Anatomy of a Show Trial — Julian and the Gangster State
By: Matthew Corr
Tags: Press Freedom, Propaganda, Injustice, National Security, Free Speech

4. The court heard that the US government prosecuting Assange went to extraordinary lengths to criminally spy on him and his lawyers. They recorded meetings with his legal counsel, burgled the headquarters of his Spanish lawyers, and openly discussed the possibility of kidnapping and poisoning him.

One of the most stunning moments in court was the testimony of two witnesses, one of whom explained that while Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy, they carried out criminal surveillance on him and his lawyers, recording his privileged conversations and sharing them directly with US intelligence. Witness 2, who worked for UC Global, the firm managing security at the embassy, admitted not only direct participation in bugging the embassy with hidden microphones and cameras, live-streaming audio and video of Assange directly to US intelligence servers, but that his company went so far as to break into the offices of his Spanish lawyer Baltazar Garzon, stealing privileged lawyer-client material, and openly discussed the prospect of kidnapping or poisoning Julian.

These testimonies were neither challenged nor tested by the prosecution or the judge, and are supported by ample physical evidence that the witness refers to. In any serious court proceeding, even a fraction of these details would quickly cause the entire case to be thrown out with prejudice, as happened in Daniel Ellsberg’s case in 1968.

Here are a few extracts from the testimony of Witness 2:

“[Morales] asked me explicitly — in my role as a member of the task force — to contact providers that sell security cameras with sophisticated audio recording capabilities. He even indicated that insofar as possible, the cameras should not show that they are recording sound… “[Morales] instructed that the cameras should allow streaming capabilities so that “our friends in the United States” as Morales explicitly put it, would be able to gain access to the interior of the embassy in real time… “In the same trip… [Morales] asked me to steal a nappy of a baby which, according to the company’s security personnel deployed at the embassy, regularly visited Mr Assange… On this occasion, Morales expressly stated that “the Americans” were the ones who wanted to establish paternity…” “Around December 2017, [Morales] said that the Americans were desperate and that they had even suggested that more extreme measures should be employed against the “guest” to put an end to the situation of Assange’s permanence in the embassy. Specifically, the suggestion that the door to the embassy could be left open, which would allow the argument that this had been an accidental mistake, which would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee; even the possibility of poisoning Mr Assange was discussed.”

The fact that the case has not been simply halted and dismissed on these grounds alone is difficult to explain. The prosecuting government were revealed to have been stealing and spying on legally privileged material, carrying out criminal surveillance on defence counsel and contemplated assassinating the defendant. It is worth repeating that nobody in the court contradicted or challenged this witness testimony. Rather, proceedings were moved on by the court, as if nothing of any real gravity had been said. In her verdict, the judge made brief mention of the UC Global testimony, deciding farcically that since this evidence is part of an ongoing case being brought in Spain, she cannot take it into account.

On top of which, the US government themselves admitted in court — as Murray points out — that Julian’s legal files in the Ecuadorian embassy, clearly marked as legally privileged, were handed over to the American authorities by Ecuador when he was arrested. In any genuine hearing, such an admission by itself should lead the case to collapse.