The prosecution lawyers in the High Court seeking to ensure Julian’s extradition to the U.S. rely almost exclusively on the judicial opinions of Gordon Kromberg, a highly controversial U.S. attorney.
"The fatal flaw of the case against Julian is that he did not commit a crime. He exposed the crimes of others. Those who ordered and carried out these crimes are determined, no matter how they have to deform the British and U.S. legal systems, to make him pay."
I want to make sure that while I am bitterly angry at the state of affairs that exists worldwide, I do not and never will promote retribution or retaliation of any type, because we have learned that it does not work. Faith and Commitment to one's inner self and our creator, while promoting love, compassion, understanding, and knowledge as the means of eradicating this ignorance is the preferred path. It remains positive, and does not fall prey to entanglements with evil.
The British and U.S. legal systems were deformed long long ago. What is happening to Julian is not the exception. All one has to do is expose the crimes of those in power to find out, as these extraordinarily brave brothers and sisters have done for us all.
Ah yes, Zionist scum lying repeatedly and unrepentantly for the greatest collection of scum ever assembled on the planet — the US government and its alphabet agencies. What else is new? As I've posted here before, I reject my identity as an American citizen. I am an organism of the Kingdom Animalia possessing genetic material derived vertically from the primate line via Darwinian evolution and horizontally from bacteria, viruses, possibly fungi, and who knows what else. Hence, I am one with the biosphere, with all other life. However, NOT with effing maniacs like Gordon Kromberg, Joseph Biden, Antony Blinken, et al. who have no clue what justice, kindness, empathy or humanity actually feel like, but who fallaciously lay claim to these characteristics nonetheless.
Couldn't agree more! I just happen to have been born here. I have absolutely no allegiance to the U.S., and probably wouldn't have any to any other country either. I'm loyal to my causes of peace and the natural environment (including all the native life there), and to my friends & family. That's it.
Likewise. But I was born here during a period when the experiment still seemed somewhat "noble" (only to my very young self, hardly at all in retrospect). Then they wanted to drag me out of grad school to transform me to cannon fodder by sending me to 'Nam. That was the moment I began to reject my identity as an American. Since early childhood experience cuts deep, it's required many years to completely extirpate that identity. Beginning in the 1980s and culminating in Twenty-first Century America has certainly completed that cleansing of allegiance.
I'm a little younger than you, but spent a lot of time opposing the Vietnam war in high school (by the time I was in college it was winding down, though I still opposed it). I was subject to the draft lottery when I was a freshman in college, but I got a high number and that was the end of my personal concern. It didn't at all change my opposition to the war though.
I too was very naively and stupidly patriotic as a child. But in sixth grade, in the height of the Cold War, our teacher explained that communism was simply a change from "to those according to ability to those according to need, and that the people in the Soviet Union and Russia were just people like us. That sounded like a lot better system to me, and I immediately lost my patriotic feelings for the U.S. Of course I've learned exponentially more since then (including the fact that the U.S. is in no way a meritocracy as my teacher had falsely assumed, including genocide and slavery, and including how the U.S. is now the dominant global empire), and now I hate this country more than any other.
Our 5th grade teacher was even better, teaching us to question EVERYTHING all the time. She taught us that American women had to go to Mexico just to get abortions, and that people in Tokyo put coins in machines just to breather some clean air, to list just 2 examples.
This was nothing more than Chicago public school, BTW. Shows just how far this society has fallen.
I have no words of praise adequate for the detailed work you are doing, Chris. The significance of this case is profound. I watched you taking notes yesterday, by hand, at the meeting with Craig Murray et al. on the Truth Defense YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZMzlnqaVU8). You are a journalist in the finest sense of the word. Thank you for defending the best in your profession.
This shows us just how far the U.S. standing in the international community has fallen, when they try to bully another nation or a foreign national to cover up their crimes against foreign nationals or war crimes against citizens of other countries. The U.S. is finally going up against courts in other countries that aren't cowtowing to them just because they had a reputation as being the good guys (that reputation is severly tarnished now). Not any more. U.S. war crimes and espionage crimes carried out on sovereign soil through the last few decades is starting to come back and haunt them. The CIA needs a win to try and make up for all of their credibility losses in the last couple of decades and they still think they are above the law. Maybe within the U.S. but not so much overseas anymore. After the Angela Merkerl phone tap disaster, the foreign black rendition sites, assassinations, coups and a host of other crimes, the CIA is a joke anymore or at the very least, guilty of crimes against humanity. Putting Julian Assange in a dark hole in the U.S. prison system won't gain them any attaboys with the international community. If anything, their credibility will be worse than it already is. Someone needs to tell them to stand down. This revenge tour will not end well for them. Let it go. Let Julian Assange go back to Australia and live out the rest of his life out of the limelight. The world needs to tell the U.S. to go home and take a time out. There are way too many paranoid Americans in powerful positions making decisions like this and they need to be replaced with more moderate thinking legislators for the good of the world and their own citizens.
Terrance, You nailed it! I hope it is OK, and I've given you full credit, but I have reposted your comment on Sardonicky. It is just too good not to share.
I swear every time I hear about these Zionist Jurists like Kromberg, they bring visions of the Judges in Nazi Germany enforcing Nuremberg Laws! Like the founding fathers of Israel, most Zionists were secular Fascists! Ben Gurion, Jabotinsksy, Shamir, Begin, Stern jump off the page as hard core fascists! Their early learning, watched Stalin cement his power with secret police, brutality and murder! Bolshevism is arguably the first fascism copied by Mussolini, Franco and Hitler! The Fascist torch was handed down to all succeeding leaders of Zionist Israel. Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Industry gave them cover, How could Zionists be Judeo Nazi's? Sadly quite easily! Zionist terrorism before WW2 and after including the NAKBA, showed their true colors! The many Racist Laws of Apartheid, the Zionist Judiciary in Israel rubber stamped since the Nakba, proves the ONLY thing they learned from the Holocaust was to copy it! But conveniently using it to hide their own hate filled master race ideology! The Israeli Judge at the ICC is cut from the same cloth, denying the Occupation and de-facto Annexation of Palestine. His rulings supported the Separation Wall , Illegal "Settlements" and even Torture using the "Ticking Bomb" trope! These men of Justice are nothing more than Kafka's dystopian henchmen, that are given respect and status, that deserve neither!
"Fascism" means corporations running the government. The U.S. has been fascist for decades. Therefore, you need to include a lot more than Biden & Blinken in that list.
Yes Jon and "Goldwater Girl" Hillary Clinton, the Democrat Limousine Liberals and ALL of the MAGA Tea Party Republicans Trump, Niki Haley, De Santis, Greg Abbot's Texas and the governing bodies in the old Jim Crow South!
As a practicing attorney for 35 years now, I have come to learn certain truths about our system that have fundamentally changed my view of the world in a huge way. I now want to leave the practice to do something else. I cannot retire as a late in life divorce left me broke. I can no longer support this system. As a Personal Injury lawyer, I now see myself as contributing to the problem, where once I sought to help people, I now see that I am a bottom feeder taking from the poor and disenfranchised by being a part of the system that promotes it. I cannot do this anymore. A paradigm shift has occurred. We have been lied to about virtually everything. And now I seek only truth, and shall live my life out that way.
Perhaps I may find work that is truly supportive of humanity as a whole, far away from destructive capitalism. If you have the chance watch Steven Greer's recent documentary:"The Lost Century" on you tube or one of those channels. It will open your eyes to the world we could have had by now. And it will direct your attention to those who have prevented us from achieving this, and why. Pure Greed and a God complex play a role.
Thank you for your courage in bowing to the aweful truth of our lives. 🙏 Although the realization that we have been used by the US fascist government to bow to their bidding is devastating, to know how the game is really played is primary. As you say, now, I look at the world and ask, 'What shall I do with this precious life and the time left?'
I'm a radical environmentalist, so my critique goes a lot deeper and much further back in time, but politically this all started in the U.S. -- ignoring the genocide of Natives, theft of their land, and using slaves -- when the Democratic Party establishment prevented Henry Wallace from becoming FDR's vice presidential running mate in 1944. The assassination of JFK and the mirroring removal from power of Nikita Khrushchev by similar jerks in the Soviet Union were the nails in the coffin for humanity going in any positive direction regarding world peace.
Let's be clear and honest about what's been happening here: The U.S. and its lapdog U.K. are torturing Julian Assange to death because he exposed U.S. war- and human rights crimes, and because he exposed other illegitimate activities of U.S. intelligence. They are making an example of Assange to others who might think about doing what he did.
People who don't want this kind of thing to happen to Julian or anyone else need to demand a dissolution or at least total restructure of U.S. security agencies. No one voted for or elected any of these people, yet in some instances they have more power than elected officials, even the president (who has too much power, but that's another issue). Any less will be meaningless, as these deep state spooks continue to run things from the shadows, acting with impunity and without any moral or even ethical compass.
In the end, all our reliances upon legal niceties prove futile, like telling a schoolyard bully looking to beat up someone that he really doesn't have the right to put his hands on you.
The only thing that will make the bully back down is force, whether delivered by a bigger, meaner bully or a bunch of schoolkids deciding that they have had enough and that they are not bluffing.
This is how, for example, europeans transformed overnight from the chest-thumping assholes who brought us nationalism and colonialism, to cowering metrosexual pacifists. Just like that. They had met The Red Army and decided that all this he-man "the world belongs to the strong" stuff ain't near so much fun when you're on the receiving end.
n.b. it is theorized that the genesis of human morality is this - groups of beta males deciding that they were sick of being terrorized (and the females monopolized) by the alpha.
I haven’t time to get my hair in place to answer your criticism of Europeans, but it was more seeing the French and then the Americans getting beaten by a former Paris waiter Hi Chi Minh and a rural schoolteacher, Vo Ngyen Giap, turned one of the greatest generals of the 20th Century - and probably since Napoleon- who both had once hidden in a ditch together from a French police raid, that made me realise that my role as a cowering pacifist was built on firm foundations. America, as Chris Hedges has pointed out, is now the most warlike nation, or civilisation if you like, in history. I think it’s the robots which could put a stop to this slaughter. Disciplined, uniformed armies with regimental traditions versus suicidal outraged cultures deploying every family member in the struggle will give way to the realisation that the robot drones are the toughest warriors, and some some sort of understanding that coexistence is not necessarily appeasement may dawn on us.
It is heartbreaking that people do not see the inhumanity of this story. The carnage of a man who was brave enough to stand up to the abuse of power and enlighten the masses to how sinister the powerful are,
Your passion for telling the aweful truth, Chris, is an integral facet for 'us' in carrying on in spite of it all, and using this one life to speak truth when lies are perpetrated. Thank you again! 🙏
Those of you haven't already done so might be well served by reading Miko Peled's work "Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five", detailing the destruction of lives carried out by our "security" state on behalf of the apartheid, fascist regime currently occupying Palestine. Beautifully written, but, fair warning, as heartbreaking as the Assange case
Read it, another injustice gone unnoticed by our citizenry and the repulsive behavior and misconduct of US prosecutors all because Bush et al hates muslims. Not only heartbreaking but scary.
That is the whole point. I am glad to see that you felt my comment was good enough to share with others outside of Substack. That is how we let the world know that this is wrong on so many levels. Feel free to share anything I offer here anytime, with anyone you choose, and that applies to any and all who may read this. If we don't make a lot of noise, things won't get better. Which is why I interview people on occasion with similar viewpoints and espouse this wrongness on my weekly podcast. Next week, I am planning a solo monlogue on American imperialism, using the Julian Assange case as another example of many others like him through the years. I am now thoroughlyh hooked on Chris Hedges and The Real News Network for indepth news that the mainstream media won't touch. Much like how I search through media like Al Jazeera, EuroNews and other overseas media outlets. They tell a different side of the news that doesn't air on mainstream U.S. media. Thank you.
Chris Hedges:
"The fatal flaw of the case against Julian is that he did not commit a crime. He exposed the crimes of others. Those who ordered and carried out these crimes are determined, no matter how they have to deform the British and U.S. legal systems, to make him pay."
Share
And the clear war crimes and other crimes Mr Assange exposed? They were never even investigated, in spite of the overwhelming evidence.
Kangaroo court indeed.
Good luck, Julian, our hearts are breaking for you.
The empire is not going to investigate itself, including its own war crimes. We need to bring down the empire.
Scapegoat, whipping boy, put him through hell. Damn the system that perpetrates this criminality against truth tellers.
I want to make sure that while I am bitterly angry at the state of affairs that exists worldwide, I do not and never will promote retribution or retaliation of any type, because we have learned that it does not work. Faith and Commitment to one's inner self and our creator, while promoting love, compassion, understanding, and knowledge as the means of eradicating this ignorance is the preferred path. It remains positive, and does not fall prey to entanglements with evil.
Well yes. Post-apartheid South Africa showed the world that truth & reconciliation works, while vengeance and retribution do not.
The British and U.S. legal systems were deformed long long ago. What is happening to Julian is not the exception. All one has to do is expose the crimes of those in power to find out, as these extraordinarily brave brothers and sisters have done for us all.
As always, thank you Chris Hedges........and Mr Fish......
Ah yes, Zionist scum lying repeatedly and unrepentantly for the greatest collection of scum ever assembled on the planet — the US government and its alphabet agencies. What else is new? As I've posted here before, I reject my identity as an American citizen. I am an organism of the Kingdom Animalia possessing genetic material derived vertically from the primate line via Darwinian evolution and horizontally from bacteria, viruses, possibly fungi, and who knows what else. Hence, I am one with the biosphere, with all other life. However, NOT with effing maniacs like Gordon Kromberg, Joseph Biden, Antony Blinken, et al. who have no clue what justice, kindness, empathy or humanity actually feel like, but who fallaciously lay claim to these characteristics nonetheless.
Vin Lo Presti. I am in agreement..
Empathy went to die somewhere with these Zionists.
Sociopaths by definition lack empathy, although the more high-functioning ones can fake it when convenient.
Couldn't agree more! I just happen to have been born here. I have absolutely no allegiance to the U.S., and probably wouldn't have any to any other country either. I'm loyal to my causes of peace and the natural environment (including all the native life there), and to my friends & family. That's it.
Likewise. But I was born here during a period when the experiment still seemed somewhat "noble" (only to my very young self, hardly at all in retrospect). Then they wanted to drag me out of grad school to transform me to cannon fodder by sending me to 'Nam. That was the moment I began to reject my identity as an American. Since early childhood experience cuts deep, it's required many years to completely extirpate that identity. Beginning in the 1980s and culminating in Twenty-first Century America has certainly completed that cleansing of allegiance.
I'm ashamed of being a member of the homo sapiens sapiens spicies. My only consolation is that I'm 2.6% homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
I'm a little younger than you, but spent a lot of time opposing the Vietnam war in high school (by the time I was in college it was winding down, though I still opposed it). I was subject to the draft lottery when I was a freshman in college, but I got a high number and that was the end of my personal concern. It didn't at all change my opposition to the war though.
I too was very naively and stupidly patriotic as a child. But in sixth grade, in the height of the Cold War, our teacher explained that communism was simply a change from "to those according to ability to those according to need, and that the people in the Soviet Union and Russia were just people like us. That sounded like a lot better system to me, and I immediately lost my patriotic feelings for the U.S. Of course I've learned exponentially more since then (including the fact that the U.S. is in no way a meritocracy as my teacher had falsely assumed, including genocide and slavery, and including how the U.S. is now the dominant global empire), and now I hate this country more than any other.
You had a great teacher - someone with the ability to think critically. Sadly, you wouldn't hear that any more from any sixth grade teacher.
Our 5th grade teacher was even better, teaching us to question EVERYTHING all the time. She taught us that American women had to go to Mexico just to get abortions, and that people in Tokyo put coins in machines just to breather some clean air, to list just 2 examples.
This was nothing more than Chicago public school, BTW. Shows just how far this society has fallen.
Kromberg another Zionist what a surprise.
I hope Julan knows we are all out here hoping he will survive and be freed.
I have no words of praise adequate for the detailed work you are doing, Chris. The significance of this case is profound. I watched you taking notes yesterday, by hand, at the meeting with Craig Murray et al. on the Truth Defense YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZMzlnqaVU8). You are a journalist in the finest sense of the word. Thank you for defending the best in your profession.
This shows us just how far the U.S. standing in the international community has fallen, when they try to bully another nation or a foreign national to cover up their crimes against foreign nationals or war crimes against citizens of other countries. The U.S. is finally going up against courts in other countries that aren't cowtowing to them just because they had a reputation as being the good guys (that reputation is severly tarnished now). Not any more. U.S. war crimes and espionage crimes carried out on sovereign soil through the last few decades is starting to come back and haunt them. The CIA needs a win to try and make up for all of their credibility losses in the last couple of decades and they still think they are above the law. Maybe within the U.S. but not so much overseas anymore. After the Angela Merkerl phone tap disaster, the foreign black rendition sites, assassinations, coups and a host of other crimes, the CIA is a joke anymore or at the very least, guilty of crimes against humanity. Putting Julian Assange in a dark hole in the U.S. prison system won't gain them any attaboys with the international community. If anything, their credibility will be worse than it already is. Someone needs to tell them to stand down. This revenge tour will not end well for them. Let it go. Let Julian Assange go back to Australia and live out the rest of his life out of the limelight. The world needs to tell the U.S. to go home and take a time out. There are way too many paranoid Americans in powerful positions making decisions like this and they need to be replaced with more moderate thinking legislators for the good of the world and their own citizens.
Terrance, You nailed it! I hope it is OK, and I've given you full credit, but I have reposted your comment on Sardonicky. It is just too good not to share.
I swear every time I hear about these Zionist Jurists like Kromberg, they bring visions of the Judges in Nazi Germany enforcing Nuremberg Laws! Like the founding fathers of Israel, most Zionists were secular Fascists! Ben Gurion, Jabotinsksy, Shamir, Begin, Stern jump off the page as hard core fascists! Their early learning, watched Stalin cement his power with secret police, brutality and murder! Bolshevism is arguably the first fascism copied by Mussolini, Franco and Hitler! The Fascist torch was handed down to all succeeding leaders of Zionist Israel. Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Industry gave them cover, How could Zionists be Judeo Nazi's? Sadly quite easily! Zionist terrorism before WW2 and after including the NAKBA, showed their true colors! The many Racist Laws of Apartheid, the Zionist Judiciary in Israel rubber stamped since the Nakba, proves the ONLY thing they learned from the Holocaust was to copy it! But conveniently using it to hide their own hate filled master race ideology! The Israeli Judge at the ICC is cut from the same cloth, denying the Occupation and de-facto Annexation of Palestine. His rulings supported the Separation Wall , Illegal "Settlements" and even Torture using the "Ticking Bomb" trope! These men of Justice are nothing more than Kafka's dystopian henchmen, that are given respect and status, that deserve neither!
"Fascism" means corporations running the government. The U.S. has been fascist for decades. Therefore, you need to include a lot more than Biden & Blinken in that list.
Yes Jon and "Goldwater Girl" Hillary Clinton, the Democrat Limousine Liberals and ALL of the MAGA Tea Party Republicans Trump, Niki Haley, De Santis, Greg Abbot's Texas and the governing bodies in the old Jim Crow South!
“When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.” JA
As a practicing attorney for 35 years now, I have come to learn certain truths about our system that have fundamentally changed my view of the world in a huge way. I now want to leave the practice to do something else. I cannot retire as a late in life divorce left me broke. I can no longer support this system. As a Personal Injury lawyer, I now see myself as contributing to the problem, where once I sought to help people, I now see that I am a bottom feeder taking from the poor and disenfranchised by being a part of the system that promotes it. I cannot do this anymore. A paradigm shift has occurred. We have been lied to about virtually everything. And now I seek only truth, and shall live my life out that way.
Perhaps I may find work that is truly supportive of humanity as a whole, far away from destructive capitalism. If you have the chance watch Steven Greer's recent documentary:"The Lost Century" on you tube or one of those channels. It will open your eyes to the world we could have had by now. And it will direct your attention to those who have prevented us from achieving this, and why. Pure Greed and a God complex play a role.
Thank you for your courage in bowing to the aweful truth of our lives. 🙏 Although the realization that we have been used by the US fascist government to bow to their bidding is devastating, to know how the game is really played is primary. As you say, now, I look at the world and ask, 'What shall I do with this precious life and the time left?'
I'm a radical environmentalist, so my critique goes a lot deeper and much further back in time, but politically this all started in the U.S. -- ignoring the genocide of Natives, theft of their land, and using slaves -- when the Democratic Party establishment prevented Henry Wallace from becoming FDR's vice presidential running mate in 1944. The assassination of JFK and the mirroring removal from power of Nikita Khrushchev by similar jerks in the Soviet Union were the nails in the coffin for humanity going in any positive direction regarding world peace.
Let's be clear and honest about what's been happening here: The U.S. and its lapdog U.K. are torturing Julian Assange to death because he exposed U.S. war- and human rights crimes, and because he exposed other illegitimate activities of U.S. intelligence. They are making an example of Assange to others who might think about doing what he did.
People who don't want this kind of thing to happen to Julian or anyone else need to demand a dissolution or at least total restructure of U.S. security agencies. No one voted for or elected any of these people, yet in some instances they have more power than elected officials, even the president (who has too much power, but that's another issue). Any less will be meaningless, as these deep state spooks continue to run things from the shadows, acting with impunity and without any moral or even ethical compass.
In the end, all our reliances upon legal niceties prove futile, like telling a schoolyard bully looking to beat up someone that he really doesn't have the right to put his hands on you.
The only thing that will make the bully back down is force, whether delivered by a bigger, meaner bully or a bunch of schoolkids deciding that they have had enough and that they are not bluffing.
This is how, for example, europeans transformed overnight from the chest-thumping assholes who brought us nationalism and colonialism, to cowering metrosexual pacifists. Just like that. They had met The Red Army and decided that all this he-man "the world belongs to the strong" stuff ain't near so much fun when you're on the receiving end.
n.b. it is theorized that the genesis of human morality is this - groups of beta males deciding that they were sick of being terrorized (and the females monopolized) by the alpha.
I haven’t time to get my hair in place to answer your criticism of Europeans, but it was more seeing the French and then the Americans getting beaten by a former Paris waiter Hi Chi Minh and a rural schoolteacher, Vo Ngyen Giap, turned one of the greatest generals of the 20th Century - and probably since Napoleon- who both had once hidden in a ditch together from a French police raid, that made me realise that my role as a cowering pacifist was built on firm foundations. America, as Chris Hedges has pointed out, is now the most warlike nation, or civilisation if you like, in history. I think it’s the robots which could put a stop to this slaughter. Disciplined, uniformed armies with regimental traditions versus suicidal outraged cultures deploying every family member in the struggle will give way to the realisation that the robot drones are the toughest warriors, and some some sort of understanding that coexistence is not necessarily appeasement may dawn on us.
It is heartbreaking that people do not see the inhumanity of this story. The carnage of a man who was brave enough to stand up to the abuse of power and enlighten the masses to how sinister the powerful are,
This reminds me of the poet Robert Frost who cynically wrote: "A jury are 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."
Your passion for telling the aweful truth, Chris, is an integral facet for 'us' in carrying on in spite of it all, and using this one life to speak truth when lies are perpetrated. Thank you again! 🙏
Those of you haven't already done so might be well served by reading Miko Peled's work "Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five", detailing the destruction of lives carried out by our "security" state on behalf of the apartheid, fascist regime currently occupying Palestine. Beautifully written, but, fair warning, as heartbreaking as the Assange case
Read it, another injustice gone unnoticed by our citizenry and the repulsive behavior and misconduct of US prosecutors all because Bush et al hates muslims. Not only heartbreaking but scary.
That is the whole point. I am glad to see that you felt my comment was good enough to share with others outside of Substack. That is how we let the world know that this is wrong on so many levels. Feel free to share anything I offer here anytime, with anyone you choose, and that applies to any and all who may read this. If we don't make a lot of noise, things won't get better. Which is why I interview people on occasion with similar viewpoints and espouse this wrongness on my weekly podcast. Next week, I am planning a solo monlogue on American imperialism, using the Julian Assange case as another example of many others like him through the years. I am now thoroughlyh hooked on Chris Hedges and The Real News Network for indepth news that the mainstream media won't touch. Much like how I search through media like Al Jazeera, EuroNews and other overseas media outlets. They tell a different side of the news that doesn't air on mainstream U.S. media. Thank you.