The crux of the US case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is simple: he put American and allied lives at risk through his exposure of classified material from military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The proof of this claim is where the problem arises for the prosecution. Because there isn’t any solid proof.

Assange is in ill health and reportedly a high suicide risk. According to a psychiatric assessment Assange has resigned himself to die if the British court ultimately decides to extradite him to the US and he has already made his confession to a Catholic priest and started writing goodbye letters to family in the event that extradition is ordered.

The Assange Case

Assange started Wikileaks in 2006 and it entered the spotlight after releasing troves of material in 2010 relating to US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accessed by US Army intel analyst Chelsea Manning. These included videos showing US military members killing Reuters journalists. Further material also exposed numerous lies and misleading actions taken by the Obama Administration and intelligence community and exposed worldwide diplomatic corruption.

Assange was accused of sexual assault in Sweden in 2010 although the case was eventually not pursued. Assange fled the charges and the mounting political firestorm around his work at Wikileaks by hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was given asylum so that he wouldn’t be extradited to the United States as a result of his publishing actions pertaining to the US national security establishment.

In 2016 Wikileaks put out another massive release of Democratic National Committee documents that were partly credited with helping Donald Trump win the presidential election. This anti-Hillary Clinton move lost Assange many of his former progressive backers and has left him out to dry politically, abandoned by the left who formerly loved his work exposing the Bush Administration and on the target list of the Trump Administration and the GOP. Nonetheless it is fair to say Assange currently has much more backing among Trump supporters than among most mainstream progressives and centrists.

Despite 2018 charges against Russian spies from Special Counsel Robert Mueller over working with Wikileaks to release the DNC material, Assange has stated that he never cooperated with Russia.

Assange’s 2019 Arrest

Assange was arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in April, 2019 and given 50 weeks in prison for breaching bail. He was charged with violating the Espionage Act by the US the next month. His trial over extradition to the US began in May, 2019 and he is currently jailed at HM Prison Belmarsh in the UK.

An unsealed indictment in 2017 charged Assange with working with Manning to cover her tracks after hacking classified materials and US grand jury hit him with 17 more spying charges last year.

Assange’s lawyers warn of up to 175 years behind bars if he is convicted of all 18 charges.

What’s Behind the Additional Charges?

The additional 17 charges against Assange stretch back to the Obama Administration’s fervent pursuit of hacking groups, particularly Assange and Wikileaks. The charges are also part of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s ongoing crusade to punish Wikileaks at all costs.

The charges are mainly cobbled together from past investigations and are full of holes where evidence should be and timeline irregularities. It’s quite apparent that the main purpose of the additional charges is to get charges which will be severe enough to prompt an extradition to the US.

Trump called for Assange to be executed in 2010, praised him during the 2016 election for utilitarian reasons, later claimed to not have much idea who Assange is in any case and has since softened into hoping Assange just stays “quiet” in jail. Trump-supporting congressman Dana Rohrbacher reportedly offered Assange an end to the extradition proceedings and a presidential pardon in a 2017 meeting at the Ecuadorian embassy if he would name his source on the DNC leak and thereby exonerate Trump of Russian collusion. Assange refused.

Potential Extradition to the United States

Assange and Wikileaks provided Americans and people all over the world with valuable information about what their governments and military leadership were doing. Now that he faces potential extradition to the United States it’s worth asking why there isn’t more media attention.

One of the few individuals who’s been reliably chronicling the proceedings is historian and former ambassador Craig Murray. His work has shed a lot of light on the monkeying around that is going on in the case and the actions of Judge Vanessa Baraitser which he has witnessed first-hand. As Murray wrote on Sept. 24:

“It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her. I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before opening arguments were received.”

Amnesty International monitors have not been allowed to observe the ongoing hearings, despite in the past being allowed to observe human rights situations from Guantanamo Bay to Turkey.

Assange’s legal team is correct in arguing that the charges against him are political and should not potentially trigger extradition. The evidence that the campaign against Assange is political is evident to anyone who takes even a cursory glance at his case and the bipartisan witch hunt against him by what Trump terms the “Deep State.”

The Assange Case is an Assault on Transparency

Every reputable news organization lists methods for sources to leak to them securely and without being caught. It’s called journalism. Encryption in journalism is not a crime, in fact it’s basic source protection.

Assange’s help of Manning to get around being caught was not criminal, and the argument that Wikileaks is not actually a publisher and doesn’t deserve journalistic protections is bogus as well. Trying to arbitrarily separate them out as not a publisher is mere sophistry and it doesn’t even matter, anyway.

The First Amendment and press freedom is not some specialized club that just applies to the Washington Post. It’s for the right to print words short of incitement that reveal information and hold the government accountable. If we regress to an increasingly blinkered view of who is a journalist or not the free press will be even more impacted – and less respected – than it is in today’s currently tense environment.

Progressives and anti-Trump conservatives seem very alarmed and angry about Trump’s attacks on the press and criticism of unfriendly journalists. Every day seems to be a new “how dare he!” But when it comes to Assange you can almost hear the birds chirping at most mainstream outlets.

Trump’s mean words about Jim Acosta make headline news, but a man rotting away in a jail cell for publishing material in the public interest is nowhere to be found on CNN. In fact, even some progressive journalists like Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald have only been given platforms on shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight now that MSNBC and other outlets have moved so far into the corporate wing of the Democratic party they even won’t give alternative views a hearing.

The Obama Administration’s previous pursuit of Edward Snowden reflects a similar pattern of executive overreach. Trump’s musing of potentially pardoning Snowden shows that despite his past harsh statements on Assange he’s aware of how these cases are being prosecuted to protect the system of endless war and the perpetual bolstering of the military-industrial complex.

If Assange dies in prison with hearings stretching out interminably or is extradited to face additional charges and prison time in the United States it will be a clear signal to journalists and truth-tellers everywhere to shut up about anything important or face similar consequences. Trump should pardon both Snowden and Assange and upset James Clapper, Susan Rice, John Brennan and James Comey’s self-righteous dinner party. Why side with the very people who oppose him?

Whether you support Assange and believe he’s pursuing a noble and necessary mission or think he’s a pretentious stooge hopped up on Russophilia, the underlying fact remains: the prosecution of Julian Assange is a threat to the free press.

As the character Tyrion says in Game of Thrones: “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

L'articolo The Prosecution of Julian Assange is a Threat to the Free Press proviene da InsideOver.

With the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi still hovering over his head , Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, also known as MBS, has again caused outrage with allegations that he had tried to hack the phone of Mr Bezos.

Ironically, Mr Jeff Bezos is the owner of the Washington Post with which Khashoggi worked as a columnist until he was killed inside the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. According to the Guardian which first reported on the incident, the billionaire’s phone was hacked around May 2018, after the Crown Prince sent him a WhatsApp message. The encrypted message contained an infected video which exfiltrated large amounts of data within hours.

MBS has always been known for cracking down and silencing those he perceives as critics and business rivals. By 2017 the number of Saudi citizens fleeing to other countries because of his crackdown had increased from 575 to 1200. According to US intelligence sources, it was in the same year that he oversaw a clandestine operation that spied on, kidnapped, detained and tortured business rivals and Saudi citizens who held dissenting views. The intelligence further revealed how a number of women were detained and tortured for being vocal about women’s rights. They were detained in small dark rooms in an unused palace where they were tortured by beatings and electric shocks, and threatened with rape and murder.

The torture was so severe that one of the women tried to commit suicide. The Saudi Government claimed they were detained, “in connection with activities that threatened the kingdom’s national security.”

Confirming that MBS was behind this clandestine operation was a phone call which was intercepted by US intelligence. In November 2018 one Turkish online newspaper reported that the CIA had a phone recording in which the Crown Prince gave firm instructions for Khashoggi to be silenced.

“It is said that the Crown Prince gave an instruction to silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible and this instruction was captured during the CIA wiretapping,” wrote Abdulkadir Selvi in the paper. According to Selvi, during the phone call with his brother Khalid, who is the Saudi ambassador to the US, MBS was heard expressing his discomfort with the way Khashoggi was portraying the Saudi administration in his writings for the Washington Post.

This history of silencing those perceived as critics of Saudi administration, therefore, leaves no doubt why Bezos’s phone was targeted.

In a statement released after the hacking allegations were made public, the United Nations Office for Human Rights expressed its concern for what it believed was the “contravention of fundamental international human rights standards.”

“The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in the surveillance of Mr Bezos’s phone in an effort to influence, if not silence, the Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia ,” said UN experts Agnes Callamard and David Kaye.

They added: “The allegations reinforce other reporting pointing to a pattern of targeted surveillance of perceived opponents and those of broader strategic importance to the Saudi authorities, including nationals and non-nationals.”

Just after his phone was hacked, Bezos was widely targeted by Saudi social media accounts as an alleged adversary of the kingdom. This was part of a clandestine online smear campaign orchestrated by those connected to the Crown Prince. According to UN experts, among those who were involved in carrying out the smear campaign was Mr Saud al-Qahtani who was greatly mentioned in the killing of Khashoggi.

The fact that the hacking of Bezos’ phone took place just five months before the murder of Khashoggi is enough to bring into focus the involvement of MBS in the killing of the Washington Post columnist.

“The circumstances and timing of the hacking and surveillance of Bezos also strengthen support for further investigations by the US and other relevant authorities of the allegations that the Crown Prince failed to stop the mission that fatally targeted Khashoggi,” noted Callamard and her colleague.

But will the US and her allies act this time round?

They’ll have to because the mere fact that the head of a top US company can be placed under Saudi surveillance should be enough to raise alarm. But in his characteristic style, President Trump will most likely choose to bury his head in the sand as he waits for things to cool down. Members of his government have been giving lacklustre responses to avoid antagonising Saudi Arabia which is a key market for US weapons.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said that the government was obviously taking the situation seriously but quickly added that: “Saudi Arabia is obviously an important ally.” Treasury Secretary Mr Steven Mnuchin refused to discuss the matter during an interview with CNBC and urged American companies to continue doing business with Saudi Arabia.

The downside of this is that the more countries like Britain and the US display their reluctance to call out MBS over his clandestine and brutal activities, the more he will be emboldened in his operations. At the moment the extent of his surveillance on world leaders and top businessmen is yet to be known. But it is suspected that more phones belonging to top government officials and leaders could have been compromised.

Among them is British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who communicated with MBS on WhatsApp around the time, and White House senior advisor Jared Kushner. The latest revelations should be a wake up call to world leaders to put business interests aside and speak against human rights violations being perpetrated by MBS.

As Andrew Miller, a Middle East expert who served on the National Security Council under Obama said: “It is clear that the Saudis have no real boundaries or limits in terms of what they are prepared to do in order to protect and advance MBS.”

L'articolo The Saudi Crown Prince has gone rogue and must be stopped proviene da InsideOver.