The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!
(2021-10-27 at 23:17:59 )

The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent by Ms Caitlin Johnstone!

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The first day of the United States appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the United States government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats its other prisoners.

I wish I was kidding.

In their write-up on Wednesdays proceedings, The Dissenters Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that "the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the United States government offered "assurances" that Mr. Assange will not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado."

What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian United States prison system is too cruel to guarantee Mr. Assanges health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer "assurances" that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

Prosecution bashes judge for blocking Julian Assanges extradition
My latest-Mohamed Elmaazi (MElmaazi) October 27, 2021

What is ridiculous about these "assurances", apart from the obvious, is that within its own legal argument the United States government reserves the right to reverse those assurances at any time and impose SAMs or maximum security imprisonment upon Mr. Assange if it deems them necessary. As Amnesty International explains:

"They say: we guarantee that he will not be held in a maximum security facility and he will not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures and he will get healthcare. But if he does something that we do not like, we reserve the right to not guarantee him, we reserve the right to put him in a maximum security facility, we reserve the right to offer him Special Administrative Measures. Those are not assurances at all. It is not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise."

So the prosecutions legal argument here is essentially "We promise we will not treat Mr. Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to."

This is not just a reflection on the weakness of the extradition appeal, it is a reflection on the savagery of all the so-called free democracies that have involved themselves in this case.

This argument made minutes after Mr. Assange had to excuse himself from his own hearing due to ill health.-Caitlin Johnstone (caitoz) October 27, 2021

This same prosecution argued that Mr. Assange should not be denied United States extradition from the United Kingdom on humanitarian grounds as in the case of activist Lauri Love because Love suffered from both physical and psychological ailments while Mr. Assanges ailments are only psychological. They stood before the court and made this argument even as Mr. Assange was visibly pained and unwell in his video appearance from Belmarsh, which he was only able to attend intermittently due to his frail condition.

"For my newspaper, I have worked as media partner of WikiLeaks since 2009," tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi who attended the hearing via video link. "I have seen Julian Assange in all sorts of situations, but I have never ever seen him so unwell and so dangerously thin."

So they are just openly brutalizing a journalist for exposing United States war crimes, while arguing that they can be trusted to treat him humanely and give him a fair trial if granted extradition. This after it has already been confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency plotted to kidnap and assassinate him during the Donald Trump administration, after we learned that the prosecution relied on false testimony from a convicted child molester and diagnosed sociopath, after it was revealed that the CIA spied on Mr. Assange and his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy, and after intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein famously died under highly suspicious circumstances in a United States prison cell.

#Assange Lawyer in Fiery Rebuttal at Days Conclusion-Consortium News (Consortiumnews) October 27, 2021

The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Mr. Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category.

The goal is to set a legal precedent which allows journalists who expose the crimes of the powerful to be persecuted not covertly as is normally done in "free democracies", but right out in the open. To tell journalists "We will just throw you in prison if you cross us."

What makes this precedent uniquely dangerous is that it is not just threatening to imprison American journalists who expose United States crimes, but any journalist anywhere in the world. This is an Australian journalist in the process of being extradited from the United Kingdom for publishing facts about United States war crimes in the nations it has invaded. The aim is to set up a system where anyone in the United States-aligned world can be funneled into its prison system for publishing inconvenient facts.

This is the savagery of the western world at its most transparent. It is not the greatest evil the United States-centralized empire has perpetrated; that distinction would certainly be reserved for its acts of mass military slaughter that it has been inflicting upon our species with impunity for generations. But it is the most brazen. The most overt.

It is the most powerful part of the most depraved power structure on earth looking us all right in the eyes and telling us exactly what it is.

And if we can really look at this beast and what it is doing right now, really see it with eyes wide open, it reveals far more about those who rule over us than anything any journalist has ever exposed.

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