 If you are a consumer of independent news and the first place you should be going to is consortium news and please do try to support them when you can. It doesn't have its articles behind a paywall. It's free for everyone. It's one of the best news sites out there and it's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades. I hope that with the public's continuing support of consortium news, it will continue for a very long time to come. Thank you so much. Contrary to serious money. Welcome to CN Live, Season 2, Episode 16, Extra Edition, Extra Edition. I'm Joe Laurier, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Boss. Today's guests are Daniel Ellsberg and John Pilger. Week two of the resumed Extra Edition hearing of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has ended at Old Bailey, with a strong case having been made by the defense against sending him to stand trial in Virginia on espionage and computer conspiracy charges. Despite a succession of defense witnesses that undercut the prosecution's argument, it doesn't seem wise to conclude that Assange's team is winning the case. While magistrate Vanessa Borrecha seems to be more even-handed as the hearing progresses, one can still not shake the impression that the case has already been decided against Assange. There have been some bizarre moments in this hearing. A coronavirus scare shut it down for a day and a half. Prosecutor James Lewis accused the judge of guillotine him with her time limits. The intrusion of a US TV report on Assange emanating from the computer of witness Eric Lewis. It turned out cleared the courtroom. But there has been a lot of substance, especially in the past week. We learned that the US government says a journalist is not precluded from prosecution under the Espionage Act. This was a key change in the government strategy. It had previously said Assange is not a journalist. And they appealed to the press, the government did, that they were not the target of this case. The government has been zeroing in instead on Assange's alleged cavalier attitude towards releasing the names of informant. Despite testimony from a parade of defense witnesses, some who worked closely with Assange that he took every precaution to redact the names of these informants. A key moment this week was the testimony on Wednesday of Daniel Ellsberg, depending on papers whistleblower, who said he redacted no names from the papers. He refuted that any informants have been harmed by weekly releases. He accused the government of cynicism and feigning concern for the informants when they refused Assange's request for help in redacting them. Ellsberg also made a key point about how far the US has fallen in trying to hide its assassination and torture programs. Daniel Ellsberg is joining us live now from California. Dan, welcome to CM Live. Glad to be here. Thanks, Dan, really for joining us. You said numerous times that the US does not have an official secrets act because of the First Amendment. I think the US should not have one because of free speech protections. But we learned this week the Trump administration has no qualms about using the Espionage Act, I guess, as a journalist under Section 793E, which criminalizes unauthorized possession and or dissemination of defense information by anyone, journalists included. Until that's challenged constitutionally, it remains in the Espionage Act, whose provenance begins, it started with very similar language from the 1889 Official Secrets Act in Britain, which passed through the 1911 US Defense Secrets Act, and then into the 1917 Espionage Act. As long as that language remains, Dan, don't you think that the US really does have the de facto Official Secrets Act? Well, it's the first person American ever charged under the Espionage Act for giving information to Americans. It's led me as a layman, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a defendant. It's led me, though, to study the history of that act and how it's been applied ever since. Looking back at the earlier legislative history going back to 1917 and later, there are many senators who voted for the act who asserted that they did not want a British type Official Secrets Act, and we're not voting for that. Nevertheless, when you look at the language, especially of paragraph E, 18, 793 paragraphs D and E, when you look at, that's the only law I can roll off like that because I had a history with it. And E actually was added for unauthorized persons having access to the information, whereas I was under paragraph D, I did have authorized access, as did Chelsea Manning, by the way, the most material. That was really added, few people know this history, to be able to get future Whitaker Chambers, not to go through that whole history, but to be able to charge someone like Whitaker Chambers who had that and was holding that information for a few hours in a pumpkin, in his case, even though he was not authorized to have it at all. But there's no question that the language of that not only covers journalists in principle, impossible as anybody who holds and retains that information unauthorized and or gives it to an unauthorized person. That doesn't apply just to journalists as well as officials who might give the information, it applies to readers, just as well. If someone reads in the paper of the New York Times, we're withholding the identity of this person who gave us this, because this information is classified. Once they've been warned that it's classified, if they were to show that newspaper to their spouse or fail quote in the words of the act, to give it to an authorized person, they're as guilty as anyone under it. So the overbreath, the broadness of this is obviously an offense against the official Secrets Act, I'm sorry, against the First Amendment. It's in line with the Official Secrets Act and Britain. But the Official Secrets Act of Britain, I believe in 1971 or earlier, would almost certainly have been judged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court if it ever addressed that. In fact, our First Amendment is a major way that distinguishes our polity, our form of government, from that of Britain, Imperial Britain. The idea that the idea, one of the major things was to oppose the idea of criticizing the government as a form of sedition, even treason. They wanted to get away from that and limited the notion of treason in the Constitution, so it couldn't be broadened except by constitutional amendment. However, that wording has always been there and for 50 years now, 49 to be exact, since 71. I've been warning journalists that they should acquaint themselves with the law and the constitutional aspects of this in preparation for having it used against them, but more importantly, to wage a campaign to change that. In Congress, through educating the public and so forth, they haven't done it because up until now, the act has only been used against official whistleblowers, people who are either currently officials or had, like me, been earlier officials with the clearance and who are violating their promise to keep that secrets when they came to realize that holding that promise, carrying it out, meant condemning innocent lives or endangering the Constitution. So all of these further, most of the earlier whistleblowers who have been tried under this, were patriots who felt that their country should do better and be better. And however, because the Espionage Act was not written to get whistleblowers, it was written for spies who give information secretly to a foreign government, especially in times of war. That's not one where the motives of the leaker, the spy, bear up very much in extenuating circumstances for a jury. So the law is a strict liability law written that you can't talk about motive or reasons for doing something at all. That makes an entirely unjust and inappropriate to use against whistleblowers, if any law should exist. But if there probably could be written a law for leaking classified information, that would pass constitutional muster for a reasonable or even liberal justice of the Supreme Court. The Espionage Act is not such a law. They can't be tried justly under this. And it would have to be changed or rescinded in order to have a law that would be fair in terms of the First Amendment. However, what has kept district judges and appellate judges so far and the Supreme Court has never been willing to address the issue. The Samuel Lillian Morrison case, 1985-6, was brought up on appeal in the Supreme Court and they refused to hear it. So they never have done that up till now. And by the way, you can't count on the current court to take real account of the Constitution, sufficiently the First Amendment if it did go to them. So I'm not in a real rush to see it go to them at this point. I'd rather see Congress change the conditions of these charges. But they've said, okay, it may be overbroad in that it could be used against readers or journalists or publishers, but the government restrains itself. It hasn't done that. So against officials, they say it's plausible enough that there should be an official sequence, even though this one manifestly is unfair to the whistleblower, but they left it. What's happening here now, and I don't think the press has recognized this, is that this is a direct assault on the First Amendment, in applying it to a journalist or a publisher. I don't understand the reasoning or the motives of the journalists who have said, Julian Assange is not one of us. He's not a journalist. I don't know why they're saying that, you know, what they gain by this foolish statement, since he obviously is performing functions of journalism, not presenting relevant truthful information to the American public, which is what they do at their best. But in any case, it's very clear that if he is extradited and prosecuted under these terms, and under the Espionage Act, by the way, as it stands, he would be convicted and probably subject to a very large portion of the 175 years he is facing. I've faced only 115 years, so things have gotten even worse in that respect. But in this case, now there's no question it is, it would be a British Official Secrets Act, should be unconstitutional, I would say, but it would mean that no journalist in the U.S. who uses classified information, which happens every day or every other day, would be free of prosecution for life and more than that, if Julian Assange, a non-American, a foreigner, Australian citizen, and now also Ecuadorian citizen, can be extradited for prosecution under these charges, no journalist in the world is safe from life in prison in the United States. So the very possibility of democracy or a move toward democracy, which depends on a free press or an independent press, and not, by the way, just a responsible press. I think it was Justice Black who said a contankerous press, an adversarial press, an irresponsible press is absolutely necessary as a foundation for any kind of democracy. When they ask whether this is a political prosecution, I would say that what's at stake here is the very foundation of politics in this country, the question of what kind of government we want, whether we want an autocracy, a dictatorship, or a republic. That's a political question, I would say. And to hack away at the First Amendment, as this does, is the most ultimate form of political prosecution here, to basically aim to changing our form of government. And I would say that Donald Trump, like Dick Cheney before him, is a domestic enemy of the Constitution. In the terms of the oath that everyone takes on this, he believes in a different form of government, an autocratic government without an independent press, what he calls the press, an enemy of the people. He wants to destroy that enemy. So the argument of the courts that this is not a political trial of prosecution, I think, is simply absurd. Tan, it's hard to over-exaggerate what you're saying. It's absolutely in a stark situation that is a determinable kind of system. We're going to live under the Unitary Executive, it's one that Bill Barr has pushed that goes back to Cheney as well. John, I'd like to move to you before Elizabeth and Alexander begin to ask you questions. You've been in the courtroom. Tell us about the treatment of Jonas on what you've seen. Well, I've never seen anything like it, and I've reported from a number of courtrooms all over the world, and not all that long ago, I actually looked through some archive footage of the Stalinist show trials. I'm not saying there is a direct equivalence, we're in different eras, but there's something very similar about the sense of them. The difference is, I noticed in the Stalinist show trials, the so-called defendant actually stands freely. He will be in the dock, but he does have his so-called lawyers nearby him. That's denied to Julian. In the court that he's in at the Old Bailey Court 10, right at the top of the old building, it's a modern court. Julian is confined in a corridor in which you can't really, he couldn't really turn that easily. He can just turn around, hear his guard. His guard sits a few chairs away, and I'm told that it's thanks to the benign nature of this guard, that the guard doesn't sit close to him and order his movements. But for Julian to talk to his lawyer, which is normal practice in any normal court, he must get down on his knees in front of this glass wall that's in front of him, and try and make a sign to the people whose backs are to him. So all the court, except for the judge, have their backs to him. He can, he's mostly successful in doing that because one of his legal teams is forever doing this to ensure that Julian makes contact with them. But he can't really discuss with his barrister his concerns because the barrister is right at the front of the court, so he must send notes up to him. He can send it through a chain of about four people. But again, this contortion that he must speak into this slit in the glass, the lawyer or whoever happens to be taking the message is like that against the glass. And so the messages are passed, usually on post-its, all the way to the barristers who are arguing his case at the front. This is a terrible, extraordinary spectacle to see this happen every day. I don't think it would be possible if someone who is unable to kneel on this hard surface writes for the day. His knees must be quite appraised at the end of it. So that's, but his day, it's all part of his day. His day starts at five o'clock. He's woken in his cell where he's solitary, confined at Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison. He has strip-naked, strip-searched, x-rayed with, I'm told, a portable x-ray machine. He is shackled. He is presumably allowed to shower before he dresses and at some point he must have some form of prison breakfast. But he goes through at least three checks as draconian as this before he gets into what his partner Stella Morris has described as a sort of tall coffin-like. I think you described it, Joe, as a refrigerator. It looks like a large refrigerator being delivered. And in that is Julian. It takes at least an hour and a half, sometimes longer through the worst traffic in London, from way down in the south of London to the Old Bailey. So that's at least three hours a day. He spends in what is basically a windowless box. There is a window, but to reach it and to look out, he has to stand up while it's in motion. And he arrives at the court in what condition? I don't know. I'm always astonished whenever I've seen Julian in Bill Marsh prison. And as long as I've known him, astonished at the man's resilience to be able to carry on through this physical and mental ordeal. And so once in court, he's then imprisoned in this glass. It's not exactly a cage. It's a glass corridor. That's his day. But as I understand, he compares it with what his days have been. And that is solitary confinement with for many, many months without a laptop, without any intellectual stimulation, being imprisoned next to people with very serious mental problems. For a long time, he was in a cell next to a man who screamed through the night. And in the midst of this, when I last saw him, his black sense of humor was actually still intact. But he talked about it being one flew over the corpus nest and described these terrible incidents in a kind of mocking way. But there's nothing in the slightest funny about really what is now happening to Julian. And yet throughout the day, he's forever taking notes, trying to pass these notes to his barristers. And yesterday, he stood up and made a wonderfully full-froated protest. Basically, the fact that Khaled al-Masri was not allowed by this judge to give evidence. And his voice wasn't even allowed. We had the charade of an Arabic interpreter trying to connect him up in Germany as if Germany was on the moon. And this ridiculous situation went on for three quarters of an hour. You know, was it contrived? I would say almost certainly. So finally, the interpreter was dismissed. We didn't hear al-Masri. Al-Masri was prevented by the judge anyway from appearing. So Julian stood up and protested this. And it was good to hear him strong a voice, quite eloquent, actually, in his outburst. But this is an ordeal. This is a show trial of the worst kind. The due process has been replaced by a kind of due revenge. It may, I felt yesterday, I felt almost a little bit optimistic that perhaps they think they've gone too far now. Perhaps this trashing of British justice in one of the oldest courts in the world was just taking it a little too far. Because this judge who has showed such personal animosity towards Julian, who is her facial expressions, have been a kind of spectrum of dismissal and sneering towards him, was allowing some things to talk. When Julian spoke out, instead of as she usually does, warn him that she would throw him out of the court, she let him speak and then simply told him to sit down. So this extreme, which this court represents, may have touched its limits. Where that goes from here, I don't know. John, as a journalist and a filmmaker, do you feel that one of the reasons the press seems to be so failing in its duty to cover this might be because they know that they're not going to face backlash, because they know they're not going to basically go against the political narrative that's pushed by powers that be. Or is there some other reason that you feel they're not covering it, despite the clear danger to the press that this case holds? Yes, I think that's it. I think we've, and I have been guilty of this. I think we have a very romantic idea of the press. And I have to say in the United States, when I've lived and worked in the United States, this romantic idea of the press, the Fourth Estate, is a very powerful part of American political life. And it is in Britain too. But I'm starting to get a little weary of hearing how the impact of this trial on a free press. There is no free press. In my own country, Australia, 70%, where you are, 70% of the capital city press is owned by Rupert Moldock. The rest are pretty much the same. In this country, Britain, this extraordinary trial, this landmark trial, this demonstrably, demonstrably political trial is being effectively ignored by the press, be it the BBC, the Guardian, as if it didn't happen. It reminds me of Harold Pinter's great speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize, that it simply didn't happen. It didn't matter. Therefore, it didn't exist. They're trying to make Julian into an unperson. Whether or not they succeed, I think depends on people like yourselves. Certainly, some of the witness, the expert witness, especially Dan Ellsbergs and John Groes is the German journalist. Well, all of them actually. The defence is winning hands down just on the quality of its expert witnesses. I so appreciate the way everybody deals with these retchered prosecutor English representatives of the US government as they play their rather pathetic games to try and trick people into saying, into not telling the truth, in fact. But that hasn't happened. It's a capricious, it's a cruel occasion. I think we can't emphasise that enough, nor can we emphasise that in so many ways, Julian Assange is now collective conscience in the same way that Dan Ellsberg was at a critical time. In the prosecution of that endless war in Southeast Asia, which I reported, people like Dan, people like Julian and a very few others are critical to our sense of decency, society's sense of decency. I'm frustrated by the fact that so many people don't really know what is happening in this courtroom. I'm not surprised by the way journalists regard it and misreport it and ignore it and can even continue to defame Julian Assange by the suggestion that he's not a journalist when in fact he is a greater journalist than most of them. Alexander. Yes, I was going to ask Daniel Ellsberg because I agree, by the way, with what you were saying that it seems to me that the prosecution case was trying at one point to get away from the subject of Julian Assange being a journalist. They basically conceded that one. They're now acting that he is a journalist, but they're going for him under the Espionage Act and they're saying that it affects journalists everywhere and it could be used against anybody who carries out investigative journalism. What struck me, there was a point in your testimony which really for me was incredibly important and that is that, of course, again, the prosecution is building up this argument about, you know, the witnesses, the people that he supposedly put at risk and you said, well, first of all, we've not actually had any evidence that he put people at risk, but we mustn't ignore the greater issue of what he exposed, the enormous war crimes that he exposed and it seems to me that this is ultimately the essence of this case. We're talking about a journalist who has exposed war crimes on a massive scale focusing on these narrow issues, should be seen for what it is using those issues to basically conceal war crimes. Well, I agree absolutely with that. I think that the list of achievements is not known, not widely known, even on Cablegate, which followed the revolution of the revelation of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, you know. Cablegate showed that basically the British army were making a mess of what they were doing in Afghanistan and were up to their own decks in criminal activities. It exposed what was happening in Sweden, that Sweden had been living a lie, pretending to be outside NATO and outside the American orbit for a long time. It exposed that Hillary Clinton had ordered diplomats to steal personal information, including DNA fingerprints, iris scans, credit card information from diplomat and tap the phones of UN officials. It exposed that Britain's endless Iraq inquiry was fixed to quote, promote, sorry, to protect US interests and so on. That's just a few of them. There's so many others. This was journalism running on with such extraordinary power and what made it different from other investigative journalism was that all of it was authentic. Having myself being, I suppose, an investigative journalist, I must say I started out in the term investigative journalist wasn't known, that was what a journalist was meant to do. Then it became an investigative journalist, but it's 100% authentic. That's a very difficult standard. That's a high bar. How do you achieve that? Well, you only achieve that if you produce authentic evidence. That's often difficult. You can produce a series of facts that make up part of a jigsaw, but what WikiLeaks has done is produced all this authentic stuff and it's done that including 800,000 files from Russia, which is seldom mentioned all over the world. We'd be here all night and morning talking about the sheer enormity of what WikiLeaks has done. This prosecution has been left with redaction as an issue. Redaction isn't an issue. It was as the Manning trial itself brought in, I think it was Brigadier General Carr, who had spent a year with the team investigating whether Manning's disclosures, basically the WikiLeaks disclosures, had led to anyone going into harm's way and he said, there are no specific examples. In other words, no. And as Dan himself made the point at his own evidence, 15,000 files held back. It's the set in the context of what WikiLeaks revealed. The numbers, I think Dan, you may have referred or alluded to this in your evidence, the recent study by Brown University that 37 million people had been displaced since the war on terror began and probably 12, there've been 12 million deaths. I mean, that's what WikiLeaks was giving us true evidence of, made horrifically vivid by the collateral murder video, which of course the prosecution is desperate as it tells every witness that comes on. Look, Assange is not charged with that. Well, he's corrected immediately and he's charged with the rules of engagement and this is the most vivid example of the rules of engagement. Either these are the real rules of engagement or rules of engagement being flouted. Look, my having sat through courts last year, having sat through much of this one, this is a case that should have been thrown out long ago. It demeans the law. It demeans this court every time it convenes. Not the witnesses, they actually give it a dignity. It doesn't deserve, but it should have been thrown out. I feel that I have no confidence that this judge will do anything but find that Assange should be extradited and that hope lies in the court of appeal, the High Court in Britain, where some real judiciary still reside. I understand. I've seen them in action occasionally. They can be very conservative, but occasionally one or two of them will express their own belief in the law that that's what they are there for. And I think that that's where hope lies. If that doesn't happen, of course, then Julian goes to the United States and will never see him again. Could I raise a question here of some of the people? I've been puzzled at the fact that the prosecutor is allowed or does one after another, ask one after another witness or tell them rather that Julian is only being charged with publishing. He is only being charged with counts of having not redacted, having failed to redact the names of some informants. Now, that's manifestly untrue. He is making a false statement about his own indictment that he's working with, the charges. And that's been pointed out by Edward Fitzgerald time after time. And I noticed he makes the claim I now see before witnesses, before me and after me and in my case. How is that he can keep saying that, raising that clearly untrue characterization of the charges against Julian? Well, the short answer to that, Dan, is that there's no judge to contradict him and a judge surely would contradict him right at the beginning. So it's left to Edward Fitzgerald, as you say, to contradict him. And of course, the judge plays no part in this, in any kind of serious judicial role, that he's allowed to go on with it. Well, then there's another point, a key when they emphasize these redactions of people who slipped through the redaction process. And evidently, some did. The charge against him, as I read it, was that he was peacefully revealing these names. Now, witness after witness has said, very compellingly in irrefutable detail, that enormous effort was taken, more by Julian than by the press, the Guardian, for example, which was pressing him to release these on deadline, on time, when Julian was saying, I need more time to redact, and was applying a heavier program to get them. So nothing could be clearer at the end, so far, and even long before testimony, and not from me, from the others, that he was not purposeful. He was the opposite. He purposefully was trying to keep these people from being revealed. So how they can even sustain that charge in the face of this evidence is not clear to me, and that's the heart of their accusation so far. And by the way, the prosecutor can come and give me, how can you say they were not in danger? Look at these names that were mentioned. Well, he's listing, you may have noticed, at several minutes' length. I had to sit there having been told that he was getting near the end of the testimony, his hour, so I wasn't sure I'd be able to answer at all. I asked him that. But he goes through all these names of people who might reasonably have been thought to be in danger, and might reasonably have worried about themselves, despite the fact that one would say that the test of the danger in the end is whether anyone was harmed. And rather amazingly, to my own surprise, there is no evidence, direct evidence, that anyone was harmed. And then Alexander, as you put it in, as you brought up here in the context here, we're talking about several hundred people who understandably felt some anxiety that was imposed on them by the failure of the U.S. government to lift a finger to keep their names from being published. When they offered the chance to redact, to tell the names they knew, as they said, they had a list of 120 people in defense, others in state, trying to find out and finding out whose names were used. They were asked to give those names, so they could be redacted. That's the opposite of purposefully here. They refused to do that. I can guess at some reason, there's none of which do them very much credit, but in any case, from their point of view, they were deliberately, purposefully, willfully, I think the word is willfully here, exposing those people to what they thought was danger or what the people might have thought was danger for other purposes, rather than take their names out of play. Now, all of this, as Alexander pointed out, in the context of a war, a war of aggression, a crime against the peace, participated in by Britain and others, in which millions of people were being harmed, not just put in danger, but were being harmed. You know, I have seen anyone notice on this absurd thing of the glass behind which Julian is being held, that there is a precedent for this. I haven't heard the word Eichmann. After all, there was a movie about him, the man in the glass box. And that's genuine. Now, who is Eichmann, a man who organized the extermination of millions of innocent people? Well, we're talking about a war that Julian was manifestly trying to shorten as well as to expose and to change the practices, but above all, to shorten a war in which the U.S. has killed more innocent people than were killed in Auschwitz. And I am giving the figure of 1.2 million people killed in Auschwitz alone. And we have, we have wrought about the death, wrongful death of more than that. So the irony of this situation is if someone who exposed the Holocaust, it's the one person to be sitting in a glass cage and that's not our past. Well, I do refer to, I defer to Julie, to John's point against me when I talked about a free press, an independent press. The truth is in our country, the only person who has been held accountable and went to prison for in connection with a program of torture which violated international law, domestic law, the Constitution, blatantly, this program of torture, the only person punished for that is John Kiriakou who exposed inadvertently by the way, the name inadvertently because he didn't think the person was still a clandestine agent and having had retired and it turned out he was still. But John went to prison for exposing that name of a torturer. So I say to you, yes, your point is well taken. The aggression in my country has been, I started out by saying derelict in addressing the secrecy system. I'll even give, if I may, to a couple of the journalists here, I guess, and let them see as to why they haven't addressed the whole abusive nature of the secrecy system entirely as a system of censorship. And that is that they live very well with it. Secrecy allows them to have scoops, exclusive leaks from an official who daily, hourly almost, will reveal secret information that serves their own reputation or their agency or their president's wishes. And they give it exclusively to one journalist. If it was open in a press conference, everybody would have it. But with it being secret, and this being a regular violation of the secrecy rules, I get my scoop today. Someone else gets it next week. And if I'm a good boy, I'll get another one eventually. So in this area, we don't have democracy. We don't have a republic. Surely Julian would be seen as having violated the British Constitutional Secrets Act open and shut here, especially after 1989, when they said no public interest defense after this. But what's the difference here? Britain has is a monarchy, not an active monarchy, but they have an empire. They have nostalgia of empire. They aren't really anymore. But their laws at the time of our Revolution or War of Independence we were trying to break free from to have the lack of an independent press makes the head of state a monarch, a king, a dictator, which in theory we don't want to, but it's what we have, especially in the area of military policy and defense policy. And it's a matter of getting away from that. And our Constitution, especially the First Amendment, does at least give us an ideal, an aspiration here of being a Republic. We have a court right now with five people and we have a president who call themselves originalists. They depend on the original Constitution. And I recognize that as meaning without its independence, without its amendments. They like the Constitution before it had the Bill of Rights, except for the Second Amendment on guns. And before it had, we now know the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments for citizenship and for civil liberties for citizenship for African Americans. And they prefer it without those and they're going to act as if it didn't have those. So we're trying to regain the Republican spirit that was at least proclaimed by slave owners to be sure at the time. But the amendments did get away from that in legality and then a Supreme Court took away that effect very much for the segregated South. I think we absolutely have jurists and certainly a president who wants to go back to segregation, if not to slavery. And only an independent press, along with people who are demonstrating the way they are bringing other pressures to bear. You need that combination and sources for the press, sources like Chelsea Manning, for example. Do we have a chance to recover that spirit? I think that's, I think that's absolutely right then. I often feel as one who, if you like, grew up in the British press when they spent a long time in other countries, especially the United States as a reporter, that there was a mythical free press and like many myths, it was partly true. And I think when you were prosecuted in the 1970s, in the United States, I put your prosecution and the church committee hearings as really the end of, if you like, open democracy. Open in a way that the influences of the post-war period, the 60s and particularly the 70s was the beginning of the end. Because from the moment that Reagan came to power and Thatcher came to power over here, things began to change. Began to change in so many ways. An economic war on people. A concentration of the media. All those newspapers across the United States like all those radio stations that television came across. That was a free press. Some of them weren't very good, but often they were. They were local. Some of them were campaigning newspapers. That existed in Britain and certainly existed in Australia. So the whole notion of being a journalist even at that level was a legitimate one. It may not have been wholly true, but there was always a chance. In other words, in the so-called mainstream media as we keep calling it, such a misnomer, there were spaces. I occupied in this country space in a national newspaper television. There were spaces for where journalism that disagreed, if you like, or went against the grain of the newspaper, even against the grain of the advertising was tolerated. That was part of the times. That was certainly reflected in the great work done on the BBC in the 60s and 70s. All that's gone. Those spaces have closed. They've closed down. There's still perhaps one or two here and there, but we have now, and what we're doing today is a form of a form of salmon cycle. We're reduced to a kind of distant journalism. This is the best kind of distant journalism. This is distant journalism. The other work that Joe does on consortium and Bob Parry before him, then that's wonderful, because it's exploiting this technological treasure of the Internet. But the old idea of the press, television that followed it and radio has gone, I believe, as homes to free journalists. There are a number of very fine journalists now, but they're all on the net. Most people don't know about them. We know about them. We look for them. We're not only being asked at universities or public meetings, we're still allowed to have those things. Where do we look? I'm really always surprised that they don't know about certain websites where there is free journalism, but that's where it's gone now. But the old media still has huge power and power to damage and destroy. If you look at the almost decade-long campaign of vilification against Julian, that's one of the most shaming periods in the history of, if you like the old press, the liberal press, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, they've all been in a lot. It was so it was such a relief to hear John Goetz's evidence. Here was someone from the liberal press in Germany, he's now with German public radio telling us the truth, speaking as journalists, as I remember, a few anyway in the 70s and perhaps later speaking, telling the truth. I think the world has changed and perhaps we need a fifth state now where journalism has having changed completely and that we bring in all kinds of people. This futile debate over whether Julian is a journalist or not, it was derogatory, most of it. But some people actually believed it. That should be in the past now and we should welcome people who can provide the extraordinary public service that WikiLeaks has and that recognition. It was just something I wanted to say which relates to what you were saying, John, about the way the case is conducted because this is incredibly upsetting because of course what is happening is that he is punished in the most cruel way, he's not been convicted of anything. Some of this is, frankly, I would call it torture, I mean it's torturous anyway. It is obviously calculated and planned the way you've described it. Now, we have of course various provisions in our law in England that are supposed to protect defendants and these laws come from international laws. We are party to the European Convention of Human Rights which outlaws torture which makes provisions for fair trials which talks about freedom of speech and the ability to pass information. We are also part of the parties to the various international conventions on torture. We've already had the United Nations rapporteur saying that Julian Assange is a victim of torture to which the British government has been complicit. Now, if you've been living in Britain over the last few weeks, you will know that there's been this huge hubbub about the British government changing international law, passing a law that's going to go against international law over its issue in Ireland and I'm not in any way disputing the importance of that but they're all saying that this is unprecedented this is remarkable Britain doesn't violate international law. We are violating international law now in the Old Bailey in one of our courtrooms right at the very centre of our legal system and of course you cannot have a free press, a kind of free press in any situation where law doesn't function and it seems to me that these two things go together so both, Julian Assange this case is so important at so many levels, firstly because it is a law about freedom of press it's a law that exposes war crimes but it is also fundamentally a case about the law itself and about human rights Well, can I comment on the very good that I totally agree but I want to draw attention to a difference in the legal situation in Britain and America there is not a difference in the legal issues as you pointed out relating to torture that the U.S. is subject to international law and domestic law and the constitution that makes it totally illegal criminal what Chelsea Manning revealed in part in Iraq I introduced Julian in London when he delivered the Iraq files to the press one of the things she revealed there was that there were hundreds of cases and she had even been in one herself hundreds of cases in which Americans protested giving Iraqi captives to Iraqi forces in the knowledge they would be tortured and they were in every case told don't pursue this any further don't investigate the international conventions on this make it clear that when a reasonable allegation of torture must be investigated must be prosecuted if it's found to be valid it was illegal to tell them not to pursue it or to turn them over as illegal and criminal as if we had torched them directly ourselves and nevertheless President Obama effectively decriminalized torture when he refused to prosecute any of the people who had manifestly taken part in it as a policy in fact he said he didn't want to look backwards well prosecution is looking backwards that's what the law does the criminal law does it doesn't look ahead to what you might do on the whole conspiracy sometimes but in effect he was decriminalizing torture but on another issue though there is a difference I'm told and that is this one of the prosecution people I saw in the records actually said at one point there is a necessity defense, a defense in the US on these grounds that what you did was justified to avoid a greater evil but sometimes called a choice of evils defense or necessity public interest defense that it was you said there is that that was flatly false by the prosecution that does not exist in the case of the espionage act now I was under the understanding that I mean I was aware that after the Clive Ponting case in which the jury had quite rightly taken account of a public interest defense that it was false and that was a very dangerous government to say that the battleship General Ben Guano had been attacked and destroyed sunk in the Faulkland's war because it was approaching the British ships and endangering them when in fact it was moving away from the British ships when he revealed that put on trial the judge virtually gave a directed verdict and the jury didn't agree quite rightly he absolutely did the right thing whereupon as you know Britain the parliament quickly passed an amendment to the official secrets act that there was no public interest defense that would be like the US however as you said they are in principle subject to the European Convention on Human Rights which does allow for a necessity defense and if Britain observed that he would have the right to explain his motives and what the impact was and whether these people had been in danger or not as opposed to the other people we were putting in danger by keeping the process secret in America he would not have that so it's a question of extraditing him to a country where he would not have the protection of the European Convention on Human Rights the US does not feel bound by that granted we have a president right now like Vice President Cheney before who doesn't feel bound by anything really the constitution laws international governments whatever but sometimes we have presidents that do take some account of that and by the way that has kept them from prosecuting journalists in the past who they hated Julian Sanchez is not the most hated person yes he is hated indeed but not more than if I may say I was or a lot of other people but they didn't prosecute because of the journalist me yes because of the blatant violation of the constitution so the difference here with Trump is that he doesn't care about the constitution and his base doesn't care about it and he will also bet that five of the court justices and now will not worry about it and if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is replaced by Trump in this one we will have a solid majority against the Bill of Rights essentially here and against other amendments to the constitution so I would say that is well worth pressing for the defense I'm not sure that he should have anyone in the world should have and that the European convention demands and that he would have in Britain it seems to me that would be a very strong case against extradition am I wrong I think you may can I just I think you may have a good point but I mean I want to make clear I'm not an expert on this but there was a case a couple of years ago which is the Catherine Gunn case a whistleblower who exposed information that in fact came out of the US which related to pressure that was being exerted by the US on UN Security Council members to support the resolution that would allow the US and Britain to attack you around so she exposed it and as I remember I'm not sure about this but I think this is right she defended it ultimately on the basis that she was exposing a violation of international law and that it was in fact a necessity defence she was actually making the necessity defence and in effect the British government decided literally at the door of the court that they weren't going to test it now in other words they pulled back they actually dropped the charge facing the judge on the first day now that was a different government that was the black government I think anyway it was an earlier time things may be harder now and of course there isn't the huge pressure on Britain that there is coming from the United States in this case so I am sure that the defence in this case the defence lawyers who are exceptional lawyers have looked through all of the incidents have got the case law worked out and we will see what they argue when it comes to the final arguments before Baritza and we will see what they take to the High Court if I may say I was I agree with you I was very close to the gun place because when I saw in the observer I guess it was on a Sunday I saw it thanks to the magic of digital communication here right away that someone had leaked an operational cable about the NSA national security agency to its counterpart GCHQ in Britain and I saw this is the level of secrecy that even I with 12 clearances higher than top secret I had had special compartment and clearance for the results of communications intelligence but not a clearance for the process of who is targeted and by whom and where and for what purpose and so forth so someone was leaking something of great secrecy on the one hand exposing themselves unmistakably to prosecution and on the other hand of great significance because as Liz as Catherine Gunn said when she revealed herself her purpose was to expose illegal methods to gain entry to legal war a criminal war now she was able to say that to the press and in court point out first of all she could not have said that in an American court because if she were on trial here the judge would do if I tried to say if I was in her position and I was with lesser material mine was only top secret Chelsea Manning's Julian Assange was only secret below that hers was at a much higher level but if I had said this was my purpose you know to the prosecution would say as they did in my case irrelevant objection and the judge upheld him totally the my lawyer eventually having tried to get it through in different wording said your honor I've never heard of a case in which the defendant was not able to tell the jury why he or her case she did what she did and the judge said well you're hearing one now well every defendant on the espionage act of a whistleblower and there have been a dozen or more than a dozen now so has had that same problem so she wouldn't have been able to say I was revealing illegal material and so she couldn't even say that but second rather than give the British government the British law too much benefit of it out here is why they why they dropped this they dropped it immediately after they learned from the witness list to be called by the defense the name was I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Wilkinson who is the highest legal officer who had resigned in protest over going into an aggressive war a war of aggression without a second resolution from the Security Council authorizing it and rather than hear that witness testify in court that the war was illegal they quickly backed off but I repeat that issue would not have arisen in American court at that point she wouldn't have she wouldn't have gotten off on that point so to extradite her to this is like kid is like what happened by the way to an Israeli court a military commission in secret for revealing the nuclear weapons being held by Israel including possibly H bombs kidnapped and prosecuted well strictly speaking Eichmann was kidnapped and faced but he was unquestionably said I will leap into my grave happy that I kill six million Jews and here we have a man being in effect kidnapped with the help of the British government to face charges that he was trying to stop a process of an illegal war in which millions were being made were killed and 37 million in the end in the Middle East made refugees is a mockery and I agree the defense lawyers here I'm sure are aware of all this I'm sure but as John said this trial should have been pushed out or this extradition should have been pushed out long ago I have an open-ended question and I apologize for the sound of a mower in the background next door but John mentioned earlier that Assange is our collective conscience and ironically the prosecution in this extradition hearing is portraying Assange is essentially without conscience is describing in this cavalier towards the redaction of informants names and we heard this week that an alleged Trump envoy basically offered Assange a pardon if he would reveal the source of the DNC and pedestrian emails in order to disprove Russia gate essentially and we heard that he refused to do so despite the fact that he was clearly being in his own interest and so I just wanted to ask for comment on that contrast so not only as it has been presented in the court but obviously by the press over the you know many years well before I do want to respond to that in one point my defense and the other people's defense that I know of does not hinge on a belief that Julian Assange judgments as a journalist we agree with in every respect we're talking now about in particular about 2010 where I did agree with him he's very controversial for actions in 2016 but which are different where I'll just say without specification I would have had different judgments in certain respects important respects but as I've said I would be making the same arguments if Stephen Bannon not to identify him further I'll just say a man I basically despise we're in the same position as a journalist for bright part news of the facing extradition and now in immediate cases just a risen John Bolton is facing apparently for publishing a book that had gone through a process of clearance by the State Department had been agreed and then another person came along under Trump and said no no there were classified things in this and he's being prosecuted for that I regard John Bolton as one of the most dangerous men in the world when he had power when he was under Trump in fact Trump has done many dangerous things but none more dangerous than appointing John Bolton as his national security assistant and in fact Bolton is in effect a whistleblower against himself in his new book because he's exposing extreme recommendations of crimes against the peace but he is exposing it and the public gets the benefit of seeing just how extremely dangerous his advice was to the president and I'm quite happy to pay for that in a book so I have I offer myself right here to not be a joke to his defense lawyers no he should not face prosecution for publishing that book whatever and coming back to Assange many people as John says for defamation that goes way back to 2010 and since then and others for real disagreements about his actions later in 2016 and I am one of those actually I'm a friend of Julian but I don't agree with all his judgment that has no bearing on whether he should be prosecuted or extradited for his current for these actions in 2010 or for that matter in 2016 well anyone has any more questions I just wanted to make one small comment about Julian being in that glass cage in an American court most common street criminal thug has brought in and he gets it maybe for the first time in his life to wear a suit and tie and he sits right there at the table with his defense attorney and he can confer anytime he wants and yet Julian Assange has put in this glass cage I just find that part of the most remarkable one of the more remarkable things about this entire case we've been over an hour now unless Alexander or Elizabeth have another question do you Alexander not not a question but just a point to what you just said that which is in fact there is case law seek a substantial case law brought up by the defense earlier in these proceedings about the glass cage the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly said putting prisoners in a glass cage in that way violates human rights it's contrary to article 6 and the country that does it most famously and notoriously is Russia and it has been repeated judgments about the Russians doing it and here we are we're doing it in the Central Criminal Court and we fought beforehand we did it in the Westminster Magistrates Court so actually just paid no attention to any of that at all Alexander I would like to ask a question about the issue of dual criminality obviously it has to be a crime in Britain and in the United States so the issue of a journalist an unauthorized possession and dissemination of defense material is that a crime in both Britain under the Special Secretary and the Espionage Act right now well the Espionage Act is an American law but I mean I would say personally that we have probably as Daniel Hellsberg was saying very elaborate laws about publishing national security information so probably the answer is yes but this is a area of the law about which I don't pretend to be an expert but it has to be a crime in both the United States that is a fundamental principle a fundamental principle of extradition if it's not recognized as a crime here what he has been charged with then it is not a crime that the British authorities connected with sorry, John or Daniel do you have any way in on that the language is pretty much the same and the Espionage Act when it comes to unauthorized possession by a journalist in this case for the Espionage Act was never intended allegedly to be an official secret site and was not designed to be one and it can't constitutionally serve one but it as an official secret site like Britain but it has been used as if it were an official secret site with respect to officials former officials essentially sources I would say and legal scholars have said that alone is unconstitutional but it is a more restrained youth in its past muster up until now they have not tried to imitate to use it as an official secret site like Britain's against a journalist or a publisher because Britain doesn't have an amendment that says Congress shall act enact no act abridging freedom of the press that was an American invention as far as I know and it was one of the things that distinguished us from the British Empire supposedly well it hasn't with respect to sources but it has it has up till now without that first amendment we would have been prosecuting that is the government would have been prosecuting journalists for the last half century so it has worked to that extent if this case goes ahead and then this administration with the help of journalists who continue to say oh it still isn't being used against the journalist you know we don't have to attack it so much constitutionally because it still isn't aimed at us that is an extreme short sightedness it's a kind of denial by the press that it isn't going to be used against us and if it is then tried we will have in full the British official secrets act the next step by the way would be applying it to people who simply retain and hold like a reader of the newspaper and actually there has been a case not unlike that the APAC case involved to what amounted to Israeli lobbyists but in any case it hasn't been officially held to be but they weren't journalists and they weren't they weren't officials and the case was the judge looked at that and narrowed the interpretation of the wording beyond the clear meaning of the words to say no you can only go against them with specific intent to harm the United States which is not the language of the act and but he did that to preserve the act from constitutional challenge and actually the Obama administration dropped that prosecution so this would be the first it would extend to people who were not journalists and not officials who simply possessed the information and obtained it and retained it like readers of the newspaper right now or in that case the APAC lobbyists and I certainly didn't hold a brief view of them as APAC lobbyists but as recipients of classified information yes I would have I approved the dropping of that case you know Claire Dobbin the prosecutor was trying to use that argument as well as the Morrison on some rulings say that the Espionage Act had been refined and Carrie Shankman the witness didn't actually agree with that but they were trying to say that Assange went way beyond the Morrison case and because he's threatening national security and damaging national security I don't see it I don't think any of the defense witnesses have seen that in fact he has helped the national security might argue of the United States by revealing the crimes John I want to know if you have last thing you'd like to say I probably will have to leave fairly quickly Joe and something is coming up you're wrapping up just your final thought yeah final thought well I think this is I mean we're rightly arguing about whether the law says something or not whether there's a proper sanction by the law or not but I think we're in an era of politics of political oppression and if you go back to when the Espionage Act was quite hurriedly enacted by Congress in 1917 you know President Wilson had no doubt what it was meant to do he described it as the firm hand of stern repression by politicians actually spoke the truth in those days but as I understand it it was used against those Americans who didn't like the idea of the United States joining Europe in at the end of the First World War and there's a great deal of dissent about it and dealing with anti-war activists dealing with people who spoke out dealing with conscientious objectors as I understand it was the aim of the Espionage Act and it's a 103 year history it's never been used against a journalist and this is the first time and it was utterly bizarre to listen to the Claire Dobbins the number two of the prosecution team in court yesterday trying somehow to prove that the Espionage Act was actually designed to stop journalists threatening the state and that the that it was used against Julian Assange only showed that it had been an enormous prior restraint by governments not to use it against journalists and this was perfectly normal that they were using it that's a kind of level of legal argument all this adds up to is lawlessness there is a lawlessness now in those countries that regard themselves that used to regard themselves as centers of international law or of course they weren't they were centers of international power but and Britain especially saw itself as a place where British justice would always prevail perhaps that was never true but even that myth like the myth I mentioned of journalism has gone this is an utterly lawless prosecution there is no new due process in the sense of the law let alone decency seeing it every day after day should be shocked that I think perhaps it was you Alexander who mentioned it that the laws can be just changed in a cavalier sense now the Brexit law is changed as far as Julian is concerned all the UN conventions that were expressed and the full weight of UN authority was expressed by the working party that condemned his incarceration and more recently by Nils Melser the UN reporter on torture is dismissed out of hand so that a foreign secretary can talk openly about Julian having been charged never charged of course but that's the media myth which he can now promote so the short of it is there is a lawlessness and we have to understand that now perhaps it's epicenter as far as we're concerned is now in court 10 in the old bay let's see how far we've come John you mentioned the Espionage Act was enacted to put down and stop the opposition to the entry into the first award of the United States many journals under the submission act part of it were imprisoned but part of that opposition to the US going to war in the first world war was the words of George Washington in his farewell address the US should not become entangled in the European affairs by the way that farewell address was given exactly on this date September 19th in 1796 and I want to draw attention to what Daniel said in his testimony how far the US has fallen in that the documents that Chelsea Manning leaked some of them were field reports that Dan said he wrote himself when he was at the embassy in Saigon and that he would never have written into their details of torture or assassination program that would have been held highly held secret to the highest levels of government and yet here the US doesn't care that thousands of people with security clients could read those reports that were briefly on that Dan Who are you addressing that to? You, when you talk about the field reports that you wrote that Chelsea Manning's field reports now mention torture whereas when you were in Vietnam that would never have happened would have been a much higher level A slightly different point I would have been astonished to read them in the Pentagon before I went through such things at that level certainly I did not mean to imply which you suggested that I was aware of torture in Vietnam that I would not have reported at the secret level I'm not saying that at all In Vietnam I would have reported it I would have opposed it to the limit and people who did that like Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert and another Colonel Hackworth who did report that they had run out of the service but they were obeying their oath not to obey illegal orders and that's what I would have recognized at the time There was torture going on but it wasn't made known to me actually my co-defendant Anthony Russo who had been interviewing prisoners became aware of the torture and when he wrote about that in a report to the Rand Corporation I am sure a factor in his being fired by the Rand Corporation later he joined me as a co-defendant putting out the Pentagon Papers So what I am saying though is given that it was happening why didn't I see it and the answer is you wouldn't put that in a secret level at that point now it's put out to not above a sergeant 100,000 corporals were now made available of the fact that we were handing people over for torture a clear violation of international law and American domestic law and they weren't worried about it it's become routine and why not because not one single person has been prosecuted either by military or civilian court it's not just an ordinary crime like, let's say, jaywalking or trafficking or something or even embezzlement or something like that we're talking about a law that's regarded as as I understand now is just co-greens one of a small category of acts so atrocious that no legislation can enable them it can't be made legal and yet it's being done in a way that as I say more than 100,000 people were made aware of it it was being reported by people who didn't want to do it hundreds and yet inside, and by the way that reached to President Obama unlike the Pentagon Papers that finally came out and did not apply to the then current administration Chelsea Manning and Julie Massange were putting out stuff that did extend into the Obama administration and I don't think it was a coincidence that they went after them as hard as they did because it was pointing a finger of criminality at the president that this was a clear cut policy and if President Obama or Trump before Ian Bush had been brought before the International Criminal Court of which they refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction I have no doubt they would have been convicted of a number of things crime against the peace as I've said but also war crimes including torture or the collateral murder the atrocities that were going on one of the things that Chelsea revealed is that the U.S. had refused to prosecute, failed to prosecute Americans who were clearly guilty in the facts of atrocities in Iraq meaning that the Iraqi parliament when that came out from WikiLeaks would not, could not accept the presence of American troops with a normal status of forces agreement which would make them immune from Iraqi prosecution with no Iraqi prosecution, no prosecution because what Julian revealed was that the Americans were contrary to their obligations under law refusing to prosecute these people and that meant that they couldn't that Obama had to obey the deadline that George Bush had set and that he had set for getting troops out of Iraq he wanted to keep them in longer but he couldn't because of these revelations so I thought of that as one of the significant consequences The word you used in your testimony was normalized that torture and assassination programs have become normalized that they would be in such a low level document that somebody like Chelsea Manning could have and it's something I wrote about comparing the Mealy massacre to the collateral murder video in the Mealy massacre and the whistleblower was actually listened to by Congress and created an investigation and there was of course Cali who was convicted in the collateral murder the whistleblower went to jail Chelsea Manning and Mealy the journalist as I heard she got a job at the New York Times got a Pulitzer got a job New York Times in the collateral murder the journalist is in jail right now and in an exhibition here in these regards I can't entirely agree that there's that big a difference the reporting in Vietnam at the field level was really extremely good for war reporting by the centers of centuries of war reporting they were able to grab a ride without asking any permission on a helicopter go with troops report what they were seeing the Pentagon learned better after that no longer can reporters do that they have to be embedded to establish rapport with the troops and in a reticence about revealing anything bad about them and we haven't seen that sort of reporting ever since but even then going back the reporting in Washington was terrible they did not reveal that we were getting into the war how was being conducted what the reasons were at all it was just terrible and it's terrible now and it was terrible in Iraq and I think I said in court I meant to I can't remember if I did or not had there been a Chelsea Manning at high level in 2001 and 2002 there would have been no Iraq war if someone at the level let's say of Lawrence Wilkinson chief of staff of the secretary of state had put out the information of what we were planning to do illegally I don't think they could have carried out that war and right now I'm saying right now we have a danger of President Trump provoking a war with Iran or conceivably even with North Korea and Venezuela, various people to get a rally around the flag effect to help him be re-elected and I would say without any question anyone privy on any basis to planning to provoke such an incident should certainly consider doing what Chelsea Manning did and that is informing the American people or what Catherine Dunn did almost exclusively about the war that was she did that there's almost no example of that and I'm sorry to say I'm not one somebody doing it in such a timely way as to prevent great harm as Catherine Dunn did but I would very much hope that someone would do that right now with a face prosecution yes they should try to be anonymous I would say but they should risk that in my opinion and I will certainly be strong in trying to in supporting their defense in that case also in the possibility of invoking or provoking martial law in this country which I think is in extreme danger in the next four months of the Insurrection Act and actually well I learned yesterday from Jeremy Scaehill listening to a broadcast of his something quite extraordinary the Insurrection Act that was for the use of American military forces to put down demonstrations and civil unrest in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act which forbids that but this is an exception if you declare a state of emergency an insurrection and calling that you can use troops President Trump has talked about using the Insurrection Act the last time it was used I just learned was under George H.W. Bush at the time of the acquittal of four people who had beaten Rodney King and by the way as I said at the time we saw more violence on the screen against an American in the beating of Rodney King than we saw in terms of the Gulf War because no longer were they able to show real combat and Americans being killed at that time by Rodney King and the acquittal of those people led to great demonstrations the Insurrection Act was used to put down the designation to be hest to the Attorney General named William Barr William Barr now I will guess there isn't one of our listeners are on the panel who is aware of that nor was I but we have him back in office and so we really have to worry about the use of the Insurrection Act and the policies that coming should let us know so there will be the utmost opposition to it thank you Dan John you have a final word or I'll need to go and now I can be very good so I wanted to thank you I think I've said enough thank you John and thank you Daniel Ellsberg for joining us John Pilger Alexander McCuris in London Elizabeth Voss and Vogan this is Joe Laurier for CNLibrary thank you for joining us and tune in next week when we have another wrap up on the third week of the Tradition Carol of Drilling Assange goodnight thank you guys that was the interplay between both of you