fading away before the skeleton arguments?...

julian

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has refused to attend his call over, with a UK court still unable to find a new venue for his next extradition hearing.

The Australian had been due for a regular call over hearing via videolink on Monday in the Westminster Magistrates Court.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser said the court had received an email from Belmarsh prison, saying Assange was “refusing to attend the hearing and refusing to sign a refusal form”.

When asked if the 48-year-old was too “unwell” to attend, his barrister Edward Fitzpatrick said the defence lawyer Gareth Pierce had sent the court an email on Friday outlining Assange “had respiratory problems for some time”.

Meanwhile, Judge Baraitser said the court was yet to find an alternative venue for Assange’s next three-week extradition hearing set for September 7.

Prosecution barrister James Lewis also said his team had been unable to conduct a psychiatric assessment of Assange because they were still unable to access the prison.

The date of both the prosecution and defence’s psychiatric reports on the Australian has been pushed back to July 31.

Mr Lewis also mentioned that new evidence – not in response to prosecution evidence – had been served by the defence and would need to be examined to determine admissibility.

The judge ordered the prosecution’s new skeleton argument to be presented to the court on August 25 with the defence skeleton argument due on September 1.

Judge Baraitser ordered Assange’s next call over hearing to be on June 29 with the search for a new venue to continue.

It’s understood that’s difficult due to the huge backlog of cases in the UK, exacerbated by the coronavirus lockdown.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser also wants to limit Assange’s travel time between Belmarsh prison and the courtroom.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/06/01/julian-assange-too-unwell-to-attend-latest-uk-court-hearing/

FREE ASSANGE TODAY !!!!!...

Free Assange today. It's the only right thing to do. English Justice looks worse than an American cop kneeling on a black man's throat for no reason...We know the rest (the unrest actually)... It's insane...

FREE ASSANGE TODAY !!!!!!!!!!

By Gus Leonisky at 2 Jun 2020 - 6:19am
Login or register to post comments

using einstein to solve the cyber...

China has denied responsibility for cyber attacks against Australia amid warnings from security experts that the threats could increase in strength and sophistication.

On Friday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia was currently under a massive cyber attack from a “state-based actor”.

Mr Morrison did not name China but experts and intelligence sources are pointing to the Asian country.

However the ABC reports China’s foreign ministry has rejected as “baseless” suggestions it was behind the attacks on government departments, service providers and companies.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Australian think thank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), of wrongly outing China.

“We’ve pointed out many times, this institute has long been receiving funding from US arms companies, and the attacks coming from the institute are completely baseless”, said Mr Zhao.

“It has been hyping up, or creating, all kinds of anti-China topics.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/06/20/australia-cyber-attack-warning/

Repeating a suggestion already made on this site:

RELEASE ASSANGE AND PAY HIM TO HELP STOP THESE CYBER ATTACKS AND FIND THE REAL SOURCES... As the best Einstein code-cracker in the world and journalist/publisher, why is he languishing in an English dungeon?

FREE ASSANGE TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By Gus Leonisky at 20 Jun 2020 - 7:33pm
Login or register to post comments

on june 19, 2012, against all odds...

On June 19, 2012, against all odds, Julian Assange entered the Embassy of Ecuador in London, requesting asylum in this country. He had exhausted all recourse to British justice to avoid his extradition.

Julian Assange, journalist and founder of WikiLeaks, a publishing organization that has published revelations obtained by whistleblowers internationally since 2006, has been deprived of his freedom of movement for exactly eight years. Having exhausted all legal remedies in Great Britain to escape an extradition which he considered dangerous for his safety, on June 19, 2012, the Australian, then aged 41, decided to enter the Embassy of Ecuador in London where he immediately asked for political asylum in this Latin American country.

The request, which caught British and Swedish authorities on the heels of Julian Assange for a sex crime case that was closed five years later, came after the British Supreme Court had dismissed the request for reconsideration five days earlier.

Assange's appeal from the decision to extradite him to Sweden.

A year and a half earlier, on November 18, 2010, Sweden launched an arrest warrant against him, as part of a preliminary investigation into an alleged sexual offense against two Swedish women, which Assange has always denied , claiming to have had consensual relations with the two women.

As documents revealed in 2014 by whistleblower Edward Snowden demonstrate, the American administration asked, in August 2010, its allied countries to open criminal investigations against the founder and members of WikiLeaks, which had just released to the press quantities of publications compromising for Washington.

Random calendar?

Ten days after the Swedish legal proceedings were launched on November 28, the headlines of the world press began to publish the content of some 250,000 diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks on US military and diplomatic activities, including war crimes, in particular in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Furious, the United States speaks of a "serious crime" and threatens Julian Assange with prosecution. An investigation is opened against him.

"For five years, I was placed under house arrest in this embassy, unable to see the light of day, while my children grew up without me. This is something that I can never forgive, or forget, because I suffered an immense injustice."

The founder of WikiLeaks who never refused to answer to the Swedish justice, however feared that an extradition to Sweden does not lead to another ... to the United States. In a press release published on June 19, 2012, the day of his entry into the Ecuadorian embassy, he explained his approach by the "regrettable declaration of abandonment", alluding to the decision of the highest British court after 18 months of legal battle.

Julian Assange considers himself the victim of a plot. The facts for which he was then the subject of the Swedish arrest warrant turned out to be an empty shell five years later, but the Swedish courts dragged on the case, opening and closing the file, until abandoning all prosecution on May 19, 2017, before relaunching the case temporarily in May 2019 and closing it definitively on November 19 of the same year, due to lack of evidence.

Find out more about RT France : https://francais.rt.com/international/76031-assange-il-a-huit-ans-fondateur-wikileaks-demandait-asile-equateur

Free Assange !!!!!!!!!!!

the imperium conspiracy against julian...

The Kafkaesque Imperium has taken yet another absurd step towards mean absurdity with another superseding indictment against Julian Assange. This move by the US Department of Justice seems to have surprised those involved in his extradition proceedings.

Mark Summers QC, one of the members of the Assange legal team, did not conceal his astonishment at the call over hearing at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

We are surprised by the timing of this development. We were surprised to hear about it in the press.”

What is baffling about this latest act of brutish pantomime is that the spruced up indictment does not contain new charges so much as added flesh. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson could only remark upon this fact with consternation. We already know the sinister import of the charges, the lion’s share of 17 focused on alleged violations of the US Espionage Act, and one of conspiring to commit computer intrusion.

US prosecutors evidently felt that the latter charge required bulking.

On June 24, the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs made mention of a federal grand jury’s return of “a second superseding indictment […] charging Julian P. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” No additional counts are added, but the new document is not immaterial in what it builds upon.

It seeks to draw out the character of Assange as the enterprising “hacker” who also sought to recruit his fellow kind, a move that transparently seeks to undermine any journalistic or publisher credentials. It also casts a wider net against WikiLeaks, its associates and those who gave it a lending hand, while expanding the timeline of alleged nefarious acts (no longer restricted to March 2010, it targets alleged activities between 2009 and 2015).

According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.”

The document makes mention, for instance, of Sarah Harrison, former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and digital activist Jacob Appelbaum. It also hones in on Assange on the conference circuit, noting how he, along with “a WikiLeaks associate”, participated at the “Hacking at Random” conference in the Netherlands. Assange “sought to recruit those who had or could obtain authorized access to classified information and hackers to search for, steal, and send to WikiLeaks the items on the ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ list that was posted on WikiLeaks’s website.”

Assange is described as encourager and provocateur, suggesting to potential recruits that, “unless they were ‘a serving member of the United States military,’ they would have no legal liability for stealing classified information and giving it to WikiLeaks because ‘TOP SECRET’ meant nothing as a matter of law.”

This indictment does little to improve on previous defects.

As Kevin Gosztola writes in the indispensable Shadowproof, the DOJ draws heavily on statements from FBI informants, namely Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson and Hector Xavier Monsegur (“Sabu”) of the LulzSec hacker group. Thordarson was fired from WikiLeaks in November 2011 after his embezzlement ventures amounting to $50,000 were discovered.

According to WikiLeaks,

In light of the relentless ongoing prosecution of US authorities against WikiLeaks, it is not surprising that the FBI would try to abuse this troubled young man and involve him in some manner in the attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks staff.”

The Bureau’s pieces of silver for Thordarson’s services amounted to $5,000.

Monsegur’s part in the whole business was, according to activist Jeremy Hammond and key figure in the hacking of the intelligence firm Stratfor, to entrap WikiLeaks in a cash-for-leaks scheme. It was also Monsegur who gave the hacker collective AntiSec access to the company’s information trove. Hammond was duly entrapped in transferring, without his knowledge, confidential data to an FBI server.

Monsegur’s rather smelly pride of place in the indictment is that of allegedly fielding requests from Assange “to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and pdfs.”

Another protagonist also makes an appearance in the prosecutorial show. “To encourage leakers and hackers to provide stolen materials to WikiLeaks in the future, Assange and others at WikiLeaks openly displayed their attempts to assist [Edward] Snowden in evading arrest.”

Harrison, tagged “WLA-4”, is noted as assisting Snowden make his exit from Hong Kong to Moscow in 2013. The assistance provided by WikiLeaks is deemed conspiratorial; vocalised support for Snowden given by Assange at the Chaos Computer Club conference on December 31, 2013, is trotted as an example of incitement to theft.

Gosztola notes the purposeful mutilations by the prosecutors regarding statements made by Assange regarding radical transparency. Assange, for instance, is noted as claiming:

that ‘the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations’ showed that ‘it was possible now for even a single system administrator to…not merely wreck[] or disabl[e] [organizations]…but rather shift[] information from an information apartheid system…into the knowledge commons.”

The actual quote is more qualified in its philosophical belligerence, emphasising such liberated knowledge as “a disciplining force” and “constructive constraint” upon “those with extraordinary power and information”while also being “used to construct and understand the new world that we’re entering into.”

Assange’s stance on information, and his encouragement to the young to rush into the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency, is taken as an exhortation of bad faith, encouraging the theft of classified information and the ruination of secrecy.

A better reading of this, urges Gosztola, is to see this as a call “to young people to help the public address a crisis of corruption in government by forcing transparency at a time when the government abuses the classified information system to conceal waste, fraud, abuse, and other illegal actions.”

The new indictment has made something of a mockery of the London extradition proceedings.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser conceded to being informed of the superseding document by email, but still awaits its official receipt. Prosecution barrister Joel Smith merely remarked that both parties were still pouring over its contents and implications. “If we need to involve the court … then we will inform the court at the appropriate time.”

Summers was less sanguine, suggesting that the expansive larding of the new indictment would affect future management hearings. “This shows,” stated Hrafnsson, “how they are abusing due process in the UK and flaunting the legal system’s rules.”

During the hearing, Judge Baraitser was again her merry self, suggesting that Assange had no good reason to avoid attending the call-over session. According to word from Belmarsh prison officials, he was refusing to attend for fear of contracting COVID-19, which was no reason at all. Medical evidence had to be supplied for any absence at the next call-over session on July 27. Another entry into the book of travesty that is this entire affair has been made.

https://off-guardian.org/2020/07/01/julian-assange-faces-second-superseding-indictment/

Read from top

FREE ASSANGE NOW!

Note the MSM are pissweak on Assange...

By Gus Leonisky at 1 Jul 2020 - 6:13pm
Login or register to post comments

topping up the spy-cy sauce...

A second superseding US government indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still yet to be served to a British court.

The 49-year-old did not appear for the call-over hearing at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London on Monday.

He hasn’t been seen in court since April 7.

The Australian is fighting extradition to the US to face 17 charges of violating the US Espionage Act and one of conspiring to commit computer intrusion.

The US added fresh allegations to his indictment last month, but Judge Baraitser is yet to be formally served with the documents that could affect his extradition hearing starting on September 7.

“As it stands no further superseding indictment is before this court,” she said.

Prosecution barrister Joel Smith countered that it had been disclosed to defence lawyers.

“It has only been disclosed to the court via email from the defence but not formally,” Baraitser replied.

“This court isn’t seized with this issue at all”.

The judge said as the new substances of the case weren’t being discussed, Assange didn’t need to appear via videolink from Belmarsh prison.

Last month she ordered him to appear unless he had a medical reason not to.

Defence barrister Edward Fitzgerald told the court that his team’s skeleton arguments would likely be submitted one day later, on August 26, before his extradition hearing starting on September 7.

The Australian is accused of publishing thousands of secret US diplomatic and military files, some of which revealed alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is also accused of trying to recruit hackers to provide WikiLeaks with classified US information.

The charges carry a total sentence of 175 years imprisonment.

The hearing continues.

-AAP

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/07/27/latest-julian-assange-indictment-from-us-yet-to-be-served-to-british-court/

FREE ASSANGE NOW!

a spy movie...

One of Julian Assange's lawyers, Baltasar Garzon, said on July 27 that the founder of Wikileaks had been spied on like in "a movie" when he was a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The former magistrate and Spanish lawyer of Julian Assange, Baltasar Garzon, said on July 27, after being heard by a judge in Madrid, that the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, had been spied on like in "a movie" when he was a refugee in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

Julian Assange lodged a complaint in 2019 against the Spanish company Undercover Global, which he accuses of having spied on him for years on behalf of the United States, when he was a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London between 2012 and 2019.

This firm was then responsible for the security of the embassy.

"You could say that it really only happens in spy movies"...

"But this is not a spy film because the life of a person is at stake, a journalist, and all that has been done is persecuting the editor of Wikileaks, for exposing many terrible acts, crimes against humanity and corruption processes” declared Baltasar Garzon upon leaving the National Hearing, a court located in Madrid.

Find out more about RT France: https://francais.rt.com/international/77230-avocat-dassange-evoque-film-...

FREE ASSANGE NOW!

Translation by Jules Letambour

Read from top.

By Gus Leonisky at 28 Jul 2020 - 10:49am
Login or register to post comments

Primary links

Search

Recent comments

Democracy Links

Member's Off-site Blogs