Julian Assange illegally arrested, to face extradition to U.S.

The Toecutter

The Toecutter

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https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-13/7-years-lies-about-assange-wont-stop-now

For seven years, from the moment Julian Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, they have been telling us we were wrong, that we were paranoid conspiracy theorists. We were told there was no real threat of Assange’s extradition to the United States, that it was all in our fevered imaginations.

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The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truths about the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the inquiry, only for it to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.

They failed to mention that Assange was always willing to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London, as had occurred in dozens of other cases involving extradition proceedings to Sweden. It was almost as if Swedish officials did not want to test the evidence they claimed to have in their possession.

The media and political courtiers endlessly emphasised Assange’s bail violation in the UK, ignoring the fact that asylum seekers fleeing legal and political persecution don’t usually honour bail conditions imposed by the very state authorites from which they are seeking asylum.

The political and media establishment ignored the mounting evidence of a secret grand jury in Virginia formulating charges against Assange, and ridiculed Wikileaks’ concerns that the Swedish case might be cover for a more sinister attempt by the US to extradite Assange and lock him away in a high-security prison, as had happened to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

They belittled the 2016 verdict of a panel of United Nations legal scholars that the UK was “arbitrarily detaining” Assange. The media were more interested in the welfare of his cat.

They ignored the fact that after Ecuador changed presidents – with the new one keen to win favour with Washington – Assange was placed under more and more severe forms of solitary confinement. He was denied access to visitors and basic means of communications, violating both his asylum status and his human rights, and threatening his mental and physical wellbeing.

Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No “mainstream” journalist or politician thought this significant either.

They turned a blind eye to the news that, after refusing to question Assange in the UK, Swedish prosecutors had decided to quietly drop the case against him in 2015. Sweden had kept the decision under wraps for more than two years.

It was a freedom of information request by an ally of Assange, not a media outlet, that unearthed documents showing that Swedish investigators had, in fact, wanted to drop the case against Assange back in 2013. The UK, however, insisted that they carry on with the charade so that Assange could remain locked up. A British official emailed the Swedes: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

Most of the other documents relating to these conversations were unavailable. They had been destroyed by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service in violation of protocol. But no one in the political and media establishment cared, of course.

Similarly, they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to answer in Sweden. They told us – apparently in all seriousness – that he had to be arrested for his bail infraction, something that would normally be dealt with by a fine.

And possibly most egregiously of all, most of the media refused to acknowledge that Assange was a journalist and publisher, even though by failing to do so they exposed themselves to the future use of the same draconian sanctions should they or their publications ever need to be silenced. They signed off on the right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special form of rendition for journalists.

This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russiagate narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush Wikileaks and make an example of its founder.

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Noam Chomsky had this to say:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...highlights-shocking-extraterritorial-reach-us

"Well, the Assange arrest is scandalous in several respects. One of them is just the effort of governments—and it’s not just the U.S. government. The British are cooperating. Ecuador, of course, is now cooperating. Sweden, before, had cooperated. The efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didn’t want the rascal multitude to know about—OK?—that’s basically what happened. WikiLeaks was producing things that people ought to know about those in power. People in power don’t like that, so therefore we have to silence it. OK? This is the kind of thing, the kind of scandal, that takes place, unfortunately, over and over."
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Glenn Greenwald's view on things quoted below as well as the views of some of Britain's labor party in the link below:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...trocities-uk-labour-leaders-speak-out-against

"The actual left in the UK, US, Latin America & Europe has largely denounced US Govt's indictment & attempted extradition of Assange. US establishment liberals have largely cheered it. That shows a key difference: liberals are authoritarians who revere US security institutions"
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Tulsi Gabbard had this to say to Chris Matthews:

“This is a threat to journalists, but it’s also something that threatens every American, because the message that we are getting, that the American people are getting is: Be quiet, toe the line, otherwise there will be consequences.”
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Personally, I find this whole affair to be disgusting. Assange did nothing wrong. He published the truth about the U.S. committing war crimes in Iraq thanks to Bradley/Chelsea Manning giving him the video proof of it in the Cablegate dump, the same Cablegate dump which had also proven Hillary Clinton illegally spied on UN Diplomats including recording their phone calls and having their DNA gathered and indexed by intelligence agencies without warrant, as well as proof of Monsanto bribing world leaders to take over production of their nations' food supply. Assange also published proof of the DNC rigging its 2016 primary in favor of Hillary Clinton, only to be derided as a "Russian Agent" and castigated by authoritarians pretending to be "liberals" when there's zero proof that he did this on behalf of Russia or the GOP after this act may have(rightfully) convinced voters to abstain from voting for the Democratic nominee(and considering his publication of documents proving Russian government crimes as well as publishing war crimes committed by Republicans, the argument falls flat on its face and requires a lot of mental gymnastics and ignoring of facts for one to accept this argument, exposing themselves as blind Democratic partisans in the process).

If the Nobel Peace Prize weren't such a sick joke(having been handed to a war criminal named Barack Hussein Obama), IMO, it would belong to Julian Assange.
 
Well, since the asylum was withdrawn and the arrest was by invitation into the embassy, the article is a bit off base. So the European Union is going Article 13, but with Brexit they don't have to care about that. But anyone who ever said anything BUT the U.S. would just keep demanding to get their hands on him is a bit looney tunes.
 
Dauntless said:
Well, since the asylum was withdrawn and the arrest was by invitation into the embassy, the article is a bit off base.
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Quote from Fidel Narvaez, former Consul of Ecuador in London, referring to the withdrawn of asylum and removal of Assange from the Embassy: “This is a violation of the right and the institution of asylum”

Assange is a citizen of Ecuador after having been granted citizenship last year, which makes the removal of his asylum a breach of both Ecuadorian and international law. But Moreno doesn't seem to care much about that, as he got a big, fat loan from the IMF that the people of Ecuador will be forced to pay back.

So the European Union is going Article 13, but with Brexit they don't have to care about that.
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A majority of the Brits who voted, voted for Brexit, yet their government thus far will not honor the results of the vote. Like the U.S. and France, Britain is a sham "Democracy". All of the people living in the EU have had their national sovereignty stripped from them by unelected bureaucrats and technocrats, just as the U.S. has had its national sovereignty stripped by an unaccountable Deep State.
 
MJSfoto1956 said:
This is not a good precedent. One that we should all be wary of. Here's Caitlin Johnstone's take on it:
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I like what she has had to say about the QAnon cultists in her other articles pertaining to this issue. These people are taking major mental leaps to justify the Trump administration's stance on this as well as Trump saying he knows nothing of Wikileaks.

https://thinkprogress.org/donald-tr...t-know-anything-about-wikileaks-3d90efd362b2/

Then there was Crooked Hillary saying "Can't we just drone this guy?" back during the Cablegate release... Assange publishing Hillary's emails had a deeply personal motive given this context.
 
A damning memo?

The Sept. 15 Trump campaign statement linked to a 2007 strategy memo published in the Atlantic from former Clinton aide Mark Penn that advises pointing out Obama’s "lack of American roots."


Penn Strategy Memo, March 19, 2007
More than anything else, this memo captures the full essence of Mark Penn’s campaign strategy—its brilliance and its breathtaking attacks. Penn identified with impressive specificity the very coalition of women and blue-collar workers that Clinton ended up winning a year later. But he also called Obama “unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” and wrote, “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” Penn proposed targeting Obama’s “lack of American roots.”
 
markz said:
Lock her up!
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Only politicians getting locked up lately are Trump campaign and administration members.
btw it was hillary clinton that started the birther movement with obama.
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Nope. That was Trump lie #9547.

Are you telling me you actually believe what Trump says? Still? If so, FOX News needs some more copy writers!
 
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019...ismissal-of-dnc-suit-against-julian-assange/#

A federal court ruling last Tuesday dismissing a Democratic National Committee (DNC) civil suit against Julian Assange “with prejudice” was a devastating indictment of the US ruling elite’s campaign to destroy the WikiLeaks founder. It exposed as a fraud the entire “Russiagate” conspiracy theory peddled by the Democratic Party, the corporate media and the intelligence agencies for the past three years.

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Judge Koeltl’s decision made plain the anti-democratic and dictatorial logic of the DNC case against Assange. He warned: “If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC’s political, financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet.” This, he stated, would “override the First Amendment” protection to freedom of the press mandated by the US Constitution.

Koeltl’s finding was an absolute vindication of Assange and WikiLeaks’ 2016 publications exposing the attempts by the DNC to rig the Democratic Party primaries against self-declared “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders in favour of Hillary Clinton.

The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”

Koeltl, moreover, found there was no evidence to justify the DNC’s assertion that WikiLeaks had colluded with the Russian state to obtain the material. Assange and WikiLeaks have always maintained that the documents were not provided to them by the Putin regime.

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markz said:
btw it was hillary clinton that started the birther movement with obama.
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WOW, now we're getting misinformation from Canada. NO Billary did not.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=hillary+clinton+that+started+the+birther+movement+&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
 
markz said:
A damning memo?

The Sept. 15 Trump campaign statement linked to a 2007 strategy memo published in the Atlantic from former Clinton aide Mark Penn that advises pointing out Obama’s "lack of American roots."
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NOTHING IN THE MEMO SUGGESTS NOT AN AMERICAN, rather "“roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,”
LA times 2008,

The March 19, 2007, memo included a section titled “Lack of American Roots,” in which Penn recommended making an issue of Obama’s “diverse, multicultural” upbringing. Obama was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia before returning to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.

Obama’s “roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” Penn wrote. “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.”

To avoid an overt attack, Penn recommended emphasizing the word “American” in Clinton’s various campaign messages -- drawing a contrast to Obama but in subtler form.

“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t,” Penn wrote. “Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to our backgrounds.”

A Clinton spokeswoman said Tuesday that Penn’s recommendation was rejected.
 
tomjasz said:
markz said:
btw it was hillary clinton that started the birther movement with obama.
Click to expand...
WOW, now we're getting misinformation from Canada. NO Billary did not.
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The fact that there was nothing, NOTHING going on with it until Hillary Clinton said 'I don't even know if he was born in the U.S. or not' has nothing to do with it? THERE is an interesting theory.
 
tomjasz said:
markz said:
btw it was hillary clinton that started the birther movement with obama.
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WOW, now we're getting misinformation from Canada. NO Billary did not.
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The fact that there was nothing, NOTHING going on with it until Hillary Clinton said 'I don't even know if he was born in the U.S. or not' has nothing to do with it? THERE is an interesting theory.
 
Haha former two term first lady and currently sitting Senator couldn't figure out if someone was born in the US or not?

Only someone entirely incapable of critical thinking would take such a statement seriously.
 
Dauntless said:
The fact that there was nothing, NOTHING going on with it until Hillary Clinton said 'I don't even know if he was born in the U.S. or not' has nothing to do with it?
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The fact is that the birtherism movement was started by Andy Martin, a GOP senatorial candidate from Illinois. He was the one who first claimed he was a secret Muslim, and he filed the lawsuit to get his birth certificate. In 2004 he claimed Obama "lied to the American people" and "misrepresented his own heritage" in a press release. (And fun fact - later he claimed that Obama's father wasn't Barack Obama Sr. at all, but a black journalist named Frank Marshall Davis.)

So claiming that Clinton started it in 2008 is a Trump-level lie. Sorry Charlie.
 
Dauntless said:
tomjasz said:
markz said:
btw it was hillary clinton that started the birther movement with obama.
Click to expand...
WOW, now we're getting misinformation from Canada. NO Billary did not.
Click to expand...

The fact that there was nothing, NOTHING going on with it until Hillary Clinton said 'I don't even know if he was born in the U.S. or not' has nothing to do with it? THERE is an interesting theory.
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Jeebus, whatelse can Billary be blamedfor? This Billaryexcuse gets old.
 
billvon said:
So claiming that Clinton started it in 2008 is a Trump-level lie. Sorry Charlie.
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No, your post is what would be a lie. All the crap you're going on about was NOTHING! Didn't matter. Until Hillary opened her mouth. . . .

Oh, you're also lying when you say you're sorry. Admit it.

Of course if it's the liberal media telling you, you have to agree with MSNBC, right?

[youtube]_QwEebZSSnk[/youtube]

But since you want to go on about Trump. . . .

[youtube]G87UXIH8Lzo[/youtube]
 
tomjasz said:
Jeebus, whatelse can Billary be blamedfor? This Billaryexcuse gets old.
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Blaming Obama is the new Billary. A GOP candidate recently needed someone/something to blame for a white supremacist shooting that wasn't guns or white supremacists, so she blamed:

Drag queens
Gay marriage
Immigrants (even though they were the targets)
Open borders
Misbehaving children
People who kneel during the National Anthem
Obama

Reminds me of a very fat protester who was walking around during Earth Day one year. His sign said "You are all guilty of the seven deadly sins - pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath and sloth!"
 
https://medium.com/@pisces_uprising...e-hear-much-about-julian-assange-bf30a647da3a

In Orwell’s dystopian fiction 1984, the government’s mission through the Ministry of Truth is to supply its people with news, entertainment, books, films, plays and songs, packed with the information it wants the people to know. It constructs lies to fit the narrative it wishes to establish and sets about rewriting historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line.

Have we slept walked our way into 1984 with the curious witchhunt of Julian Assange?

...

The apparent dismantling of Assange’s character and disinformation has been thorough. Most people do not know the specifics of his case, but “believe” he is an arrogant rapist and an ungrateful, badly behaved houseguest, smearing faeces on the embassy walls and being cruel to his cat. These disputed claims are now so well accepted it’s inconceivable that they could actually be lies.

The one surety about Assange was that he did publish secret State documents and videos. Embarrassing yes, but surely not indictable in a country that protects freedom of speech in its constitution. Never mind the fact that Assange is an Australian citizen, but far from protecting him against being tried for espionage in America, the Morrison government’s public statements have been limited to assurances that he is being treated like any other citizen with ongoing consular assistance.

...

Instead of seeing the 2016/17 Democratic National Committee (DNC) email leaks as important data on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the prevailing narrative by the mainstream media was that Wikileaks’ handed the presidency to Donald Trump. Although the voter count showed Clinton had the majority by just over 3M votes and that Trump’s win had more to do with the American Electoral College system, the focus remained on the now debunked “Russiagate.”

...

At a recent press freedom conference in England, Special Envoy for Media Freedom, Amal Clooney, spoke of the alarm felt by journalists around the world at the Assange US indictments which “criminalises common practices in journalism that have long served the public interest.” If this is true who are the concerned journalists and why aren’t we hearing from them?

Not only has the UK government silenced Assange in prison, but the last decade of his life appears to have been censored. Who is steering the narrative in a near vacuum of information and repeated disinformation? Is there are a modern day “Ministry of Truth” behind the ongoing media blackout of one of the most influential and controversial people of our times?

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they rebelled they cannot become conscious” — George Orwell
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