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Julian Assange fights extradition to the United States in court
LONDON — The long-running legal drama of Julian Assange opened a portentous new chapter on Monday, when the WikiLeaks founder and his lawyers entered Woolwich Crown Court to formally contest his extradition to the United States.
The court sits beside the gray walls of Britain’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, Assange’s home since he was dragged by police from the Ecuadoran Embassy in central London in April. Originally, Assange hid out at the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where police were investigating a rape allegation against him. That case has been dropped.
Now, U.S. prosecutors want the 48-year-old Australian to stand trial in federal court in Northern Virginia on charges that he violated the Espionage Act. Prosecutors allege that the anti-secrecy activist helped obtain and disseminate hundreds of thousands of pages of secret military documents and diplomatic cables regarding American action in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to prosecutors, Assange helped former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning hack into government computers.
The U.S. case for extradition was presented by James Lewis, who told the court that Assange was not a journalist but a hacker who conspired to publish stolen classified documents. The material was not redacted, Lewis stressed, and contained the names of sources who had assisted U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, thereby putting their lives in grave danger. He did not provide any examples of actual harm being done to the sources.
Lewis said that WikiLeaks’ initial publishing partners — the New York Times, the Guardian, El PaĂs, Der Spiegel and Le Monde — issued a joint statement saying they deplored the publishing of the sources’ names.
Lewis said the crimes that Assange is alleged to have committed would also be prosecutable, under similar circumstances, in the United Kingdom under the Official Secrets Act. But he added that it was not for the British court to decide whether Assange is a patron of a free press, a hacker, a whistleblower or a journalist, but to turn him over to the United States for trial.
If found guilty of the 18 charges in U.S. court, Assange would face up to 175 years prison. But Lewis argued it was hyperbolic for the defense to argue that Assange would receive that entire sentence, describing to the court more likely sentences of 48 or 63 months.
Speaking before District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, Lewis said that Assange “is not charged with disclosure of embarrassing or awkward information that the government would rather not have disclosed.” He is charged with conspiring to steal secret material.
Assange’s supporters fear he would be forced to serve any sentence in the supermax federal facility in Florence, Colo., in solitary confinement, beside al-Qaeda terrorists, the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Robert Hanssen, the former FBI agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States.
Assange’s extradition proceedings are to be divided into two parts: this first week of legal arguments, followed by two or three more weeks of witness testimony in May.
In pretrial hearings, Assange’s lawyers signaled that they will argue their client acted as nothing more nefarious than publisher and journalist — and that the prosecution is politically motivated, which should make extradition unlawful.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/julian-assange-fights-extradition-to-the-united-states-in-court/2020/02/23/7389ad1a-54f5-11ea-80ce-37a8d4266c09_story.html
https://archive.ph/WYQCD