Your man in the public gallery: Assange hearing day 1

January 4th will see some news on the Assange trial.   Activists asking Trump to pardon Assange:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/14/130999/

Roger Waters, in Salon, on free expression and Assange:

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/06/standing-up-for-free-expression-means-s...

NDPP wrote:

New Assange recording reveals WikiLeaks founder tried to WARN Washington about damaging release, defying claims of carelessness

https://on.rt.com/axfl

"With calls mounting for President Trump to pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a new tape reveals that despite being smeared as a foreign agent, Assange tried to limit the release of damaging information to the US. Critics of WikiLeaks have long been arguing that the outlet has been careless with the way it handled the leaked documents, allegedly endangering US officials and troops abroad by publishing the information without a  proper editorial process. However, the latest leaked call between Assange and the State Dept seems to demonstrate the opposite. "....

Why are Canadian journalists who constantly prattle on about 'human rights' in China, Russia and elsewhere, stonily silent on the treatment of Assange? Ditto the NDP. Answer: They are true and loyal servants of the 'rules-based-international-order' crime syndicate.

The facts shown in the recording with Assange and the Clinton  State Department official were known many years before the release of the recording. But it doesn't matter.

The "hearing" outcome is a foregone conclusion, there is no "bombshell" testimony if it isn't even reported by the mainstream outlets. It is a Stalinist show trial designed by the UK and US governments as an example to those who would expose state crimes.

It doesn't really matter what the defense demonstrates, or even the audio recording of Assange warning the due to the forced the release of the unredacted Manning cables by Guardian creatures publishing the password to the files, which was then accessed by others.  https://www.actvism.org/en/politics/assange-update-audio-recording/

The "hearing" proceeds with the complicity of state and corporate media which remains largely silent--silence being the best strategy rather than bring any attention at all to the blatant display of crooked lawfare.

The UK's security state and legalism collusion in the "Assange case" has been persistent, obvious, and documented from the beginning when the cover story was the never laid charges of sexual assult from Sweden.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jan/04/julian-assange-cannot-be-e...

"The judge’s decision, focusing on Assange’s health, came after she knocked down one argument after another made last year by Assange’s lawyers. Sending him to the US would not breach a bar on extradition for “political offences” she said, and she had no reason to doubt that “the usual constitutional and procedural protections” would be applied to a trial he might face in the US.

But she accepted the evidence of prominent medical experts, including details of how Assange had suffered from depression while in prison in London. “The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man who is genuinely depressed about his future,” said Baraitser."

Mobo:  Not sure all the implications here, or how narrow the ruling focuses on his health, or what will happen to him now.   But overall good news, happy new year Julien!  

Analysis of the ruling by Jonathan Cooke:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/04/assange-wins-the-cost-the-crushi...

"The US demand for extradition was rejected on what was effectively a technicality. The US mass incarceration system is so obviously barbaric and depraved that, it was shown conclusively by experts at the hearings back in September, Assange would be at grave risk of committing suicide should he become another victim of its super-max jails.

One should not also discard another of the British establishment’s likely considerations: that in a few days Donald Trump will be gone from the White House and a new US administration will take his place.

There is no reason to be sentimental about president-elect Joe Biden. He is a big fan of mass incarceration too, and he will be no more of a friend to dissident media, whistleblowers and journalism that challenges the national security state than was his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. Which is no friend at all.

But Biden probably doesn’t need the Assange case hanging over his head, becoming a rallying cry against him, an uncomfortable residue of the Trump administration’s authoritarian instincts that his own officials would be forced to defend.

It would be nice to imagine that the British legal, judicial and political establishments grew a backbone in ruling against extradition. The far more likely truth is that they sounded out the incoming Biden team and received permission to forgo an immediate ruling in favour of extradition – on a technicality.

Keep an eye on whether the new Biden administration decides to drop the appeal case. More likely his officials will let it rumble on, largely below the media’s radar, for many months more."

The judge's ruling reminds of the brutality of the American prison system reflected in so many cases, but one of the most tragic being that of the African-American youth Kalief Browder. Technical ruling or not by the British judge, I am glad Assange is not being sent into this system.

Last night on CBS's 60 Minutes, they discussed the case of an African American who was prosecuted six times for the same set of murders in repeat trials with phony evidence who ended up on death row and ended up being freed only because of the years long efforts of two reporters to show he was framed. Meanwhile a witness who claimed that the defendant had confessed to him in prison, was released early for giving this evidence and proceeded to allegedly commit three murders himself. Despite two hung juries and four trials being overturned on appeal because the prosecutor hid evidence, etc., he was allowed to keep doing the same thing.   The entire criminal justice in the US is criminal.  

Kalief Browder (May 25, 1993 – June 6, 2015) was an African-American youth from The Bronx, New York, who was held at the Rikers Island jail complex, without trial, between 2010 and 2013 for allegedly stealing a backpack containing valuables. During his imprisonment, Browder was in solitary confinement for two years.

Two years after his release, Browder hanged himself at his parents' home. His case has been cited by activists campaigning for reform of the New York City criminal justice system and has attracted widespread attention in the years following his death. ...

Browder was imprisoned at the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC) on Rikers Island. Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the RNDC had a "deep-seated culture of violence", in which inmates suffered "broken jaws, broken orbital bones, broken noses, long bone fractures, and lacerations requiring stitches".[7]

Browder said inmates washed their own clothes with soap and a metal bucket, causing rust stains on the clothes. Browder's mother began visiting him weekly and provided him with clean clothes and snack money. To avoid becoming a target of the inmates, he slept on top of his belongings, including his bucket. Browder said he felt pressure to gain physical strength to defend himself from prison violence. He said, "Every here and there I did a couple pullups or pushups. When I went in there, that's when I decided I wanted to get big."[6]

Browder was a victim of prison violence; on one occasion, he and other inmates were lined up against a wall. Correction Officers (CO) wanted to find the instigator of a prison fight. Browder and the inmates were punched, one by one; he said, "Their noses were leaking, their faces were bloody, their eyes were swollen". The guards threatened the inmates with solitary confinement if they reported their injuries.[6]

On October 20, 2010, a gang member spat in Browder's face. Later in the day, Browder punched the gang leader and was set upon by fifteen gang members.[6] On September 23, 2012, a video was recorded showing Browder in handcuffs being assaulted by guards.[8] After a fight with an inmate, Browder was put in solitary confinement for two weeks; he later said of the other inmate, "He was throwing shoes at people. I told him to stop. I actually took his sneaker and I threw it, and he got mad. He swung on me, and we started fighting."[6]

Altogether, Browder spent nearly two years in solitary confinement, mostly after fights with inmates. Browder later said that while in solitary confinement, correction officers beat him when he was showering. He said a verbal confrontation with a guard would escalate into a physical altercation.[9] During his time in solitary confinement, Browder was allowed to participate in activities such as reading; he also studied for the General Educational Development (G.E.D) examination.

https://www.google.com/search?q=kalief+browder+wiki&rlz=1C5CHFA_enCA680C...

Of course Assange remains incarcerated while the UK's top judiciary puts on a phoney display of humanitarian concern and political independence, neither of which have the faintest reality:

 Both Tortuous and Torturous
January 6, 2021  Craig Murray

Magistrate Vanessa Bararitser walked into Westminster Magistrates Court No.1 at 10.12am this morning with the sunniest smile and most carefree disposition I have ever seen her adopt. Her shoulders appeared visibly lifted. She positively beamed at Clair Dobbin, counsel for the US government, as she invited her to put the case for the prosecution as to why Julian Assange should not be released on bail.
...
It is ironic to hear Baraitser declare in condemnatory tones, without equivocation, that Julian only entered the Embassy to escape extradition to the USA. This is of course perfectly true. But I remember the many years when the Establishment line, from the government and repeated in several hundred Guardian columns, was that this truth was a fiction. They claimed there was never any intention to extradite to the USA, and actually he was avoiding extradition to Sweden, on allegations that never had any basis and which disappeared like mist when the time actually came. I suppose we should be grateful for at least this much truth in proceedings....

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/01/both-tortuous-and-tortur...

The dishonest smear job by the Guardian, and MSM in general, was echoed by many anti-Assange voices on Babble.

Sadly, the most slimey piece of "journalism" ever allowed to be published as a Rabble blog post was by the "woke" Michael Laxer and Matt Fodor ("No exception for Assange: Rape apologetics and the left") who accused anyone on the left, including Chomsky, as being a "rape apologist" and/or "conspiracy theorist" --for saying then what the UK governnment judiciary now states was always the reason for Assange's fleeing to the Equdorian embassy, and the current excuse for denying bail.

No pardon for Assange or Snowden:

https://dissenter.substack.com/p/trump-bows-to-republicans-assange-snowden

"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden were not offered clemency because Trump "did not want to anger Senate Republicans who will soon determine whether he's convicted during his Senate trial."

"Multiple GOP lawmakers had sent messages through aides that they felt strongly about not granting clemency to Assange or Snowden," according to CNN.

NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who was the first to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act under Trump, and former CIA officer John Kiriakou pursued pardons. They were effectively denied as well."

Excuses. As if the 'Deep State' was just going to roll over. In the alternate universe where Trump isn't a fakester fraud, the credibility gained by pardoning Assange would have been worth more political capital than any damage done by impeachment.  A lot of big talk by Trump and Tucker leading up to a big cowardly whiff. Obvious concern trolls.

Tucker and Trump's "anti-war" "anti-deepstate" talk reminds me a lot of the Canadian Liberal Party's talk on "tackling climate change" in how much credit they get for pretending to care about things they obviously would never actually put up a fight for. Grifters love a cheap date.