Assange: Subtle Subsidence via Carefully Placed Legal Explosives
An astute discussion on CN Live.
Published: 2024-04-01
A Discussion
Deep in the dungeons of subtlety of the CN Live discussion of Julian Paul Assange's infinite persecution, curious nuggets of insight lay hidden. In raising them to the light of inspection both the horror of the persecution and some gallows humor can be illuminated. Upon inspection, a potential path out of the darkness is exposed.
Kim Dotcom and "Free, free, Julian Assange"
The most insightful recommendation on Assange's legal process came from Kim Dotcom back in the 17th century. His advice was direct and simple: Apply for bail and get Julian out of jail!
Assange's legal team have now failed for 5 years to provide their client any freedom. Yes, they're fighting against a nation state, and the British legal system has been exposed as a political entity in the process. But, they seem to have neither taken this information to heart nor to have been listening to the slogans chanted by Assange's supporters at every event: "Free, free, Julian Assange"
Assange's legal team seem to have trapped themselves into a responsive approach rather than taking the initiative to imbalance their foe.
The Prosecutorial Force
During the discussion Chris Hedges declared that the motivating force behind the Trump issued indictments was the CIA because of the Vault 7 release. This was the largest CIA leak in history which exposed their precious "cyber" tools. Bill Binney, ex-Technical Director of the NSA, calculated these to the cost of billions.
The CIA were already involved and motivated due to the State Department Cables for the State Department and CIA are joined at the hip. Those cables riled an extremely powerful political figure with deep ties to the CIA, one Hillary Rodham Clinton. To understand how deep those ties are look up Mena, Arkansas and drug running during the Iran-Contra era and who was the Governor of Arkansas at the time.
Irrespective of the Clintonite connection, the Assange legal team are not just fighting a nation state, but a nation state armed with some of the best digital surveillance tools money can buy.
These are for sale. The market sells what are known as 0days. A 0day is an unpatched vulnerability, in an operating system (OS), which are the best, or a widely used product like Microsoft Office (which is so close to the OS, its laughable; but that's an old *NIX "hacker" opinion). Either vulnerability (vuln) provides the ability to launch injected code, an exploit. OS "vulns" are more valuable because they inherit extremely high privileges. Application level "vulns" require additional work to "jailbreak" them up the privilege ladder to acquire those privileges. But, enough "cyber" jargon for now.
A Wander Down Memory Lane into Cyber Defense
As is now well known, thanks to the Spanish legal case and excellent investigative reporting by Max Blumenthal, Assange's legal team have been spied on by the CIA for years. The UC Global contractor employed by the Ecuadorian Government to secure its Embassy in London collaborated with the CIA. Given the CIA motivation, if one wishes to run a legal case with any chance of imbalancing the US Department of Justice (DoJ) then the first thing one needs is to invest in a significant degree of information security. This requires hardware, carefully chosen software, and training, and more training. We're talking about multiple secure facilities, air-gapped computers, and seriously competent security expertise, none of which is cheap. Assange has the expertise, but he's stuck in jail.
I am reminded of a gathering of the heads of IT for the departments at the University at which I worked. I'd only been in the role a couple of years and was still very much learning about the university's digital and political architecture. At this meeting, the department technical leads were discussing threat response. I'd been spending over 14 hours a day for 5 days between Christmas and New Year, each year, for years, listening to serious presentations at the Chaos Computer Club's annual conference. I considered myself reasonably well informed about the level of threats which existed.
The types of threats they were being discussed in the meeting amounted to those from national actors. The expectation management reset which I offered my colleagues was that there was no way we could defend against a nation state actor like the CIA, or MI-6. The sooner we accepted our limitations the better. Our job was to make life impossible for crappy crackers and difficult for good ones. More than anything, we should focus on well developed and well tested backup recovery systems and processes.
But, an aggressive Assange legal team do not get to fall back like this. Digital compromise compromises the legal strategy. Its is burned. Its loses its impact. Hence, the problem outlined above of serious expertise, associated training, hardware and facility construction.
The point to realise is that in our age, this is the case for anyone who is being targeted by the foreign operations branches of advanced nation states. One has to sacrifice a considerable amount of freedom and money to guard against the forms of attack which can easily be launched against one. Meanwhile the nation state suffers no such penalty and one cannot digitally "attack back" successfully either. The power imbalance is very real.
But, if one accepts this, one can proceed, and Assange's legal team are years late in taking the initiative.
Back on the Attack
Following Kim Dotcom, the next most insightful legal advice on offer to the Assange legal team came from US lawyer Bruce Afran. He observed last August that Julian could offer a remote plea deal. This could be offered remotely because Assange is not "on the run", from a US perspective. The plea deal offers a way out of the current political conundrum which the Biden regime faces.
The greater point which Afran is making is that Assange can launch legal proceedings against the DoJ. He and his legal team do not need to sit there like a deer in the US headlights, running back and forth to different British courts and considering the European Court of Human Rights. US courts are where one challenges the US government. I know its obvious, but someone had to say it.
The plea deal may actually not be where the case is headed, yet. It was again Afran who offered the panel a key observation from his reading of the 66 page judgment by the High Court, and perhaps the transcript. To understand it and its implications we return to Hedges.
His lasting impression of the two days of precedings before the High Court was that the prosecution, representing the US, was disorganised. It lacked any of the conviction which had been shown previously. This impression was confirmed by Craig Murray who begrudgingly offered respect for the prosecution's absent KC (Kings Counsel), Lewis. This came in comparison to the pathetic display given by second counsel, Claire Dobbin KC.
Penalizing Oneself
The insight which Afran offered was that in response to the judges' queries about the possibility of the US requesting the death penalty, the prosecution had gone beyond erring. Afran emphasized that during an extradition hearing before a British court to a nation which still has the death penalty on the books, the issue of the death penalty is central and fundamental. It will be raised. Failure to prepare for it is a total failure by the legal team.
When the judges asked the prosecution about this matter, their natural response, if they did not already possess detailed instruction, would have been to sadly inform the judges that they could not provide a detailed response at that time. Instead, and this is what struck Afran, they proceeded to not only admit that the death penalty could be used, but to outline a sequence of hypothetical circumstances in which it would be possible.
What Hedges and Murray saw as incompetence, Afran saw as a deliberate ploy to undermine the case.
Murray also informed us that the British courts are generous to leading barristers. Court dates are generally fixed to enable them to represent their clients. The US' prosecution team, not only did not have their lead barrister, Lewis, at the court, but had also failed to replace him with another leading KC. Viewed in the light of Afran's observation, this may itself have been deliberate, to field a less competent team as a later plausible excuse for losing the case. That "weakened" team may have been instructed to allow, to reinforce even, any query as to the death penalty. The prosecution may have carefully placed an explosive under its case.
To understand this, we return to Hedges' observation that the driving force is the CIA. However, a US presidential election is running and the Assange case is a political albatross around the Biden campaign. A subtly engineered defeat of the extradition hearing in the British courts is a manner in which the DoJ can defeat the CIA and free Biden of the burden.
In support of Assange's legal team, they had foreseen the looming political pressure of the presidential election and have been building towards it. They have had, and perhaps have been involved in generating, excellent support from the Australian parliament. Tours by John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian's father and brother, have generated wide public support in both the citizenry and parliaments of Europe and some in the US. These chips are being cashed in, and credit is due to the greater Assange team for generating them.
Raising a Selective Spectre
Returning to the using the US' legal system to wrongfoot the DoJ, during the discussion Elizabeth Vos reminded everyone that the first publication of the materials which included the names of "informants" and others, which seemed important to the judges, was neither Wikileaks ror Assange. It was John Young at cryptome.org who used the password for the encrypted archive published by MI-6 lackey and Guardian reporter Luke Harding as a chapter title in his book. Young used this to decrypt the State Department Cables archive and publish it, unredacted. He, Young, then challenged the DoJ to charge him, after they charged Assange.
Afran's immediate response to Vos' reminder was "selective prosecution". This is a potential political attack which may be able to be launched in the US. I obviously have no idea of the Assange legal team's strategy and they may well have considered this. I’m also not a lawyer, but am capable of listening to them carefully.
The attack amounts to, with the permission and support of John Young, prosecuting the DoJ for "selective prosecution". This would raise the Assange persecution in the US during the election process and pose a considerable political risk to Biden's camp. This could, in turn, be used to push for the plea deal which seems to be slipping off the menu.
One Cannot Return to Where One Is
But, Afran was not the only sharp knife in the draw. In the final moments of the discussion Joe Lauria raised a question from CN Live Producer, Cathy Vogan. It concerned the language of the UK Extradition Act and Treaty. Her question revolved around the use of the verb 'return'. In a normal state of affairs a state requests the return of a person to their jurisdiction in which a crime was committed to stand before that nation's legal system.
Assange's case is particularly special because the US is asserting universal jurisdiction. In fact, Assange has 'already' been 'returned' to the country in which he committed the crime which the USA asserts; he's in one of His Majesty's goals right now.
Thus, the court could respond to the request saying: Yes, this has already been done. He is in the jurisdiction in which you allege that he committed the crime. Thanks for contacting us. We are happy to have helped.
Alternately, they can be pedants and say that the extradition is not possible because they can not "return" him, because he was not in the USA when the crime was committed. When the US replies saying that this is no the intent of the treaty, the court can respond saying that, incompetent as the legislature is now and then, they could hardly have been expected to foresee universal jurisdiction.
Case closed, either way.
Clever Cathy Vogan!
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Sources
Can Assange's Extradition Be Stopped?, Majorie Cohn, Consortium News, 2024-03-31
An expert legal opinion on the state of the case.
WATCH: CN Live! — The Assange Dilemma for the US, Consortium News, 2024-03-28
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