The Biden administration will continue to pursue the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the UK to face charges in the US, according to a statement released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday.
The Biden government’s statement was in part a response to the January 4 decision of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocking the extradition of Assange on mental health grounds only—she completely endorsed the US prosecution’s denial of the free speech and freedom of the press rights of the WikiLeaks publisher—and to set the record straight in advance of the Friday deadline for the administration to appeal the ruling.
Joseph Biden (left) (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez) and Julian Assange (AP Photo/Matt Dunham) A statement from DoJ Acting Deputy Director and Senior Communications Advisor Marc Raimondi said, “While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised. In particular, the court rejected all of Mr. Assange’s arguments regarding political motivation, political offense, fair trial, and freedom of speech. We will continue to seek Mr. Assange’s extradition to the United States.”
The statement was also a direct rebuke to a coalition of civil liberties and human rights groups that mounted a campaign for the Biden administration to drop the effort to extradite Assange that was initiated by the Trump White House.
In a letter dated February 8 addressed to Biden’s Attorney General Monty Wilkinson, the coalition of twenty-four organizations—including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Human Rights Watch—wrote, “We urge you to drop the appeal of the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court to reject the Trump administration’s extradition request. We also urge you to dismiss the underlying indictment.”
The joint letter also explained, “The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do. … In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.”
The organizations also drew a connection between to the prosecution of Assange and the historical development of undemocratic measures in the US and internationally, “It is unfortunately the case that press freedom is under threat globally. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we protect a robust and adversarial press—what Judge Murray Gurfein in the Pentagon Papers case memorably called a ‘cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press’—in the United States and abroad.”
In a separate statement the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, said, “Most of the charges against Assange concern activities that are no different from those used by investigative journalists around the world every day. President Biden should avoid setting a terrible precedent by criminalizing key tools of independent journalism that are essential for a healthy democracy.”
The official announcement from the DoJ on Tuesday laid to rest any illusions that the Biden administration would take a position on First Amendment rights any different than that of Donald Trump. Biden intends to pursue the prosecution of Assange on 17 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 that carry a maximum prison sentence of up to 170 years.
Although a US grand jury had issued a sealed indictment of Assange in March 2018, the charges against him were only made public more than a year later in April 2019 after the WikiLeaks journalist was evicted from the Ecuadorean Embassy and arrested in London. Julian Assange—initially detained on a bogus charge of bail jumping—was remanded to London’s notorious HM Prison Belmarsh where he has been held without bail pending a final decision on his extradition to the US.
As the World Socialist Web Site and other defenders of the rights of journalists to tell the truth to the public about government policy have consistently maintained, Assange has committed no crimes. He has been targeted by the governments of the US and UK because WikiLeaks published details about the criminal actions of imperialism during the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that began in 2001 and 2003, respectively. WikiLeaks also exposed the role of major corporations in imperialist crimes as well as the conspiracy of the Democratic Party leadership during the nomination process for the 2016 presidential elections.
The decision by the Biden administration to push on with the persecution of Assange comes as absolutely no surprise to those who base themselves on a class analysis and understanding of the logic of political developments.
It is significant that the Trump’s top national security official in the DoJ, John C. Demers, is still in place at the National Security Division. Demers was asked by the Biden transition team to stay on for continuity purposes while many other Trump political appointees resigned.
Meanwhile, Mr. Demers’s predecessor from 2013 to 2016, John Carlin, has returned to the DoJ and is currently serving as the acting deputy attorney general. That there really are no fundamental differences between the Trump and Biden administrations on key national security topics is demonstrated by the fact that Carlin’s predecessor, Lisa O. Monaco, in charge of the National Security Division from 2011 to 2013, is Biden’s nominee to be deputy attorney general but has not yet been confirmed.
Additionally, The New York Times was cynically promoting illusions that the Democrat Biden might stop the Assange extradition policy while it was fully aware that no such change was in the offing. Speaking out of both sides of its mouth, The Times said on Monday, “A Friday deadline in the London extradition case may force the Biden administration to decide whether to keep pursuing a Trump-era policy,” while at the same time, “For now, the Justice Department remains committed to appealing the denial of its request to extradite Mr. Assange, said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for its National Security Division.”
It is also possible to go back further and review what Biden said about Assange more than ten years ago after WikiLeaks had published the diplomatic cables and when he was Vice President during the Obama administration. When asked about the WikiLeaks exposures on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on December 19, 2010, Biden called Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and furthered the unproven claim that “this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.”
CLINTON – OBAMA – TRUMPERNOMICS: STEAL FROM THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS and HAND IT TO THE SUPER RICH ON A SILVER PLATTER!
"The Wealth-X report shows that the world’s billionaire population has grown by 15 percent, to 2,754 people, since 2016, and that the wealth of these billionaires “surged by 24 percent to a record level of $9.2 trillion,” equivalent to 12 percent of the gross domestic product of the entire planet."
VIDEO:
JUDICIAL WATCH GOES AFTER CLINTON AND OBOMB… will they see prison time?
THE OBAMA-CLINTON SWAMP…. How close they came to destroying American democracy…. It’ what happens when two psychopath lawyers are permitted to run for office!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/monty-pelerin-drain-swamp-becomes.html
“If the Constitution did not forbid cruel and unusual punishment, the sentence I would like to see imposed would place both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same 8-by-12 cell.” ROBERT ARVAY – AMERICAN THINKER com
HILLARY & BILLARY: THE CLINTON MAFIA
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY GLOBAL THIEVES
Their Looting of the Poor of Haiti
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-clinton-mafia-loots-poor-of-haiti.html
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service” into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes. The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
HILLARY CLINTON’S VISION:
SURRENDER OF OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX AND SUCKING IN GLOBAL BRIBES FOR THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/hillary-clintons-global-agenda-open.html
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, Breitbart News has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the Los Angeles Times observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for
globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
Ten years since
WikiLeaks published the
US diplomatic cables
Today is the tenth anniversary of “Cablegate” when WikiLeaks, leading a group of partner media organisations, began reporting on the contents of hundreds of thousands of leaked United States government diplomatic cables.
The documents revealed the vast scope and global reach of US imperialism’s criminal conspiracies against the international working class, and the brutality and corruption of capitalist governments the world over.
Julian Assange (Credit: Newsonline, Flickr)
Of historic significance in their own right, the publications followed WikiLeaks’s extraordinary releases earlier that year of the “Collateral Murder” video—showing the killing of Iraqi civilians, including journalists and first responders, by US soldiers—the Afghan War Logs and the Iraq War Logs.
These publications earned WikiLeaks, and in particular its founder, the journalist and publisher Julian Assange, the undying enmity of the ruling class . A vicious campaign of slander and pseudo-legal persecution was launched against Assange that continues to this day. He is currently locked up in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison awaiting a verdict on his extradition to the US, where he faces a likely sentence of 175 years in the darkest corner of the American prison system, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Just a small sample of the diplomatic cables exposures gives a sense of their significance.
They revealed that the US had knowledge of and approved the military coup that toppled Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. American officials discussed the possibility of a similar overthrow of the Pakistani government in 2009 with the country’s top general. In 2009, Washington privately supported the military coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and worked to cover up the repression which followed.
US intelligence assets helped to engineer Kevin Rudd’s replacement as Australian prime minister by Julia Gillard in 2010, to ensure a continued Australian presence in the criminal US-led occupation of Afghanistan. Rudd was also targeted for suggesting America make minor accommodations to China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific region.
The cables demonstrated that the US government was fully aware of the torture, random arrests, and extra-judicial killings carried out by its ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. They proved Washington’s detailed knowledge of state corruption in Tunisia and exposed the government’s collaboration in abrogating the rights of Tunisian citizens detained in Guantanamo Bay. Governments in Pakistan and Yemen were shown to have collaborated with US drone operations in their own countries, responsible for the repeated massacres of civilians.
American officials were aware of an explosion at a BP gas rig in the Caspian Sea in 2008 but took no action to investigate the safety of the company’s other sites. Two years later, an explosion at a rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven people and created the largest marine oil spill in history. During the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, the US successfully bribed and blackmailed poor countries over development aid to gain support for a watering down of climate commitments.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US embassies and UN representatives to gather personal information, including credit card and frequent flyer account numbers, internet passwords, work schedules and even DNA samples, from UN and foreign government officials. The only realistic purpose being to facilitate similar blackmail operations.
Yet more cables detailed the domination of the Nigerian state by Shell Oil.
Contrary to the claims of the US government that WikiLeaks recklessly endangered vulnerable sources named in the cables, a painstaking and collaborative process was established to review and redact the documents before publication. At Assange’s extradition hearing this September, journalists from all over the world testified to WikiLeaks’ “pioneering” use of encryption to protect sources and documents. The cables were scheduled to be released over the course of a year, on a country-by-country basis, making use of the expertise of local partner media organisations to ensure the appropriate redactions took place. In some cases, the US government itself provided suggestions for redactions.
Evidence heard at the hearing also established that it was Guardian journalist David Leigh who was responsible for allowing the release of tens of thousands of unredacted cables, which had been securely stored by WikiLeaks, in September 2011. In a hatchet-job on WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy , Leigh published the password to a secure online archive containing the cables, making them freely accessible.
Assange called the US State Department to warn them of an impending release but was ignored. He and the other WikiLeaks editors then took the decision to publish the unredacted cables themselves, since the documents were already in the public domain. WikiLeaks’s main media partners, the Guardian , the New York Times , Der Spiegel , El Pais, and Le Monde , used this event as a pretext to break off relations with the organisation and denounce its work.
The American government responded to the initial “Cablegate” publications with an embargo on WikiLeaks. Amazon removed the site from its web servers, PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account and Mastercard and Visa prevented payments being made to the organisation. Bank of America stopped handling WikiLeaks payments and Swiss bank PostFinance froze Assange’s assets.
WikiLeaks also came under a massive “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack, effectively preventing users from accessing its site.
Obama’s Democratic Party administration launched a furious salvo of denunciations, with then Vice President Joe Biden calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist” and Hilary Clinton reportedly asking, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” This opened the floodgates to a torrent of demands from Republicans and the right-wing media for his assassination.
Assange was subjected to a sprawling conspiracy, as Sweden launched a manufactured sexual assault investigation to secure his arrest. Swedish prosecutors were encouraged by the UK authorities who used a Swedish extradition request to arbitrarily detain Assange in the Ecuadorian Assembly in London, where he had claimed political asylum. Pseudo-left political organisations abandoned Assange entirely over this smear campaign, or openly attacked him as a “rapist”, despite no charges ever being laid.
In April 2019, the US, UK and a new Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno reached a deal to see Assange illegally seized from the embassy by British police.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators. 1. Globalism: Google VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
2. Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
3. Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the most.
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