Title: Talks With Kiriakou About the Assange Extradition
Show: Kevin Gosztola (The Dissenter)
Date: 2021-01-05
URL: https://youtu.be/GmDLt0eVZJc
Duration: 36:00

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[00:00] fine okay hello everyone i'm kevin gustola managing editor for shadowproof.com and i'm very pleased to be joined by john kiriakou cia whistleblower and um also a colleague who uh is a contributor over at consortium news thanks for joining us john happy to do it kevin so um as we as we get rolling here one second as we get rolling here let me begin by asking you

[00:30] just generally i mean what a day what an extraordinary day this decision uh and such a turn i mean 95 of the ruling as you're going through it sounds horrid like we're just in for the inevitable um i i was following it in real time but so other people were following what reporters were putting out there who were following the virtual the virtual courtroom and then suddenly it takes this turn where the judge is

[01:01] taking seriously his mental and physical health what's your reaction to the outcome here i i was shocked very pleasantly so but shocked uh one of the things that um that really surprised me was that the judge said that the u.s government had made its case and i don't think that the u.s government at all made its case i think that she said that gratuitously because the uk has something called the official secrets act which is even more onerous than the

[01:31] espionage act and uh she wanted to send him back to the us but you know in the end it seems that um that uh a cooler head is what ended up prevailing and uh and she she changed her mind now one one important point i think is that there is a precedent for british courts not sending prisoners back to the united states

[02:02] uh and it's specifically because of the way the u.s uses solitary confinement the the un considers the us practice of solitary to be a form of torture the british courts have held that it is a form of torture and if somebody is is mentally or emotionally fragile it's very very easy to commit suicide in prisons certainly at the federal level people commit suicide in american prisons every single day and so in the end

[02:34] despite the swipes that she took at julian and julian's supporters and julian's actions in the end she did the right thing you you and i we go back as uh people who have been following the mass incarceration system in the united states very closely and it was remarkable to me that uh you know basically the us government had an open and shut case they could

[03:06] have convinced this if you if you read it you know assuming that she's not just copying out here i mean there's there's different ways that you can look at what the judge is doing i see one theory out there that she's just basically using this as a way to not have to engage the charges and find against any of the allegations that were put forward by the us government this is a this is a nice thing because as you say there's a precedent there's a precedent here for the uk government not authorizing

[03:37] extraditions to the us because of how people would be abused in the u.s prison system um but you know it's just it's remarkable i mean the thing i wonder if you have any comment here on the part of the ruling where uh she basically recognizes that julian assange would be held in special administrative measures if he was brought to the united states and i think uh you know what's so important about this aspect is she ties the

[04:10] fact that she believes he would be put in sam's to the statements that mike pompeo had made about wikileaks being a non-state hostile intelligence agency so i think so crucial for her to draw that connection that his treatment in a us prison would be a direct result of how the u.s government views him yeah i i was actually quite excited by that and i have to conclude also kevin that

[04:40] you know after so many of us have spent the last how many years talking and writing about uh conditions inside these special communications these uh communications management units cmus uh that that the judge actually took this seriously you know so many times we we talked about how because julian was not your run-of-the-mill prisoner who was going to go into an american prison that uh that he would be placed in

[05:11] in solitary confinement he would be placed in a cmu in some god forsaken place like like florence uh the adx in florence or the communications management unit in in the penitentiary at terre haute that that whatever they decided to do with him it was going to be terrible it was going to be a human rights violation it was going to push the man over the edge mentally it was going to possibly lead to his suicide you know we talked about it so

[05:41] much and held these vigils every month and and wrote about it in in publications all around the world i like to think that she took some notice and and like you said after that outrageous statement by mike pompeo that wikileaks is a is a non-state intelligence uh service that was just too much i also wonder too and and if you'll allow me to even ask a question of you i wonder to if there was any role that the incoming biden administration

[06:13] played here i wonder if if prosecutors consulted biden people if the british consulted biden people like did does the does the biden administration want this thing to go away so it's interesting that you'd see say that let me just plug the uh panel discussion i wrapped up with noam chomsky and dan ellsberg and marjorie cohn that the assange defense committee hosted because gnome actually says this he says if you believe in conspiracy

[06:44] you would think that the biden team consulted with the judge because this is perfect for them think about it it holds everything that the biden administration would want and they don't have to prosecute julian assange in order to have a precedent in this decision by the judge that would be useful to the us government going forward so it almost doesn't matter and i've also been in in talking with some people today highlighting the irony of all of this of

[07:14] people who have constantly acted like oh this is an exception to the rule julian assange isn't really a journalist this is very unique they wouldn't really come after journalists but think of it this way everyone who treated this as like an anomaly that julian assange isn't really you know like them he's now got off on a technicality and they're the ones who are in trouble they're the ones who are going to be left in the future trying to figure out

[07:44] how to protect themselves from being targeted i mean what do you say to that that's right that that's probably the most dangerous development in this whole odyssey and that is that the mainstream media print and broadcast failed to rally around julian they failed to support julian on their editorial pages and so here's julian getting off on a technicality and still there's a path for american journalists at a-list

[08:16] outlets doing their job investigative journalism national security reporting who now face espionage act charges and they have only themselves to blame because they did not support julian in the first place yeah and you know i'm just imagining what if they had been louder what if some of these people who have spoken up for julian assange in the last two weeks because it was like fashionable to do so as the clamor for a pardon from trump

[08:47] escalated what if uh you know alan russ bridger has been outspoken i give him credit but the new york times put their editorial in support of assange in their newspaper within the last month yeah not sooner so what if these places had been more vocal all along maybe maybe the judge wouldn't have been you know so concerned that she would upset the national security agencies if she rebutted the uh charges and allegations that were put forward by the

[09:19] prosecutors but it's clear to me that it looks like she's looking for a kind of loophole because you know i've always treated her as a kind of careerist she's concerned about her future but she also knows that she doesn't want her name to be tied to a destructive outcome i mean i think she's this is as much about her as it is about julian assange vanessa barretzer does not want her career to be followed by the fact that julian assange came to the united states and then killed himself in a u.s prison yeah so she doesn't care

[09:49] about julian assange's health she just cares that people might come after her and dislike her because julian assange hurt himself yeah i think you're i think you're right you know and this is the this is the thing about these these civil servants be they uh prosecutors or judges this is how they get promoted right prosecutors don't get promoted by not prosecuting people they they get promoted by prosecuting people convicting them or or forcing a plea and then getting

[10:19] the longest possible sentence well here's here's a judge who's working in a country that has draconian national security laws and uh she's she's examining this extradition request from another country that has draconian national security laws so what does she want to do she she wants to show that she's a team player she's not trying to upset the apple cart and declare the espionage act and the and the official secrets act

[10:50] null and void so she gives us this long soliloquy on how the the department of justice proved its case that julian did all these terrible things he leaked all this classified information but for humanitarian reasons he's not going to be extradited it wasn't i agree with you it wasn't for humanitarian reasons she was she was able to say all the right things to ensure her career and then make it so

[11:22] that he didn't come to the united states and kill himself in a prison cell in the end everybody wins everybody wins so just let me take a minute here i want to read this exceptional part which is that not only is she finding he's going to be held in sam's but that he would be sent to adx florence and i i just want to take a minute to read this section um if you'll permit me i think it's really important context for people so that we get out here what it would be

[11:54] like if julian assange ended up or or if he had been authorized to be sent to the u.s and was on this path to being held in adx florence this is laid out in the center for constitutional rights to report and first off just let me take a moment because it was this this this man was a mentor of julian assange let me just pay tribute to michael ratner right now and say you know how disappointed i am that he can't be here to share in the elation we're all feeling today

[12:25] i know this is one of the people in julian assange's life that he's been greatly missing but there's a report that the constitutional rights worked on called the darkest corner in 2017 and the judge quotes from it so i just want people to be aware if you don't know what sams are like at adx florence it goes like this prisoners are generally allowed a total of 10 hours outside their cell per week however the time is spent alone in a small indoor room or a cage hardly bigger than their cell inmates are forbidden from communicating

[12:55] with other prisoners for example by yelling through the walls communications with people outside the prison are usually restricted to their lawyers in a few immediate family members who must be cleared by the u.s government sams typically restrict prisoners to writing one letter per week to a single family member and this may not exceed their three double-sided sheets of paper and they're forwarded to an fbi agent for approval over time the delays in receiving mail can decr degrade the quality of

[13:26] communication between a prisoner and his family to the point where it can feel worthless phone calls are severely restricted and contemporaneously monitored during non-legal in-person visits no physical contact is allowed with conversations taking place through a thick glass barrier and prisoners shackled and chained at their wrists ankles and to the ground 14 days notice 14 days advance notice required for visits and these can take months to

[13:59] coordinate because sam's prisoners cannot use a visiting room when any other prisoner is present these are all of the things that she had to factor into her decision and i you know i asked i'm talking to you you were sentenced to prison for 30 months you weren't ever under any of these kinds of restrictions but you did have a special designation you were treated differently than some of the other inmates at the low security prison so you have some experience with how you know people who

[14:32] run the prison could treat you differently um i mean what do you have to say to this pact because i'm really actually stunned that she agreed he would be sent to adx florence that was actually uh highly debated during the extradition trial because there are other places he could go there are other facilities but the fact that she believes he can be sent to one of the worst hellholes in the united states that's pretty huge it's huge uh that that is that is the worst hellhole uh in the united

[15:03] states at least among federal prisons there was a terrific expose that was published in the new york times magazine in may of 2015. i i remember it now five and a half years later because it was so impactful and it talked about adx florence and what it's like living there in solitary confinement or in one of the uh administrative the special administrative units and one prisoner and they they talked about this prisoner because this was typical

[15:33] of what prisoners experience at adx florence but one prisoner was so distraught at not having human contact with anybody that he broke a window in his cell and he ate the glass he ate the broken glass just so that it would shred his stomach so he could go to an outside hospital and at least interact with another human being that's how bad things get now and when they say that

[16:04] you're allowed outside your cell for 10 hours a week that's not exactly true what that means is at the back of the cell is a is a small door and the door leads outside to a cage and the cages are usually about 10 feet by 10 feet and so for one hour a day you can walk in a circle in that 10 foot by 10 foot enlarged dog cage that's attached to the back of

[16:35] your cell so you're not really out of the cell per se you're just able to get a little bit of fresh air for one hour and then you're allowed two or three times a week out of the cell to take a shower and that's it um people who are in solitary confinement are are not permitted phone calls except to their attorneys as you noted or as the judge noted uh you have to just like you see on tv

[17:05] in the movies if you have a visitor which is rare it's behind that that glass wall and you have to have a phone and and talk to your visitor over the phone uh and then if you receive a letter you don't physically get a copy of the letter what they do is there's a screen like a tv screen or a monitor that's attached to the ceiling and they'll scan your letter and you're allowed to look up at the monitor at the ceiling and they'll have it there for five minutes you read it in that five minutes and

[17:37] then they take it away and they destroy the letter so it's enough to make the the most sane person insane i i don't know how anybody over the long term can survive something like that and let's face it julian was looking at 175 years in prison nobody can survive a lifetime of that the most charitable sort of view was

[18:08] that he would be there for the rest of his life for about a 40-year sentence yes that um thomas durkin's an attorney in chicago um who has done a lot of work on national security and civil liberties cases and he provided testimony and you know one of the things that he assessed was that it could be about 40 years if it wasn't a maximum sentence and even there he's a 50 year old man do we think julian assange is going to live to be 90 years old probably not in his condition

[18:39] i mean we just have to be realistic here and so anytime in prison more than 20 to 30 years is probably a death sentence it's a death sentence kevin you and i have had this conversation uh several different times but when i was in prison and again this was a low security prison people were dropping like flies you know you've got cancer they give you tylenol you have uh emphysema you get a tylenol or diabetes you get a tylenol half the

[19:10] people in there are insane um one of the psychologists told me that 85 percent of prisoners in american federal prisons have some sort of mental illness 85 percent well people who are mentally ill generally don't take a very good care of themselves physically as well and then on top of that you're in a prison where it's difficult to take care of yourself physically uh the food is not human grade food we've also talked about that uh it's very very carb heavy

[19:41] so you're not eating healthy foods you lack medical care a lot of people have these these chronic uh conditions and then you die and that's it so sure if the average life expectancy in the united states is what 78 for men and 81 for women you're not making it to 78 in a federal prison you're just not and uh the other thing is beyond the mental health i mean we got insight into the fact that he suffers

[20:11] from osteoporosis and we could uh you know could be bending over and suffer a fracture there's no way he's getting any appropriate attention from any one inside the prison to treat that condition well osteoporosis is one of those conditions that is not treated in in u.s prisons like they'll they'll treat you if you have um something immediate you've got diabetes they will give you insulin you've got a heart condition they'll

[20:43] give you heart medication but something like osteoporosis they're not going to treat hepatitis c they don't treat because it's very expensive so you just have to you just have to lump it um there was a prisoner in my housing unit who had a quite a long sentence and had hepatitis c and there was a court ruling saying that that the prison had to uh give him this medication i think it was a thousand dollars a month it was when it first

[21:13] came out and what they did is they just released him they just let him go here there you go we're not paying for this so they're not going to give you the medications that you need and something like osteoporosis is going to take a a toll over a long period of time and it's going to make for a miserable life if it's not treated uh so what's your reaction to um you know aside from this aspect which we can give kudos i suppose to the judge for

[21:44] being on the right side aside from this you know a lot a lot of the rest is pretty horrible and i must probably spend the rest of the week digging through it and and doing reports and and piecing out what i know from covering the extradition trial is complete bunk from the judge but one thing i know that you could uh react to because we've talked about it is the fact that she accepted based upon a cnn story from 2019 about how they fabricated some thing that was laundered by

[22:15] us government officials or nat sec officials about the embassy being used as an election meddling command center that they said the embassy so she agreed that the embassy might have been used for this purpose by assange and so the the spying operation which we have all kinds of details about could have been reasonable and what's your reaction to this right you know that was one of the first things that i that i thought of when i woke up this morning and saw what the decision was

[22:46] my thought was i wonder what she said about the spying operation and uh i was disappointed because she should have condemned this buying operation to me the spying operation should have been enough to result in julian's release in the first place and she just didn't uh she didn't address it at least not in any substantive way um i agree with you i i'm outraged at the notion and this this is considered to be unethical in

[23:17] the united states judges are not allowed to you know google you or look for articles about you that's just forbidden and she freely admitted that that's exactly what she did to help her decide this case i was flabbergasted by it it's an article that was given to her by the prosecutors but it can hardly be claimed to be primary evidence i mean it's it's just uh hey let's float this idea that he might be working for the russians out of the

[23:48] ecuador embassy meanwhile uh for those who don't know about this article there's been some good write-ups about it at the gray zone i did my own write-up about it because these are the exact same documents that el pais had yes and they at least responsibly looked at each other and went you know we're not going to make up some story about him working for the russians what's important here is that this shows evidence of his legal team being targeted by some private security outfit and we

[24:20] don't really know if the cia or the fbi is behind it but we do know that some private security contractors should probably be pursued for committing criminal acts because they should not be doing this agreed and i think we do have to assume that it was the cia behind it um even though the fbi would have had primacy on this case uh the cia always has primacy overseas and so it it likely would have been a

[24:51] cia operation oftentimes um and i think this this is apropos julian's situation oftentimes it's uh more cost effective and it's safer to contract it out to a private firm the cia does that all the time i think that's what we saw here this was this was essentially a cia operation that was just farmed out to bring in sheldon adelson to help can you imagine uh so

[25:23] and it's actually not a really good operation because he already has yacht security so you would have scratch your head and say well you just hired david morales for yacht security but you already have this so what is this person doing like even people at the company weren't sure what this was about because like why does sheldon adelson need help with his yacht security this is very confusing so um there's a couple things i want to ask you before we leave uh and and the broadcast i've got some really

[25:54] nice people following our conversation uh mexico is offering up political asylum to julian assange what do you think about that i was thrilled thrilled to see the report uh you know we'd have to wonder if if the pri is is uh is elected again uh if if there would be any impact on on julian but i'll tell you what i was really worried about is that let's say julian wins this whole thing the brits expel him there was nowhere for him to go so he goes back to australia he's an

[26:26] australian citizen what's to keep the united states from then asking the australians to extradite him and he has to go through this whole thing all over again so when i saw that the mexicans had offered him asylum i i couldn't think of better news well the other problem here is that there are these allegations outstanding that have nothing to do with these 2010 offenses and i think the cloud hanging over julian assange is going to be what to do uh there's you know it's very clear in this decision from

[26:58] vanessa beretzer that she recognizes the the authorities could come after him for the vault seven materials those are highly highly classified those are like revealing the crown jewels right of how the cia yes cyber operations so yeah i'm i think there is a reasonable fear and i think that's going to be difficult for julian and his people to figure out what to do once this case ends because i think the

[27:29] question becomes does joe biden decide to pursue a case on very different grounds yeah i i think that's really a great question remember it was it was the obama biden administration that prosecuted almost three times as many whistleblowers as all previous presidents combined uh so yeah i i don't think that joe biden becoming president is is any great help uh for julian assange

[28:00] um i'll say also i have to agree with your assessment that that it's going to be difficult for julian to actually do something for a living once this is over let's let's say he ends up in mexico in the next uh three weeks or so what does he do if he goes back to wikileaks he makes himself a target and you know that the justice department is is licking its chops over prosecuting the vault seven leaks i mean like you said these were the

[28:30] crown jewels these are these are probably the most sensitive intelligence related documents that have ever been leaked uh they're going to want to scalp for that leak besides just the the guy who released the information so i i i would worry about julian and and his future you know eventually the spotlight is going to leave him he's uh he's got two children now he has a partner who's very loving and supportive and so he's going to want to get along with his life we just don't know what

[29:01] that looks like yeah and you know i wouldn't fault him if you want to just hang it up and and having a family i i uh i think that was probably part of his consideration when he decided to have children um and you know he believed that he was going to be able to get out of this embassy because he didn't think that the obama administration and and they didn't think the trump administration oh sorry he did not think that the obama administration was going to come after him anymore and in 2017 with the way that trump had been talking about him i think he

[29:33] thought that he might be insulated somewhat right although it turned out to be wrong it turned out that jeff sessions could do what he wanted with the justice department without donald trump getting involved um but let me just also put forward this scenario because we've got um on the other side of the globe we've got people in australia that are watching us talk so i think let's conclude here which is you know australia has grown pretty hostile towards whistleblowers and the publication of information so you what if uh he ends up going back to australia

[30:06] with his family um because that's where he was born and then they just returned to pursuing an extradition there maybe they decide within the justice department and the biden administration we don't want to deal with the uk government because we got this issue about our prisons and that's set president let's try australia and see if they'll let us get julian assange to the united states um the government there is i don't know if you're familiar but i think his name is

[30:36] david mcbride who has done the the revealing of crimes war crimes in afghanistan and he's facing quite a harsh prosecution yes so well that could be a great place to turn to to get julian assange yeah that's why i was so happy about mexico the australian government is quite conservative and even by conservative standards they're very very conservative when it comes to whistleblower issues whistleblowers are not protected in australia especially national security whistleblowers this is something that that several different ngos are working

[31:07] on um in in australia especially uh blueprint for free speech which does a lot of these whistleblower uh legislative projects around the world even though they're based in australia they have a devil of a time trying to convince australian politicians that whistleblowers ought to be protected so yeah i agree if if i were julian i wouldn't want to go to australia right now i would try to get to mexico as quickly as possible yeah i mean i think he has more his fortunes could actually be much
