Julian Update and Plea Agreement Insights 🌿
Julian Update and Plea Agreement Insights 
It’s been more than a month since Julian was released and reunited with his family in Australia.
He is settling into life in the bush with Stella, his wife and Gabriel and Max, their two children. Enjoying simple pleasures like fresh food and coffee.
In July, Gabriel Shipton, Julian’s brother visited Julian and his family. For the first time ever they got to stand on the shore and watch their children play together on the beach.Â
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FINALLY FREE
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FINALLY FREE
June 24, 2024
The WikiLeaks publisher left Belmarsh Prison on Monday morning and departed the U.K. headed to Australia,  WikiLeaks said.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE- HEADED BACK TO HIS HOME IN AUSTRALIA
The End Of The Biggest Press Freedom Case Of The Century
A global effort by advocates, campaigners, journalists, organizers, and supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pushed President Joe Biden’s administration to finally free Assange.Â
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On June 24, Assange left His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh in London. He flew to the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth in the Pacific Ocean. He was scheduled to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information under the Espionage Act and then fly home to Australia.Â
The U.S. Justice Department agreed to a sentence of about five years, a little less than the time that he spent detained at Belmarsh. They also agreed to a plea deal without requiring Assange to travel to the continental U.S. for a hearing in the Eastern District of Virginia courthouse just outside of Washington, D.C. Â
Read moreBiden must drop charges against Assange, says IBA
The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) is urging US President Joe Biden to drop all charges against Julian Assange over the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked classified documents in 2010.
In mid-May, the UK High Court of Justice granted Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange the right to appeal against his extradition to the US. The IBAHRI has welcomed the ruling, noting its “exceptional significance” in reaffirming international laws and standards that protect the fundamental right to freedom of expression and the protection of media personnel and public interest journalism worldwide.
In 2010, Assange and Wikileaks published more than 250,000 leaked classified documents, exposing alleged human rights abuses allegedly perpetrated by the US Army during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
President Biden has said that the US is “considering” allowing Assange to return to Australia, following the passage in Australian Parliament of a motion, back in February, calling on the US and the UK to return him to his homeland.
In late March, the UK High Court deferred its judgment on Assange’s request to appeal the extradition order, pending satisfactory assurances from the US that Assange would not receive the death penalty when tried in the US, be able to rely on the First Amendment to the US constitution, which protects freedom of speech, and not face prejudice because of his Australian identity.
Judge Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson ruled that, in the absence of satisfactory assurances, Assange would be granted the right to appeal without a further hearing.
Assange Won a Victory, but the Fight Isn’t Over"
Attached is a review of the May 20th High Court decision by Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights and Dissent as published in the recent edition of Jacobin.
Chip does a great job of summarizing the situation and I encourage you to read the article.
At the March hearing, the judges had requested certain assurances pertaining to Assange’s rights to freedom of speech and protection from the death penalty.
The U.S. State Dept. provided the following assurances on freedom of speech:
“ASSANGE will not be prejudiced by reason of his nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing. Specifically, if extradited, ASSANGE will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.”
Clearly, the above is no guarantee that Assange will be accorded the right of freedom of speech and the judges allowed the appeal because of the obvious unsatisfactory nature of these assurances. The assurance against the use of the death penalty was accepted by the defense and the court.
The use of the term “nationality” is interesting, Nationality is based on one’s country of birth, and many foreign nationals are U.S. citizens and have full citizenship rights. As the lawyers for the U.S. pointed out, Assange wouldn’t be discriminated against because of his nationality; however, non-citizens do not have citizenship rights!
“UK lawyers, representing the United States, pedantically lectured the court on the distinction between citizenship and nationality. Any deprivation of Assange’s First Amendment rights would be due not to his nationality, but his citizenship (i.e., an Australian-born US citizen could not be deprived of First Amendment rights, but any noncitizen may be). One of the UK government lawyers representing the United States stated Assange would not be “prejudiced for reason of his nationality, but because as a matter of law he is a foreigner operating on foreign soil.”
Hopefully at the appeal hearing, the judges won't be pedantic about the distinction between nationality and citizenship because the judges at the March hearing clearly made a mistake when they asked for assurances referring to nationality rather than citizenship - or did they???
Bottomline, this has now come down to the issue of free speech and the right of a foreign journalist/publisher/news-gatherer working from a foreign country to publish secrets of the U.S.  Does the U.K. really want to greenlight this situation as a freedom of the press precedent? Â
No news yet as to when the next proceedings will take place.
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Peace and solidarity,
Frank Lawrence
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Read moreDay 1 of Day X - Craig Murray's Report from the Courtroom in London, Feb. 20, 2024
Craig Murray's detailed, literate, and historical account of February 20 in the Royal Courts of Justice, when Assange's lawyers had the entire day to lay out all their grounds for appeal, is often hilarious. In Murray's blogpost, "Final Appeal - Your Man in the Public Gallery", he describes Assange's lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, KC:Â
Barristers’ wigs have tight rolls of horsehair stuck to a mesh that stretches over the head. In Mr Fitzgerald’s case, the mesh has to be stretched so far to cover his enormous brain, that the rolls are pulled apart, and dot his head like hair curlers on a landlady.
But Murray's meticulous presentation will give you a thorough understanding of the points of law under consideration. This is the first time that issues such as freedom of the press, and the war crimes exposed by Assange's publications, and the plot to assassinate Assange by the U.S. government, for example, have been allowed to be brought up in court to appeal the amended verdict to extradite.
Given how the U.K. excluded all applicants from the U.S. and Australia who were not on British or Welsh soil from even viewing a live-stream of the court proceedings, and given the poor quality of the stream provided, it is clear that the court did not want a wider audience to hear this "public" trial. (As I've noted, my application was denied as was that of others here in Milwaukee, as well as Chicago's Kevin Gosztola, author of the book, Guilty of Journalism, about Assange. Noteably, the New York Times did not report on the content of the day's hearing.)
About two thirds of the way though the day, the lawyers seemed to miss the opportunity to explain the context for the revelation of unredacted names, failing to bring up the Guardian's David Leigh and Luke Harding's printing of the password to the unredacted cables in their book. That password made the entire cache of unredacted cables vulnerable to exposure by others, which is exactly what happened and was testified to in the 2020 hearing.
That evening, Craig and many of his fellow journalists gathered together to rehash the day in court and specifically brought up that missed opportunity in their conversation. You can watch the entire confab here. It's a fascinating discussion with among others: Pulitzer-prize-winning Chris Hedges, Joe Lauria of Consortium News, London-based journalist Mohamed Elmaazi, and Fidel Narvaez who was the Ecuadorian consul while Julian was in the Embassy - all of whom were in London that day.
Below is the beginning of Craig Murray's extensive and comprehensive blog-post of that day in court. The link to the entire publication is below.
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Assange Final Appeal – Your Man in the Public Gallery
by Craig Murray
Reporting on Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has become a vocation that has now stretched over five years. From the very first hearing, when Justice Snow called Assange “a narcissist” before Julian had said anything whatsoever other than to confirm his name, to the last, when Judge Swift had simply in 2.5 pages of glib double-spaced A4 dismissed a tightly worded 152-page appeal from some of the best lawyers on earth, it has been a travesty and charade marked by undisguised institutional hostility.
We were now on last orders in the last chance saloon, as we waited outside the Royal Courts of Justice for the appeal for a right of final appeal.
The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of grey and brown, valuing scale over proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an indication of the stupidity of large scale power.
Court number 5 had been allocated for this hearing. It is one of the smallest courts in the building. Its largest dimension is its height. It is very high, and lit by heavy mock medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap from the gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of despair; below them you peer through the weak light to make out the participants.
A huge tiered walnut dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out, at one side housing journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoner or prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in medieval style is a Blair era introduction to the so-called process of law.
Read moreWill We Let a Publisher Go to Prison?
January 14 at 10 a.m. CST
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Join Us for a HYBRID presentation by Ray McGovern at the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee.
INFO is HERE.  In-person at 1432 N. Astor Street or live-streamed on YouTube. Only the in-person audience can ask questions.
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Ray McGovern, CIA Soviet Foreign Policy Branch (retired) and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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This winter, freedom of the press is in serious danger as publisher Julian Assange languishes in prison. As the extradition process of Julian Assange winds down in the UK, it is clear that this political case is now in our hands. The founders of the U.S. knew that tyranny is inevitable without a free press and so we have the first amendment. Can we muster the courage to safeguard it? Mr. McGovern will discuss Julian Assange’s case and its implications for our free press.
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https://uumilwaukee.org/event/will-we-let-a-publisher-go-to-prison/
Read more