 Welcome to CNN Live's daily report on the extradition hearing of Julian Sange at Old Bailey in London. I'm Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Well, today was a jam-packed day of testimony. It's possible to summarize everything that happened. The court has only ended about an hour ago. I'm going to do my best. There are several issues here, all of them significant in their own right. The most complex and substantive part of today's testimony was by Carrie Shanklin, a civil rights attorney in New York who was extremely combated with the prosecutor Claire Dobbin. It was a masterful display of lawyers trying to outlaw each other, and Shanklin may have done that. As a layman, I'm going to do my best to summarize that, but the testimony began this morning with Nicky Haga, he's an investigative journalist in New Zealand. He testified like other defense witnesses have that Julian Sange took extraordinary precautions in redacting the names of informants from WikiLeaks documents before publication. Now, we again are on the issue of informants which the US has zeroed in on. They are only charging him with publishing those documents, although he's charged in numerous other counts of receiving and possessing defense information, classified information. They're zeroing in on this informant's issue, as we've been talking about. Haga spoke about how important WikiLeaks releases were in his work as an investigative journalist, particularly in a book called Run about the conduct of a New Zealand special forces in Afghanistan that led to an inquiry in New Zealand. Later, he was cross examined about that because this inquiry said that they got some things wrong. Of course, the prosecution tried to present that to James Lewis as if he got it all wrong, but Mr. Haga was very good about taking his position that in fact most of what they had recorded was found to be credible by the inquiry in New Zealand and they got only a few things wrong. But he credited WikiLeaks, of course, for the enormous help that those releases in Afghanistan gave him in his work and he worked directly with as a partner with Julian Sange. He was given about 400 documents, I believe, to go through and redact himself. The prosecution tried to say that he wasn't qualified to do redactions and he didn't spend enough time only a few days on these hundreds of documents and Lewis pointed out that Stefania Morizzi, the Italian journalist, will be testifying. At some point, has said in her written testimony that she and another journalist spent nine months on 4,000 documents to try to show that Haga really didn't do such a good job. Again, trying to portray a Sange as somebody who was recklessly publishing this information, Haga pointed out first that in his interactions with Julian Sange that he wanted to say that the portrayal of his character in the media was completely at odds with his time spent with with the Sange, that he was a humorous and serious person and it's completely foreign way he's being portrayed and that he even had problems with his colleagues and friends and a family to convince them that a Sange was not the monster that he's portrayed as, but I guess it wasn't very successful. The documents that he used again were redacted and the prosecution tried again to bring up this dinner and I find this really something because if you recall on Wednesday, John gets the German journalist who was at this dinner at the Mauro Restaurant in London where David Lee and Luke Harding, which is along with Gordon Cromberg, Zaffer David, clearly the favorite reading material of the prosecution because they refer to it repeatedly throughout these first two weeks, which concluded today, Friday, that at that dinner, apparently, a Sange said it didn't matter if sergeant, sorry, informants were killed, they deserved it. Now, Gertz was not permitted to be questioned on that. That was a key moment in testimony on Wednesday, so it still hangs out there in the court that a Sange may indeed have said that. Of course, Gertz has signed a statement and he said in press reports that a Sange never said that, but he was not allowed to put that on the record for the benefit of Judge Vanessa Perreza. There was also the issue of the frontline club that Lewis brought up on a press conference in which a Sange said to the words to the effect that a weak leaks is not obligated to protect other people's sources from unjust retribution. A part of that sentence that a Sange uttered that the prosecution obviously did not want to highlight. Again, they want to portray him as a reckless man who didn't care about people dying from the publications of weak leaks. On cross examination, it was brought out that there have been cases where the press has published names of informants, when those informants were known to have been adjunct provocateurs who had committed crimes. Hage responded that that was a sharp edge of the question of journalism. They didn't really want to get into it, but the point was made that in certain circumstances informants, the press has published the names of so-called informants when they were misbehaving in egregious ways. Northern Ireland was pointed out by the defense attorney to show that that had happened before. Essentially, the issue of the redactions or not was at the heart of the testimony of Hage and the government again is trying to portray a Sange in a certain way and the defense is saying that it's not true that in fact it was David Lee and Luke Harding who first put out the password to the unredacted State Department cables that were then published first by Krypton in the United States and the next day was released by WikiLeaks. They're not accepting that. The government says that a Sange put out in August another 133,000 documents. They alleged there are informants' names in that. The defense has said that those were not classified documents and apparently he's not being charged for those. So that was Hage's testimony. Again, going over this familiar territory of the informants still being the main issue for the government and everything that the defense has said, of course, has not changed the opinion about that. So this is a key, key part of our hearing. We then broke and when we came back this extremely interesting witness, Khaled Almazry, was actually trying to log on through the court's online video link system and he was unable to. And I think it was Mark Summers who said he regrets that something like Zoom could not be used for this testimony, rather than this more highly complex court video system. But Hage did not respond to that, but it was put out there. So instead of him testifying and, in fact, James Lewis, the prosecutor, jumped to his feet to object that he should be testifying it all, saying that it was irrelevant, clearly the information that we're going to hear, I'm going to tell you about Almazry, was not something that the United States or British attorneys want to be heard in a British courtroom. It's rare to hear the kinds of absolutely proven horrendous misconduct of the US government in Afghanistan in particular, and in this case of Almazry, that we heard in this courtroom today. Alexander McCurris, the legal analyst who's been joining us on our weekend shows, said that in, again, Northern Ireland there have been cases where British government and its army has been accused and in open court of crimes. But this is something I think on a larger scale, because we're dealing with many different situations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and here, Almazry. So to hear the US really raked over the coals by British lawyers in a British court is something you don't read about very often in the mainstream press, except when they published a weekly story back then when they partnered with them. Usually the role of the mainstream press, unfortunately, is to not ask those kinds of questions or, in effect, cover up illegal behavior, even criminal behavior by the government, and that's what we heard about. And that's the case of Almazry. In fact, there was an Arabic interpreter in the courtroom and R.H. or dismissed her because she was not needed. So instead, Mark Summers in defense turned red, the testimony of Almazry. And this is a man who, as Lebanese born, had become a German citizen after 11 or 20 years in Germany, was an upstanding citizen, according to Mark Summers. And he was on holiday in Macedonia in June 2014 when he was taken off a bus and kidnapped by CIA agents and sent, eventually, to a Black site in Afghanistan where he was sodomized and tortured. And that was according also to the testimony of John Gertz on Wednesday, the German reporter. Gertz actually found these CIA agents who did this in his investigation. And he wrote a cover story in der Spiegel that led to a German preliminary investigation, sorry, parliamentary investigation, and ultimately the filing of an arrest warrant by prosecutors in Munich for this CIA team because of Almazry being a German, they had jurisdiction over that. But the warrant was never issued for the United States. And now Almazry never understood why until he read the WikiLeaks' cables, the diplomatic cables, in which it was clearly written there, in black and white, that the deputy head of the German, of the U.S. mission after Zoom in Munich, but I'm not sure that wasn't said where, made de Marches to German officials that U.S.-German relations would be seriously affected if they went ahead and tried to arrest the CIA men. Now the thing about Almazry was that he was tortured and brought back and released on Albanian territory in the middle of the night. He didn't know where he was. He thought he was going to get shot in the back. So all the hearts that they perpetrated on this guy. And he was released by the U.S. under condition that you're not speak about this to anyone. Well, he violated that. He tried to get accountability. And he finally came to a German lawyer who started to help him. But he was being ridiculed and ignored and not believed in Germany, the things that he was saying in public, until Gerritz the Spiegel reporter got on the case and did that front page story in his very important magazine, Spiegel, of course, in Germany. And as Summers said, as a result of the cables, it's now known, but it wasn't known at the time of the warrant that Germany bowed to the pressure not to seek extradition of the 13 CIA agents. In effect, the U.S. threat also put an end to a parliamentary probe into this. Summers says that the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in December 2012 sided with the Almazry story and said it was true. And that the grand chamber of that court actually mentioned the WikiLeaks cables were relied upon for them to make their judgment. Subsequent Freedom of Information Act lawsuits in the U.S. revealed that the CIA Inspector General had investigated Almazry's story. This is a guy who's completely innocent who was on a vacation and was thought to be some kind of an insurgent and was tortured and then just released and said, don't talk about it. But the CIA Inspector General, their report that was revealed in a FOIA only determined that Almazry's torture and detention were unjustified. Even the CIA admitted this was some horrible mistake. So Almazry, with that information, started a lawsuit in the Eastern District of Virginia, which Summers pointed out is the same court that has issued this indictment for Assange and where he would be tried if he goes to the U.S. is Almazry sued the CIA there and that court in Alexandria. The CIA agents involved as well as those who controlled them. But guess what? The U.S. attorney in that court in Eastern Virginia declined to pursue the case. So here was a CIA report that showed it was wrong and it shouldn't have happened. So he tried to sue on that, but the U.S. attorney declined to pursue the case. This is the Justice, Freedom and Justice for All. Casual again, another good example in the United States covering up misdeeds by, in this case, the CIA. So the ACLU initiated proceedings in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. That eventually led to the international criminal court taking up this case. They decided March this year to investigate Almazry's story. And the reaction of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he said extreme measures would be taken against the ICC and its prosecutors. And I'm quoting Summers here. Mr. Almazry said that without the brave exposure of state secrets what happened to him, excuse me, would never have been understood that exposure of state secrets, of course, by WikiLeaks. So here's an attempt by the defense to show the court what WikiLeaks does, what they do for a living and how they help this individual immensely in order for him to try to get justice. So at least to clear his name, this is one of the main arguments of the defense, what WikiLeaks is actually all about. We then had a break and next up was a statement read on behalf of Jennifer Robinson, of course, is one of the lawyers in Sandra's team. And Robinson says in this statement read by someone else of the court that she was invited to a meeting at the Ecuador embassy back in August 15, 2017. Sandra still in the embassy then. And at this meeting was a sitting U.S. congressman at the time, Donna Robrocker. And he came on behalf he claimed of President Donald Trump to offer a deal, a win-win situation that Assange's prosecution would not go ahead, he may even get a pardon if he was able to tell the United States or give evidence that of who the leaker was of the Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 presidential election, clearly with that knowledge Trump would be able to say that he wasn't Russia, if that's what Assange said and he has publicly said it was not Russia, but they wanted to know who it was. And Trump would be able to win politically and also Robrocker, who was quite friendly towards Russia for a congressman, that he felt that there was a new Cold War tensions between Russia and the U.S. that resulted from this entire Russia-gate scandal and that by Assange giving up the name of who the source was that could lessen tensions and get Trump off the hook, it sounded like a good deal except Assange refused and he refused because he won't give up the sources, which is paramount when you're doing the work that WikiLeaks does, if any journalist dealing in these times with stories needs to protect their sources. So he refused. The U.S. prosecutor then stood up and said that while he believed that Jennifer Robertson's words were true, and what happened at that meeting, he did not accept what Robrocker claimed that Trump had sent him to effect Donald Trump later. He rejected that, denied it, said he was gone, he went on his own, he said, I believe he hardly knew Robrocker, met him a couple of times. Who could believe Trump on a story like this? But that was put on the record there and I think obviously to try to show again the political nature of this entire case from the United States, if they were able to make a deal, if the president was going to give him a pardon if he gave up the source, you know, well how serious are they about this kind of a term from a criminal law perspective to cross-secure drill in Assange. The last part was again the most substantive part. This was the resumption of testimony by Kara Schenckman, a civil rights attorney in New York and an expert on the Espionage Act, he's engaging in a study right now, a book he claimed the first ever real history of the Espionage Act in book form. And Schenckman had talked yesterday about a lot of previous cases, but the cross-examination by Claire Dobbin had been interrupted because they ran out of time and it was resumed today and it was quite a session and it was a lot to digest here and we do my best to summarize it. The key points are that Claire Dobbin, the prosecutor, was again saying very clearly now that the Section 793E of the Espionage Act does not preclude the arrest or the prosecution and arrest of a journalist for having unauthorized possession of cross-examination or defense information and or disseminating it, just having it is enough to be charged under the Act. He was trying to simply establish that but by doing that they have given up the pretense that Assange is not a journalist and that this is not going after the mainstream press, you know that this is not something sorry that threatens the mainstream press, I mean because this is the only thing that I've been saying all along since the first indictment came out right after Assange's arrest in April 2019. That's the only thing they really had him on that's technically still on the books in the Espionage Act. Of course most fair-minded people studied that realized that conflicts with the First Amendment shouldn't be in the Espionage Act but it's never been successfully challenged in court to have it removed from the Act. But this inherent conflict with the First Amendment runs through the entire history of the Espionage Act and the many many cases that Shenkwin brought up and that Dobbin discussed with him in this very intense couple of hours of testimony in the afternoon here on Friday. She was trying to establish that journalists can be prosecuted under that section of the Act and as a layman myself I would have said yes. She was looking for a yes and no answer and it seems on the face of it we would say yes because it doesn't distinguish who would be liable any person who anywhere in the world by the way because of a 1961 amendment which made this a universal jurisdiction not just the US territory. Anyone can be prosecuted for unauthorized possession of defense information. So again I would have said yes but this is he's a lawyer. Mr. Shenkwin is quite a lawyer and he outlawed her and to some extent I think he would simply not give her an answer yes or no that that's the case. He said that it was not simple and that there were many this what's the case law that he cited and also scholarly audit opinions to show that that's not so simple. She brought up the Pentagon Papers case now that was 1971 the New York Times and the Washington Post have been given injunctions not to publish any more of the Pentagon Papers and they stopped and sued and within a few days it was rushed to the Supreme Court and the court ruled the majority opinion was that the government could not exercise prior restraint there that is not they cannot tell a newspaper order a newspaper not to publish them however there was dissenting opinion in that case which said after publication the government could prosecute a newspaper for publishing defense information once it was published that goes back to 793 E which is that anyone who possesses an unauthorized way defense information and or publishes it can be prosecuted so that possibility was there and in fact we do know that Richard Nixon had a grand jury in Boston to go after Hendrick Smith and Neil Sheehan of the New York Times the two reporters on the Pentagon Papers case and it only collapsed when Ellsberg's phone had been tapped his psychiatrist office had been invaded by the plumbers to try to dig up dirt on him but Nixon went pretty close to to prosecuting a newspaper there so so Dobbin was trying to use that dissenting opinion to say isn't it true that the government can prosecute a journalist based on what was said in the court and again Shankman did not give a very easy answer he was quite argumentative and it got pretty heated between them he was simply saying that that case at the time the New York Times Pentagon Papers case was the focus of the case was prior restraint not this issue and it wasn't argued in that case so he didn't want to comment on it wasn't argued that wasn't he doesn't even know why those dissenting justices put out that bit of information but it basically warned Mike Gravel the senator Mike Gravel to whom Dan Ellsberg gave a copy of the Penningham Papers to put in congressional record the very night before the Supreme Court decision that we're talking about Gravel was in the well was in the basement of the Capitol and he read the papers broke down crying while doing that that also led to another case that came up in today's testimony Beacon Press case now Gravel brought the papers to Beacon Press a small publisher part of the Unitarian Church in Boston to publish as a book and Gravel knew that he was protected by the speech and debate clause on the Senate inside the Senate or anywhere where a legislative act is taking place you could talk about anything you wanted to any press information could not be questioned about it could never be arrested but once he went outside a legislative act to publish this classified material the Penningham Papers as a book he was liable to prosecution Nixon decided not to go after a sitting senator but we heard from Shankman today the details of what happened would be Beacon Press that they the FBI was sent there I knew this from Mike himself Mike Gravel told me about when we worked on a book together 2008 the FBI was sent there and bankrupt almost bankrupted this small publisher um and this was a point he also made shankman that it wasn't necessary because Dobbin at one point tried to say well the fact that there's never been a prosecution before this it's kind of contradicts the whole purpose of their indictment of assange but she said because there has never been a prosecution of a journalist before under seven nine three e means that there's been the governor's exercise restraint until now and he disagreed with that in fact he just agreed with everything that she said and he said no because even if it's not been prosecutions it's had a very adverse effect on journalism on many newspapers the ones they went after were barely almost bankrupted because of the legal fees and it sent to chill throughout the industry that they know the government can go after them and the reasons the government us government's gone after newspapers throughout the whole period of the espionage act is because they use those publications opposed the policy of the administration or the administration itself or or revealed misconduct by government so i mean how is this different one must ask from any jim pot dictatorship where they shut down media because they reveal wrongdoing or because they write things that the leader doesn't like about themselves i mean this is this is reminiscent of the 1798 tradition act of adams second president who didn't like what was being written in these pamphlets and of course it it only lasted until the end of the administration jefferson had it repealed and refunded the fees that the fines rather than people who were at charge i mean it's the same spirit of that you are not supposed to expect in the so-called democracy that united states itself has and great britain does too and he talked about a couple of other cases i think are worth mentioning a black newspaper african-american newspaper chicago defender fdr when i sent the fbi after them and charged tried to charge them with conspiracy then there's the case of america which is an interesting one this is a publication that had only about 2000 readers but was widely read inside powerful circles in washington and that after the second world war there was a debate in the state department amongst the china hands the people on the china desk about how to uh what u.s relationship with china should be with with red china after the of course after the revolution in 1949 and some of the debate was so fierce that some members of some state departments leaked documents to this small publication americia to most of their case in this general argument at the state department and the government went after them and tried to prosecute them and also accuse them of conspiring and shanklin wisely pointed out that this were elements because he was asked by dobbing that the case that you're with we're hearing today against julien son there's nothing to do with any of these he vehemently disagreed with that he said that there was they were trying to establish conspiracy between the editors and their sources and uh in the beacon press case he saw a similar recollects in that uh just the way we can this is trying to create a library of documents to that the public has a right to know secret documents that beacon press was trying to publish the entire four volumes of the pentagon papers um that senator grovel brought to them so he saw lots of similarities in this constant theme of going for political reasons going after his publications large or small that threatened an administration um at one point when he talked about beacon press i think is when claire dobbing said um that this is frivolous and nonsense it got really testy there at other points shanklin was telling her i don't want to tell you how to do your job but you know and we're wasting the court's time and my time and this is not relevant to what my testimony is and i don't know what you're allowing a questioning and one point he said i know where you're going with this you're going to try to ask me this and let me answer it right away and venezia beretzer cut him off to let the question be asked so it was um highly a tense exploration of various cases another one i should mention is the marison case this is the man who was working with the navy and he leaked some photographs uh that were apparently classified to jane's defense weekly in the uk not to the soviet government not to china but to a newspaper and and he was arrested for that and he his argument was that he had first amendment protections because it was just he was just leaking to the press and the judge russell was the lead judge i guess because he said that it uh he did not have first protection and protection rights that it would be an abuse of the first amendment that he had no right to give those documents away uh he was a government employee and of course he was charged under the espino jack he actually served two years if i'm not mistaken uh it was only on cross on redirect rather than that that the defense attorney i think it was summers for charl i'm sorry i don't remember um pointed out that the other two judges on this case there were three judges wrote a dissenting opinion saying uh that they didn't agree with russell this with judge russell that there was no first amendment defense here so this this type of argument was uh underscored what shankman was trying to get across while he held his phone to his face because the audio was bad that these are not simple open and shut cases black or white that there's enormous dissent and disagreement within the legal community with an academic community about the meaning of these espino jack prosecutions of the media there've been a whole slew of them none of them have gotten to the point where we are with julien assange and the and that fact even though dob and tried to say that proved restraint by the government but that fact uh is is destroyed that argument is destroyed by the fact that this prosecution has gone forward against julien assange and this is what makes this so historic it's never been a case like this of a journalist being pub being and they are admitting basically he's a journalist thinkers they're saying uh and i thought correctly that the that the espino jack allows prosecution of a journalist because of this unbelievably broad and there was a huge argument over the vagueness of broadness of the espino jack is so broad that anybody who can uh who comes in possession of classified information that means you if you read a download a wiki leaks document that's still considered classified and you email to a friend you have essentially broken the law as well and dob and tried to argue that martin in that case study was established that the government would not go after people like that but only certain uh people who were really damaging that damage to the national security interests of the u.s had to be proven but again that's not what the espino jack says this is what law uh in cases that dealt with the espino jack builds up over time and this is why shankman was saying that well you can't give easy answers to this these are no binary answers to these questions no legal scholar who's aware of this uh who studies the espino jack could give you the binary answers that you are looking for there was another argument that was interesting and that was uh she dob in uh went after shankman because he apparently in his written testimony had said that the executive branch basically uh is writing the law on this on the espino jack because they determine what is classified and what is not classified they determine what is national defense information which does not need to be classified so it's so broad it's so broad that in this case the u.s governors decided that naming informants even if there were some inadvertent ones and totally ignoring all the testimony about the care that sounds put into it but naming informants was was the informants names themselves were defense information and therefore they could charge them on publishing those few names or some names that came out despite all the efforts that were made not to publish the uh the names of informants so uh she really took issue with the fact that uh shank and shankman were saying that in essence the executive branch which has no role in making law of course it's the judicial it's the sorry the legislative branch that does that that the executive innocence in essence was making law by saying what is classified and what's national defense because that's some of the pitfalls of this broad confusing incomprehensible as marxon was called it yesterday espino jack the government could do basically what they want and it's politically motivated as we've seen from these other cases and clearly they're he's trying to say shankman that this is a politically motivated case they made a decision at the highest levels not at the department of justice but in the white house and the attorney general took instructions and they already made statements session said that they were going to go after assange as paio did when he was cia director so uh it was very clearly laid out again and only a very close-minded person on that bench would not understand how complex this issue is how fraught it is how dangerous it is for press freedom and also this it's not been proven yet how national security of the united states was harmed by any of this this is a key point i think we're probably going to hear more of that in the weeks coming up but that has not been established yet either in fact we saw how the people of iraq and afghanistan and mr l mazary was harmed by the united states and that the revelations by wiki leaks helped this man's life and and helped the public to understand what their government is doing i won't get into the long argument that they didn't suit about the rules of engagement and whether uh because uh at the end uh uh mark summers i believe read out the testimony of dean yates yates was a 20 or 30 year reporter with borders and he was the bureau chief and fagdad in 20 in 2007 april when the events of the collateral murder video took place when two rodas journalists were killed and yates was lied to uh he later found out why because the wiki leaks release of the video that the government lied that this was a firefight and that uh you know the pilots thought that the camera of this word is photographer was actually a rpg and when yates saw the video just like when mazary saw the video just like we've heard in other testimony when wiki leaks released matters of public interest they're making this clear in this case what wiki leaks does that he understood he was lied to and he's only recently in the this year yates came out and he put his statement on the record in the court as testimony vernessa berets have tried several times to block summers from reading this because asan has not been charged with releasing the collateral murder he has been charged with receiving and obtaining and receiving the rules of engagement without which you cannot show that that was a crime i mean you could look at that video and pretty much understand that that was a crime there would hardly be any military's rules of engagement written down anywhere in the world that would say you can open up fire on civilians anytime you want but the having the rules of engagement prove that the rules of engagement were violated in that instance that was not known until asans leaked uh sorry published a rules of engagement and that video so he was able to get that on the record uh it was a long long day uh again the defense for a fair minded person i think made certain gains uh it was the it was a difficult uh slot between dobbing and shank went up there and the enormous amount of uh case law scholarly opinion uh cases that were discussed but she was simply trying to say that a journalist can be prosecuted under the espionage act and shank was saying well not so fast because the constitution is the law of the land and that's part of this issue too in other words no law is really set in stone and he even said in testimony yesterday that if these things are black and white he'd be out of a job that's what lawyers do he'd go through the enormous gray areas in the law and try to fashion arguments so it was a wild day in court flurry of activity uh the weekends upon us the people in the court will rest but we'll put together a weekend show for you at fact two of them one we can't discuss yet because it's a barcode but we're going to have our regular show uh on saturday to wrap up this week's events and i can announce that two of our guests are daniel ellsberg depending on papers a whistleblower who leaked depending on papers who testified on wednesday he will appear on our show and on the show to discuss that with him and the rest of us is john pilger the famed australian filmmaker and journalist and we've also invited a few other guests so please tune in that will be uh on saturday we'll release the details timing etc in different parts of the world and then we have this other video so we've got uh we need that coffee so please give us the five dollars that i asked for yesterday if you could please ground around this one of our videos got over 3000 views all in our over a thousand we're not asking for all thousand of you or uh but a few of you if you can't and pledge five dollars a month to our patreon page cn live that is patreon.com backslash cn live and we will see you on saturday for our wrap-up show so four sort of news and cn live this is joe laurea reported