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RT is claiming Tucker Carlson visited Assange in jail for an interview.
Tucker Carlson visits Assange in prison (Russia Today, 4 Nov 2023)
The Wikileaks publisher faces extradition to the US and a 175-year prison sentence if his final appeal failsFormer Fox News host Tucker Carlson visited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at London’s high security Belmarsh Prison on Thursday, the former Fox News host has revealed in a post on X (formerly Twitter) later that day.
The American journalist included a photo of himself walking with Assange’s wife, Stella Moris. The post garnered positive reactions from activists who have collaborated with Wikileaks in the past, including Mega founder Kim Dotcom and former British MP George Galloway.
While Carlson did not elaborate on the nature of his visit, media commentary suggested it was an interview for Carlson’s popular self-titled show on X. He previously interviewed Assange’s father and brother for a Fox News segment in 2021, and again earlier this year.
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I cannot open the link given.thx 4 the info
Berliner Zeitung on Assange:
“WikiLeaks ends wars”: This is why Julian Assange should be a free man
Time passes and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been sitting in a high-security prison for over four years. A scandal.”
non-archived:
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/julian-assange-wikileaks-beendet-kriege-deswegen-sollte-er-ein-freier-mann-sein-li.2156769archived:
https://archive.is/z3qXmThis is an odd German article intended to keep up the Assange protest and presence by Berliner Zeitung, which is important no question.
But what on earth is the introduction???
“Much has already been said about Julian Assange. For many, he is a hero of freedom who spread uncomfortable truths with his WikiLeaks platform at the beginning of the decade and changed journalism forever. For others, he is the hacker crook, the spy, the criminal Assange, whose unscrupulous behavior helped to put the reputation of the United States at risk.”
It argues to release him and Evan Gershkovich (people on this blog divided on comparing them). But that´s not the point.
The next sentence says “the world public is argueing over whether Assange is a hero or criminal”.I did not know that a couple of corrupt secretaries of state and dishonest politicians are “the world public”.
Then it again turns:
“Also known as the “Guantánamo of England”, Belmarsh is home to some of the most dangerous criminals in the world. Terrorists and mass murderers are imprisoned there behind thick steel bars. Some of them have since been transferred to other prisons or even released, but Julian Assange has not.”The rest is ok.
like this one quoting Passareli:
“According to the documentary filmmaker, a secret dossier documenting the massacre of Iraqi civilians by US troops persuaded the Iraqi government not to renew the immunity agreement for US soldiers. The then US President Obama would then have withdrawn 50,000 US troops from Iraq and thus ended the war.”But of course as usual it starts out with fabricated but catchy controversies – just as they teach you at those despicable second-rate elite schools of journalism. Oh and Gershkovich is never mentioned again. That too is again, odd.
“whose unscrupulous behavior helped to put the reputation of the United States at risk.” lol
The behavior of America destroyed the reputation of America – invasions, CIA, regime chamge etc, etc
Precisely.
And this utter inconsistency of thought and double standard in judgement you can now observe all over the place.Poster JACK in one comment regarding Gaza asked “Why” all this cruelty and these lies.
Frankly I don´t know. And I can explain it only to a certain extent.
But above is a very light example of how it works, since you pointed it out.““Free the Truth”: The Belmarsh Tribunal on Julian Assange & Defending Press Freedom”
1.1.24
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/1/julian_assange_belmarsh_tribunal_jan1_2024“… whose unscrupulous behavior helped to put the reputation of the United States at risk.”
Indeed. That is absolutely priceless – how dare this man tell the truth about the USA??
may be this is the adequate spot?
Ex-CIA whistleblower Schulte sentenced to 40 years. And he did not ask for pardon or any such thing.
Remarkable.NYT, Febr. 1st, 2024
“C.I.A. Computer Engineer Who Leaked Secrets Is Sentenced to 40 Years
Joshua Schulte, 35, who transmitted classified information to WikiLeaks, also faced child pornography charges. Before his sentencing, he complained about his treatment in jail.”Joshua Schulte was responsible for the vault 7 leaks revealing some of the hacking tools (which he himself partly developed) used by the CIA and iirc revealing the US spying on allies. I might be wrong about that though. It was also the largest leak in US security history.
Odd that all these people have a propensity for child pornography……..
He will not survive in supermax prison
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68335787
His final appeal will be heard at the U.K. High Court on TuesdayConsortium News will be stepping up to the plate to cover the court proceedings.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/18/coverage-of-julian-assange-hearing/not the ideal spot but don´t know where it would fit better:
“Mike Benz, Former State Department Head of Cyber Portfolio, Discusses Extent and Mechanisms of Censorship with Tucker Carlson”
The transcript + video are here:
https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-tucker-carlson-podcast/mike-benz
archived
https://archive.is/btL6vThis is very well worth watching:
Judge Andrew Napolitano
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-thHf0G6eLQ
Gabriel Shipton: Julian Assange’s Brother on British “Justice”Major German piece on Assange from Jan. 2024 by one of his former associates, Holger Stark. Back in the 2000s with SPIEGEL magazine Stark was involved in the publication of WikiLeaks. So he used to know Assange. Don’t know if he still does today.
Form your own view on this:
the original German source:
https://archive.is/L5DRd#selection-2247.0-2263.45machine-translation:
“(…)
In democracies this is called journalism
The decision about Julian Assange’s future will soon be made. With him, our author published secret US documents in 2010. And explains here why the WikiLeaks boss is a political prisoner.By Holger Stark
Updated January 5, 2024
In a few weeks a decision will be made that will say a lot about the state of democracies in the USA and Great Britain. The British High Court, England’s highest court, has scheduled a final hearing in Julian Assange’s case for February 20th and 21st. Negotiations are underway as to whether the WikiLeaks founder can be extradited to the United States. Assange has appealed a previous decision. If the judges reject his appeal, Assange may be loaded onto a plane to America from the maximum security prison in Belmarsh near London. There he is charged under the Espionage Act, a law that has been forgotten for decades and was once enacted against traitors and spies during the First World War and has now been brought out again. It would be the sad culmination of more than a decade of persecution that is unprecedented in the modern history of Western democracies.
Where does this desire to destroy come from? And where is the public outcry that would be appropriate given the brutal persecution?
Assange suspected early on what could happen, back in the summer of 2010, when we sat together in London and were in the process of evaluating three of the most spectacular leaks in history: several hundred thousand secret US Army documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as one Quarter million confidential US State Department cables.
Chelsea Manning, a young American army analyst, had sent the documents to WikiLeaks, and Assange had shared them with us journalists from the New York Times, the Guardian and Spiegel, and later with Le Monde and El País. On a July day in 2010, the WikiLeaks boss sat together in London with my then Spiegel colleagues Marcel Rosenbach and John Goetz and pondered what the publications would trigger. Assange said that day that he believed the US was trying to prosecute him as a co-conspirator under the Espionage Act. That’s why he avoids America. Too risky.
The forecast was prophetic. The multiply expanded indictment from June 2020 accuses him of 18 offenses, including conspiracy to break into computers. The core of the indictment is that Assange received and published confidential information from the US Army. In democracies this is called journalism, no matter how painful the exposure of wrongdoing may be for a government. And it was about grievances, be it the suppressed numbers of civilian deaths in Iraq, US espionage against the United Nations or corruption in Turkey. Many editorial teams around the world have reported extensively on this; To this day, the published documents are a treasure for reporters and historians.
So why is Assange being thrown in prison for something that journalists are given awards for?When WikiLeaks was founded in Melbourne in late 2006 by a group of young Australian online activists, it was initially less about journalism and more about political influence. “We have decided to create a global movement of mass leaking, which we believe is the most efficient form of political intervention,” Assange wrote in December 2006 to Daniel Ellsberg, the American whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 and was one of Assange’s great role models.
A few weeks later, Assange proclaimed: “Leaking will bring down many governments that obscure reality – including the US government.” And WikiLeaks’ founding statement from 2007 said: “WikiLeaks can become the most powerful secret service in the world, a secret service of the people.” Assange has never lacked hubris.
WikiLeaks raised the question of power back then. And the most powerful nation in the world heard them. However, it took a few years for the US to understand how serious Assange was.What began as a subversive political mission with the then new, revolutionary technology of an anonymous digital submission system turned more and more into a journalistic enterprise in the following years. At the top: Assange, who tracked down and published a report on corruption in Kenya as well as insider documents from a Swiss bank or the right-wing extremist British National Party. Since then, Assange has been a bit of everything: a former hacker, an activist who temporarily founded his own party, the WikiLeaks Party – but also a publicist and journalist.
Despite all the furor surrounding the revelations, the Obama administration refrained from prosecuting them, also because otherwise we journalists from the New York Times, the Guardian and the Spiegel, which are the ones in the indictment, would also have had to be prosecuted The allegations formulated apply equally.
However, that changed when Donald Trump moved into the White House as President – the very US politician with whom Julian Assange had temporarily flirted indirectly behind the scenes (among other things, probably in the hope that Trump would ask the Australian government to release him, Assange , to be appointed Australian Ambassador to Washington).With Mike Pompeo, Trump made a hardliner the head of the CIA, and Pompeo delivered, including in the case of WikiLeaks. A few weeks after taking office, he described WikiLeaks as an “enemy secret service.”
But what Pompeo really thinks is documented in a previously unpublished tape recording from February 2019. Pompeo, who had already been promoted to US Secretary of State at the time, flew to Munich for the security conference and held a closed-door panel discussion about the current greatest challenges for the USA spoken. “We have introduced a system by which we can identify our opponents in other countries,” said Pompeo in a conversational tone in Munich. And that he spends a lot of his time dealing with their efforts – “be it Al-Qaeda or Isis, be it WikiLeaks or Hezbollah.”
WikiLeaks a terrorist organization? Assange a terrorist? That is the worldview with which the Trump administration viewed the case and which runs through the indictment. There is no sign so far that the Biden administration would see things differently.
The exorbitant comparison of WikiLeaks to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State explains why the CIA hunted Assange in London like, well, a terrorist, including internal simulations to kidnap him from the Ecuadorian embassy. And to this day, Assange remains in Belmarsh, a prison designed for terrorists and serious criminals.
Another, previously unpublished audio recording shows how thoroughly political this process is. On November 26, 2010, two days before the worldwide publication of the US State Department’s diplomatic cables, we at Spiegel asked the US government for an interview. We wanted to know whether there were passages in the documents that were particularly sensitive from the American government’s perspective. We wanted to hear whether publication would endanger human lives.
The US government decides when someone becomes dangerousA dispatcher made the connection, it took a while, then something clicked and the White House called. A moment later the CIA was also on the line, a moment later the Pentagon, the US intelligence coordinator and finally the US State Department in the person of Hillary Clinton’s confidants Cheryl Mills and Phil Crowley.
Crowley, who spoke, spoke of “stolen documents” that contained the contents of confidential conversations with kings, prime ministers and other members of government around the world and were highly sensitive. He asked us not to mention the names of the US diplomats we spoke to, as this would be dangerous. And then Crowley said a sentence that says a lot about what the US was and is about at its core: “Public naming will lead to limited cooperation.” The indictment states that Assange “revealed the names of human sources and caused significant and immediate risk to life and limb.” But Phil Crowley’s quoted sentence is probably more honest: The US government feared above all for its reputation and influence in the world. Assange has come too close to the core of power. The “unauthorized disclosure” could endanger “the national security of the United States,” the indictment says. Anyone who attacks the military-intelligence complex of the superpower will be fought with the full force of the machine.
The essence of a democracy is to allow criticism, even when it hurts. If the American prosecutors, assisted by the British judiciary, succeed in their plan to de facto bury Assange alive, this would, in addition to the personal tragedy, be a massive curtailment of press freedom. Good journalism consists precisely in finding access to unauthorized information from within a government, from the Foreign Ministry or even the army. This is the only way to control politics. Journalism that has to rely on authorized information is not journalism, it is PR. No matter how contemptuous Assange has expressed himself about the media in the past (and he has often) – every independent editorial team would have to stand behind him because of this attack on press freedom.
But the message of this indictment goes beyond that. It is that challenging the superpower USA can have existential consequences. Anyone who questions the national security of the United States, even through publication, will face the harshest consequences imaginable. The US government decides when someone becomes dangerous. In this sense, Julian Assange is a political prisoner.
On that summer day in July 2010, when my Spiegel colleagues met Assange in London, he also speculated about what would happen in the event of possible persecution. Does he regret coming to London, given the British government’s close ties to the US? No, Assange replied, “I have too much support here,” and a little “action” would actually be quite useful for him. And added with conviction: Extradition from Great Britain to the USA is “impossible”.
This may be the mistake of his life.
(…)”Democracy Now has an interview with Alan Rusbridger on Assange:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/23/julian_assange_alan_rusbridger
Since Rusbridger used to be a GUARDIAN editor I became curious and it turns out, Craig had several articles on Rusbridger 10 years ago – (his name is truly of the kind from a Coen movie, think their 1994 “Hudsucker” with bad guy Paul Newman as “Mussburger”) – which are not too sympathetic towards the guy.
I did have my suspicions initially when I read Rusbridger’s article headline featured in the DN interview in Prospect Magazine here:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/64791/enough-is-enoughits-time-to-set-julian-assange-freeSaying: “Enough is enough—it’s time to set Julian Assange free”
As if there had ever been anything of an adequate punishment to Assange that Rusbridger would regard as “not enough” or “enough”. What would that be? 3 months, 3 years? (I stated this question before because its perverse notion pops up.)
The third paragraph in Prospect puts Rusbridger in his proper place I assume within the propaganda system:
“There is no shortage of people who don’t, much. They may dislike Assange—and it has to be conceded that he has a unique ability to lose friends and alienate people. Many in the media don’t believe he’s a “proper” journalist, and therefore won’t lift a finger to defend him. Some will never forgive him for his role in leaking information about the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and accuse him of being Putin’s patsy.”
Thank your for this insight.
“And that is why you need national security reporting and the ability to sometimes delve into matters that are considered secret by governments. And that’s why I’m so concerned about the attempt to use this really heavy legislation, the Espionage Act, which has no defense, to prosecute Julian.”
I guess that´s the CIA´s favourite reporter.
Interestingly the interview with Amy Goodman goes on like this:
“AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the argument that we hear, and the corporate media certainly in the United States repeated over and over, that he is not like newspapers like yours — you were the editor of The Guardian — or The New York Times, though he worked with all of you, because he released names, he endangered people? Can you respond to that?
ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I certainly can. He wasn’t the first person to do that. There was another website that released material. And it’s now become apparent that he actually went to some attempts certainly to tip the U.S. government off, before he felt the necessity to release them. Now, I mean, we had disagreements about that at the time. We weren’t in touch. And I don’t think the five newspapers knew of his attempts to alert the authorities.
But I think it’s really a smokescreen for the way that, certainly since the Edward Snowden revelations — which I was also involved in — the U.S. government, the Australian government, the U.K. government have all tried to tighten up the laws and their punitive behavior towards journalists to try and create a situation where no one will ever do that kind of reporting again. And that video that you kicked this interview off with is one illustration of why that shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: You write, Alan Rusbridger, “Why should we care? There is no shortage of people who don’t, much.” They don’t like Julian Assange. “[I]t has to be conceded that he has a unique ability to lose friends and alienate people. Many in the media don’t believe he’s a ‘proper’ journalist, and therefore won’t lift a finger to defend him.” It’s not like you’re a friend of his, Alan.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER: No, we’ve had well-publicized fallings out. But I think, in the current situation, you have to look beyond the person. Assange has famously fallen out with many people who have tried to work with him. But that’s not the point. The point is what is happening in the legal sphere.”
One of Craig´s phrases in 2014: “Alan Rusbridger, by royal appointment destroyer of hard drives.”
The entire DN interview is worth a read.
I guess the files and ranks in journalism share this irresponsible view of national security and news media.Apparently, the Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz has just said that Julian Assange should be released by the U.K. and definately not be sent to the U.S.A.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-scholz-speaks-out-against-julian-assange-extradition/a-68433675When President Trump was in office, at the last knockings, it was suggested to Trump, that he should let “Assange go”.
Trump was invested in this notion
however the deep state would not allow Trump, to let Assange go.
There is a good chance Trump, will next year, be the new president.
Trump is going to wipe out the deep state.“Trump is going to wipe out the deep state.”
I doubt that.
Unless his real voter outcome is like 90% approval I don´t see any reason why his position would be stronger than in term #1.
And already then did the “deep state” bypass him.
And eventually he is as bad as everyone else. However saying the same things Biden says wouldn´t get him elected and would be much less fun.
Why should Trump take any issue with the deep state by itself in the first place?Of course letting Assange go could be a real option. The deep state has done enough harm to the entire media. Assange has been enough of a warning. And enough laws have been passed all over the EU by now.
May be they figure letting Assange go in the long run will be more beneficial to them in the public eye.
“CIA being benign.” Nothing better than that.Kennedy Demands Immediate Release and Pardon of Julian Assange
https://www.kennedy24.com/kennedy_demands_release_pardon_julian_assangeRamaswamy says he would free Snowden, Assange
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4068138-ramaswamy-says-he-would-free-snowden-assange/I would hope that Trump would also come out in support to release Assange.
Also, does anyone know if Tucker actually interviewed Assange?
Just about time to throw the game board over, flip the table and burn the place to the ground.
Why is Assange not getting more help from WikiLeaks?
Why is Assange not getting more help from Patriots?
I know 4 people who know the truth about the Seth Rich/DNC leak/RussiaGate/murder story.
Dana Rohrabacher, Ellen Ratner, Kim Dotcom, Craig Murray.
I KNOW there are dozens others. WikiLeaks staff? DC police? Ecuador embassy visitors? Stella?
Let’s end this miserable, sorry story and tell the fucking truth !
Why does this not end?
KIM DOTCOM hides behind the internet and claims he was involved, know all about Seth.
CRAIG MURRAY has spoke on the edges about Mr. Rich.
DANA ROHRABACHER and ELLEN RATNER have said as much once but have not spoken since.
Assange will be dead in a UK prison or a US prison if someone doesn’t blow up the RICH/DNC/Russia Gate mess.
It is time for you spineless weaklings to organize.
If Assange cannot get a fair trial, if Seth Rich is to be honored, if there is to be justice for all of
this mayhem, burn the fucking place to the ground.Joe Biden has been asked by the Australian Government to drop the charges against Assange.
It has been reported that Biden has said he will consider the Australian Government request.The Australian government is now hinting, it may accept or recognise a Palestine state.
I expect Joe Biden would rather let the U.K. release Australian Assange placating their new AUKUS mates the Australians?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUKUSWhat I mean, is that Joe Biden would rather drop the charges against Australian Julian Assange, to placate the Australians, as long as the Australians shut up about suggesting Palestine become a viable state.
This is what German weekly FREITAG featured as an exclusive, non-paywalled piece, made available in German/English
April 15th 2024:Julian Assange: What the US “assurances” for extradition are all about
Wikileaks The USA is to give the UK diplomatic “assurances” regarding Julian Assange’s possible extradition. What to make of these? And what about Joe Biden’s recent statements on Assange’s home country Australia?
by Anja Larsson, John Brown
