patrick.net

gabbar says

"Assange is a Australian citizen. Their silence makes Australia a cuck nation?"

No. Australia is demanding his immediate release. See "Australia's parliament has passed a motion calling on the US and
UK to release Julian Assange, ahead of a crucial legal hearing." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68302206

This latest delay is because the Court has asked the US government to supply ‘assurances’ that if Assange is put on trial in the US, he will be treated as if he were a US citizen, not a foreigner; that he will be guaranteed First Amendment freedom of speech protections;

In what many will agree was good news yesterday, object of elite hatred and Wikileaker Julian Assange won the right to appeal his extradition to the U.S., for alleged crimes of publishing leaked military documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that embarrassed the United States. The BBC ran the story under the headline, “Julian Assange: Wikileaks founder can challenge US extradition.”

Even more embarrassing for the U.S., the reason the British court gave Assange another chance was because it was unconvinced the U.S. would honor Assange’s constitutional rights, particularly his free-speech rights.

In a short but dramatic ruling yesterday, which was literally the jailed journalist’s last chance to avoid extradition, two senior judges gave Assange permission to appeal the earlier order granting his extradition to the U.S. The judges ruled that Assange must be provided a full appeal in the UK.

The claim is that Assange leaked documents showing how the US military had covered up killing civilians during the Afghanistan war. In other words, the U.S. did what the ICC would consider war crimes, that is if it applied yesterday’s standard to President Obama. Specifically, the U.S. argues Assange “put lives at risk” by failing to redact the names of intelligence agents in the leaked documents.

For some reason, many people think Assange will not receive a fair trial in America. They seem to believe he’ll be relegated to the DOJ’s coach class along with President Trump and the January 6th Capitol tourists. That loss of trust in America’s judicial institutions is a bad sign, given that until recently, the U.S. used to be considered the ‘gold standard’ of justice.

But don’t worry! As we have been repeatedly reassured, we will save democracy by first flattening it into a dead roadside raccoon.

The claim is that Assange leaked documents showing how the US military had covered up killing civilians during the Afghanistan war.

.Odd, since Assange is not a US Citizen, but the person who leaked that info to Assange (Manning) was, and that US citizen leaker was pardoned by Obama.

What were the terms of his plea "deal"?

Assange, the only known survivor of Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome, agreed to plead guilty to a single count of espionage yesterday, in exchange for credit for his five years of time served in solitary confinement in a high-security British prison.

Now, suddenly, inexplicably, Julian is free. Assange, now 52 and quite pale, requested sentencing at a remote U.S. outpost in the Marianas Islands, a U.S. Pacific island commonwealth where it turns out we have a United States Federal Courthouse attached to a Tiki bar.

After that, Julian hopes to return to his native Australia, as far from anybody named ‘Clinton’ as he can get.

The deal seems to have developed last month after a British High Court appallingly denied Assange’s extradition to the U.S., ironically and embarrassingly holding that U.S. officials had not satisfied them that America could protect Mr. Assange’s Constitutional rights. At that time, just a couple months ago, the U.S. sought to lock Assange up for 170 years.

Cynics speculated the Assange deal was a news nugget tossed out to distract everyone from what is going on in the Proxy War.

This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper, were not effective in any remotely reasonable time. I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice after being detained for years and facing a 175-year sentence, with no effective remedy.

Justice for me is now precluded as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European court of Human rights, or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source, and I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.

I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.

As I emerged from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period. How expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished. I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship. ...

When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world.

But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq, and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval. In fact, 40 years of my potential 175-year sentence was for obtaining and releasing those policies.

The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world’s dirty wars and secret operations is simple: let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest. ...

However, in February 2017, the landscape change dramatically. President Trump had been elected.

He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive as CIA director and William Barr, a former CIA officer as US Attorney General.

By March 2017 Wikileaks had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of French political parties. Its spying on French and German leaders. Its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and a standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole. We revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs, and iPhones.

CIA director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution. It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me, with the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and authorised going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks and the planting of false information.

My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife, and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six-month-old son’s nappy.

This is the testimony of more than thirty current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in the prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.

The CIA’s targeting of myself, my family, my associates, through aggressive extrajudicial extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain. ...

When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without this, no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources that a state aggressor can deploy.

If the situation were not already bad enough in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position. Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the US claims its espionage act still applies to them, regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned. An American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to, perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime with no defence and he may be extradited just like me. ...

The criminalisation of news-gathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.

The fundamental issue is simple: journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs.

Journalism is not a crime. It is a pillar of a free and informed society.