36 Minute Trials and No Jury – Starmer’s Fascist Mass Courts

Craig Murray

Those charged with terrorism for supporting Palestine Action will have no jury in trials limited to 36 minutes each, with prison sentences up to six months. These are the plans for Starmer Courts for mass trials of anti-Genocide protestors.

The plans are devised by Justice Michael Snow. He is the epitome of judicial prejudice. When Julian Assange appeared before Snow in the first hearing after being dragged from the Embassy, Snow called Assange a “narcissist” even though Assange had said nothing but to confirm his name, and no evidence had been led.

Snow has now decreed that those 2,000 people charged under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act with supporting Palestine Action, will be tried in batches of five at the rate of ten people a day – giving 36 court minutes for each defendant. This is a farce, a spectacle of mass show trial. The 36 minutes includes both prosecution and defence cases and cross-examination.

At a scheduling hearing on Wednesday, one of the accused, 72 year old Deborah Wilde, objected that these trials would be far too short to present a proper defence.

Snow snapped back “I’m satisfied that the time is sufficient. I am not going to give more time. Your only remedy is the High Court”.

As I am sure Snow realises, ordinary people cannot afford to go to the High Court. The worrying thing is that the trials will be held before judges including the appalling Snow, with no jury.

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‘Assange extradition should be warning to liberals who believe in American democracy’ – Zizek

   “What really worries me is the inertia of the wider public; they are aware and yet they don’t really care about it.”

RT

The UK’s decision to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US should be taken as a warning to all liberals who still have any faith in ‘American liberal democracy,’ says cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek. 

The Slovenian sociologist told RT that signing of the extradition order is just one of two recent events that really worry him. The other “ominous” event was the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to US authorities to take possession of Assange’s property from its London embassy when he was taken to prison, including book manuscripts, computers and other personal possessions.

“The nightmare is that the accuser was directly invited to take possession of all these documents. This breaks even the elementary the norms of legality,” Zizek explained.

“The message is, ‘Yes, we will be brutal beyond measure.’”

Zizek drew particular attention to the sheer brutality of the coordinated effort against the whistleblower after he exposed the US government and military’s gross misdeeds.

“It’s always an ominous signal when measures against a threatened individual are done in such a directly brutal way that this very brutality means something,” he said.

Zizek also railed against so-called liberals back across the pond in the UK arguing that “those in the UK who are most fervent advocates of Assange’s extradition, are not conservatives but more centrist Blairite wing of the Labour Party.” 

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Why Didn’t Mueller Investigate Seth Rich?

Daniel Lazare
Consortium News

After bungling every last aspect of Russia-gate since the day the pseudo-scandal broke, the corporate press is now seizing on the Mueller report to shut down debate on one of the key questions still outstanding from the 2016 presidential election: the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.

No one knows who killed Rich in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016.  All we know is that he was found at 4:19 a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood “with apparent gunshot wound(s) to the back” according to the police report. Conscious and still breathing, he was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead at 5:57.

Police have added to the confusion by releasing information only in the tiniest dribs and drabs. Rich’s mother, Mary, told local TV news that her son struggled with his assailants: “His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything…. They took his life for literally no reason. They didn’t finish robbing him, they just took his life.”

But cops said shortly after the killing that they had no immediate indication that robbery was a motive. Despite his mother’s report of two shots in the back, all the local medical examiner would say is that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the torso. According to Rich’s brother, Aaron, Jeff “was very aware, very talkative,” when police found him lying on the pavement. Yet cops have refused to say if he described his assailant. A month later, they put out a statement that “there is no indication that Seth Rich’s death is connected to his employment at the DNC,” refusing to elaborate.

The result is a scattering of disconnected facts that can be used to support just about any theory from a random killing to a political assassination. Nonetheless, Robert Mueller is dead certain that the murder had nothing to do with the emails — just as he was dead certain in 2003 that Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction “pos[ing] a clear threat to our national security.”

Mueller is equally positive that, merely by expressing concern that the murder may have had something to do with the release of thousands of DNC emails less than two weeks later, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was trying to protect the real source, which of course is Russia.

Here’s how the Mueller report puts it:

“Beginning in the summer of 2016, Assange and WikiLeaks made a number of statements about Seth Rich, a former DNC staff member who was killed in July 2016. The statements about Rich implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails. On August 9, 2016, the @WikiLeaks Twitter accounted posted: ‘ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.’

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When the Journalists Ganged Up on Assange They Ganged Up on Themselves

Paul Craig Roberts

Journalists did not appreciate the implications for themselves of the contrived and false indictment of Julian Assange by a corrupt US government.  It was obvious to a few of us that the indictment by the US government, a government constrained by the First Amendment, of a foreign national for publishing leaked material, an action never before regarded as espionage or a crime, was the beginning of the end of any Western government ever again being held accountable by a free press.

Not that the Western World has a free press.  It has a collection of presstitutes that serve as a Ministry of Propaganda for the ruling oligarchies.

Still, in principle it was possible that governments could be held accountable.  But that possibility ended with Assange’s false indictment.

First of all, no honest government would have spent years trying to invent a way to indict a journalist for practicing journalism.

Second, no intelligent grand jurors with an ounce of integrity would have been putty in the hands of a corrupt US prosecutor and enable a prosecution that ensures the destruction of accountable government.

Third, it was obvious that once America led the way in shutting down the principle of a free press, governments of other “Western democracies” would follow as soon as they could.

And follow they did.  Assange’s indictment led to raids by the “Australian Gestapo” on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst and on the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. See this.

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Belmarsh Prison Inmate Provides Photos of Julian Assange, Says the ‘Internet is the One Thing They Can’t Control’

Cassandra Fairbanks
The Gateway Pundit 

The Gateway Pundit has obtained exclusive testimony, as well as photos, from a fellow inmate of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside London’s highest security prison. 

The inmate, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent multiple photos of Assange from inside Belmarsh maximum security prison and spoke to The Gateway Pundit about the WikiLeaks founder’s situation using a contraband phone he has inside.

Assange is imprisoned in the United Kingdom and faces eighteen charges under the Espionage Act in the United States for his publication of the Iraq and Afghan War Logs. If extradited and convicted, he could be face a maximum sentence of 175 years for the “crime” of publishing material that the US government did not want the population to know.

Along with the photos from inside the prison, the inmate pushed a fundraiser — causing supporters to worry that he was attempting to extort WikiLeaks or harm Assange by violating his privacy. The Gateway Pundit reached out to him to get his side of the story.

This reporter spoke to the inmate through a series of online messages and a phone call for multiple hours on Wednesday evening. At the beginning of the conversation I asked him if he was a prisoner or someone who works there — and if his motive was to extort money from the organization. 

“I’m in prison right now,” he said, sending a photo from inside his cell. “Extort him for what reason? He exposed the biggest scandals in the world. Whose side do you think someone in prison would be on? The government who have us locked up in here or a fellow prisoner who actually doesn’t deserve to be here?” 

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Julian Assange and the unrelenting state

craigmurray.org.uk

We are seriously worried about the condition of Julian Assange. He was too unwell to appear in court yesterday, and his Swedish lawyer, Per Samuelson, found him in a state where he was unable to conduct a conversation and give instructions. There are very definite physical symptoms, particularly rapid weight loss, and we are not satisfied that genuine and sufficient diagnostic efforts are being made to determine the underlying cause.

Julian had been held for the last year in poor, highly confining and increasingly oppressive conditions in the Ecuadorean Embassy and his health was already deteriorating alarmingly before his expulsion and arrest. A number of conditions, including dental abcesses, can have very serious consequences if long term untreated, and the continual refusal by the British government and latterly the Ecuadoreans to permit him access to adequate healthcare while a political asylee was a callous denial of basic human rights.

I confess to feeling an amount of personal relief after his arrest that at least he would now get proper medical treatment. However there now seems to be no intention to provide that and indeed since he has been in Belmarsh his health problems have accelerated. I witnessed enough of the British state's complicity in torture to know that this may be more than just the consequence of unintended neglect. That the most lucid man I know is now not capable of having a rational conversation is extremely alarming.

There is no rational reason that Assange needs to be kept in a high security facility for terrorists and violent offenders. We are seeing the motive behind his unprecedented lengthy imprisonment for jumping police bail when he entered political asylum. As a convicted prisoner, Assange can be kept in a worse regime than if he were merely on remand for his extradition proceedings. In particular, his access to his lawyers is extremely restricted and for a man facing major legal proceedings in the UK, USA and Sweden it is impossible, even were he healthy, for his lawyers to have sufficient time with him adequately to prepare his cases while he is under the restrictions placed on a convict. Of course we know from the fact that, within three hours of being dragged from the Ecuadorean Embassy, he was already convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term, that the state has no intention that his lawyers should be able to prepare. 

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Assange as free to leave as someone ‘on a rubber boat in a sharkpool’ – UN's Melzer destroys Hunt

RT

After finding that Julian Assange displayed symptoms of “prolonged psychological torture,” UN Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer has traded barbs with the UK’s Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt over the WikiLeaks founder’s persecution. 

“This is wrong. Assange chose to hide in the embassy and was always free to leave and face justice,” British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Hunt tweeted less than an hour after Melzer gave his statement on Assange’s condition, insinuating that Assange’s time in the Ecuadorian embassy in London was somehow voluntary.

“The UN Special Rapporteur should allow British courts to make their judgments without his interference or inflammatory accusations,” Hunt added.

Melzer quickly fired back in a rather creative fashion, saying: “With all due respect, Sir: Mr Assange was about as ‘free to leave’ as someone sitting on a rubber boat in a sharkpool.” He also reiterated comments that the British justice system had failed to show the “impartiality and objectivity required by the rule of law.”

Melzer drew on his two decades' experience working with prisoners of war and political prisoners when assessing Assange’s deteriorating mental state, which was further exacerbated by a lack of adequate medical care for several years.

The UN special rapporteur on torture also stated that Assange appeared agitated, stressed and was unable to cope with the complexities of his legal case, for which he failed to testify via video link Thursday citing health issues.

Melzer expressed concern about the potential for a “politicized show trial” should Assange be extradited to the US to face a slew of charges under the Espionage Act, following what he dubbed “persecution” not “prosecution” at the hands of the British legal system. He alleged that “dozens if not hundreds of individuals” including judges and senior politicians had defamed Assange, though he did not name any specifically.

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See also:  ‘Grave concerns’: Assange can barely talk, moved to prison hospital, says WikiLeaks

Sweden to reopen rape case against WikiLeaks' Assange

Comment: They are intent on making Assange an example, one way or another. 

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Associated Press

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Swedish prosecutors said Monday they are reopening a rape case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a month after he was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. They said they will seek his extradition after he has served his 50-week prison term in Britain for jumping bail.

va-Marie Persson, Sweden's deputy director of public prosecutions, told a news conference in Stockholm that "there is still a probable cause to suspect that Assange committed a rape." She added: "It is my assessment that a new questioning of Assange is required."

Swedish prosecutors filed preliminary charges — a step short of formal charges — against Assange after he visited the country in 2010, following complaints from two Swedish women who said they were the victims of sex crimes committed by Assange.

A case of alleged sexual misconduct was dropped in 2017 when the statute of limitations expired. That left a rape allegation, but officials couldn't pursue it because Assange was living at the embassy and there was no prospect of bringing him to Sweden.

The statute of limitations on that case expires in August 2020. Assange has denied wrongdoing, asserting that they were politically motivated and that the sex was consensual. Persson said a European arrest warrant will be issued for Assange. The Swedish move would leave British authorities to decide whether to extradite Assange to Sweden or to the United States, where he is wanted separately for allegedly hacking into a Pentagon computer.

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Julian Assange Refuses Extradition To The United States

Collective Evolution

In Brief:

• The Facts: Julian Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in Jail earlier this week. Now, he has stated he refuses to give himself up for extradition to the United States. It is likely his extradition court process will take many months.
• Reflect On: Do you support Julian Assange's work with WikiLeaks or do you feel it should be deemed illegal? That is the question at hand here. His work is simply accountability for government and public empowerment.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has stated that he does not consent to being extradited to the US based on charges related to leaking government secrets received from Chelsea Manning and others.

Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail on earlier this week for breaching The Bail Act, it was just a few days later that his extradition hearing began. It is expected that this extradition process will go for many months in court.

The 47-year-old Julian Assange told the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday:

“I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many awards and protected many people.”

Beyond that, nothing overly big to report from this first hearing, the case was adjourned until 30 May 2019.

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Julian Assange sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for jumping bail in UK

RT

 

A British court sentenced WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to 50 weeks for skipping bail. The activist also faces a court hearing on extradition to Washington where he is wanted for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.”

The Southwark Crown Court in London on Wednesday sentenced Assange to almost a year for “violating bail conditions.”Last month, he was formally convicted of skipping bail in the UK in 2012 when he was wanted over a rape allegation in Sweden (the case was later dropped).

Judge Deborah Taylor told the journalist that he had used bail to escape the law and expressed disdain for British justice.

In a letter read to the court, Assange explained that he was “struggling with circumstances” when he did so.

I did what I thought at the time was the best or perhaps the only thing that I could have done.

The whistleblower also apologized to all who “consider I’ve disrespected them.”

WikiLeaks slammed the sentence as “shocking” and “vindictive,” adding that they have “grave concerns” as to whether Assange will get a fair extradition hearing, scheduled for Thursday. 

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The Prosecution Of Julian Assange Is Infinitely Bigger Than Assange

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium.com

Julian Assange’s mother reported yesterday that the WikiLeaks founder has not been permitted any visitors during his detention in Belmarsh Prison, including from doctors and his lawyers. Doctors who visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy have attested that he urgently needs medical care. Belmarsh is a maximum security prison sometimes referred to as “the UK’s Guantanamo Bay”.

And yet we’re asked to believe that this has something to do with an alleged bail violation and a US extradition request for alleged computer crimes carrying a maximum sentence of five years. If you zoom out and listen to the less-informed chatter of the overt propagandists and the brainwashed rank-and-file western mass media consumers, you will also see that people believe this has something to do with Russia and rape allegations as well. 

Actually, none of these things are true.

Assange is being imprisoned under draconian conditions for journalism, and for journalism only. The Obama administration declined to prosecute him after WikiLeaks’ publication of the Manning leaks out of concern that doing so would endanger press freedoms, and the Obama administration didn’t have any more evidence at its disposal than the Trump administration has now. The “crime” Assange is accused of consists of nothing other than standard journalistic practices that investigative journalists engage in all the time, including source protection and encouraging the source to obtain more material. The only thing that has changed is an increased willingness in the White House to prosecute journalists for practicing journalism, and there are an abundance of reasonsto believe that he will be hit with far more serious charges once extradited to US soil. They’re not going to all this trouble for a bail violation and a five-year maximum sentence.

But if you zoom out even further, in the grand scheme of things this barely even has anything to do with Assange. Sure, he has of course been a thorn in the side of those who operate the transnational western power alliance, and given the choice they would of course prefer him to be locked up or dead than free and alive. But that’s not what the corrupt influencers who are strangling our world are shooting for here. They are making a grab for something much, much bigger. Assange just happens to be a stepping stone along the way. 

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Julian Assange exposed the crimes of powerful actors, including Israel

Alison Weir
If Americans Knew 

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange is incarcerated in a UK prison that has been called “Britain’s Guantanamo.” His crime was exposing actions the US government, the media, the Democratic–Clinton machine, Israel, and others wanted kept hidden, including war crimes and torture.

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has finally been imprisoned, an objective long sought by powerful parties he helped to expose over the past dozen years.

Assange’s “crime” was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the U.S. government, the media, the Democratic Party-Clinton machine, and Israel.

Wikileaks revealed the U.S. government’s cover up of torture, cruelty, the killing of civilians, spying on its own citizens and others. It exposed Democratic Party cheating and manipulation, the fraudulence of “Russiagate.” It unmasked Israeli plans to keep Gaza on the brink of collapse, to use violence against Palestinian nonviolence, to make war upon civilians. All of this will be detailed below.

Without Wikileaks’ exposés, many of these actions would quite likely have remained hidden from the general public, as the perpetrators hoped.

The actual charge against Assange is allegedly conspiring with Chelsea Manning “to commit computer intrusion,” violating a somewhat problematic law with what one expert terms “overly expansive wording.”

The government seems to have resorted to this charge after the Justice Department had concluded in 2013 that it could not charge Assange for publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs (which revealed various U.S war crimes detailed below), because government lawyers said this would also require charging various U.S. news organizations and journalists.

The Washington Post reported that Justice officials “realized that they have what they described as a ‘New York Times problem.’ If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.”

Even the current charge, when examined closely, turns out to be problematic on free press grounds. As Glenn Greenwald notes: “Assange is charged with helping a source preserve anonymity, a common practice by investigative reporters.”

Assange is being held in a maximum-security prison in London that has been called the UK’s Guantanamo. It has been used to detain alleged terrorists, sometimes indefinitely.

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Assange's Judge A Disgrace To The Bench, Former UK Ambassador Says

Craig Murray

Both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange are now in jail, both over offenses related to the publication of materials specifying U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both charged with nothing else at all. No matter what bullshit political and MSM liars try to feed you, that is the simple truth. Manning and Assange are true heroes of our time, and are suffering for it.

If a Russian opposition politician were dragged out by armed police, and within three hours had been convicted on a political charge by a patently biased judge with no jury, with a lengthy jail sentence to follow, can you imagine the Western media reaction to that kind of kangaroo court? Yet that is exactly what just happened in London.

District Judge Michael Snow is a disgrace to the bench who deserves to be infamous well beyond his death. He displayed the most plain and open prejudice against Assange in the 15 minutes it took for him to hear the case and declare Assange guilty last week, in a fashion which makes the dictators’ courts I had witnessed, in Ibrahim Babangida’s Nigeria or Isam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, look fair and reasonable, in comparison to the gross charade of justice conducted by Michael Snow.

One key fact gave away Snow’s enormous prejudice.

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Ecuador accuses Assange of ‘misbehavior’ to justify his arrest – lawyer

RT

The Ecuadorian authorities have fabricated claims about Julian Assange's alleged "gross misbehavior" at its embassy as a pretext to surrender him to the UK police, the WikiLeaks founder's lawyer said. 

 

"The first thing to say is [that] Ecuador has been making some outrageous allegations," Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, told Sky News on Sunday following the whistleblower's arrest earlier this week. Quito made these claims to divert public attention from its own misdeeds and to "justify the unlawful and extraordinary act of letting police come inside an embassy," she added.

Earlier, Ecuadorian Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo complained about the embassy staff having to tolerate gross misconduct for far too long. The 47-year-old was specifically accused of "putting feces on the walls," among other things. He was also alleged to have left dirty underwear in the lavatory, failed to clean dishes, and left a cooker on.

Apart from that, the embassy staff complained earlier that the WikiLeaks founder also listened to loud music and skateboarded inside the embassy hall at night – claims that make the whistleblower sound like a rowdy teenager.

Robinson dismissed all those allegations as "not true" and hit back by saying that it was the Ecuadorian authorities that eventually turned the whistleblower's life in the embassy into a sort of a solitary confinement as he was holed up for seven years.

"I've been visiting him for the last seven years. This man has been inside a room with no outside access. Inside the embassy, it has become more difficult," the lawyer said, adding that Ecuador's attitude to Assange drastically changed for the worse after its current president, Lenin Moreno, came to power.

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John Pilger: Assange Arrest A Warning From History

John Pilger
Consortium News

The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi-fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

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Why Assange's Accuser, Anna Ardin, is Almost Certainly Lying

Accuser of Julian Assange and possibly CIA-connected, Anna Ardin

Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk
via Sott.net 

The mainstream media have ensured very few people know the detail of the "case" against Julian Assange in Sweden. The UN Working Group ruled that Assange ought never to have been arrested in the UK in the first place because there is no case, and no genuine investigation. Read this and you will know why.

The other thing not widely understood is there is NO JURY in a rape trial in Sweden and it is a SECRET TRIAL. All of the evidence, all of the witnesses, are heard in secret. No public, no jury, no media. The only public part is the charging and the verdict. There is a judge and two advisers directly appointed by political parties. So you never would get to understand how plainly the case is a stitch-up. Unless you read this.

There are so many inconsistencies in Anna Ardin's accusation of sexual assault against Julian Assange. But the key question which leaps out at me - and which strangely I have not seen asked anywhere else - is this:

Why did Anna Ardin not warn Sofia Wilen?

On 16 August, Julian Assange had sex with Sofia Wilen. Sofia had become known in the Swedish group around Assange for the shocking pink cashmere sweater she had worn in the front row of Assange's press conference. Anna Ardin knew Assange was planning to have sex with Sofia Wilen. On 17 August, Ardin texted a friend who was looking for Assange:

"He's not here. He's planned to have sex with the cashmere girl every evening, but not made it. Maybe he finally found time yesterday?"

Yet Ardin later testified that just three days earlier, on 13 August, she had been sexually assaulted by Assange; an assault so serious she was willing to try (with great success) to ruin Julian Assange's entire life. She was also to state that this assault involved enforced unprotected sex and she was concerned about HIV.

If Ardin really believed that on 13 August Assange had forced unprotected sex on her and this could have transmitted HIV, why did she make no attempt to warn Sofia Wilen that Wilen was in danger of her life? And why was Ardin discussing with Assange his desire for sex with Wilen, and texting about it to friends, with no evident disapproval or discouragement?

Ardin had Wilen's contact details and indeed had organised her registration for the press conference. She could have warned her. But she didn't.

Let us fit that into a very brief survey of the whole Ardin/Assange relationship. 

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See also: Revealed: Assange ‘rape’ accuser linked to notorious CIA operative

Ecuador’s Globalist Regime Received Billions to Sell Out Julian Assange

Big League Politics

Ecuadorean President Lenín Moreno thrust a dagger into the heart of free speech today after he allowed a foreign country’s authorities into his nation’s embassy in Britain to arrest heroic whistle-blower and award-winning journalist Julian Assange.

What was Moreno’s price to commit this betrayal? A 4.2 billion loan guarantee from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), it seems.

The Economist published a profile on Moreno showing how he has reversed the policies of his predecessor, Rafael Correa. Correa was a populist who used oil revenues to fund social programs and stood firmly with Assange.

Moreno has moved Ecuador toward being a submissive vassal state of the globalists, begging international financiers for handouts to keep his corrupt regime afloat.

“Thanks to the firm decisions I have made, we are not what Venezuela is today . . . we have recovered democracy,” Moreno said in February. “This money will create work opportunities for those who have not found something stable.”

 

The IMF deal was announced on the seven-year anniversary of Julian Assange’s asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, hardly a coincidence. It was clear in Moreno’s rhetoric that they were bowing to their global masters and readying to throw Assange under the bus.

“Our government is recovering its credibility,” Moreno said as he sold his nation to the IMF syndicate, also announcing that other globalist entities like Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank would be trampling over Ecuadorean sovereignty as well. “The fact that the world trusts us shows that we are on the right path.”

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Wikileaks Founder Assange Dragged Out of London Embassy in Handcuffs After Ecuador Tears up Asylum Deal

RT

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has spent the last six years. Ecuador's president has announced that the country has withdrawn asylum from Assange.

The eviction follows reports that the Australian founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblowing portal would be handed over to British authorities. Ecuador denied the reports and said it had no intention of stripping him of his protected status, but apparently another decision was made by Quito.

That's only a day after WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson claimed that an extensive spying operation was conducted against Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. During an explosive media conference Hrafnsson alleged that the operation was designed to get Assange extradited.

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See also: George Galloway: 'Julian Assange exposed great crimes & now a great crime is committed against him'

WikiLeaks Calls QAnon A Likely ‘Pied Piper’ Operation

Comment: A bit rich coming from Wikileaks, but true nonetheless...

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Caitlin Johnstone
Medium.com
 

A few months back I started having bizarre interactions on social media of a kind I’d never experienced previously. Suddenly, whenever I’d write about President Trump’s nonstop warmongering and capitulations to longstanding neoconservative agendas like implementing aggressive new cold war escalations against Russia along multiple fronts, the illegal occupation of Syria with the stated goal of effecting regime change, increasing troop presence in Afghanistan, unprecedented civilian deaths in drone strikes, facilitating the slaughter of civilians in Yemen, or the administration’s open regime change policy against Iran, I’d get all these weird accounts telling me things like “Trust the plan” and “This is the Art of the Deal, Trump is playing 4-D chess”, and saying I should research something called “QAnon” or “Q”.

It happens literally every time I write anything critical of this administration; a deluge of commenters telling me in effect, “Shush. Calm down. This is nothing. What looks like Trump facilitating longtime establishment agendas just like his predecessors is actually brilliant strategic maneuvering.” Every single time, without a single solitary exception.

It got particularly frustrating when I’d try to talk about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ statement that arresting WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is a high priority for this administration, a statement Trump personally supported. These Q people told me they had great news for me: Assange is no longer languishing in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. No, some clever researchers had deciphered some cryptic statements from an anonymous poster on 8chan, and it turns out that Assange is now walking free and enjoying a full presidential pardon. Some even say it to Assange’s own mother.

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Victory for Assange: Court of Human Rights orders safe passage of Wikileaks founder out of embassy

Adam Garrie
Eurasia Futures

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights based in Costa Rica is a multinational independent judicial body which handles court cases relating to the human rights of individuals in or effected by the laws of the members states of the Organization of American States (OAS). At present the OAS is comprised of every North American, Central American and South American nation, although Venezuela has expressed a desire to withdraw from the body.

Today, the Court ruled that it is the duty of nations to allow for the passage of successful asylum seekers from embassies to the mainland territory of the state that has granted an individual asylum. For Julian Assange, this would mean that according to the Court's decision, Britain has a legal obligation to allow Julian Assange to exit the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in peace and allow for his safe transit to an airport from which he would be able to fly to Ecuador, the country that has granted Assange asylum and where he now also holds formal citizenship.

Relevant portions of the press release from the Court can be read below:

"The Court interpreted the reach of the protection given under Article 22(7) of the American Convention on Human Rights and Article XXVII of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, which recognize the right to seek and receive asylum in a foreign territory. In particular, the Court declared upon the relative issue of whether this human right protects both territorial asylum and diplomatic asylum.

Similarly, the Court determined the human rights obligations of Member States of the Organization of American States regarding the host country and, in this case, for third States, in virtue of the risk that persons seeking international protection could suffer, which was the reason for the principle of non-refoulement.

Starting with the inclusion of the term "in a foreign territory" within the instruments, (which clearly refers to the protection derived from territorial asylum as opposed to diplomatic asylum), and in an analysis of the preparatory work of the American Declaration regarding the choice of the States to omit the concept of diplomatic asylum as a protected classification under such human rights norms, the Court held that, given the protections enshrined by Article 22(7) of the American Convention and Article XXVII of the American Declaration, the right to seek and receive asylum can be contemplated as a human right to seek and receive international protection in a foreign territory, including refugee status under the relevant United Nations instruments or corresponding national laws as well as territorial asylum under the different Inter-American conventions on the topic.

Similarly, the Court concluded that the scope and breadth of diplomatic asylum should be governed by the appropriate interstate conventions and the provisions of internal legislation, considering that the States have the sovereign right to choose whether to grant such asylum.

In addition, the Court emphasized that the general obligations established by the American Convention are applicable to the conduct of diplomatic agents deployed to the territories of third States, whenever the nexus of personal jurisdiction can be established with the particular person. In this vein, the Court considered that the ambit of protection against refoulement (that is, the prohibition on sending a person back to the territory in which their life, integrity, security, and/or liberty may be at risk due to persecution or threat of persecution, generalized violence, or massive human rights violations, among others, as well as where they run the risk of being subjected to torture or other cruel, degrading, or inhuman treatment, or to a third State from which they could be sent to a territory where they could incur these risks) is not only limited to persons who may be found in the territory of the State, but also obliges States extraterritorially whenever authorities exercise their authority or effective control over such persons, as may happen in legations, that, by their own nature, may be in the territory of another State with that State's consent and authorization.

The Court added that host States under whose jurisdiction the person falls who had requested protection in diplomatic headquarters have the obligation to adopt positive measures regarding an individualized evaluation of risk, such as the opportunity of a personal interview or a preliminary evaluation of the risk of refoulement, as well as the obligation to adopt adequate means of protection, including those against arbitrary detention. Thus, States must arbitrate all the necessary means to protect persons in the event of a real risk to their life, integrity, liberty, or security if they were sent back. Similarly, since the legal status of the person cannot stay in limbo or be prolonged indefinitely, States must adopt measures which expedite suitable safe passage, which is why the Court recalled that the duty of cooperation between States in the promotion and observance of human rights is an erga omnes norm".

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