British courts for five years have denied due process to Julian Assange as his physical and mental health deteriorates. That is the point of his show trial

Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.

The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal?

Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically?

If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years.

The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.

No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.

The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty, offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal is rejected.

It is hard to see how the U.S. can refuse the two-judge panel, composed of Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, which issued on Tuesday a 66-page judgment accompanied by a three-page court order and a four-page media briefing.

The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021.

If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.”

But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.

Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq andAfghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.

Julian took refuge in the embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police, who were permitted by the embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London.

The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the C.I.A., eviscerating attorney-client privilege.

The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van.

The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses.

The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes.

Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S when he was sent the leaked documents.

The British courts are considering extradition, despite the C.I.A.’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police.

Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial, although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions after he obtained asylum in the embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a fine.

Finally, Julian did not, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, leak the documents. He published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Three of the nine legal grounds were accepted by the judges as potential points for appeal. The other six were denied. The two-judge panel also rejected the request by Julian’s lawyers to present new evidence.

Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that the then-director of the C.I.A., Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian.

Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S. attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal cover for an assassination.

The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings underway in Spain against UC Global.

The C.I.A. is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking tools that permit the C.I.A. to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices.

The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7 files.

Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as “another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of 2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for their political opinions.

The judges also dismissed the arguments made by Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a fair trial and protections against punishment without law respectively.

The U.S. largely built its arguments from the affidavits of the U.S. prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”

Ben Watson, king’s counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence.

The U.S. and the U.K secretary of state were urged by the judges to offer the British court assurances on these three points by April 16.

If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed.

If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene again on May 20 to decide if the appeal can go forward.

The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government crimes. Use Julian’s slow motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S.

Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates.

This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.

(Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”)

by Robert Tracinski

I have argued for the necessity of a third alternative in the culture wars. If ever there was an issue on which this is desperately needed, it’s sex.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, in whose aftermath we all live, billed itself as an attempt to sweep away the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism it attributed to the previous era. Yet it turned itself into a twisted mirror image of that very Puritanism.

This sort of thing happens all the time, on both the left and the right: the other side draws a caricature of you, and you “defy” them by embracing the caricature. The advocates of the Sexual Revolution agree that sex is dirty, filthy, disgusting, meaningless, impersonal, and brutishly physical—but they’re for it! The symbol of this, in my mind, is when I occasionally see a come-on for “adult” website, usually in a spam e-mail, with a sales pitch along these lines: “This is the filthiest, nastiest, most disgusting site on the Web!” Who sells their product this way? Who sells food by advertising the filthiest, most disgusting restaurant in town?

And then a show like “Girls” comes along and says: sex is also awkward and ugly and fraught with emotional confusion and insecurity. Great! Where can I sign up?

So what went wrong?

What Went Wrong with the Sexual Revolution

The Sexual Revolution was not just about removing artificial impediments to sexual enjoyment. What it advocated was not merely sex without guilt, but sex that is “zipless,” i.e., “without emotional involvement or commitment.” It is sex without meaning, context, consequences—or human connection.

This is quite perverse, when you think about it. You have a movement that says it is in favor of sex, which then tries to empty sexuality of all value and significance. They seek to liberate sex by trivializing it.

One of the consequences is the well-documented death spiral of the pornography addict who needs more and more stimulation—something weirder, more shocking, more over-the-top—just to get the same level of arousal, like a drug addict who acquires resistance and needs higher and higher doses. When sex is trivialized and deprived of meaning, people have to find some way to fill the emptiness. Some of them will try to make it up on volume.

This also explains what I find most disturbing about the recent “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon: the assumption that you have to make sex weird, forbidden, kinky, and dangerous in order to make it really interesting.

But this is a consequence of the core premise of the counterculture. The Sexual Revolution invariably defined sexual liberation negatively, as a form of opposition to a traditional morality that it was trying to tear down. In practically every variant of its mythology, there is the priggish authority figure that we are all out to shock. (Until we reached the point, somewhere between the emergence of Madonna and that of Miley Cyrus, when there was no remaining way to shock anyone, and it all became hopelessly boring.)

Sex Has Become Politics, to Its Demise

In this as in many things the counterculture’s self-serving portrait of the previous era was cartoonish. Prior to the 1960s, there were plenty of portrayals of sex as something that could be a lot of fun, not to mention glamorous and romantic, without any compulsion to inflate it into a warped caricature in defiance of some authority figure.

But after the 1960s, liberation wasn’t just about enjoying sex. It was about sticking it to The Man.

All of this leads us to the dead end of the Sexual Revolution, in which sex has become all about the least sexy thing on earth: politics. It’s no longer about defying joyless authority figures, because there is no authority figure more joyless than the campus feminist. Instead, it’s about “smashing the patriarchy.”

A great example of this is the cultural left’s ambivalence about gay marriage. It was advertised as a way for homosexuals to embrace the joys of a meaningful, committed long-term relationship. But now some of its own advocates are restlessly admitting that their actual goal was simply to tear down traditional marriage and do away with the institution.

Sonny Bunch recently quoted a Soviet filmmaker who criticized a Sergei Eisenstein film because “There was no socialist element in it.” Read Bunch’s summary of this Social Realist theory of art:

Doesn’t that perfectly describe the modern left’s culture war on sexuality? Sex is treated as an instrument for a political end. Your sex life may not be politically correct if “there is no social justice element in it,” as decided by whatever arbiter of social justice is loudest on Twitter this morning.