As the Extradition Hearing of Julian Assange Ends, A Reminder That The CIA Wanted To Assassinate Him

Spearheaded by Mike Pompeo

Julian Assange’s extradition hearing ended yesterday. Assange was seeking permission to appeal his extradition from the UK to the US on espionage charges. For those that don’t know, this all relates to Julian’s WikiLeaks releasing leaked documents which embarrassed the US. They showed that torture had become routine and institutionalised during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

He also released videos, including the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ recording of Apache helicopter crews firing on and killing civilians, including two Reuters journalists.

However, Julian himself said that the revelations above are not what annoyed the Americans. It was not until he exposed the CIA’s secret spying techniques that they got really mad. The Vault 7 documents exposed the CIA’s capabilities to compromise “cars, smart TVs, web browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, the operating systems of most smartphones including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android and computer operating systems including Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux.

Vault 7 revelations are probably not a surprise to most who read this newsletter but it confirmed the speculations. As a result, the CIA redefined WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service”, which raised some eyebrows.

During the hearing, Assange’s lawyers argued that the UK/US Extradition Treaty explicitly excludes extradition on political grounds. Furthermore:

The Wikileaks revelations had revealed serious state illegality by the government of the United States, up to and including war crimes. It was therefore protected speech.

Article III and Article VII of the ECHR were also engaged because in 2010 Assange could not possibly have predicted a prosecution under the Espionage Act, as this had never been done before despite a long history in the USA of reporters publishing classified information in national security journalism. The “offence” was therefore unforeseeable. Assange was being “Prosecuted for engaging in the normal journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information”.

Whilst there is a lot of coverage of Assange’s hearing, let’s not forget that the country he may be extradited to, actually plotted to assassinate him. This was even brought up in the hearing with the prosecution arguing that the CIA plans to kill Assange should not be admissible in court.

In 2021, Yahoo News reported that “some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries”.”

“Mike Pompeo was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange…Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood”.

“It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.”

To be fair to the MSM, this was a Yahoo News scoop and was reported on by other outlets such as the Guardian.

Unfortunately, the only mention of it on the BBC was on BBC Somali!

Let’s hope that enough outrage has been felt around the Courts of Justice and Julian’s is allowed a full appeal hearing on the extradition request. I am not optimistic, however, as it has become clearer in recent years that, if in doubt, judges side with the Establishment. Declassified does a great job of highlighting the interests of those involved and in this case, the judge presiding over Assange’s extradition case was “previously paid to represent the interests of MI6 and the Ministry of Defence - whose activities WikiLeaks has exposed”.

Craig Murray also points out the conflicts of interest the justice system is not disclosing:

They inhabit the same social milieu as ministers, belong to the same institutions, attend the same schools, go to the same functions. The United States’ appeal against the original blocking of Assange’s extradition was granted by a Lord Chief Justice who is the former room-mate, and still best friend, of the minister who organised the removal of Julian from the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The blocking of Assange’s appeal was done by Judge Swift, a judge who used to represent the security services, and said they were his favourite clients. In the subsequent Graham Phillips case, where Mr Phillips was suing the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for sanctions being imposed upon him without any legal case made against him, Swift actually met FCDO officials – one of the parties to the case – and discussed matters relating to it privately with them before giving judgment. He did not tell the defence he had done this. They found out, and Swift was forced to recuse himself.

If the judges deny Assange a full appeal hearing, then, unless there is an intervention by the European court of human rights, he could be extradited within days. And If Julian is extradited, it is unlikely he will survive for long. “One day in an American prison is like a year in a high-security prison in Britain. You could do a year in Belmarsh and it wouldn’t match a day in one of those places,” noted Babar Ahmad who was extradited in 2012.

Even if Assange avoids the 175 year jail sentence in the US, the picture is not much rosier in Britain. It is likely the Establishment will prolong his incarceration for as long as possible and with his health already suffering, he may not last long in solitary confinement.

Assange needs to be released now, not only to protect the ability for journalists to publish content that holds the Establishment to account but also to reinstate some morality and ethics into our society. These have been slowly and then quickly worn away. How can we accuse other countries, such as Russia and China, of human rights abuses when we don’t have our own house in order. We need to re-establish a moral high ground and export this around the world for the sake of humanity.