Here is an image of Julian and I talking in the Ecuadorean Embassy, part of the spycam footage that was commissioned by the CIA from Spanish security firm Global. Julian and I were discussing a number of overseas missions to liaise with foreign governments, which I was carrying out on his behalf.
(Incidentally can anybody explain why the precise image you see there is an image which does not appear at any stage when you run the video? I am not even hinting at anything suspicious, just technically interested).
Having been on the inside and knowing their capabilities, I have always assumed that the security services know everything I say and do, so I cannot claim this comes as a great shock or that my behaviour would have been much altered had I known. The shadowing on those overseas trips was unsubtle in any case, more of a warning off than attempt at covert surveillance. As anyone who has read my books will realise, I have always rather enjoyed the more shadowy elements, with me since my former profession. During a visit to Washington in September 2016 which has become somewhat infamous, for fun I entered an establishment of low repute and spent an afternoon giving out free flash drives with my tips to various young ladies and barmen, just to give the FBI lots of particularly wild geese to chase. I have wondered occasionally whether subsequent embarrassment is connected to Robert Mueller’s lack of desire to accept my evidence. (If you have no idea what I am talking about do not worry, you haven’t missed much and just skip this para).
While I am gently rambling away, I might add that it was most amusing to be portrayed as a housebound obsessive blogger by MSM journalists attacking me on Twitter over my Salmond coverage: that is attacked by MSM journalists who have never done anything in their life except copy and paste the odd establishment press release and pick up fat pay cheques from their billionaire owners.
There is however a point to this post. As the ABC news item above shows, Julian’s privileged conversations with his lawyers on his legal defence were being spied on, by the government which is now seeking to extradite him. In any jurisdiction in the civilised world, that should be enough immediately to bring proceedings to a halt. The first witnesses to be called when the hearing resumes are the witnesses who will attest to this. The defence have requested an adjournment of the case beyond May 18, because at present they have no access to their client due to Covid 19 lockdown in the jail, and because it is not at all clear witnesses will be able to travel from abroad by 18 May. Judge Vanessa Baraitser has refused to reschedule.
It is also worth asking why has nothing like that ABC coverage been seen on the BBC or Sky, where this case is actually being heard and Julian is a prisoner?
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Craig, I bet the spooks at Langley didn’t even bother running your image through a facial recognition system, I’ve no doubt the jumper was enough to ID you. Maybe your secret is in the knitting pattern? Oh wait, what’s this?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/04/anti-surveillance-clothing-facial-recognition-hyperface
Hi
Do you not appear briefly at 2.00 minutes in?
Keep up the good work
Chris
I do, but not that moment when Julian is facing away from me.
Point taken. They must have thousands of hours of this stuff, you should be proud they put you on the front of it all
Chris
Hi Craig, my guess would be that the video editors had a limited amount of footage in which Assange is clearly identifiable (notice in the other recordings they use he’s far away etc.). They probably took a snapshot of a moment that Assange stood the closest to the surveillance camera and also with his frontside showing, serving best for the very little size at which video thumbnails on YouTube are usually displayed.
The subtle change in image might just be a change in aspect ratio between Youtube’s thumbnail still format and the running video format.
The Assange case, the reporting of it and Baraitser’s attitude that she doesn’t even care that it doesn’t even LOOK legal are leading me to the inevitable conclusion that not only do we not have a free press, but that we no longer have a free country…
The degree and frequency of abuse of process is rather frightening, isn’t it? As is the radio silence from the UK media.
Like that other guy said “justice must not only not be done, it must be seen not to be done” in the JA case.
I”ve always wondered why German officials continued to do their jobs in 1944-5, when it should have been obvious that defeat was imminent
I think we’re seeing similar behavior today.
The reporters have used it as a cover image expressly to get your attention. Obviously they have far more footage than is shown. Not surprising if so, you are after all one of the very few insiders with the strength of mind and the presence of mind to gladly speaks their own mind. There are surprisingly few of you around.
To explain your question (why image which does not appear at any stage when you run the video) it’s because youtube allows you to replace the paused thumbnail screenshot from video with image of your own – it’s often used by content creators to insert a title card, watermark, or something that indicates it’s a part of the series. It’s also often used for clickbait (showing something that won’t appear in video for multiple reasons in hopes that audience click on it when they wouldn’t usually). I guess it was done here because nothing in the video made a good still shot?
“I guess it was done here because nothing in the video made a good still shot?”
That begs the question posed.
An image of Julian and ME
Err yes. It’s my personal blog. Should it be about your life?
I think Grammar’s point is about your first sentence, and s/he is saying the ‘I’ should in fact be a ‘me’.
Dang, I just remembered – I’m supposed to be banned from posting here. Sorry.
Aah, hadn’t twigged it was a grammar point. I am not sure. It is “Julian and I talking”. I don’t think “Julian and me talking” sounds right. If the “talking” were not there, it would be Julian and me, certainly. Any views?
the quick and easy check is to take other people out of the sentence and see which works. So in this case – “Me talking” vs “I talking”. Then it becomes clear which is correct.
So you could grammatically say “Julian and me talking” or to use ‘I’ correctly, then “Julian and I stood there” as both work when taking Julian out of the sentence.
p.s. I don’t care which people use, but as it was raised, I believe this to be correct.
No, Craig, any wriggling is futile. Your original reads
Here is an image of Julian and I talking in the Ecuadorean Embassy
.
A bit worrying reading all this tripe about the Accusative vs Nominative cases (no punning reference to your recent Émile Zola-post intended). Sadly “Grammar” is indeed correct, although I suspect this may be more luck than judgment.
The preposition “of” governs the accusative. It’s that simple. “Of me”, “of him”, “of me and him”, &c.
Bit worrying, and a rather strange mistake to make for anyone with a decent educational background, of any type. I’d venture to say (and this doesn’t play well with your work in 2020; I’m immensely impressed by almost everything you’ve blogged since Christmas) the original is, I believe, an example of hypercorrection.
Hypercorrection is the Hilda Ogden¹ of) grammatical errors: the most inexcusable and heinous and revealing.
¹referring to her hideous, grating attempt at erudition, sophistication and grace (on so many levels hideous) with her famed “Muriels”.
PS
As we don’t have a fully-fledged declination of cases in English, “of” in fact governs the genitive” not the accusative. Sorry, a rushed comment. Not that anyone is much the wiser.
Pardon me for butting in. Any inside on JA from HMP?
“Of” doesn’t take the accusative. Personally I say it takes the genitive, and that the genitive has the same form in English as the accusative. That’s because I put a lot of emphasis on function and I also like to be comparative. But most grammarians of the English language would say that “of” takes the “objective” case.
So if HM had been present would she have said Julian and we or Julian and us?
If you substitute “Julian and I” with “us” it reads better than “we” in my opinion.
… an image of us talking
… an image of we talking
The objective form of the pronoun reads better, so I’d use the objective form “me” rather than the subjective “I”. Not that it matters – the sense is clear.
“Aah, hadn’t twigged it was a grammar point. ”
What, that message from Grammar?
Mr. Murray forgot to put a smiley, and now the local grammarians lined up here in a row like soldiers 🙂 Convenient. Sort of self-filling list, eh?
Must be “fine art of provocation” in action 🙂
Well spotted Grammar.
Me sounds weak, I is more fun, grammar can bugger of back to his Irrelevant Victorian rule books while the rest of us enjoy modernity.
“An image of Julian and me talking” is both correct and good style.
“I” is always nominative. “Of I” is never acceptable, either in grammar or style.
“Talking” here is an appositive, so it’s safe to leave it out to test. “An image of Julian and I”? That’s grammatically so wrong it shouldn’t even get a stylistic look-in. It’s the “snob’s pronoun”.
“Me” can sometimes be nominative: it depends on the register. For example, you could say “It was Julian and me talking” on the grounds that writing “It was Julian and I talking”, though “correct”, would be “hypercorrect” in the same way as “It was I”. Whether or not “It was Julian and me talking” is suitable depends on the desired register. To my ear it would sound fine in a blog or a novel. If it doesn’t suit, don’t use “It was Julian and I talking”, because we can all hear how silly that would sound; recast.
‘Myself’ sounds even better to me.personal and distinguished.
Why have we not seen suggested the grammatically invincible “image of Julian’s and my talking in the Ecuadorean Embassy”?
That’s how Hitler started out, first it was the grammar….
ABC probably has longer footage than that shown, and the still is from that.
‘In any jurisdiction in the civilised world, that should be enough immediately to bring proceedings to a halt.’
Did Julian’s lawyers try to get the case thrown out when they learned about the spying? Also, I have often wondered whether the treatment suffered by Chelsea Manning might not have been used as a precedent which would prevent extradition.
Another horrible aspect to this is that Julian’s time with his fiancée must have been recorded – who knows how many people have seen/heard it. What a nightmare.
A nightmare indeed, and not least for all the women who actually used the ladies bathroom where one of the cameras was positioned. I bet the CIA pervs are having a field day with that footage.
You’re asking about the poster image of the video, that is not contained in the video footage itself. The explanation for this is, for certain YouTube channels you’re able to choose free poster images for your videos. This can be any image, it does not have to be contained in the video. E.g. you’re free to choose an image file from your hard drive. This only applied for monetarized video channels when I was active on YouTube, but this restriction may have changed since then. Ordinary channels were only allowed to choose between 3 stills taken from the video’s content. Those 3 images were selected by YouTube.
@Troubleshooter –
The sheer power that that company, Google, wields!
I have seen some people noting that this is not ‘a case’ but ‘a hearing’, explaining away some of the oddities and irregularities of the proceedings.
Can anybody comment on this?
If you equate ‘case’ with an actual ‘trial’ – then so be it.
In every case, there are usually all sorts of preliminary or pre-trial hearings.
So there.
Can anyone explain to me the difference between that and what the Stasi did in the former GDR (DDR)?
There at least the police was in the same room with the defendant and his lawyer, nothing “underhanded” there….
“In any jurisdiction in the civilised world, that should be enough immediately to bring proceedings to a halt”
I hope you do not still harbour any illusions with regards to either the British or the US “justice” system….
What’s being done now makes the Stasi look good.
I have long held that the UK security services make the Stasi seem like schoolchildren. They infiltrate every single nook and cranny of UK life. The NHS is riddled with them. So are the Universities. Large numbers of management consultancies have direct links to both DC and Vauxhall Bridge. ‘Investment Banks’ are fronts for intelligence service money laundering, black ops etc etc.
We live in a police state, it is just that ‘the police’ are not necessarily wearing a blue uniform.
Craig, was the Ecuadorian embassy and government aware that it’s embassy was being spied on by the US Government ?
Do you anticipate film of Julians’ lockdown rumpy-pumpy to popup on a porn channel ?
Video vs. stills aside………the main point here is about the “heart of the justice system”(past).
Well, things have changed, as the Donald, exemplifies daily and at every possible opportunity. We must believe that the US not only has a big stick, but is now clearly telling everyone listening that it is prepared to use it in any way possible, regardless of past legal norms and niceties. There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded US Beast feeling it is loosing power to other global entities.
Julians`allies are fighting back, but they are using the adherence to the OLD RULES in doing so. Julian is providing the US an opportunity to teach the world, how thing ARE GOING TO WORK. Based on the observed rate of change since Covid-19 became the lock-down mantra, the new Trump Regime will cancel this silly idea of an popular election process in November and move on to strait forward autocratic rule and do away with the current need for niceties and kowtow-ing to past norms.
Desperate times, we will be told, require desperate measures (for our own safety and security, of course).
A nicetie is all the electoral process is in the United States.
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/jimmy-carter-u-s-oligarchy-unlimited-political-bribery/
You got this the wrong way round: it is the democrats who want to suspend elections as they cannot win them. Trump would like nothing more that a thumping landslide in November.
The Deep State absolutely does not want Trump to win a second term, they want the swamp to return and they want Trump out of the way.
Trump is not the biggest problem, by any means….
Don’t get me wrong, autocracy will come no matter which flavour or colour suits you. It is just right now the Orange Man has the inside edge as he is in power and has a plausible excuse for shutting down elections.
If the judge has issued interlocutors that Assange is receiving a fair trial under ECHR Article 6, why hasn’t the defence appealed them as a preliminary issue?
We in the U.K.are rapidly moving in to a surveilance society, with 5g, smart meters and recognition cameras all over the place,
self driving electric cars, swipe cards, facebook sign-in to watch BBC iplayer
but lawyer and client should always be unserveiled
“We in the U.K.are rapidly moving in to a surveilance society”. Polite correction We not moving into, we already ARE.
We were a surveillance society in 2002, friend.
Amazing, given the US Supreme Court is very clear and determined in defense of attorney–client privilege. In England and Wales, the principle of legal professional privilege is seen as a fundamental principle of justice.
Ecuadorian law that counts? As it’s in their embassy.
Bought off Lenin Moreno will never complain.
Since the security service love you so much, they’ve probably bugged your own home, Im reminded of that excellent film The Lives of Others.
Stay safe.
Most homes are fully bugged anyway these days…
Smartphones,tablets,smart bulbs,routers,TV/satellite,Alexa,Echo,The Internet of Things etc..
None of these bugged devices are forced on us and there is no law saying that you have to have such a thing in your home.
I know that,i was just pointing out how easy it is for the State to also piggyback on such tech.
@ nevermind April 15, 2020 at 19:45
Not yet, maybe. There are still other methods (laser bouncing, burgle and install) if THEY really want to listen.
@ Jm April 15, 2020 at 17:06
Sigh, oh for the good old days, when all you had to worry about was Reds under the beds and walls with ears (and Honey Traps and drinking too much down the pub).
The best way to deal with it is to say absolutely outrageous things about those who are listening in.
If you do not want my opinion, do not listen in and all that….
Craig, looking at the falling number of responses on your Twitter feed, it looks like you might be on some kind of partial shadowban. I would do another “reach” test, only this time I think you should specifically ask people to like, respond to, or forward your Tweet, and count the numbers. Your last one was a bit confusing.
There’s not much point on me commenting on Twitter, as I appear to be on an almost total shadowban. Which is curious, since although I’ve had a Twitter account for ten years, it’s only been active for a couple of weeks, in which I’ve mostly argued with other posters in defence of Alex Salmond.
The force of intention that Craig generates is particularly powerful. It is notable the CIA are interested and watchful when that force is directed towards those CIA games that kill people on a massive scale:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/12/cias-absence-conviction/
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/05/cia-triumph/
I like to remind myself and recall the intentness of Craig’s posts especially the focus on US and UK secret services that only serve the billionaires, neo-con friendly and pro-Israel schmucks.
can’t see the video. Is there a link?
—
[ Mod: Yes ]
ABC News Australia – ABC obtains alleged spying footage of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (YouTube)
thanks mods
The precise image is likely to have occurred in the original footage but to have been edited out in the final cut for the piece. sometimes that is actually quite useful because you get to shoehorn in another image which you can’t get into the news piece itself.
The third man — who?
The ABC story was covered in February, here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-23/surveillance-of-julian-assange-captured-lawyers-conversations/11985872
with a little bit of extra detail.
Older than that surely.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/10/julian-assange-wikileaks-says-spies-at-work-in-ecuadorean-embassy
“In any jurisdiction in the civilised world, that should be enough immediately to bring proceedings to a halt.” That is the problem these days.
While I would imagine that it’s Ecuadorian law that counts, the embassy being their sovereign territory, I have no idea what Ecuadorian law is on lawyer privileged conversations. (I was married in the British embassy in Baghdad, and that was under British law, not Iraqi – the Foreign Marriages Act of 1898, which demanded that all windows and doors be open, so that anyone could object. Very Victorian, and the embassy didn’t like it).
Also it might be useful to know when the videos shown were taken. If they were after the Ecuadorian change of policy, they might well have approved the spying. I would say it’s certain they did know what was going on.
The issue isn’t whether the US government has broken Ecuadorean law but whether they are abusing judicial process in a matter that they have caused to be brought before an English court. Evidence that they have carried out actions anywhere in the world that indicate they are abusing this process should be admissible.
PS Minor quibble: the Ecuadorean embassy is under Ecuadorean law but it’s not sovereign Ecuadorean territory.
For analogy, consider a criminal trial in London in which before he gives evidence a defence witness travels to Spain where he is cornered by a British police officer involved in the case who blackmails him into not giving evidence. That’s an abuse of the English judicial process. Whether the police officer broke English law I don’t know, but that’s not the point.
If the case were taking place in Ecuador under Ecuadorian law, I might agree.
If what was done was legal under Ecuadorian law – and I don’t know that it was – an argument cannot be brought that legal process was abused.
@Craig – That’s a lovely story about the flash drives. Hopefully they contained heavily encrypted files of laundry lists etc. 🙂
“Julian’s privileged conversations with his lawyers on his legal defence were being spied on, by the government which is now seeking to extradite him. In any jurisdiction in the civilised world, that should be enough immediately to bring proceedings to a halt.”
It should be, but often it isn’t. In Britain the police and MI5 love to arrange for the “burglary” of prison cells and the copying of defence legal documents – never admitted. “What, us?” (Innocent face.)
behold and read more at El Pais
https://english.elpais.com/international/2020-04-15/spanish-firm-that-spied-on-julian-assange-tried-to-find-out-if-he-fathered-a-child-at-ecuadorian-embassy.html