WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is currently held in Belmarsh prison awaiting hearings that could see him extradited to the US to face prosecution for alleged espionage-related offences.

Award-winning US journalist Chris Hedges described the torture that would await Assange in the US prison system, adding they will attempt to psychologically destroy him. If extradited, Assange would likely be detained in accordance with Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). One report equates this to a regime of sensory deprivation and social isolation that may amount to torture.

US journalist Chris Hedges spoke about the treatment Assange is likely to receive in the US. He argues that the US authorities will psychologically destroy him and that conditions imposed could see him turned into a zombie to face life without parole:

Australian journalist John Pilger agrees:

If Julian is extradited to the US, a darkness awaits him. Hell be subjected to a prison regime called special administrative measures He will be placed in a cage in the bowels of a supermax prison, a hellhole. He will be cut off from all contact with the rest of humanity.

Assange is already in a precarious position, alongside all other UK prisoners. Belmarsh is a high-security Category A facility and, as with all other prisons in the UK, inmates there are at risk to infection from coronavirus (Covid-19).

On 28 April, the BBC reported that there were 1,783 possible/probable cases of coronavirus on top of 304 confirmed infections across jails in England and Wales. Also that there were 75 different custodial institutions, with 35 inmates treated in hospital and 15 deaths.

Vaughan Smith, who stood bail for Assange, reported that the virus was ripping through Belmarsh:

We know of two Covid-19 deaths in Belmarsh so far, though the Department of Justice have admitted to only one death. Julian told me that there have been more and that the virus is ripping through the prison.

Assange has a known chronic lung condition, which could lead to death should he become infected with coronavirus. Assanges lawyers requested he is released on bail to avoid succumbing to the virus, but that request was rejected.

As for the psychological effects of segregation, a European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment report argued that it can can have an extremely damaging effect on the mental, somatic and social health of those concerned.

Its likely that Assange will be placed under SAMs if he is extradited to the US. The Darkest Corner, a report authored by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and The Center for Constitutional Rights, describes how SAMs work.

In its summary, the report explains that:

SAMs are the darkest corner of the U.S. federal prison system, combining the brutality and isolation of maximum security units with additional restrictions that deny individuals almost any connection to the human world. Those restrictions include gag orders on prisoners, their family members, and their attorneys, effectively shielding this extreme use of government power from public view.

It continues:

SAMs deny prisoners the narrow avenues of indirect communication through sink drains or air vents available to prisoners in solitary confinement. They prohibit social contact with anyone except for a few immediate family members, and heavily regulate even those contacts. And they further prohibit prisoners from connecting to the social world via current media and news, limiting prisoners access to information to outdated, government-approved materials. Even a prisoners communications with his lawyer which are supposed to be protected by attorney-client privilege can be subject to monitoring by the FBI.

It ominously adds that: Many prisoners remain under these conditions indefinitely, for years or in some cases even decades. Moreover, these conditions can be used as a weapon to force a prisoner to plead guilty:

In numerous cases, the Attorney General recommends lifting SAMs after the defendant pleads guilty. This practice erodes defendants presumption of innocence and serves as a tool to coerce them into cooperating with the government and pleading guilty.

The report provides further details on how SAMs incorporate sensory deprivation and social isolation measures that may amount to torture. Also, it argues that the SAMs regime contravenes both US and international laws.

Should the UK courts agree to extradite Assange, he could face months, if not decades, of psychological torture. However, Article 3 of the European Court of Human Rights states clearly: No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Under that article, the US extradition request should be rejected by the UK courts.

For a publisher to be subjected to such a nightmare scenario would be intolerable.

Featured image via Mohamed Elmaazi

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From the frying pan into the fire. The torture that awaits Julian Assange in the US. - The Canary

For two and a half years the House Intelligence Committee knew CrowdStrike didnt have the goods on Russia. Now the public knows too.

Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble

By Ray McGovernSpecial to Consortium News

House Intelligence Committee documents released Thursday reveal that the committee was told two and half years ago that the FBI had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers to filch the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in July 2016.

The until-now-buried, closed-door testimony came on Dec. 5, 2017 from Shawn Henry, a protege of former FBI Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureaus cyber crime investigations unit.

Henry retired in 2012 and took a senior position at CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to investigate the cyber intrusions that occurred before the 2016 presidential election.

The following excerpts from Henrys testimony speak for themselves. The dialogue is not a paragon of clarity; but if read carefully, even cyber neophytes can understand:

Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC? when would that have been?

Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated (sic). There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just dont have the evidence that says it actually left.

Mr. [Chris] Stewart of Utah: Okay. What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were exfiltrated?

Mr. Henry: Theres not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. Theres circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.

Mr. Stewart: But you have a much lower degree of confidence that this data actually left than you do, for example, that the Russians were the ones who breached the security?

Mr. Henry: There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network.

Mr. Stewart: And circumstantial is less sure than the other evidence youve indicated.

Mr. Henry: We didnt have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.

In answer to a follow-up query on this line of questioning, Henry delivered this classic: Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didnt see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw.

Inadvertently highlighting the tenuous underpinning for CrowdStrikes belief that Russia hacked the DNC emails, Henry added: There are other nation-states that collect this type of intelligence for sure, but the what we would call the tactics and techniques were consistent with what wed seen associated with the Russian state.

Not Transparent

Try as one may, some of the testimony remains opaque. Part of the problem is ambiguity in the word exfiltration.

The word can denote (1) transferring data from a computer via the Internet (hacking) or (2) copying data physically to an external storage device with intent to leak it.

As the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has been reporting for more than three years, metadata and other hard forensic evidence indicate that the DNC emails were not hacked by Russia or anyone else.

Rather, they were copied onto an external storage device (probably a thumb drive) by someone with access to DNC computers. Besides, any hack over the Internet would almost certainly have been discovered by the dragnet coverage of the National Security Agency and its cooperating foreign intelligence services.

Henry testifies that it appears it [the theft of DNC emails] was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just dont have the evidence that says it actually left.

This, in VIPS view, suggests that someone with access to DNC computers set up selected emails for transfer to an external storage device a thumb drive, for example. The Internet is not needed for such a transfer. Use of the Internet would have been detected, enabling Henry to pinpoint any exfiltration over that network.

Binney

Bill Binney, a former NSA technical director and a VIPS member, filed a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. Binney said: WikiLeaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive.

The So-Called Intelligence Community Assessment

There is not much good to be said about the embarrassingly evidence-impoverished Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017 accusing Russia of hacking the DNC.

But the ICA did include two passages that are highly relevant and demonstrably true:

(1) In introductory remarks on cyber incident attribution, the authors of the ICA made a highly germane point: The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation malicious or not leaves a trail.

(2) When analysts use words such as we assess or we judge, [these] are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong. [And one might add that they commonly ARE wrong when analysts succumb to political pressure, as was the case with the ICA.]

The intelligence-friendly corporate media, nonetheless, immediately awarded the status of Holy Writ to the misnomered Intelligence Community Assessment (it was a rump effort prepared by handpicked analysts from only CIA, FBI, and NSA), and chose to overlook the banal, full-disclosure-type caveats embedded in the assessment itself.

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Then National Intelligence Director James Clapper and the directors of the CIA, FBI, and NSA briefed President Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017, the day before they gave it personally to President-elect Donald Trump.

On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama saw fit to use lawyerly language on the key issue of how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks, in an apparent effort to cover his own derriere.

Obama: The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.

So we ended up with inconclusive conclusions on that admittedly crucial point. What Obama was saying is that U.S. intelligence did not knowor professed not to knowexactly how the alleged Russian transfer to WikiLeaks was supposedly made, whether through a third party, or cutout, and he muddied the waters by first saying it was a hack, and then a leak.

From the very outset, in the absence of any hard evidence, from NSA or from its foreign partners, of an Internet hack of the DNC emails, the claim that the Russians gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks rested on thin gruel.

In November 2018 at a public forum, I asked Clapper to explain why President Obama still had serious doubts in late Jan. 2017, less than two weeks after Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs had thoroughly briefed the outgoing president about their high-confidence findings.

Clapper replied: I cannot explain what he [Obama] said or why. But I can tell you were, were pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails. Pretty sure?

Preferring CrowdStrike; Splaining to Congress

Comey briefs Obama, June 2016 (Flickr)

CrowdStrike already had a tarnished reputation for credibility when the DNC and Clinton campaign chose it to do work the FBI should have been doing to investigate how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks. It had asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraines struggle with separatists supported by Russia. A Voice of America report explained why CrowdStrike was forced to retract that claim.

Why did FBI Director James Comey not simply insist on access to the DNC computers? Surely he could have gotten the appropriate authorization. In early January 2017, reacting to media reports that the FBI never asked for access, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee there were multiple requests at different levels for access to the DNC servers.

Ultimately what was agreed to is the private company would share with us what they saw, he said. Comey described CrowdStrike as a highly respected cybersecurity company.

Asked by committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey said it would have. Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server thats involved, so its the best evidence, he said.

Five months later, after Comey had been fired, Burr gave him a Mulligan in the form of a few kid-gloves, clearly well-rehearsed, questions:

BURR: And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?

COMEY: In the case of the DNC, we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didnt get direct access.

BURR: But no content?

COMEY: Correct.

BURR: Isnt content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?

COMEY: It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.

In June last year it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.

By any normal standard, former FBI Director Comey would now be in serious legal trouble, as should Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. Additional evidence of FBI misconduct under Comey seems to surface every week whether the abuses of FISA, misconduct in the case against Gen. Michael Flynn, or misleading everyone about Russian hacking of the DNC. If I were attorney general, I would declare Comey a flight risk and take his passport. And I would do the same with Clapper and Brennan.

Schiff: Every ConfidenceBut No Evidence

Both pillars of Russiagatecollusion and a Russian hackhave now fairly crumbled.

Thursdays disclosure of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee shows Chairman Adam Schiff lied not only about Trump-Putin collusion, [which the Mueller report failed to prove and whose allegations were based on DNC and Clinton-financed opposition research] but also about the even more basic issue of Russian hacking of the DNC.

[See:The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate republished today.]

Five days after Trump took office, I had an opportunity to confront Schiff personally about evidence that Russia hacked the DNC emails. He had repeatedly given that canard the patina of flat fact during an address at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta think tank, The Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Fortunately, the cameras were still on when I approached Schiff during the Q&A: You have every confidence but no evidence, is that right? I asked him. His answer was a harbinger of things to come. This video clip may be worth the four minutes needed to watch it.

Schiff and his partners in crime will be in for much tougher treatment if Trump allows Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham to bring their investigation into the origins of Russia-gate to a timely conclusion. Barrs dismissal on Thursday of charges against Flynn, after released FBI documents revealed that a perjury trap was set for him to keep Russiagate going, may be a sign of things to come.

Given the timid way Trump has typically bowed to intelligence and law enforcement officials, including those who supposedly report to him, however, one might rather expect that, after a lot of bluster, he will let the too-big-to-imprison ones off the hook. The issues are now drawn; the evidence is copious; will the Deep State, nevertheless, be able to prevail this time?

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A former CIA analyst, his retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

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RAY McGOVERN: New House Documents Sow Further Doubt That Russia Hacked the DNC - Consortium News

MOVIES

6:30 PM PDT 5/6/2020bySheri Linden

Befitting a documentary executive produced by Errol Morris, Enemies of the State is polished, assured and chilling. But as director Sonia Kennebeck traces a tale of hacker culture, government surveillance and extreme family loyalty, the smooth surface buckles. Paranoia and unreliable narrators begin to dominate the disquieting mix, and the viewer starts to question how and why the story is being told. That uncertainty is the film's primary, illuminating strength, exposing built-in biases (ours as well as those of onscreen figures) and underscoring the dangerous internet-age velocity with which one person's conspiracy charges can turn into a seemingly righteous cause.

The cause in this twisting, decade-long series of events is that of Matt DeHart, celebrated by some complete with fundraising merch as a whistleblower in the good fight against covert, anti-free-speech government activity. A digital native with definite ties to gaming and vaguely delineated connections to hacktivist collective Anonymous and WikiLeaks, DeHart claimed that the FBI framed him, harassed his family and tortured him in pursuit of classified information that crossed his screen when he ran a darknet server. After law enforcement ransacked the Indiana home where he lived with his parents, DeHart said they were looking for top-secret files relating to a shocking CIA operation; the authorities said they were looking for child pornography.

Leann and Paul DeHart, with their down-home embrace of God and country, are not people you'd expect to slip across the border under cover of night, as they did in April 2013 with their son, seeking asylum in Canada. Paul is a minister, and they're both veterans of military intelligence. So too is Matt, although his career was curtailed by mental health issues. The couple speak openly to the filmmaker, distraught over their son's treatment at the hands of authorities and stressing the need to watch the watchers. They believe Matt unequivocally. "We raised him to think critically," says Paul, who once drove his son to the Russian and Venezuelan embassies in Washington so that he could try to defect.

A crucial thumb drive goes missing, and only some of the troubling aspects of DeHart's case are substantiated, but given an already well-documented history of government abuses and dirty tactics against activists, his complaints draw the alarmed interest of experts, a number of whom appear in the film. They include a McGill professor, an investigative reporter, and a fascinating assortment of attorneys who run the gamut in terms of point of view.

Kennebeck talks briefly, and revealingly, to old friends of DeHart, some from his school days. Several of them try to put an amusing, benign slant on his behavior one compares him to Leave It to Beaver troublemaker Eddie Haskell but the picture that emerges is a disturbing one: telling glimpses of a self-dramatizing manipulator, lending further fuel to the "who to believe" fire.

Nagging questions percolate as the doc moves back and forth through the timeline: Are the national security case and the child porn case parallel or connected? Focusing at first on the espionage angle, Enemies of the State seems for a while to push aside the pornography charges as pure fabrication, as do the DeHarts. In Tennessee, yet another location in this multi-state, international saga, a prosecutor and a detective remain quietly unshakable in their conviction that Matt DeHart is a predatory pedophile.

In addition to the film's new interviews and footage of the family, Kennebeck stages re-creations of key events, in particular legal hearings on both sides of the border that use actual audio: The actors' lips move, convincingly, but the voices we hear belong to their real-life counterparts. Much of the new material is cast in a frosty blue palette that emphasizes the institutional layers of bureaucracy and stealth.

In her 2016 drone-warfare documentary, National Bird, Kennebeck chronicled whistleblowers; here her central protagonist lodges complaints that relate chiefly to his personal treatment and only in the broadest sense to a larger political picture. Pitting the heavy cloak of government secrecy against the openness of a mother and father, Enemies of the Statecertainly doesn't answer every question it poses, but it's a wake-up call for all of us keep asking them of government, of public figures, and of ourselves.

Production companies: Codebreaker FilmsDirector: Sonia KennebeckProducers: Ines Hofmann Kanna, Sonia KennebeckExecutive producer: Errol MorrisDirector of photography: Torsten LappEditor: Maxine GoedickeComposer: Insa RudolphCasting directors: Erica Hart, Maren PoitrasVenue: Tribeca Film Festival (Documentary Competition)Sales: Submarine

104 minutes

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'Enemies of the State' Review - Hollywood Reporter

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump is despondent these days. But not over the death, illness and economic calamity as a responsible, empathetic leader would be. Rather, hes upset over his supposedly declining electoral fortunes:

Some of Trumps advisers described the president as glum and shell-shocked by his declining popularity. In private conversations, he has struggled to process how his fortunes suddenly changed from believing he was on a glide path to reelection to realizing that he is losing to the likely Democratic nominee, former vice presidentJoe Biden, in virtually every poll, including his own campaigns internal surveys, advisers said. He also has been fretting about the possibility that a bad outbreak of the virus this fall could damage his standing in the November election, said the advisers, who along with other aides and allies requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The president is also eager to resume political travel in June, including holding his signature rallies by the end of the summer in areas where there are few cases, advisers said. Trumps political team has begun discussions about organizing a high-dollar, in-person fundraiser next month, as well as preliminary planning about staging rallies and what sort of screenings might be necessary, according to Republican National Committee officials and outsider advisers. One option being considered is holding rallies outdoors, rather than in enclosed arenas, a senior administration official said.

These two short paragraphs illustrate the cloud of delusion under which Trump operates.

First, there are no areas where there are few cases. Not only is COVID-19 running rampant in rural areas, and not only would it take only a few asymptomatic contagious individuals to infect dozens or even hundreds of other rallygoers, it would literally be nearly impossible given the dearth of testing to know whether an area had few cases or not. Second, given the fact that 72 people were infected likely after attending an anti-social-distancing gathering in Wisconsin, it seems highly unlikely that holding a rally outdoors will make much of a difference in terms of the safety of the attendees.

But even from the limited point of view of Trumps personal electoral self-interest, his perspective is grounded more in wishful narcissism than fact.

Trump was not, in fact, on a glide path to re-election prior to the arrival of the virus. Joe Biden has been leading Trump by the same wide margin since this time last year. If anything, Bidens average margin hasshrunk in recent polls as Trump briefly enjoyed a sympathetic bounce due to the crisis. Sanders also dominated Trump over the same year-long period by a slightly smaller margin, and Warren held a consistent, slim lead as well.

Of course, Hillary Clinton led by significant margins throughout the 2016 only to lose in the electoral college at the very end. But there were a number of unique factors in that election from Clintons negative favorability rating to the Russian hacking and release of her campaign emails via Wikileaks, to the final intervention by James Comey. Nor are Democrats likely to make the same mistake in overlooking electoral realignment trends and mistaking where the real swing states lay as they did in 2016, or to be complacent in the face of Trump.

Meanwhile, Democrats dominated Republicans in the 2018 midterms and in most special elections since then.

So there is little reason outside of unearned confidence for Trump to believe he had a clear path to victory. In fact, fear of Biden is why Trump attempted the Ukrainian coercion scheme that led to his impeachment.

If Trump does lose in November, he will certainly claim election fraud and a number of other conspiraciesbut insofar as he strays away from conspiracies he will likely blame the virus. But theres no reason to believe he would have won, regardless. Only the same narcissism and wishful thinking that permeates the rest of his worldview.

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Trump Was Never on a Glide Path to Re-Election Even Before the Virus - Washington Monthly