Ramón Casas A young decadent 1899
How bad are the riots and shootings in the US going to get?
The biggest problems right now are undoubtedly in Europe. The Netherlands is just one example. Mismanagement at its finest. They’ll just blame the people. None of these people have quit over their own failings.
Netherlands
The Netherlands needs action
A little more than a month in the Netherlands and unfortunately:
– Total cases: +38,945 (+61%)
– COVID-free municipalities: -91 (-86%)#go2zero #endcoronavirus #BreekDeTweedeGolf #Netherlands pic.twitter.com/Id68aIZ9NO— EndCoronaVirus.org (@endCOVID19) September 24, 2020
Rand Paul and Fauci Long version
Rand Paul just confronted Dr. Fauci to his face on lockdowns:
"You have been a been fan of Cuomo and the shutdown in NY. You lauded NY for their policy. NY had the highest death rate in the world. How could we possibly be jumping up and down and saying Cuomo did a great job?" pic.twitter.com/VdXWVZ5TGM
— Kelb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 23, 2020
Rand Paul and Fauci Short version
If you want to see Dr. Fauci get really rattled… Check out this exchange of him trying to defend New York City and their awful #COvId19 record to @RandPaul
Thank you Senator! pic.twitter.com/jkGm1BBwrO
— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) September 23, 2020
NYT headline: “Republican Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Biden” -The report delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.
Sorry, that not what I read.
• Senate Report Slams Bidens For Conflicts Of Interest, Possible Criminal Activity (JTN)
A year-long Senate investigation concluded Wednesday that Hunter Biden’s efforts to cash in on foreign business deals during his father’s vice presidency raised alarm among U.S. government officials, who perceived an ethical conflict of interest and flagged concerns about possible criminal activity ranging from bribery to sex trafficking. The long-awaited joint report by the GOP-led Senate Homeland and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees delivered several blockbuster revelations less than two months before Election Day, suggesting Obama administration officials ignored clear warning signs about ethical conflicts and possible extortion risks involving Joe Biden’s family. Perhaps the most explosive revelation was that the U.S. Treasury Department flagged payments collected overseas by Hunter Biden and business partner Devon Archer for possible illicit activities.
The so-called Suspicious Activity Reports flagged millions of dollars in transactions from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, a Russian oligarch named Yelena Baturina, and Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing’s communist government, the report said. Senate investigators have yet to determine if the FBI or others investigated the concerns. “The Treasury records acquired by the Chairmen show potential criminal activity relating to transactions among and between Hunter Biden, his family, and his associates with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals,” the 87-page report disclosed, confirming an earlier report in Just the News. The report, citing U.S. government records, also raised concerns about possible ties to sex and human trafficking rings.
“Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring,” the report said. [..] Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson told Just the News Wednesday morning that the sheer volume of suspicious activity in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings left the Vice President vulnerable to illicit influence or extortion. “The report raises serious questions that former Vice President Biden needs to answer. There are simply too many potential conflict of interest, counterintelligence and extortion threats to ignore,” he said.
Biden Ukraine
This interview is a disaster for Joe Biden.pic.twitter.com/oxqfWVRLgM
— The First (@TheFirstonTV) September 23, 2020
Of course you want the info. How can you not?
• Ron Johnson Requests Documents From Biden, Archer’s Attorneys (JTN)
Senator Ron Johnson has requested information from the attorneys of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer after a bombshell Congressional report on Wednesday revealed that the duo had received millions in cash transfers from foreign nationals. A years-long investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees revealed on Wednesday that, among other arrangements that raised red flags among government officials, Biden had received a $3.5 million wire transfer from a Moscow politician’s wife and Archer had received over $140,000 from a Kazakhstan businessman.
Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, told Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon on Wednesday that Senate officials had reached out to attorneys representing the pair for further information regarding the revelations in the Senate report. “We have sent an email to both Devon Archer and Hunter Biden’s attorneys requesting information,” Johnson said on the podcast John Solomon Reports. The senator said that officials have also extended the two men “an opportunity to come in for a transcribed interview.” “From my standpoint, I think it’s important for us to gather this information, you know, validate it, publish it,” Johnson continued.
Sidney Powell
https://twitter.com/i/status/1308833306889400321
Call him in, let him explain. Or do you want to give the Trump campaign free ammo? Or as Kunstler says: “If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?”
• Hunter Biden Received $3.5m Wire Transfer From Russian Billionaire (NYP)
Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow, Senate Republicans revealed in their report on the younger Biden’s work in Ukraine. Baturina is referenced in the 87-page report, which was released Wednesday, addressing her payment to Biden’s investment firm in early 2014. “Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her plastics company, Inteko, received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor,” it said in providing background on the businesswoman.
The report described her involvement with Biden as “a financial relationship,” but declined to delve deeper into why the wire transfer was made. The probe also found that Baturina sent 11 wires transfers between May and December 2015 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA, a tech startup that filed for bankruptcy in March 2019. Nine of those 11 wire transfers were first sent to Rosemont Seneca Partners, the investment firm founded by Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, before being transferred to BAK USA. All 11 transactions described the payments as “Loan Agreement” in the details section.
The report reads, “[B]etween May 6, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015, Baturina sent 11 wires in the amount of $391,968.21 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA LLC (BAK USA). Nine of the 11 transactions, totaling $241,797.14 were sent from Baturina’s accounts to a Rosemont Seneca Thornton bank account, which then transferred to the money to BAK USA. The 11 transactions all listed ‘Loan Agreement’ in the payment details section. “BAK USA was a startup technology company headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y., that produced tablet computers in cooperation with unnamed Chinese business partners. BAK USA filed for bankruptcy on March 29, 2019, with a reported loss of $39 million. These transactions were identified because of Baturina’s reported criminal activity,” it continues.
Paving the way for Hunter?!
• Judge Orders Eric Trump To Testify Before Election In New York AG Probe (CNBC)
Eric Trump must testify in response to a subpoena from the New York Attorney General’s office before the presidential election as part of an investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s company improperly valued real estate assets in official statements, a judge ordered Wednesday. Eric Trump, who is the president’s middle son and a top executive in the Trump Organization, must testify no later than Oct. 7, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled after a hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court, where Trump’s lawyers had asked to delay his deposition until after the election. Engoron noted that, “Mr. Trump cites no authority in support of his request, and at any event, neither petitioner nor this court is bound by timelines of the national election.”
Attorney General Letitia James’s office called the ruling a “major victory.” “The court’s order today makes clear that no one is above the law, not even an organization or an individual with the name Trump,” James said in a prepared statement. The attorney general is investigating whether the New York-based Trump Organization improperly inflated the values of several real estate assets on annual financial statements that were used to obtain loans, as well as to get economic and tax benefits related to those properties. James last month had filed an action with the court seeking Eric Trump’s compliance with the subpoena after she said that he had reneged on an agreement to testify this summer.
“If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?”
The climate is changing, all right, but not in the way that some think it is. The political climate is changing, and what has been a pestilential subtropical sink on the Potomac is overdue for that cleansing we’ve heard about. Weeks from now, as the fetid water subsides, the protective miasma above will dissipate and the people from sea to shining sea will finally get a good look at the landscape revealed and the pitiful, wriggling, dying life-forms of the order Democratica stranded on it.
Case in point: Joe Biden. Many will wonder in the days to come whether the sole and otherwise inexplicable reason for his elevation to candidate-for-president was a ruse to avoid prosecution — his own and others. The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just “point man” overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine’s entire political ecosystem — as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine’s politics was any of our business in the first place.
The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natgas company, Burisma. And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold US aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma’s sketchy affairs. Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier.
The impeachment fizzled, but the charges and the odor of the Biden-Burisma scandal lingered without resolution — all the while that Mr. Biden posed as a presidential candidate in the primaries. This week, two Senate committees (Finance and Homeland) are expected to release a joint report detailing findings of their investigation into the Biden family’s exploits abroad. It is expected to not look good. Also implicated are the State Department officers in the Kiev embassy who pretended not to notice any of this, pointing also to their engagement in further shenanigans around the Trump-Clinton election of 2016 — a lot of that entwined in the Clinton-sponsored RussiaGate scheme. Will the committees be so bold as to issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department? If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject? Does this finally force Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from what has been the most hollow, illusory, and dispirited campaign ever seen at this level in US political history?
4-4 really is dangerous.
• Trump Says Supreme Court Will Decide The Election, Needs A Ninth Justice (ZH)
Over the weekend, in the aftermath of Ruth Bader GInsburg’s death, we said that the “worst case scenario” for markets – a contested election – had become even more complicated as it now appeared that the US was heading into the most controversial election since Gore vs Bush with a SCOTUS that could end up deadlocked with a 4-4 vote should the election outcome escalate to the Supreme Court. It appears that the president agrees, because moments ago President Trump also predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the outcome of the November election and argued the Senate should confirm his nominee – who we already know will be a conservative woman – to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to break any tie. Trump said that “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important to have nine justices.”
Speaking before reporters at the White House, he continued, claiming that “this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it’s a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court,” Trump plans on Saturday to announce a nominee to replace Ginsburg, a liberal icon who died Friday at 87. Lawyers representing Trump’s campaign are challenging mail-in voting rules in a host of states, as a result of Trump’s claims that mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting on Election Day. As reported yesterday, there is a growing probability that the first major test of the new post-RBG iteration of the Supreme Court, which will soon have a 6-3 conservative majority, the GOP is planning to ask SCOTUS to review a major PA state court decision that extended the due date for mail-in ballots in a critical battleground state.
They must have found a way to let bankers profit even from this.
• Fed Prepares To Deposit “Digital Dollars” Directly To “Each American” (ZH)
Over the past decade, the one common theme despite the political upheaval and growing social and geopolitical instability, was that the market would keep marching higher and the Fed would continue injecting liquidity into the system. The second common theme is that despite sparking unprecedented asset price inflation, prices as measured across the broader economy – using the flawed CPI metric and certainly stagnant worker wages – would remain subdued (as a reminder, the Fed is desperate to ignite broad inflation as that is the only way the countless trillions of excess debt can be eliminated and has so far failed to do so).
The Fed’s failure to reach its inflation target – which prompted the US central bank to radically overhaul its monetary dogma last month and unveil Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (or FAIT) whereby the Fed will allow inflation to run hot without hiking rates – has sparked broad criticism from the economic establishment, even though as we showed in June, deflation is now a direct function of the Fed’s unconventional monetary policies as the lower yields slide, the lower the propensity to spend. In other words, the harder the Fed fights to stimulate inflation, the more deflation and more saving it spurs as a result.
In short, ever since the Fed launched QE and NIRP, it has been making the situation it has been trying to “fix” even worse while blowing the biggest asset price bubble in history. And having recently accepted that its preferred stimulus pathway has failed to boost the broader economy, the blame has fallen on how monetary policy is intermediated, specifically the way the Fed creates excess reserves which end up at commercial banks instead of “tricking down” all the way to the consumer level.
The Fed will have you covered.
• 46% of Americans Struggle To Pay Rent, Bills (NPR)
Jean was one of more than 3,000 people who took part in a new poll released Wednesday from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her story is an especially stark example of how pandemic financial stress is playing out. But the poll found many people reported problems with housing, health care and unsafe workplaces, and a high percentage of Americans — 46% — said they’re having “serious financial problems.” Nearly one out of three respondents had used up all or most of their savings. “Our surprise is how large the numbers are,” says Robert Blendon, a Harvard University public health professor who worked on the poll.
He notes that the poll was conducted during July, months after Congress approved an extra $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits that were still supposed to be flowing to people. Stimulus checks had gone out, too. And yet so many said they’re struggling. One in six households even reported missing or delaying paying major bills just so they could buy food. Blendon says it’s like the government sent 100 Federal Emergency Management Agency trucks into a disaster zone, but a lot of people never saw them or got help. “It’s just like interviewing people in a hurricane area and the people are telling you there’s no relief,” he says, when “it should be there.”
EU governments all committed the same mistakes. And brute force is not the answer.
• UK New Covid Restrictions Unscientific Mumbo Jumbo, Exercise In Futility (RT)
I accept my dissenting voice may not be heeded by the UK government, but when a former Supreme Court judge delivers a damning verdict that the rules are ‘pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary’, shouldn’t they be listening? The UK has announced a fresh suite of draconian Covid restrictions, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson warning they could be in place for six months. But, like all previous attempts, the new rules are worse than useless. You’ve all heard the new rules by now, so I won’t analyse the details of what the individual implications will be. Just as poring over a government white paper based on astrology would be pointless, tepid nit-picking within the nascent pseudoscience of ‘Covidology’ is an exercise in futility. It’s also an immediate acceptance of the quacks’ terms of the argument.
‘The rule of six’ could be ‘the rule of seven’, the pubs could close at midnight or 10pm, level 4, 5 or 75 could be enforced – none of this would make any difference. Nor is it acceptable. The fiddled numbers, the fake compromises, the newspeak – all of it is misdirection. In a nutshell, this doubling down means nothing less than the acceleration of an end to the free, decent life to which all human beings are born entitled. Only a total return to normality should be demanded, and it’s non-negotiable. Just ask former Supreme Court justice Lord Jonathan Sumption, who has been making waves this week with his scathing analysis of the government’s madcap plot. He’s dubbed Johnson’s ‘rule of six’ “pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary”.
It’s pointless, he says, because, without a Stasi-like secret army of citizen spies, it cannot be enforced. He is correct, of course (although I don’t consider the likelihood of an army of snitchers quite as unlikely as he seems to). It’s arbitrary because it’s far from universal – people mix in much larger numbers in schools and workplaces, on public transport and in the streets, all of which is essential. And it’s unnecessary because the increase in positive tests is being driven – as Health Secretary Matt Hancock is so fond of reminding us – by the young, to whom the disease poses relatively little threat.
Rapid test them 2x a week. What are you waiting for?
• Feared Coronavirus Outbreaks In Schools Yet To Arrive (WaPo)
Thousands of students and teachers have become sick with the coronavirus since schools began opening last month, but public health experts have found little evidence that the virus is spreading inside buildings, and the rates of infection are far below what is found in the surrounding communities. This early evidence, experts say, suggests that opening schools may not be as risky as many have feared and could guide administrators as they chart the rest of what is already an unprecedented school year. “Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of transmission in the schools. In colleges, there have been. We have to say that, to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
This does not mean the risk of contracting the coronavirus is zero. Poor and inconsistent reporting in many parts of the country means that experts do not yet have a full view of the situation, and most schools have been open for only a few weeks. It’s also unclear how closely the incidence of the coronavirus in schools is tied to policies in schools such as mandatory mask-wearing. Most of the nation’s largest districts opened with fully remote teaching, so the data are largely from smaller communities. And the pandemic may grow worse as flu season and winter approaches. But the fact that large swaths of the country opened for in-person school while others did not offers the more cautious districts a chance to observe how things have gone elsewhere in charting their next steps.
On Wednesday, researchers at Brown University, working with school administrators, released their first set of data from a new National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard, created to track coronavirus cases. It found low levels of infection among students and teachers. Tracking infections over a two-week period beginning Aug. 31, it found that 0.23 percent of students had a confirmed or suspected case of the coronavirus. Among teachers, it was 0.49 percent. Looking only at confirmed cases, the rates were even lower: 0.078 percent for students and 0.15 percent for teachers.
I know a few people who will refuse any such implant.
• DARPA-Funded Biochip Implant to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Market by 2021 (MPN)
The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ BARDA. The revolutionary breakthrough came to a Canadian scientist named Derek Rossi in 2010 purely by accident. The now-retired Harvard professor claimed in an interview with the National Post that he found a way to “reprogram” the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.
These molecules are called ‘messenger ribonucleic acid’ or mRNA and the newfound ability to rewrite those instructions to produce any kind of cell within a biological organism has radically changed the course of Western medicine and science, even if no one has really noticed yet. As Rossi, himself, puts it: “The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing.” [..] As early as 2006, DARPA was already researching how to identify viral, upper respiratory pathogens through its Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) program, which led to the creation of the agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) [..]. In 2014, DARPA’s BTO launched its “In Vivo Nanoplatforms” (IVN) program, which researches implantable nanotechnologies, leading to the development of ‘hydrogel’.
Hydrogel is a nanotechnology whose inventor early on boasted that “If [it] pans out, with approval from FDA, then consumers could get the sensors implanted in their core to measure their levels of glucose, oxygen, and lactate.” This contact lens-like material requires a special injector to be introduced under the skin where it can transmit light-based digital signals through a wireless network like 5G. Once firmly implanted inside the body, human cells are at the mercy of any mRNA program delivered via this substrate, unleashing a nightmare of possibilities. It is, perhaps, the first true step towards full-on transhumanism; a “philosophy” that is in vogue with many powerful and influential people, such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil and Eric Schmidt and whose proponents see the fusion of technology and biology as an inevitable consequence of human progress.
It’s getting beyond depravity.
• Assange Could Crochet And Play Bingo In Supermax Prison, US Prosecutor (SMH)
The US government has suggested that Julian Assange would not be held in solitary confinement and would be able to crochet and play bingo if he is extradited and jailed on spying charges. The revelation emerged at Assange’s extradition hearing underway at London’s Old Bailey which has this week been focussed on Assange’s mental health. His defence team has called witnesses to testify that he has Autism Spectrum Disorder, Asperger’s, anxiety, hears voices, is depressed and would take his own life if he loses his legal battle. The court has heard that Assange has withheld telling doctors his true mental state while detained in Belmarsh Prison because he fears being placed in solitary confinement.
Assange remains in custody while he fights his extradition arguing that his human rights would be violated. Psychiatrist, Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, has previously told the court that if Assange is extradited there is a “very high” risk the father of four would take his own life rather than serve out any sentence in a US supermax prison. But Seena Fazel, a professor in forensic psychiatry at Oxford University, who interviewed Assange earlier this year said that he found the prisoner to be “moderately depressed,” an improvement on the severely depressed state he accepted Assange was in as recently as December last year.
Fazel appeared for the prosecution. He disagreed with a psychiatrist called by the defence on Tuesday about the likelihood of Assange committing suicide. He said the 49-year old had shown himself capable of managing his own suicide risk, by taking medication, undergoing counselling and accessing support from the Samaritans – a British mental health charity. On Tuesday the court was told that Assange has made preparations for death, including writing farewell letters, receiving absolution from a Catholic priest and preparing a will.
Imagine having your medical record laid out like this in public, for reasons that have nothing to do with what you are -falsely- accused of. That, too, is a form of torture.
• ‘Clear’ Julian Assange Is On Autistic Spectrum, Doctor Tells Court (PG)
A psychiatrist has told the extradition hearing of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange it is “clear” he is on the autistic spectrum. Dr Quinton Deeley, a consultant neuropsychiatrist, diagnosed Assange with Asperger’s syndrome after witnessing a two-hour autism assessment and conducting six hours of phone calls with the 49-year-old in Belmarsh prison. Assange is fighting extradition to the US, where he is facing an 18-count indictment alleging a plot to hack computers and conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. Giving evidence on Wednesday, Dr Deeley, who also spoke to Assange’s parents during his assessment, said: “To my mind, it’s clear Mr Assange presents as a person with an autistic spectrum condition. “He’s an intelligent person, he’s learnt to adapt to some of those characteristics.”
The Old Bailey heard Assange refused to complete two components of the autism test, including a task to act out brushing his teeth and answering questions about his daily “self-management” or “self-care” routine because he found them “demeaning”. James Lewis QC, for the US government, suggested: “It’s highly unusual for people to refuse these tests?” Dr Deeley, who said he has assessed hundreds of people to determine if they are autistic, replied: “Correct.” He described Assange as “an intelligent person” who shares the characteristics of “many high-functioning people on the autistic spectrum”, including engineers and computer scientists.
Dr Deeley said he has “difficulty discussing his own emotions”, with a “primary focus on his own thoughts and interests” and noted a “failure to initiate or sustain” conversations. Assange’s mother, Christine, told the doctor her son as a child “had a preference for solitary play” but made a small number of friendships in his teens with “geeky” boys who shared his interest in computers, the court heard. The court also heard Assange’s close friend Suelette Dreyfus referred to his “Edwardian style of speaking”, such as talking about Coca-Cola as mead, “like he’s been reading Jane Austen novels”.
There are two precedents that did not get extradited for this reason.
• Doctor Diagnosed Julian Assange With Asperger’s Syndrome (Gosztola)
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, while detained in the Belmarsh high-security prison in London. This likely increases Assange’s risk of suicide if confined in restrictive prison conditions in the United States, according to a psychiatrist who testified at his extradition trial. Dr. Quinton Deeley, who works for the National Health Service (NHS), conducted an Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) test on Assange and produced a report. He interviewed Assange for six hours in July. Assange told Deeley he feared he would be held in isolation in a U.S. prison. He was afraid of the fresh indictment. He was also concerned about the fate of Joshua Schulte, who was held in harsh confinement conditions prior to his trial for allegedly disclosing the “Vault 7” materials to WikiLeaks. (Schulte’s case resulted in a mistrial in March.)
The U.S. Justice Department charged Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense. The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the U.S. government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world. In the cases of Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon, the U.S. government was blocked from extraditing them because the United Kingdom High Court of Justice (Love) and the British Home Secretary (McKinnon) recognized their Asperger’s syndrome would result in degrading or inhuman treatment that violated human rights.
Love was accused of hacking into systems controlled by the Federal Reserve, U.S. Army, and a number of other government agencies. McKinnon was accused by the U.S. government of the “biggest military computer hack of all time.” Edward Fitzgerald represented Love, and he is part of Assange’s legal team, and the arguments against extradition that Fitizgerald put forward in Love’s case are nearly identical to the arguments in this case. Particularly: (1) The mere fact of extradition and detention in the United States would be likely to lead to a serious deterioration in the mental health of Mr. Love (2) To the extent that suicide was prevented by Mr. Love being placed on suicide watch, the conditions in which he would be held on suicide watch, or in segregation, would lead to a serious and permanent deterioration in his mental health, which was also related to his physical health.
James Lewis, the lead prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Authority, which represents the U.S. government in this case, went after Deeley and attempted to discredit his diagnosis. He said Assange has written books, given speeches, and hosted a “chat show” for RT. Plus, no other psychiatrist who saw Assange diagnosed him with Asperger’s syndrome. “It’s possible to both have a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome and to demonstrate expertise and be authoritative and knowledgeable when talking about certain topics,” Deeley replied.
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