The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has lost a high court battle to prevent the US government expanding the grounds for its appeal against an earlier refusal to allow his extradition to face charges of espionage and hacking government computers.

On Wednesday, judges said the weight given to a misleading report from Assanges psychiatric expert that was submitted at the original hearing in January could form part of Washingtons full appeal in October.

Sitting in London, Lord Justice Holroyde said he believed it was arguable that Judge Vanessa Baraitser had attached too much weight to the evidence of Prof Michael Kopelman when deciding not to allow the USs appeal.

The expert had told the court he believed Assange would take his own life if extradited. But he did not include in his report the fact that Assange had fathered two children with his partner while holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London a fact Assange later used in support of his bail application.

Clair Dobbin QC, for the US, argued the expert misled Baraitser, who presided over the January hearing.

Edward Fitzgerald QC, representing Assange, told the court Baraitser, having heard all of the evidence in the case, was in the best position to assess it and reach her decision.

He said Kopelmans report was given long before any court hearing and against a background of concern for the human predicament in which Assanges partner, Stella Moris, found herself at the time.

Delivering the latest decision, Holroyde said it was very unusual for an appeal court to have to consider evidence from an expert that had been accepted by a lower court, but also found to have been misleading even if the experts actions had been deemed an understandable human response designed to protect the privacy of Assanges partner and children.

The judge said that, in those circumstances, it was at least arguable that Baraitser erred in basing her conclusions on the professors evidence.

Given the importance to the administration of justice of a court being able to reply on the impartiality of an expert witness, it is in my view arguable that more detailed and critical consideration should have been given to why [the professors] understandable human response gave rise to a misleading report.

The US government had previously been allowed to appeal against Baraitsers decision on three grounds including that it was wrong in law. Assanges legal team had described the grounds as narrow and technical. The two allowed on Wednesday were additional.

During Wednesdays hearing, the US government argued Assange, 50, was not so ill that he would be unable to resist killing himself if extradited challenging Baraitsers ruling that the US authorities could not prevent Assange from finding a way to commit suicide if he was extradited.

Dobbin said the US government would seek to show that Assanges mental health problems did not meet the threshold required in law to prevent extradition.

She told the court: It really requires a mental illness of a type that the ability to resist suicide has been lost. Part of the appeal will be that Assange did not have a mental illness that came close to being of that nature and degree.

Holroyde said he would not ordinarily have allowed this to form part of the appeal on its own merits alone. But he said it must be taken in the context of the broader grounds allowed and could be argued at the full hearing.

Assange appeared at the hearing via video link from Belmarsh prison, wearing a dark face covering and a white shirt, with what appeared to be an untied burgundy tie draped around his neck.

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It is an issue of the abuses enabled by powerful men who believe that their power is unlimited, Philip Giraldi writes.

An English friend recently learned about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to either kidnap or kill journalist Julian Assange and quipped Ill bet hes happy to be safe and sound in Belmarsh Prison if he has a chance to read about that! I replied that his time in Belmarsh has been made as demeaning as possible by an English judge and the British are just as capable of executing a Jeffrey Epstein suicide or accident if called upon to do so by their American cousins. He agreed, reluctantly. Indeed, the roles of American allies Britain and Australia in what is turning out to be one of the worlds longest-playing judicial dramas has been reprehensible.

For those readers who have missed some of the fun of the Assange saga, a recap is in order. Julian Assange, an Australian citizen who was living in London, was the Editor in Chief and driving force behind Wikileaks, which debuted in 2006 and was one of the alternative news sites that have sprung up over the past twenty years. WikiLeaks was somewhat unique in that it often did not write up its own stories but rather was passed documentary material by sources in government and elsewhere that it then reprinted without any editing.

Assange attracted the ire of the ruling class when he obtained in 2010 a classified video from an unidentified source that showed an unprovoked 2007 shooting incident involving U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad in which a dozen completely innocent people were killed. The governments anger at WikiLeaks intensified when, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with classified material that demonstrated that the U.S. government wasillegallyspying on Americans. WikiLeaks also reportedly helped to arrange Snowdens subsequent escape to Russia from Hong Kong.

The bipartisan animus directed against WikiLeaks intensified still further in the summer of 2016 when the groups website began to release emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clintons campaign. The immediate conclusion propagated by Team Hillary but unsupported by facts was that Russian intelligence had hacked the emails and given them to WikiLeaks.

It was perhaps inevitable that Assanges reporting, which has never been found to be factually inaccurate, was in some circles claimed to be based on information provided to him by Russian hackers. Even though he repeatedly denied that that was the case and there are technical reasons why that was unlikely or even impossible, this led to a sharp Russophobic response from a number of intelligence and law enforcement services close to the United States. Assange was charged in Britain in November 2010 on an international warrant demanding that he be extradited to Sweden over claims that he had committed rape in that country, an accusation which later turned out to be false. He posted bail but lost a legal battle to annul the warrant and then skipped a preliminary hearing in London in June 2012 to accept asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy, which has diplomatic immunity. He stayed in the Embassy for eighty-two months, at which point a new government in Quito made clear that his asylum would be revoked and he would be expelled from the building. He was preparing to leave voluntarily in April 2019 when police arrived and he was arrested on a charge of his failure to appear in court seven years before which was regarded as bail jumping. He was sent immediately to Belmarsh high security prison, where Britains terrorist prisoners are confined.

After his arrest, Assange continued to be incarcerated due to a U.S. Justice Department extradition request based on the Espionage Act of 1918, apparently derived from possible interaction with the Chelsea Manning whistleblower case. Assange has now been in Belmarsh for 29 months in spite of increasing international pressure asserting that he is a journalist and should be released. The British have hesitated to extradite him on the basis of the evidence produced by the U.S. government, which included the claim that Assange aided the former U.S. Army analyst Manning break into a classified computer network in order to obtain and eventually publish classified material, but they have likewise failed to release him. The British judge denied extradition in January, suggesting that if he were to be returned forcibly to the U.S. he would likely commit suicide, but she also denied Assange bail as he was considered to be a flight risk. The U.S. appealed that verdict and the next hearing is scheduled for the end of October. It should be noted that no evidence produced by the Justice Department has plausibly linked Assange to the Russian intelligence services.

Which brings us to the Yahoo news revelation regarding the CIA plot toshoot, poison or kidnap Assangewhile he was sheltering in the Ecuadorian Embassy. It goes something like this: in 2017, Assanges fifth year in the Embassy, the CIA debated going after him to end the alleged threat posed to government secrets by him and his organization, which was still operating and presumed to be in contact with him. WikiLeaks had at that time beenpublishingextremely sensitive CIA hacking tools, referred to as Vault 7, whichconstitutedthe largest data loss in CIA history.

In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trumps new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. Its time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. It was a declaration of war. The label non-state hostile intelligence service is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the WikiLeaks Team worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.

At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.

CIA responded by preparing to foil Assanges possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscows spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a rendition, which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him. Fortunately, saner views prevailed, particularly when the British refused to cooperate in any way with activity they regarded as clearly illegal.

So Assange is still in prison and what does it all mean? The only possible charge that would convincingly demonstrate that Assange was spy paid by Russia would be related to his possibly helping Chelsea Manning to circumvent security to steal classified material, but there is no real evidence that Assange actually did that or that he is under Russian control. So that makes him a journalist. That he has embarrassed the United States, most often when it misbehaves, is what good journalists do. But beyond that the disgraceful CIA plans to kill or abduct Assange as an option to get rid of him reveal yet again the dark side of what the United States of America has become since 9/11.

More to the point, getting rid of Assange will accomplish nothing. He worked with a number of like-minded colleagues who have been more than able to pick up where he left off. He has been largely incommunicado since he has been languishing in Belmarsh Prison and it is his associates who have continued to solicit information and publish it on their site. Mike Pompeosunapologetic responseto this assassination or kidnapping story was They were engaged in active efforts to steal secrets themselves, and pay others to do the same Of course, if all that were true Mike and the government lawyers have had an opportunity to demonstrate just that in a British court. They couldnt do so and instead promoted the easier option of just killing someone for publishing something true. And assassination is a blunt instrument that rarely accomplishes anything. One recalls that in January 2020 Pompeo certainly participated in the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Militia Leader Muhandis in Baghdad. What did that accomplish apart from turning a nominally friendly Iraq hostile to the U.S. presence?

Or, as Assanges lawyer put it more to the point, As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information. Unfortunately, that is not all that the Assange case is about. It is not just a question of truth or fiction and journalistic ethics, but rather an issue of the abuses enabled by powerful men who believe that their power is unlimited. That is the real abyss that the United States has fallen into and the only way out is to finally hold such people, starting with Pompeo, accountable for what they have done.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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Photograph Source: Jeanne Menjoulet CC BY 2.0

Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a foreign power.

It was revealed this week that a year before the Khashoggi killing in 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed at the highest levels of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal quoted in a 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo News into the CIA campaign against Assange.

The plan was to break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want, recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide options about how this could be done. Trump has denied that he did so.

The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, saidpublicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of a hostile intelligence service. Apologists for the CIA say that freedom of the press was not under threat because Assange and the WikiLeaks activists were not real journalists. Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselveswho is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as information brokers, who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power.

Among those against whom the CIA reportedly wanted to take action were Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the Intercept magazine and a former Guardian columnist, and Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. The arguments for doing so were similar to those employed by the Chinese government for suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, which has been much criticised in the West. Imprisoning journalists as spies has always been the norm in authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, while denouncingthe free press as unpatriotic is a more recent hallmark of nationalist populist governments that have taken power all over the world.

It is possible to give only a brief precis of the extraordinary story exposed by Yahoo News, but the journalists who wrote it Zach Dorfman, Sean D Naylor and Michael Isikoff ought to scoop every journalistic prize. Their disclosures should be of particular interestin Britain because it was in the streets of central London that the CIA was planning an extra-judicial assault on an embassy, the abduction of a foreign national, and his secret rendition to the US, with the alternative option of killing him. These were not the crackpot ideas of low-level intelligence officials, but were reportedly operations that Pompeo and the agency fully intended to carry out.

This riveting and important story based on multiple sources might be expected to attract extensive coverage and widespread editorial comment in the British media, not to mention in parliament. Many newspapers have dutifully carried summaries of the investigation, but there has been no furor. Striking gaps in the coverage include the BBC, which only reported it, so far as I can see, as part of its Somali service. Channel 4, normally so swift to defend freedom of expression, apparently did not mention the story at all.

In the event, the embassy attack never took place, despite the advanced planning. There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition, said a former senior US counter-intelligence official, who added that the British had refused to allow the operation to take place.

But the British government did carry out its own less melodramatic, but more effective measure against Assange, removing him from the embassy on 11 April 2019 after a new Ecuador government had revoked his asylum. He remains in Belmarsh top security prison two-and-a-half years later while the US appeals a judicial decision not to extradite him to the US on the grounds that he would be a suicide risk.

If he were to be extradited, he would face 175 years in prison. It is important, however, to understand, that only five of these would be under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, while the other 170 potential years are under the Espionage Act of 1917, passed during the height of the patriotic war fever as the US entered the First World War.

Only a single minor charge against Assange relates to the WikiLeaks disclosure in 2010 of a trove of US diplomatic cables and army reports relating to the Iraq and Afghan wars. The other 17 charges are to do with labeling normal journalistic investigation as the equivalent of spying.

Pompeos determination to conflate journalistic inquiry with espionage has particular relevance in Britain, because the home secretary, Priti Patel, wants to do much the same thing. She proposes updating the Official Secrets Act so that journalists, whistle-blowers and leakers could face sentences of up to 14 years in prison. A consultative paper issued in May titledLegislation to Counter State Threats (Hostile State Activity)redefines espionage as the covert process of obtaining sensitive confidential information that is not normally publicly available.

The true reason the scoop about the CIAs plot to kidnap or kill Assange has been largely ignored or downplayed is rather that he is unfairly shunned as a pariah by all political persuasions: left, right and centre.

To give but two examples, the US government has gone on claiming that the disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010 put the lives of US agents in danger. Yet the US Army admitted in a court hearing in 2013 that a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers had failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks. As regards the rape allegations in Sweden, many feel that these alone should deny Assange any claim to be a martyr in the cause of press freedom. Yet the Swedish prosecutor only carried out a preliminary investigation and no charges were brought.

Assange is a classic victim of cancel culture, so demonised that he can no longer get a hearing,even when a government plots to kidnap or murder him.

In reality, Khashoggi and Assange were pursued relentlessly by the state because they fulfilled the primary duty of journalists: finding out important information that the government would like to keep secret and disclosing it to the public.

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Julian Assange 2021

The government is accusing him of violating federal espionage laws, a move that's raising questions for journalists in the digital age. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. Ecuador has decided to grant julian assange political asylum, in a move meant to prevent the wikileaks founder from being extradited to sweden where he is. By mikael rickns idg news service | today's best tech deals picked by pcworld's e. By john ribeiro idg news service | today's best tech deals picked by pcworld's. The wikileaks founder was taken into custody from the ecuadorian embassy in london where he had spent nearly seven years. Federal prosecutors say assange should be sent to the us to answer charges of working with former army intelligence analyst chelsea manning to steal and publish secrets. The washington post reports that. The wikileaks founder was taken into custody from the ecuadorian embassy in london where he had spent nearly seven yea.

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By john ribeiro idg news service | today's best tech deals picked by pcworld's. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. While today is a major victory for assange, it is believed the u.s.

Will move quickly to appeal the ruling. While today is a major victory for assange, it is believed the u.s.

The washington post reports that.

Whether you prefer the convenience of an electric can opener or you're perfectly fine with the simplicity of manual models, a can opener is an indispensable kitchen tool you can't live without unless you plan to never eat canned foods.

The government is accusing him of violating federal espionage laws, a move that's raising questions for journalists in the digital age. The wikileaks founder was taken into custody from the ecuadorian embassy in london where he had spent nearly seven yea. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects.

Assange and ecuador have been at loggerheads for some time. The government is accusing him of violating federal espionage laws, a move that's raising questions for journalists in the digital age.

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Julian Assange 2021 - New $484B Relief Bill Lacks Funds ...