Tag: war on whistleblowers

Julian Assange’s Wife Says He’ll Kill Himself After Brits Approve Extradition To America

Stella Moris, the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, suggested that her husband would kill himself if he is extradited to the United States after the British Home secretary approved a judge’s order to fly Assange from the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison in London to Virginia to stand trial.

British Home Secretary Pristi Patel approved the order on Thursday; paving the way for Assange, a native Australian, to stand trial on espionage charges.

“If he’s extradited to the U.S., the conditions he will be under will be oppressive,” Stella Moris told a press conference Friday. “It will drive him to take his own life. That’s not simply a regular discussion about mental health. We are talking about driving a person to take their own life.”

American officials have informed the British government that Assange will not be held in maximum security if he is extradited.

Moris said Assange’s declaration that he would kill himself was made “recently,” adding that she would fight the order with “every available avenue. … I’m going to use every waking hour fighting for Julian until he is free,” The Daily Mail reported.

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The UK’s Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK’s Freedom Lectures Are a Farce

The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assange was extended and escalated on Friday morning. The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the U.S.’s extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East.

This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the U.S. and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. Those performative self-glorifying spectacles are constantly deployed to justify these two countries’ interference in and attacks on other nations, and to allow their citizens to feel a sense of superiority about the nature of their governments. After all, if the U.S. and UK stand for freedom and against tyranny, who could possibly oppose their wars and interventions in the name of advancing such lofty goals and noble values?

Having reported on the Assange case for years, on countless occasions I’ve laid out the detailed background that led Assange and the U.S. to this point. There is thus no need to recount all of that again; those interested can read the granular trajectory of this persecution here or here. Suffice to say, Assange — without having been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, for which he long ago served out his fifty-week sentence — has been in effective imprisonment for more than a decade.

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Judge suggests CIA may have illegally recorded Assange conversations, challenging extradition demands

Spanish media is reporting that a court order issued by Spanish High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz indicates that content of communications between Julian Assange and his lawyers may have been illegally recorded during the time he spent at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The order that the newspaper El Pais has seen names Spain’s Under Cover (UC) Global security company as handing over the information to CIA agents. That would have revealed the defense strategy of Assange, a whistleblower and journalist whom the US wants extradited from the UK on espionage charges, a request that has been granted and will be decided on within the next two months by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel.

If put on trial and found guilty in the US, Assange could be sentenced to 175 years in prison for revealing damning US military operations during the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and publishing it on the WikiLeaks website.

The Spanish court order is procedural in nature, sent by Jusge Pedraz to the UK as an explanation as to why the country’s authorities should allow him to take testimonies from Assange’s doctors and UK lawyers – one of whom is well known solicitor and human rights activist Gareth Peirce – who were the subject of spying at the embassy.

Legal sources have told El Pais that the extradition request could fall through for violating the right of defense if there is proof that US intelligence agencies managed to learn about Assange’s defense by illegally spying on his legal representatives and doctors. Spain gaining access to these individuals for the sake of obtaining witness testimonies would leave the British justice system “in an embarrassing situation,” some believe.

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THE FBI TRIED TO AMBUSH MY SOURCE. NOW I’M TELLING THE WHOLE STORY.

FBI AGENT GRAYDEN RIDD had a confidential message for his informant. An FBI team had been given the green light by the Justice Department to ambush and derail a planned meeting between a reporter and a source, and the informant’s job was to let the FBI know when and where the meeting would take place.

The reporter whose meeting they planned to target was me.

It was January 2014, and I was an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times focusing on national security. The FBI wanted to stop me from obtaining documents that I’d been told would reveal the details of massive spying operations by the National Security Agency. The FBI was convinced that I was in contact with someone they had secretly nicknamed the “second Snowden,” who was about to give me an archive that they feared could go far beyond what former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had leaked about the agency’s spying operations the year before.

The FBI’s plan to grab my source at our scheduled meeting was approved by top officials at the FBI and the Justice Department during the Obama administration, according to audio recordings I obtained of several phone conversations between Ridd and his informant. At the time, Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general and James Comey was FBI director.

“Right now, they are on board,” Ridd said in one phone conversation to plan the ambush operation, referring to top Justice Department and FBI officials. “I have to periodically go up to the throne room and recommit them. … We actually have a lot of buy-in and a lot of support, but I do need to feed the beast.”

The FBI declined to comment and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. Holder did not answer a request for comment left with his office; Comey did not respond to a request for comment conveyed through his lawyer. Ridd did not respond to a request for comment placed with a relative or to a knock at the door of his home in Washington, D.C.

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Who Really Killed Seth Rich?

Who is Seth Rich, and why was he murdered?  Many media outlets ignored this unsolved murder in D.C. in July 2016.  Those who wrote about this suspicious death were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.  Jack Cashill wrote the best summary of Rich’s murder:

Unknown assailants gun down the young DNC data analyst at 4 A.M. on a Washington, D.C., street and take nothing.  Two weeks later, international man of mystery Julian Assange strongly suggests on Dutch T.V. that Rich was his source for the purloined DNC emails then roiling the Democratic Party.

Many watched the Kabuki Theater of the Deep State unfold over many years with a very jaundiced eye.

[But what if this was a] . . . leak by a disgruntled DNC worker who had physical access to the server and copied the files to a thumb drive or similar.  This thumb drive was then handled [sic] directly to a WikiLeaks operative.  Julian Assange continues to deny he received the DNC files from the Russians.  There is no doubt the Russians, the North Koreans, and the Chinese, and other intel agencies were in Hillary Clinton’s homebrew server.  And yet we were assured with high confidence by our intel agencies Russians [sic] operatives did the DNC hack.

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A Weird, Stupid Dystopia

The last few days in the United States have seen a parade of wealthy freaks fellating each other’s egos and preening for the cameras in outlandish garb while ordinary Americans suffer more and more.

The weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner saw a gaggle of media celebrities congregate to congratulate one another on what a great job they’ve been doing bravely telling the truth and holding the most powerful government on earth to account. The host, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, gushed with enthusiasm about how much freedom the press have in America to say things the powerful don’t like.

“As we sit in this room tonight, people, I really hope you all remember what the real purpose of this evening is,” Noah said. “Yes, it’s fun. Yes, we dress nice. Yes, the people eat, they drink, we have fun. But the reason we’re here is to honor and celebrate the fourth estates and what you stand for — what you stand for — an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one.”

“And if you ever begin to doubt your responsibilities, if you ever begin to doubt how meaningful it is, look no further than what’s happening in Ukraine,” said Noah. “Look at what’s happening there. Journalists are risking and even losing their lives to show the world what’s really happening. You realize how amazing it is. In America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth even if it makes people in power uncomfortable, even if it makes your viewers or your readers uncomfortable. You understand how amazing that is? I stood here tonight and I made fun of the president of the United States, and I’m going to be fine. I am going to be fine, right? Do you really understand what a blessing it is?”

Of course there are people who’ve said things that US presidents don’t like who are not in fact fine. Julian Assange continues to waste away in Belmarsh Prison as the US government continues its efforts to extradite him to he can become the first publisher ever tried under the Espionage Act. Edward Snowden, an American, remains in exile because one US president after another continues to refuse to pardon his heroic whistleblowing about the sinister surveillance practices of the US intelligence cartel. Daniel Hale, also an American, sits in prison for exposing the depravity of America’s monstrous drone program.

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Judge approves Julian Assange’s extradition to US over spying charges

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is one step closer to facing espionage charges in the US after a British judge formally approved his extradition.

The case will go to Britain’s interior minister for a decision, and Assange, 50, still has legal avenues of appeal.

A judge at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday issued the extradition order in a brief hearing, as Assange watched by video link from Belmarsh Prison. He stated his full name and date of birth.

It is up to Home Secretary Priti Patel to decide whether to grant the extradition.

The order comes after the UK Supreme Court last month refused Assange permission to appeal against a lower court’s ruling that he could be extradited.

The move doesn’t exhaust the legal options for Assange, who has sought for years to avoid a trial in the US on 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse related to WikiLeaks’ publication of a massive trove of classified documents more than a decade ago.

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Biden’s Justice Dept. spied on journalists’ Apple and Google accounts: Project Veritas

The journalistic whistleblower organization, Project Veritas, announced Wednesday that Apple and Google have come forward to provide documents showing that President Biden’s Justice Department issued nine secret subpoenas to the companies to access multiple Project Veritas journalists’ private information.

The subpoenas and warrants were reportedly even extended to the journalist’s security detail.

In a video, published by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, the documents purport to show that the Justice Department “compelled Apple and Google not to disclose that they were providing the individual’s private data to the government,” according to Project Veritas.

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