Julian Assange threatened with death
After a deep investigation and thanks to some former US officials, journalists Michael Isikoff, Zach Dorfman and Sean Naylor were able to reconstruct how, in 2017, the CIA planned to kidnap the journalist Julian Assange, at that time a political refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and plans were also made to organise his assassination (following the explicit intentions of the Barack Obama Administration, when Hilary Clinton, Secretary of State, suggested killing Assange with a drone).
At that moment the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appointed by Donald Trump, was Mike Pompeo, who had publicly sworn revenge on Wikileaks, described by him as "a non-state hostile intelligence service", after they had published "Vault 7", a series of secret documents detailing the activities and capabilities of the CIA to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare.
In the end the US Central Intelligence Agency considered the plans too risky to apply in a European country, and moreover they would have brought the case more in the sunlight.
Assange was in fact arrested later on by the British Police inside the Ecuadorian embassy right after the South American country had revoked political asylum.
Just to know, the government of Ecuador, with the approval of the United States, had signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for 4.2 billion dollars two months earlier, as well as agreements with multilateral credit organizations for another 6 billion dollars.
The process of requesting the United Kingdom to extradite Assange to the United States therefore continued.
The appeal hearings are expected for 27 and 28 October: on these two dates, the US prosecution will try to overturn the January sentence who, persuaded by the tragic state of health of the Wikileaks founder, had previously rejected the extradition.
In fact, on 11 August Timothy Holroyde and Judith Farbey, the British judges in charge of examining the appeal of the United States, recognized the arguments presented by the lawyer, Clair Dobbin who, representing the US Government, contested the sentence of first instance issued by judge Vanessa Baraitser last January 4th. That sentence specifically focused on the fact that Assange could not be extradited due to his psycho-physical condition and the US prison conditions that awaited him, even if the judge confirmed all the indictiments that the United States brought against him.
In that preliminary hearing Julian had appeared unrecognizable: neglected beard and long white hair, he appeared very exhausted, so much so that the session had been interrupted several times because he disappeared from the frame. In fact, as the journalist Eugenio Abruzzese reported "at that time Assange was not allowed to attend the hearing in person, but only to connect remotely from Belmarsh prison. Even the worst criminals are not denied the right to participate in their own trial face-to-face. Assange is treated as if he were a spectator: he watches the trial from afar, via a screen, as if all this did not concern him."
Photo by Jimmy Baikovicius released under Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 license
On 27 and 28 October there will therefore be the appeals sentences that will decide again on the extradition of Assange to the United States of America, where he risks a sentence of 175 years in prison for espionage, while instead he has made known to the world the crimes of war that were waged by the US and showed the world that if wars can be started by lies, they can end with the truth.
We report below the statement issued at the Swiss Magazin Republik from someone who investigated about Julian's case: Niels Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Professor of International Law at the University of Glasgow, and member of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.
The point is to intimidate other journalists.
Intimidation, by the way, is one of the primary purposes for the use of torture around the world.
The message to all of us is: "this is what will happen to you if you emulate the Wikileaks model".
It is a model that is so dangerous because it is so simple: people who obtain sensitive information from their governments or companies transfer that information to Wikileaks, but the whistleblower remains anonymous.
The case is a huge scandal and represents the failure of Western rule of law.
If Julian Assange is convicted, it will be a death sentence for Freedom of the Press.
In these following days, before and during the Appeal of 27 and 28 October at the High Court in London, Julian needs all of our support.
The big media corporations are outrageously ignoring the gravity of all this, but you can inform yourself, listen, read, ask, share.
Telling the world his Injustice is the only Justice he has left with.
The cover artwork is a derivative of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Julian_Assange_August_2014.jpg
by David G Silvers used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic by The Human Exploring Society.