent by those waging war on Julian Assange, and the western Press has been frighteningly silent on the issue, considering the grave implications to their industry.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1469345829685243909

- ggreenwald

Oh yes, a few of them are now finally beginning to come out in condemnation of this ruling, after the fact, but where have they all been for the past two years, as their silence in the face of this grave injustice and all-out war on press freedom has led to the very government victory they now step forward to condemn? They don't care, no doubt because they believe that as long as they tow the establishment line they are safe from this type of persecution.

https://twitter.com/Oly_2_G/status/1469738999145238532

- Oly_2_G

Still, they may not be as safe as they think, with outlets such as the New York Times having previously partnered with WikiLeaks to publish pieces exposing US war crimes in Iraq, as one of the few people over at the ACLU willing to speak out against this travesty of justice explains in the following clip from an interview on Democracy Now, in a concise breakdown of just exactly what is going on here and what is at stake if the US empire wins this most important battle against press freedom:

https://twitter.com/democracynow/status/1469299189939154959

- democracynow

Reporters Without Borders were also among the organizations to publicly denounce this ruling as a "travesty of justice..."

That more have not stepped forward to denounce this grave injustice and demand Julian's freedom is but a reflection of the current state of our society. As @theouterlight notes in his recent coverage of this story, this is reflective of a society in which the job of the 'media' has become the reporting of mindless 'news' such as what celebrities like Kim Kardashian are wearing, and the nonstop praising of pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer.

Let us not delude ourselves as to what is transpiring before our eyes. "Julian Assange sits alone in his cell at Belmarsh prison following the crudest, most brutal political judgement in Britain's modern judicial history," as John Pilger writes, and the vast majority of the world remains silent. If this were not so, the persecution of Julian Assange could have never progressed to this point. The ruling class can only ever get away with as much tyranny as the peasantry will bear. Assange will not go silently to his demise, that much is certain, but how many of us speak out and stand up against this madness may well determine just how the story ends.

https://twitter.com/johnpilger/status/1469662314475442181

- johnpilger

I highly recommend Pilger's poignant piece, The Judicial Kidnapping of Julian Assange, which opens with a highly relevant quote by Jean-Paul Sartre, words which "should echo in all our minds following the grotesque decision of Britain’s High Court to extradite Julian Assange to the United States": “Let us look at ourselves, if we have the courage, to see what is happening to us.”

What is happening to Julian Assange is on some level happening to all of us, as all those who have been paying close attention to the fast accelerating technocratic enslavement of humanity can well attest to. Just see the recent eye-opening TLAV interview with Catherine Austin Fitts on the global financial coup and technocratic slavery that follows.

What does the latest decision from the UK high court tell us about ourselves, and the state of western society right now? If nothing else, that truth is treason in the empire of lies.

Volumes of witness by people of distinction, who examined and studied Julian and diagnosed his autism and his Asperger’s Syndrome and revealed that he had already come within an ace of killing himself at Belmarsh prison, Britain’s very own hell, were ignored.

The recent confession of a crucial FBI informant and prosecution stooge, a fraudster and serial liar, that he had fabricated his evidence against Julian was ignored. The revelation that the Spanish-run security firm at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Julian had been granted political refuge, was a CIA front that spied on Julian’s lawyers and doctors and confidants (myself included) – that, too. was ignored.

The recent journalistic disclosure, repeated graphically by defence counsel before the High Court in October, that the CIA had planned to murder Julian in London – even that was ignored.

The empire will of course continue to ignore the truth in favor of the lies that give it life, and if they have to sacrifice Julian Assange, even if they have to sacrifice 100 Assange's, they will do so without a second thought, as long as they are convinced that the peasants will endure the injustice, and that doing so will not ignite a revolution that will threaten their power. That is simply how the story always goes. The dance between tyrants and serfs, truth and deception, war criminals and those like Julian Assange whose courage exposes their crimes against humanity. Those who speak dangerous truths have historically always met fates similar to the fate that looks to now be awaiting Julian Assange. Sadly, it now seems, only a miracle will prevent the almost certain demise of the resistance icon whose only crime was to publish the truth.

Before Julian's fate had been written in stone by the black robed tyrants responsible for this latest mockery of justice, his family was setting up a Christmas tree, hoping beyond hope that maybe, just maybe, this would be the year he would finally be able to join them for the holiday once again.

https://twitter.com/StellaMoris1/status/1468143437228785667

- StellaMoris1

Now it looks almost certain he won't be home for Christmas, not only not this year, but never again. Christmas, has, however, always been a season full of miracles, and if the world was in need of a Christmas miracle this year, this would surely be it. The fight for freedom and justice for Assange will go on, as our prayers go out for Julian and his family this Christmas season. As we celebrate the holidays this season, let us not forget that one man is rotting in prison for publishing truth that exposed US war crimes, while the war criminals he exposed through WikiLeaks continue to walk free.

I cannot help but conclude with the powerful closing words of John Pilger's piece:

"Who among us is prepared to stand up rather than remain mere bystanders to an epic travesty such as the judicial kidnapping of Julian Assange? What is at stake is both a courageous man’s life and, if we remain silent, the conquest of our intellects and sense of right and wrong: indeed our very humanity."