The American government promise of fair treatment for Julian Assange should he be extradited to stand trial is a bold face lie and total rubbish.
Two weeks ago a main witness behind the trumped up (pardon the pun) charges against Assange admitted to having committed perjury. Julian Assange never committed a crime. He performed a heroic public service in making known for all the world to see the perfidy of American government policy makers in conducting its overseas wars and meddling.
The Brits should free Julian Assange and let him live his life in peace.
President Biden may be receiving accolades from some Progressives and the mainstream media for his performance in office thus far. On this issue he is totally wrong and needs to called to account.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 7.7.2021
LONDON—The U.S. government has given assurances to the U.K. that Julian Assange wouldn’t be held under the strictest maximum-security conditions if extradited to the U.S., a concession aimed at resolving Washington’s yearslong battle to put the WikiLeaks founder on trial on espionage charges.
Mr. Assange, 50 years old, is wanted in the U.S. on 18 counts of breaking espionage laws and conspiring to hack a military computer. The alleged offenses relate to the publication in 2010 and 2011 by WikiLeaks of a huge trove of classified material that painted a bleak picture of the American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and their aftermath.
The U.S. has also assured British authorities that Mr. Assange, if convicted, would be permitted to serve any jail time in his native Australia, according to excerpts of a court ruling provided by the U.K. Crown Prosecution Service, the public prosecutor’s office for England and Wales.
The ruling on Wednesday makes clear that the Justice Department under President Biden has continued to pursue Mr. Assange’s extradition. The U.S. first sought his arrest in January 2017, before formally requesting his extradition in 2019. Mr. Assange’s defenders have lobbied the U.S. to drop the case, including protesting as recently as last week outside the Justice Department’s headquarters.
A British judge in January refused to grant a U.S. request to extradite Mr. Assange on the grounds that he would likely commit suicide if incarcerated in a federal maximum-security, or “Supermax,” prison and subjected to added security measures, such as solitary confinement, which are common pretrial arrangements in national-security cases.
The U.S. has given the U.K. a package of assurances that Mr. Assange won’t be held at ADX, a maximum-security federal penitentiary in Colorado, or subjected to extra security measures, according to the excerpts of the ruling, potentially removing a key impediment to his potential extradition.
A lawyer for Mr. Assange and a spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.
Experts said the Justice Department’s offer to allow Mr. Assange to serve out any sentence in Australia was unusual, given that inmates usually only apply for such a move once they have been convicted, under the international prisoner transfer program.
“It is extremely rare, and it’s usually based on a process after conviction,” said Mark Lytle, a former federal prosecutor who is now a lawyer at the law firm Nixon Peabody. “To offer it up front to gain extradition, that is a break with the policy.”
Nick Vamos, a partner at London law firm Peters & Peters and a former head of extradition for the CPS, said that it is also unusual for the U.S. to provide broader assurances to a foreign court on prisoner treatment and that it had previously refused to do so in terrorism cases.
The U.K. court’s ruling in January against Mr. Assange’s extradition marked a major setback in Washington’s pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder for publishing secret documents relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Lee's Perspective 