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https://images.app.goo.gl/uuixko3jMUGuTG4J9
The absolute hypocrisy of Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling is staggering. After ruling that Julian Assange cannot be extradited because of concerns over suicide and the cruelty of the American prison system, she sent him back to Belmarsh, the Covid-ridden maximum security prison in South London. This makes it obvious that both the UK and US want him to die a slow torturous death as both his physical and mental health have deteriorated, perhaps beyond repair. One thing is certain, it’s highly unlikely that Assange will ever be a free man again. A message is being sent to journalists that despite 1st Amendment protections, the official narrative is not to be challenged -- the watchdog function of the media is no more.
The treatment of Assange sends a chilling message and has serious implications for journalists everywhere. The penalty for challenging the US government is death. In the years that Wikileaks has been in existence they have never published anything that has turned out to be false. It is not only Assange on trial for his life, but the truth as well. He’s being held although there are no charges against him, he is also being denied bail while waiting on the US to file an appeal.
“There are no charges pending against Julian Assange in the U.K. A U.K. judge denied the U.S.’s request to extradite him, the only place where charges are pending. Despite this, the judge just ruled he must remain imprisoned — in a COVID-ridden high-security prison — while the U.S. appeals,” added Glenn Greenwald. “This shows how authoritarian the British judiciary is. The only thing the U.S. cares about is keeping Assange in a cage, silenced and disappeared. This gives them the best of all worlds: he stays in prison, with no need to prove he’s guilty of anything. That’s despotic.”
“On Monday, Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be sent to the United States as she was not convinced that the U.S. prison system could guarantee he would not commit suicide while incarcerated. The publisher faced up to 175 years in prison for his alleged breach of the Espionage Act of 1917 while receiving classified information from U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning. However, she sided with the United States on both their assertions and the legality of their claims, setting a precedent that some called a “chilling” ruling for investigative journalism.”
The objective of both the US and UK is clear, to permanently silence Julian Assange. By siding with the US on their claims it leaves the door wide open for her decision to be overturned on appeal. When does revealing crimes make a journalist a criminal? When the perpetrator of the crimes is the government of the most powerful nation on earth. National security has become nothing more than a catch phrase for covering up crimes against innocent civilians, and now crimes against those who report them. When Assange and Wikileaks were revealing the crimes of the Bush administration they were hailed as heroes, but when the Clinton and Podesta emails were “leaked” revealing the corruption of the DNC they became targets. It is the Deep State power brokers that stole the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 that are behind Assange’s current persecution. The UK and their security services are heavily invested in the corrupt Clinton cabal.
If Assange’s security or threat of suicide -- an extremely unlikely scenario given what he’s already endured -- was of any concern whatsoever to the British government there are planty of alternatives to the harsh conditions of Belmarsh Prison, for example an ankle monitor or a safe house where he could be monitored. Sending him back to Belmarsh shows a callous disregard for his well being.
“A particularly high-security prison, H.M.P. Belmarsh is generally considered the U.K.’s most notorious jail, taking in prisoners from around the country that other prisons cannot handle. The government’s 2019 report on conditions inside the facility noted it was overrun with 120 violent gangs and that there were 161 recorded inmate assaults on staff. After a COVID-19 outbreak this year, inmates have been largely locked down in their cells, typically for 23 hours a day.”
Judge Baraitser rulings throughout the hearings consistently favored the attorneys from the US while at the same time obstructing the Assange legal defense team. She also has one of the highest rates for having her cases overturned.
Although denying extradition on the grounds of the severity of the American prison system, Judge Baraitser consistently upheld America’s right to prosecute Assange making a mockery of the British system of jurisprudence. “So it was barely surprising, as I explained in my last post, that, while denying the extradition claim, she supported all the arguments advanced by the US accruing to itself the right to prosecute Assange – and any other journalist – for the crime of doing journalism. She ignored the facts, the expert testimony presented in court and the legal arguments – all of which favoured Assange – and backed instead what amounted to a purely political case made by the US.”
Not to minimize Julian in any way, but this has become a much bigger issue, one in which he has become a symbol, an icon for freedom of the press and against censorship. Should he die in Belmarsh Prison he will become more of a martyr than he already is. “Those who campaigned so vigorously to keep Assange’s case in the spotlight, even as the US and UK corporate media worked so strenuously to keep it in darkness, are the heroes of the day. They made the price too steep for Baraitser or the British establishment to agree to lock Assange away indefinitely in the US for exposing its war crimes and its crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we must not downplay the price being demanded of us for this victory.”
“We have contributed collectively in our various small ways to win back for Assange some degree of freedom, and hopefully a reprieve from what could be a death sentence as his health continues to deteriorate in an overcrowded Belmarsh high-security prison in London that has become a breeding ground for Covid-19. The US and British establishments do not care where Assange is imprisoned – be it Sweden, the UK or the US. What has been most important to them is that he continues to be locked out of sight in a cell somewhere, where his physical and mental fortitude can be destroyed and where he is effectively silenced, encouraging others to draw the lesson that there is too high a price to pay for dissent.”
There is no price too high when it comes to free speech and freedom of the press. Declaring dissent to be a manifestation of mental illness was a tactic used by Hitler in Germany and perfected by the USSR and now Communist China. “If he regains his freedom, it will be solely because he has been characterised as mentally unsound. That will be used to discredit not just Assange, but the cause for which he fought, the Wikileaks organisation he helped to found, and all wider dissidence from establishment narratives. This idea will settle into popular public discourse unless we challenge such a presentation at every turn.”
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Assange and the Clinton Cabal
One question that looms large, in light of the fact that Assange warned the State Department about an upcoming leak of over 250,000 cables, is why is the DOJ so vigorously pursuing his extradition? In 2011 he warned a State Dept. lawyer that a rogue official from the same cabinet dept. Was about to release these cables thus endangering numerous people.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “We have intelligence that the State Department Database Archive of 250,000 diplomatic cables…is being spread around and…within the next few days it will become public.”
Assange: There is time “in case there are any individuals who haven’t been warned that they should be warned.”
Assange to State Department: Rogue former employee Daniel Domscheit-Berg intends to release classified State Department cables without redactions or other precautions.
James O’Keefe: “There is an integrity to Assange’s conduct that cannot be denied, whether you welcomed his releases or not.”
https://creativedestructionmedia.com/news/politics/2020/12/16/audio-of-assange-warning-u-s-government-of-damaging-leak-released-project-veritas-does-it-again/
The answer is clear, Assange has information damaging to the Deep State and the Clinton cabal. Even should he be completely exonerated Julian would still have a target on his back and he would likely suffer the same fate as those who have damaging evidence against the Clintons and their phony foundation -- he would be Clintoncided.
"Assange earned the eternal enmity of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and identified both nations as major funders of Islamic State [ISIL/ISIS]. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. They exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. They exposed Clinton as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate."
https://thewashingtonstandard.com/the-empire-is-not-done-with-julian-assange/
The ones with the most to lose from a freed Assange are the Deep State and Clinton cabal, two entities that are synonymous. The fact is that nobody crosses Hillary Clinton and lives, whether it’s suicide by shooting yourself in the back of the head several times or a long lingering death in a British hellhole. Anyone believing that Assange will have a life of freedom is sadly mistaken. Assange and Wikileaks hold the key to unlocking the murder of Seth Rich exonerating the Russians and shining the light on those really responsible. When it comes out that Russia wasn’t responsible for the DNC “leaks” the only viable suspects are the DNC themselves and Hillary Clinton had control of the party after cheating Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic nomination. There’s no one left with a motive to kill him.
By removing Assange, either through murder or perpetual incarceration, it sends a message to anyone dissenting against the Deep State and globalist cabal -- anyone questioning the official narrative will be branded a domestic terrorist. The Biden administration, Democrats, and RINOs are already proposing legislation to effectively silence dissent. That coupled with internet censorship by the social media giants will make the truth harder to spread. Assange and Wikileaks were branded “terrorists” after the Cablegate diplomatic cables were released.
Secretary of State Clinton said after the release of the cables, “Disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper functioning of responsible government.” Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department was conducting ‘an active, ongoing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.’ Then US Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI) called WikiLeaks ‘a terrorist organization.’ Former GOP Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called for WikiLeaks to be shut down and Assange treated as ‘an enemy combatant who’s engaged in information warfare against the United States.’”
“For those who ran the American empire, the truth hurt,” Ratner writes. “For the rest of us, it was liberating. With the 2010 release of the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, and Cablegate, WikiLeaks went far beyond traditional investigative reporting. It proved that in the new digital world, full transparency was not only possible, but necessary in order to hold governments accountable for their actions.”
https://thewashingtonstandard.com/the-empire-is-not-done-with-julian-assange/
Now the government is making it official and it won’t only be Wikileaks that is affected. America is no longer a constitutional republic but is rapidly becoming a totalitarian police state where the government exercises complete control over its citizens and is taking over the flow of information and what they are allowed to see or hear. Access to truthful information becomes more difficult by the day. The tech giants are not only complicit but responsible for the suppression of the truth.
Those who fight back will pay the price -- in Julian Assange’s case the ultimate price. The Deep State can have it no other way, Assange is one of the biggest threats to the official narrative. Bear in mind, Wikileaks has never published anything that has turned out to be false. Of all the people that has released damaging information about the Clintons, Assange is the biggest threat. Even Peter Schweitzer’s book enumerating their many crimes has posed little threat to the Clintons’ criminal empire. It is now entirely likely that Hillary will assume a prominent post in the Biden administration.
Michael Ratner, an attorney for Assange, describes the transition of America from a freedom loving country to a mass surveillance state -- particularly the unwillingness of the American people to do anything about it. We have sat idly by as our rights have been eroded little by little, particularly our right to free speech along with the 4th Amendment protections from unreasonable government overreach.
“My view is that mass surveillance is not really about preventing terrorism, but is much more about social control,” Ratner writes. “It’s about stopping an uprising like the ones we had here in the US in the ’60s and ’70s. It shocks me that Americans are passively allowing this and that all three branches of government have done nothing about it. Despite mass surveillance, my message for people is the same one that Mother Jones delivered a century ago: organize, organize, organize. Yes, the surveillance state will try to scare you. They will be watching and listening. You won’t even know whether your best friend is an informant. Take whatever security precautions you can. But do not be intimidated. Whether you call it the sweep of history or the sweep of revolution, in the end, the surveillance state cannot stop people from moving toward the kind of change that will make their lives better.”
https://thewashingtonstandard.com/the-empire-is-not-done-with-julian-assange/
Julian Assange will likely die in Belmarsh Prison… if not there, in a similar place here in the US. To allow his freedom would encourage others to challenge the powers that be and that cannot be allowed. He still possesses enough information to make him an existential threat to the Clintons and the Deep State and for that reason he cannot be allowed to be free.