 Welcome to day 11 of CN Live's continuing coverage of Julian Assange's extradition hearing at the Old Bailey in London. This is Joe Laurier reporting for CN Live. Today, we had one witness on the stand for the defense, Professor Michael Koppelman. He is a professor emeritus of neuropsychology at King's College, London. Professor Koppelman and the defense attorney Edward Fitzgerald made an appeal to the media before the testimony began that we exercised judgment in what we were reporting. They were basically, they were speaking on behalf of Julian Assange's family and friends because an enormous amount of medical history of Julian Assange and his current conditions was discussed in great detail during this entire day of testimony by Professor Koppelman. So we are limiting what we say about it to what has already appeared more or less in public. For instance, we have already heard that Julian Assange has had a tendency towards suicide and that he's suffered from depression. So we're limiting to the reporting. To that, in fact, that was the bulk of the medical points that were made, except there was an enormous amount of detail that we've never heard before that we will keep from public in interest of the privacy of Julian Assange, the medical privacy as we all would expect for ourselves. So Professor Koppelman examined Julian Assange several times at Belmarsh Prison and he's made a report that became his sworn testimony. And he had said that Assange is suffering from severe depression with a loss of sleep, appetite, weight loss. And he found a high risk of suicide, especially if extradition appears imminent. Koppelman said he had a history of clinical depression and that the risk of suicide would increase if extradition was about to happen. Of all the efforts that the defense are making to present to Vanessa Barreza, the magistrate a case why Julian Assange should not be extradited to the United States, all the issues of the YesPrinage Act of the First Amendment has never happened before. Everything we've heard up until now, whether this is a political case or not, we heard yesterday President Trump directly ordered his arrest. The issue of the medical condition of Julian Assange might be the least controversial for a British court to decide not to send him to the United States. It would evade all these other very, very controversial and sticky issues if it can be demonstrated in an establishing court that Assange indeed is suffering this severe depression and is at high, high risk of suicide if you were to be extradited. But of course, the defense was not going to let Professor Koppelman get away with simply making these statements based on his examination and his long, long history in examining patients in neuropsychology. Of course, our friend James Lewis then had Koppelman on the stand for gross examination. As he's done with virtually every witness, he's tried to undermine his credentials, in this case saying that Koppelman was not a forensic psychiatrist, meaning one who works normally in prisons with prisoners, but that he was a neuropsychiatrist. Lewis had some very strong moments of getting back at, sorry, I'm sure Koppelman got back at Lewis and it turns out they know each other for some time, because Koppelman turned the tables on him when his credentials were being questioned, when he told a story of a few years ago, when he got an urgent call in his office, that his services and expert witness were needed in an extradition case, and the person making that call was James Lewis QC. So the court burst out into laughter, including Judge Vanessa Bereica, the first time I saw a smile on her face, since these proceedings began. She laughed, it was quite a funny inside joke I spoke with lawyers, that here was Lewis trying to undermine the credentials of Koppelman, and Koppelman talked about the time that Lewis called him up and said, you got to come over here because I need your expertise in my extradition case. So they go way back, it seems like, but there's no love lost for them on the stand this day. Lewis basically then went through a line of questioning that Kristen Hefferns and the current editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks told reporters outside Old Bailey during the lunch break, he found it appalling. And what Lewis was trying to do was to prove that Assange is faking it. And there's a term for that, and it's called exaggeration and malingering. And basically he went through, there's one of the strategies that Lewis had today to prove that Assange is faking this, that he has a motive to fake this, because as I said, this could be a reason not to extradite him to the US if he is determined by the court to be not mentally capable of enduring such an extradition, let alone imprisonment in a US maximum security under the special administrative measures, as we've heard discussed previously and also this afternoon with Coppelman. So he was saying, Lewis, that Assange when he first arrived at the prison refused to answer basic psychiatric questions unless he saw a lawyer first. He thought that was highly suspicious and also that he found out that Assange was reading the British Medical Journal. So he's trying to weave a tale that he's conspiring with his lawyers to come up with ways to pretend that he's mentally ill. Studying British Medical Journals to find out more about illnesses that perhaps he could fake. This is the line I'm questioning that he was going through. And it was a bit much, I suppose. However, there were two instances that Lewis brought up that took place some time ago in the prison. And one of them was an instance where in the report, the written testimony of Coppelman, Assange tells Coppelman that he had hidden a razor blade in his cell. And on another occasion, there were two cords that he was hiding in his cell. And both times they were discovered. The inference, of course, is that he may have been trying to use these to actually commit suicide, as Coppelman said he has a high risk of. The prosecutor, Lewis, was able to demonstrate that Coppelman did not really do his full homework here. He was unable to cooperate that with the court. It was only a self-described evidence or self-evidence of Assange. In other words, Assange told Lewis this and Lewis never went to the court to see whether he'd reported it or not. So as lunch ended, one had the feeling that Lewis was backed up on his feet, that he should have and did not cooperate this with the court. So he left open the question of whether this was a legitimate instance of whether Assange was making up. The government is not saying there wasn't a razor blade there, but they thought it could have just been a normal razor blade that are allowed in the prison, a safety razor. So that wasn't a great moment for Coppelman. But then Lewis started another line of questioning in which he compared the notes of other examiners, doctors, psychiatrists within the prison who had examined Assange. What they wrote down and what the testimony of Coppelman is. Now the thing was, and Coppelman made this point over and over again, is that the period that Lewis was looking at, about April of 2019, just as he got to when he was arrested, and the month of May when you first arrived at Belmarsh, until 31 May was the first time that Coppelman actually examined Assange. So the whole period was before Coppelman ever examined Assange. And it was before July 8 when as Coppelman went out, Assange went into solitary confinement in which his conditions, his depression, completely deteriorated. So we would have this thing where Lewis was saying, well, they said he was being friendly and cooperative and he went out and played pool with the other inmates. Is this a man, professor, who's thinking about committing suicide 100 times a day? Is this a man who's severely depressed? And of course, Lewis being a psychiatrist, sorry, Coppelman, and not Lewis, Coppelman was trying to explain to him that yes, you could be extremely severely depressed, go out, play around a pool and then collapse in your cell in complete misery. That he's seen cases like that, that there are moments of lucidity, that there are times when someone can be both clinically severely depressed as well as being able to be rational at times. And Lewis tried to prove that he wasn't, that someone who is severely depressed is not functioning. But of course, Coppelman knows this subject here a lot better than Mr. Lewis does. So in great detail, he explained that what it means to not function, that it's very rare to be someone to be so depressed that they cannot move, basically. But there is severe depression when people can be functioning in some respects, but that their memory, their intellectual capacity has been impaired. And this is what he diagnosed as a doctor from Drilling Assange. Now, going back to the question of whether he was faking it or not, there was a really special moment there for the defense when Lewis, who was quite proud of himself and his knowledge in other fields seems like tried to tell Professor Coppelman that Assange never had a test. There are tests, apparently, to see if somebody's faking it. A malingering test. And he tried to say that he never had one of these. And Mr. Coppelman said, yes, he had what was called a T-T-O-M. Of course, am I saying that right? Yeah, Tom, T-T-O-M test. And Lewis said, that's not a test to prove malingering. And Lewis said, the T-O-M stands for test of malingering. The first T stands for the name of the man who created the test. So it was a bad moment for Lewis, because in fact, he did take the test and he later said on redirect, Coppelman did, that Assange had had one of these malingering tests and had passed. So it was administered to him independently. He passed the test showing, at least in this instance, that he was not faking his mental illness, his severe depression. So Lewis had a couple of weak moments there, but so did Coppelman when it was shown that he could corroborate the story about the razor blade and the cords being found in the cell of Julian Assange. He never went to the prison to corroborate that. However, at the end, towards the end of the hearing, the defense attorney, Edward Fitzgerald, told the court that in fact, the defense would produce corroborating evidence. They didn't have it already to show that the story of the razor blade and the cords was true. So that's gonna be quite interesting to see if that evidence is brought forward. That would certainly bolster the argument of Coppelman and the overall argument of the defense that Julian Assange is too ill to be extradited and too at risk of suicide. There was another instance then where Lewis brought up Nils Meltzer. Now we've talked a lot about Nils Meltzer over the months. Nils Meltzer, of course, still the special rapporteur for torture at the United Nations. This is an independent position at the UN and he was brought in to see Julian Assange sometime, I believe, around that era of May of 2019, not long after he was in Belmarsh. He brought with him a physician and a psychiatrist that he made a report Nils Meltzer did in which he said that he was being psychologically tortured. This was based on the psychiatrist's input and he went further and said that four countries, Ecuador, the United States, Sweden and the United Kingdom had ganged up on Julian Assange, basically, and that they were threatening him with, see if I could find this exact quote here, that they are, that they're vexed the ganging up on him. Yes, that there's a campaign that Ecuador, Sweden, the US and the UK are contributing to a campaign of public mobbing, defamation and also powerful political insults, humiliation, open threats and instigation of violence and assassination. Now, Lewis spoke with this with the most condescending sarcastic tones and said, call this palpable nonsense. Now, I think we're gonna post on consortium news a compilation video that someone put together of American officials and some journalists on American TV over the last 10 years calling for the killing of Julian Assange. Let alone what Julian with Hillary Clinton said in a meeting where she said that he should be drowned. And everybody laughed in the room. And when I first read, I thought that was, she was joking too. But if you keep reading, she wasn't laughing and everybody stopped laughing. So I'm not gonna judge on what Hillary Clinton whether she meant it or not, but there have been numerous threats to kill Julian Assange by officials of the United States government. So for him to say that's palpable nonsense is frankly palpable nonsense. The issue though that Lewis was trying to bring here to our professor, Koppelman is that he was quoting from the Meltzer report. How he was cherry picking what he needed. How could he quote from a report that had such palpable nonsense in it? And Koppelman tried several times to explain that he didn't comment at all or used any part of the political part of that report in his testimony, but only that what was taken from the psychiatrist who'd seen Julian Assange in the cell that day with Meltzer. But Lewis continually tried to undermine the man's testimony by saying that he was aligning himself with the political position of Nils Meltzer. And the professor kept saying you have to interview, I'm sorry, examine in the court political experts. I'm not a political expert. This is not my expertise. I'm talking about psychiatry. So it was, I get, I think another weak effort on Lewis's part to try to tear down Koppelman's testimony by aligning him with Meltzer's political views, which as I said can be proven are not that off the wall in terms of coming together and sort of mugging Julian Assange several countries ganging up to torture him psychologically. I think we've come to the end of the report today. There was a, well, we can roll that clip. Is it all set up? Well, then that extraordinary. So my producer here, we're going out live. She's got the clip of these American officials saying that they think Julian should be assassinated. So when she sets that up, we will see that, again, this had nothing, no bearing on Koppelman's testimony. He wasn't going there. He's not involved in politics. He is a psychiatrist. He was only taking from Nils's report the psychiatric part of it. But Lewis insisted on linking him to what Lewis and the US government clearly sees as absurdity of Meltzer to accuse US officials of threatening assassinations. Are you ready to roll? Yeah. It's ready to roll. High tech terrorist. Cyber terrorist. Information terrorism. Shut it down. We're gonna hang you. We use a drone or something for bulletin' the brain. Illegally shoot the son of a b***h. Information warfare is warfare. And Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism. And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant. WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively. Should the United States do something to stop Mr. Assange? We're looking at that right now. The Justice Department is taking a look at that. I would argue that it's closer to being a high tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers. This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community. The head of WikiLeaks is not a particularly credible source in my mind. He's a criminal, and he ought to be hunted down and grabbed and put on trial for what he has done here. I think the man is a high tech terrorist. He's done in his arms. Yeah. He needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, he needs to change the law. Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract that maybe use a drone or something. You don't want to act panicked and have the president in his hands. You can act tough and say, if we catch you, we're going to hang you, or whatever. We heard some of that from Holder. Julian Assange is a cyber terrorist in wartime. He's guilty of sabotage, espionage, crimes against humanity. He should be killed. How is it that the WikiLeaks die remains free? Back in the old days, when men were men in countries where countries, this guy would die of lead poisoning from a bullet in the brain. And nobody would know who put it there. The way to deal with this is pretty simple. We've got special ops forces. I mean, a dead man can't leak stuff. This guy's a traitor, a treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be, and I'm not for the death penalty. So if I'm not for the death penalty, I don't want to do it. Illegally shoot the son of a f***. It's time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is, a terrorist organization whose continued operations threatens our security. Shut it down. Shut it down. It is time to shut down this terrorist organization, this terrorist website WikiLeaks. Shut it down, Attorney General Holder. So there you have it. That's our report for tonight, day 11 of the extradition hearing during Sange. Many of those were not politicians. They were members of Congress, Secretary of State, and leading commentaries like Rush Limba. People with enormous information. Joe Biden, and I think he's running for some office, I heard. We're going to leave you with that for the day 11. We hope to see you again tomorrow night. And remember, if you can, go to patreon.com. Backslash CN Live. We're asking for people to donate just $5 more, if you can, of course, to help these videos keep coming during the extradition hearing of Julian Sange, which is going to go at least one more week after this, it seems. And of course, we have every weekend a CN Live special report, looking back on the week previously. And we're going to have another good show this week. We've had two weeks in a row, defense witnesses who were testified, who then came on our show, Dan Ellsberg last week, and the private Tim, sorry, the week before. So signing off here is Joe Lawyer for CN Live. Go to patreon.com. Backslash CN Live. And please help us stay on the air. Good night.