 Welcome to CN Live's continuing coverage of the two-day hearing of the US appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange, the imprisoned WikiLeaks editor. I'm Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Well today was the final day of the hearing at the High Court inside the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London and it was a day where we saw a final argument in the last 30 minutes of rebuttal by the US prosecutor James Lewis and the entire day was given over to the defense side for the argument by Assange's two lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald and Mark Summers, about why the decision of Vanessa Baraitza in January not to extradite Assange should be stayed and not overturned. Of course Baraitza decided not to extradite him because on the grounds of health that he's has severe mental conditions that would cause him to commit suicide very likely if he spent time in a harsh American jail in solitary confinement. So because those are the two pillars of Baraitza's judgment, everything else in this case, everything else WikiLeaks has ever done, publications, the Espionage Act, all of that. It took up many many fascinating weeks of the four week hearing on September 2020 that we covered without daily nightly videos and our reports on conservative news. None of that matters. It all comes down to those two questions. Is Assange seriously ill? Will he face isolation in an American prison? And that combination according to Baraitza who has was absolutely no fan of Julian Assange. But she was convinced that he is ill enough that if he were sent at the prospect of being extradited and facing those kinds of conditions and the special administrative measures, even at the Alexander detention center pretrial that those isolated sentences could very, very highly likely cause him to commit suicide. Based on that, she did decided to discharge him and not extradite him. I just want to mention one point why Baraitza was no fan of Assange. When the Yahoo! News story broke, of course it became a talk of a lot of people, even mainstream media, that the CIA had decided they had planned or had serious discussions to either abduct or assassinate Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. This was in 2017. That figured very strongly in today's hearing. But I just wanted to make the point about Baraitza that this knowledge of this plot was already in the court in September 2020 because two former partner and a former employee of Global, excuse me, UC Global, the Spanish security firm that was contracted by the CIA to spy on Assange 24-7 had been hired by the Ecuadorian embassy to protect Assange. These employees anonymously testified that the CIA was discussing assassinator and kidnapping him. But what the Yahoo! Story did was confirm that by talking to many former officials. Baraitza's reaction to that and her ruling to free Julian Assange, based only on the health grounds and the condition of US prisons, was to essentially express sympathy that she didn't know if it was true. But if it were, it was essentially understandable because the US was very concerned about his ongoing activities. So this is the mindset of Vanessa Baraitza. She wasn't too bothered by the idea they may have tried to assassinate Julian Assange in the heart of London, steps from Harrod's on the territory of a foreign nation and their embassy. So the US appeal and their task is to overturn, to convince these two High Court judges, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Ian Burnett, and Justice Timothy Holroyd, that in fact he's not very sick and the American prisons aren't all that bad. And how did the US go about doing that? Well, attacking the testimony yesterday and again today was the defense of this Michael Koppelman, who was the chief medical witness who convinced Vanessa Baraitza that he was seriously ill. And other testimony about the prisons convinced Baraitza that those prisons were very bad and that he should not go to them. So the US has attacked Koppelman. They have tried to say that he's not seriously ill. And when James Lewis, the prosecutor, summed up, he cited three witnesses. One defense, two prosecution witnesses who said that he was moderately depressed. But he was when he was examined at that moment. And it's kind of ironic because Lewis yesterday said, we can't talk about what the future, what he might suffer in the future. When he gets extradited, what his mental state is, whether he's suicidal there or not, it's dynamic. He said, but so we can't talk about the future, but he talked about the past today that at one moment he was diagnosed as moderately depressed. So that's the argument they pushed. He's moderately depressed. And then there comes to the assurances. And this was really the key part of today's testimony. The United States gave assurances to Britain that they would not put him in one of these hell holes, a SAMS, or even an ADC, an isolation at all. The US, the Assange lawyer said, too late. You had to say that during the hearing in September. You can't change the case because you lost. Now say, oh yeah, by the way, we're not going to put you in those SAMS. Well, Lewis came back and said that there were instances where a high court even discharged someone, released them. And then the assurances came from a requesting government and they put the guy back in an extradition hearing. He also said they could do that to Assange, which was quite chilling to hear him say that. And also that another case was suspended for two weeks in order to get together these assurances. So he's making the argument that it wasn't too late, that you can put it in during the hearing or after the hearing. Now the most dramatic part of the day's testimony was, of course, when Mark Summers, the lawyer for Assange, detailed that the CIA's plot to kill him, to Chief Justice Ian Burnett interrupted him and said it's, when he started saying that the relationship between the CIA and Mr. Assange is vast and it's not before the court, Burnett interrupted and said it's not contested that the CIA is intensely interested in Mr. Assange. But then he went on to give all those details of the Yahoo story and all everybody I'm sure is familiar with what they are that they actually discussed killing him. Pompeo said some of it is true. Lewis, when he came to his battle, said absolutely nothing. So the challenges were that the US doesn't accept these assurances. They don't believe they're worth the paper they're written on. They're not worth too Bob is what John Shepton and Assange's father said on one of our webcasts that we broadcast. So the US is saying they don't believe it. They gave examples where they broke their word. But here is Lewis contending that the United States has never broken a promise to Great Britain ever and Great Britain has never complained to the US about this. The US, Assange's lawyer is called this conditional aspirational. It does say in these assurances that if Assange would do something to threaten national security of the United States, they could throw him back in Sam's again. The all through the hearing we heard that that was where he was going to go. That's what Vanessa Barreza thought. That's why she made the ruling that she did. So to sum this up, Lewis thinks that the message he was saying to these two judges is that the two pillars of the lower court decision by Barreza, in his view, were demolished. Assange is not seriously ill, moderately depressed, and he won't be going to a harsh US prison. One of the judges, I think was Burnett said, you have given us much to think about and we'll take time to consider it. And they have got until who knows when it could take months. They think around December Christmas time or maybe early next year, we will get a decision. Will those judges side with the United States that he's not very ill, and that they believe the American assurances, he won't go to a prison, a harsh prison, and that the sentencing won't be as long as the many of Assange's lawyers fear it. They will, or will they side with Assange's lawyers and say he is ill? The testimony shows that. And he may or may not go into the, you know, if they're going to be, I find it hard to think that high court judges, establishment figures, Chief Justice of England and Wales will doubt the US word. They might come down more on whether he's really seriously ill or not. But you need both. The combination of terrible, horrible American prisons and Assange's suicidal impulses driven by his mental disorder. So this will be decided by the high court sometime around December. So this is a quick report tonight. I'm going to sign off. This is Joe Laurier for Consortium News. We'll be back that night for the decision of the hearing.