PEPE ESCOBAR—It’s a long and winding road, to be traversed in at least two years, if Julian Assange is ever to be extradited to the US. Two things for the moment are already crystal clear. The USG is obsessed to shut down WikiLeaks once and for all. And because of that, Julian Assange will never get a fair trial in the “so-called ‘Espionage Court’” of the Eastern District of Virginia, as detailed by former CIA counterterrorism officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou.
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CHRIS HEDGES—Britain will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if Britain as well lacks one.Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he was put in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his health steadily deteriorated.
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JONATHAN COOK—Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper.The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truths about the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the charges, only for them to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.
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TUCKER CARLSON—Julian Assange embarrassed virtually everyone in power in Washington. He published documents that undermined the official story of the Iraq War and Afghanistan. He got Debbie Wasserman-Schulz fired from the DNC. He humiliated Hillary Clinton by showing that the Democratic primaries were, in fact, rigged.Pretty much everyone in Washington has reason to hate Julian Assange. Rather than just admit that straightforwardly, “he made us look like buffoons, so now we are sending him to prison!”
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ABOVE IMAGE: STEPHEN COHEN HAS BEEN PATIENTLY BATTLING TO INJECT SOME TRUTH AND SANITY…
