LONDON The United States government began laying out its extradition case against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, in court on Monday by arguing that he had put lives at risk and was no better than an ordinary criminal.

Reporting or journalism is not an excuse for criminal activities or a license to break ordinary criminal laws, James Lewis, a lawyer representing the U.S. government, told the court.

Mr. Assange has been indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents and he could face as many as 175 years in prison if found guilty on all charges.

His lawyers will begin presenting their defense later in the week.

Mr. Assanges appearance in Woolwich Crown Court was the latest twist in a saga that stretches back to 2010, when he began publishing secret American military and diplomatic documents that were provided by the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was convicted at a court-martial in 2013 of leaking the documents.

From the outset, Mr. Assanges case has raised profound First Amendment issues.

He is accused of conspiring with Ms. Manning to break into a classified military network under another users identity. The subsequent disclosures included a classified military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

To his defenders, dozens of whom gathered outside the courtroom in a show of support, Mr. Assange, 48, is the victim of a politically driven prosecution.

Mr. Lewis, the lawyer for the U.S. government, told the court on Monday that the charges against Mr. Assange were not connected to the publication of materials demonstrating wrongdoing by American military forces or embarrassing officials, but for publishing specific classified documents that contained unredacted names of innocent people who risked their safety and freedom to aid the United States and its allies.

These are ordinary criminal charges and any person, journalist or source who hacks or attempts to gain unauthorized access to a secure system or aids and abets others to do so is guilty of computer misuse, he said.

Mr. Assange has largely receded from public view after he was dragged out of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in April. He had found refuge in the embassy for seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations. He denied those charges, and the case has since been dropped.

His strange existence at the embassy, where he lived with his cat in a small corner room, helped him become perhaps the worlds most famous self-proclaimed political refugee.

He continued to run his internet group, hold news conferences and wave to admirers from an embassy balcony. But with the departure in 2017 of Ecuadors leftist president, Rafael Correa, who had granted him asylum, Mr. Assanges days in the embassy were numbered.

By the time the Metropolitan Police in London dragged him from the embassy in April, he looked haggard and disheveled.

For the last year, he has been held at Belmarsh Prison, which is next to the courtroom where his extradition case will be heard over the next month.

Mr. Assanges lawyers, in pretrial motions, suggested that they would cast the prosecution as politically motivated and argue that their client was simply acting as a journalist and publisher.

Mark Summers, one of Mr. Assanges lawyers, has said that prosecuting his client could have a chilling effect on press freedom.

This is part of an avowed war on whistle-blowers to include investigative journalists and publishers, Mr. Summers told the court last year.

Mr. Assanges legal team has also sought to tie their client to President Trump, telling the court that former Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, an ally of the president, had offered a pardon to Mr. Assange on Mr. Trumps behalf if the WikiLeaks founder were to say that Russia had nothing to do with the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

The White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, has called the suggestion of a pardon offer a complete fabrication and a total lie.

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Julian Assange Faces Hearing on Extradition to the U.S. - The New York Times

I was in Kabul in 2010 when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks first released a vast archive of classified US government documents, revealing what Washington really knew about what was happening in the world. I was particularly interested in one of these disclosures, which came in the shape of a video that the Pentagon had refused to release despite a Freedom of Information Act request.

When WikiLeaks did release the video, it was obvious why the US generals had wanted to keep it secret. Three years earlier, I had been in Baghdad when a US helicopter machine-gunned and fired rockets at a group of civilians on the groundwho its pilots claimed were armed insurgents, killing or wounding many of them.

Journalists in Iraq were disbelieving about the US militarys claims because the dead included two reporters from the Reuters news agency. Norwas it likely that insurgents would have been walking in the open with their weapons when a US Apache helicopter was overhead.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

We could not prove anything until WikiLeaks made public the film from the Apache. Viewing it still has the power to shock: the pilots are cock-a-hoop as they hunt their prey,includingpeople in a vehicle who stopto help the wounded, saying, Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards, and, Ha, ha, I hit them. Anybody interested in why the US failed in Iraq should have a look.

The WikiLeaks revelations in 2010 and in 2016 are the present-day equivalent of the release by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers, unmasking the true history of the US engagement in the Vietnam War. They are, in fact, of even greater significance because they are more wide-ranging and provide an entry point into the world as the US government really sees it.

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The disclosures were probably the greatest journalistic scoop in history, and newspapers such asThe New York Timesrecognised this by the vast space they gave to the revelations. Corroboration of their importance has been grimly confirmed by the rage of the US security establishment and its overseas allies, and the furious determination with which they have pursued Assange,the co-founder of WikiLeaks.

Daniel Ellsberg is rightly treated as a hero who revealed the truth about Vietnam, but Assange, whose actions were very similar to Ellsbergs, is held in Belmarsh high-security prison. He faces a hearing in London this week to decide whether he will beextraditedfrom the UK to the US on spying charges. If extradited, he stands a good chance of being sentenced to 175 years in the US prison system under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Ever since Assange orchestrated the release of documents through WikiLeaks, he has been the target of repeated official attempts to discredit him or, at the very least, to muddy the waters in a case that should be all about freedom of speech.

The initial bid to demonise Assange came immediately after the first release of documents, claiming that it would cost the lives of people who were named. The US government still argues that lives were put at risk by WikiLeaks, although it has never produced evidence for this.

On the contrary,the US counter-intelligence official who was in charge of the Pentagons investigation into the impact of the WikiLeaksdisclosures admitted in evidence in 2013 that there was not a single instance of an individual being killed by enemy forces as a result of what WikiLeaks had done.

Brigadier General Robert Carr, head of the Pentagons Information Review Task Force, told the sentencing hearing for Chelsea Manning that his initial claim that an individual named by WikiLeaks had been killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan was incorrect. The name of the individual was not in the disclosures, he admitted.

On the day the WikiLeaks revelations were made public, I had a pre-arranged meeting in Kabul with a US official who asked what the coding on the top of the leaked papers was. When I read this out, he was dismissive about the extent to which the deep secrets of the US state were being revealed.

I learned later the reason for his relaxed attitude. The database Manning had accessed was called SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router), which is a US military internet system. After 9/11,it was used to make sure that confidential information available to one part of the US government was available to others. The number of people with the right security clearance who could theoretically access SIPRNet was about 3 million, although the number with the correct password, while still substantial, would have been much fewer.

The US government is not so naive as to put real secrets on a system whose purpose was to be open to so many people, including a low-ranking sergeant such asChelsea Manning. Sensitive materials from defence attaches and the like were sent through alternative,more secure channels. Had the US security services really been using a system as insecure as SIPRNet to sendthe names of those whose lives would be in danger if their identity weredisclosed, they soon wouldhave run short of recruits.

The false accusation that lives had been lost, or could have been lost, because of WikiLeaks damaged Assange. More damaging by far are the allegations that he has faced ofthe rape and sexual molestation of two women in Sweden in 2010. He denies the allegations, buttheyhavecondemned him to permanent status as a pariah in the eyes of many. The Swedish prosecutor discontinued the rape investigation last year because of time elapsed, but this makes no difference for those who feel that anything Assange has said or done is permanently tainted and that the WikiLeaks disclosures are only a tangential issue. Likewise, much of the media views Assanges character and alleged behaviour as the only story worth covering. Although information about SIPRNet and General Carrs evidence was published long ago, few journalists seem to be aware of this.

But it is not because of anything that may have happened in Sweden that Assange is threatened with extradition to the US to face prosecution under the Espionage Act. The charges all relate to the release of government secrets, the sort of thing that all journalists should aspire to do, and many have done in Britain and the US without being subject to official sanctions.

Compare the British governments eagerness to detain Assange with its lack of interest in pursuing whoeverleaked the secret cables of the British ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, to theMail on Sundaylast year. His negative comments about Donald Trump provoked an angry reaction from the president that forced Darroch to resign.

Assange has made disclosures about the activities of the US government that are more significant than the revelations in the Pentagon Papers. That is why he has been pursued to this day, and his punishment is so much more severe than anything inflicted on Daniel Ellsberg.

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With WikiLeaks, Julian Assange did what all journalists should aspire to do - The Independent

Boris Johnson should block attempts to extradite Julian Assange to the US, say two Australian MPs who visited the Wikileaks founder in prison, describing him afterwards as a man under enormous pressure and whose health and mental health had deteriorated.

George Christensen, a Liberal National MP for the ruling party in Australia told a press conference outside the gates of Belmarsh prison that he knew of information, which would come to light during the start of the extradition hearing next week, that would make people in Australia sit up and worry.

He said: I think that now is the time that the government that I am a part of needs to be standing up and saying to the UK and the US: Enough is enough leave that bloke alone and let him come home.

Andrew Wilkie, an independent federal MP and the co-chair of the Bring Julian Assange Home parliamentary group, who joined Christensen in London, told a press conference in London on Tuesday morning that the extradition of Assange, who has been charged by the US with conspiring to hack into a secret Pentagon computer network, would set a dangerous precedent.

This will establish a precedent that if you are a journalist who does anything that offends any government in the world then you face the very real prospect of being extradited to that country, he said. This is a political case and what is at stake is not just the life of Julian Assange. It is about the future of journalism.

Wilkie said that Assange had done the right thing by publishing secret video in 2010 showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an airstrike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for the Reuters news agency.

Speaking after he and Christensen had spent a half an hour with Assange, who they said had asked about his family and had been worried about the impact of Australias bushfires, he said: He faces charges of espionage and computer hacking. If he is convicted of those charges he faces up to 175 years in prison, in a US federal prison. Its a life sentence and could almost be said to be a death sentence. Why wouldnt you be in there feeling under enormous pressure. That helps to explain why he is in the state that he is.

Assange is no longer being kept in solitary confinement and his health is improving, WikiLeaks said on Tuesday. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson said he had been moved from solitary confinement in the medical wing to a different part of the prison with 40 other inmates after complaints from his legal team and prisoners, who had petitioned the governor.

Christensen said he had sent a letter to Johnson in which he noted that the prime minister had recently admitted that Britains extradition treaty with the US was imbalanced following the rejection of an extradition request for Anne Sacoolas, the woman accused of causing the the death of motorcyclist Harry Dunn.

Christensen said: I am a big fan of Trump, I am a big fan of Bojo [Boris Johnson] but Ill tell you what I value more: free speech, he said. There are a lot of Australians on the right and left who think that Julian Assange is a rat bag, that I am a rat bag, but that he should be brought home.

I hope that Boris Johnson withdraws this case that is before the courts, he said. There is a problem here What if it was a British journalist or an outspoken British citizen who went on holiday to another country that has an extradition treaty with China, and China wanted to extradite that British citizen?

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, is expected to visit Assange in prison on Wednesday. The first part of the hearing next week at Woolwich crown court will cover arguments that the extradition is politically motivated and an abuse of process. A decision is unlikely to be handed down for several months - and even then, it is likely the losing side would appeal.

The Australian MPs appearance in London before the start of an extradition hearing next week came as a letter by a group of doctors representing 117 physicians and psychologists from 18 nations called for an end to what they described as the psychological torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange.

The letter, which was published in the medical journal the Lancet and has also been sent to the Australian foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, expresses concern over Assanges fitness to take part in the legal proceedings.

The letter, which echoes the concerns raised by the UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, on Assanges health, adds: Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN special rapporteur on torture has warned, he will have effectively been tortured to death.

Much of that torture will have taken place in a prison medical ward, on doctors watch. The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds.

Assanges father, John Shipton, told the BBCs Victoria Derbyshire programme on Tuesday: The ceaseless anxiety that Julians been under for now 10 years, it has had a profoundly deleterious effect. I cant speculate on to his state of mind, but I imagine that he will be really worried because being sent to the United States is a death sentence.

Assange is being held in Belmarsh prison in south-east London.

A US grand jury has indicted him on 18 charges 17 of which fall under the Espionage Act around conspiracy to receive, obtaining and disclosing classified diplomatic and military documents.

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Julian Assange: Australian MPs call on UK to block US extradition - The Guardian