Court to Rule on Julian Assange Extradition Today

The founder of WikiLeaks faces extradition to Sweden to face sex crime allegations. Julian Assange , who wears an electronic monitoring device on his ankle while in Britain, maintains that these accusations are politically motivated. The Press Association reports:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will hear on Wednesday if he has won or lost his high court bid to block extradition to Sweden where he faces sex crime allegations.
His lawyers asked two judges to rule that extraditing the 40-year-old Australian would be "unfair and unlawful".
The Swedish authorities want Assange to answer accusations of raping one woman and sexually molesting and coercing another in Stockholm in August last year.
Assange, whose WikiLeaks website has published a mass of leaked diplomatic cables that embarrassed several governments and international businesses, denies the allegations and says they are politically motivated.
The high court in London is having to decide whether to uphold or overturn a ruling in February by District Judge Howard Riddle at Belmarsh magistrates' court in south London that the computer expert should be extradited to face investigation.
Judgment will be handed down by President of the Queen's Bench Division Sir John Thomas, sitting with Mr Justice Ouseley.
The Assange legal challenge, which has attracted worldwide attention, centers on a European arrest warrant (EAW) issued by a Swedish prosecutor, which led to Assange's arrest.
His QC, Ben Emmerson, argued at a two-day hearing in July that the prosecutor was not a "judicial authority" entitled to issue the EAW.
The warrant had also contained "fundamental misstatements" of what had occurred in Stockholm last August while Assange was in Sweden to give a lecture, said the QC.

This extradition case is not  linked to the Australian's notorious work as editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, which has so upset U.S. authorities. Assange's organization, which enables the anonymous uploading of secret information onto its website, has published around a quarter million confidential U.S. diplomatic cables in the past year, embarrassing to the government and possibly putting some named informants in potential danger. If the court rules in his favor, he will walk free.

UPDATE:  The British judges have ruled against Assange, but he has two weeks to appeal his case to the highest court, according to the Associated Press. It is increasingly likely that Sweden will be his next destination.

Female Soldier Jailed for Leaking IDF Assassination Policy

Israel is punishing its kosher version of Bradley Manning, the fomer IDF conscript and online reporter Anat Kam, who was just sentenced to four and a half years behind bars, despite her lengthy secret house arrest.  But the journalist who reported on her leaked documents about the IDF's hit list, Uri Blau of Haaretz, is presently holed up in Britain -- in an odd echo of Wikileaks' Julian Assange.  He's not as defiant, though. In a plea bargain, Blau has returned all confidential documents to the Israelis.

So, what is the price of speaking truth to power inside Israel? The Independent of London's Catrina Stewart reports on this crime, its punishment, and the Israeli gag order:

Israel has sentenced a former soldier to four and a half years in prison for leaking classified documents to a journalist who used them to expose an alleged army policy to assassinate wanted Palestinian militants in violation of court rulings.

Anat Kam, 24, was convicted in February for copying 2,085 military documents on to a disc as she completed her mandatory army service and passing some of them to Uri Blau, an investigative reporter with the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.

She escaped the much more serious charges of harming state security after reaching a plea bargain.

 Her case provoked a domestic uproar - in part because she was held for four months under secret house arrest with the Israeli media banned from reporting on it, but also because it was viewed as an assault on the freedom of the press. The Independent was the first newspaper to report on Ms Kam's arrest.

In passing sentence yesterday, the three-judge panel elected to send a clear message to other would-be whistleblowers. "If the army cannot trust the soldiers serving in various units and exposed to sensitive issues, then it cannot function as a regular army," the judges wrote. They said that Ms Kam's motive for taking the documents was "mainly ideological". Ms Kam has already served nearly two years of house arrest, which will not count towards her prison term, and she received a further 18-month suspended sentence.

As a clerk in the Israeli Defence Forces' central command, Ms Kam stumbled across documents that appeared to point to the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank, despite a Supreme Court ruling that severely restricted such operations, determining that the army should arrest suspects if possible.

 The photo of Anat Kam, above, comes courtesy of SabbahReport, where reporter Gila Svirsky has probed into the scandal of the Shin Bet hit list, the gagging of the gag order, and the perils of whistle blowing.


Crossposted on Israelity Bites

WikiLeaks plugged

A bank blockade is about to staunch the flow of information from Julian Assange's notorious WikiLeaks website. According to reports in the Guardian and the New York Times, two of the newspapers that splashed the news from a torrent of secret documents uploaded to the website mostly by a low-level American soldier, Bradley Manning, publishing has stopped abruptly. What's lacking is, er, liquidity.

Julian Assange announced Monday that his pro-transparency hacker website will temporarily halt publication because of a cash shortage and will now concentrate on fundaising efforts. Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, Western Union, and Paypal boycotted WikiLeaks last year after the release of thousands of classified U.S. State Department cables and a threat to leak a big stash of documents incriminating the Bank of America. Consequently, the organization has lost about 95 percent of its revenues, Assange said at a press conference in London. Mortgage frauds hinted at in B of A emails were published on the related site Anonymous in March, but had less impact than anticipated. Arizona and Nevada had already filed charges for

a host of deceptive practices by Bank of America, including falsely advising people that they must be in default before getting a modification, promising modifications would be made permanent after an initial trial period, and pursuing foreclosures even after assuring homeowners that the foreclosure process was stopped.

Already, the death knell is sounding and commentators are writing obituaries for the website, like this one in the Atlantic. While Manning remains in solitary confinement, the Australian whistleblower Assange is out on bail in Britain.

Tweet

Wikileaks switches to Torygraph!

According to Luke Harding, of the Guardian, who recently co-wrote a quickie book about the Wikileaks saga, the Telegraph is nudging out the Guardian as Britain's public outlet and interpreter of Julian Assange's scoops. But how long this will last is anyone's guess. Negotiations between the Australian and the leftleaning British paper had been quite fraught, especially following the serialization of the book in the daily. Enter the Torygraph. Harding's tweet cited a rather anodyne piece in the Financial Times. The promised leaked cables exposing international banks and money institutions are expected to be released in the Telegraph now.