A British appeals court has handed the United States a major victory in its efforts to bring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to trial.
, it had developed plans to abduct Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy and possibly even assassinate him.Instead, the court primarily focused on the risks to Assange’s mental health from being placed under harsh confinement in an Alexandria, Va., jail while awaiting trial or sent to the maximum security prison in Florence, Colo., if convicted.
But Pollack called the assurances “vague,” and Assange’s British lawyers had argued they could easily be revoked if U.S. officials decide he had engaged in further conduct — such as publishing more classified documents that WikiLeaks possesses — while he is in U.S. custody. Pollack also said that Assange’s lawyers will seek to raise other issues in the British courts — such as what they view as vengeful conduct by the CIA toward him — that could postpone a final ruling for years.
Assange has been a target of senior U.S. officials for more than a decade ever since he began publishing classified documents about errant U.S. military strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department cables from U.S. embassies abroad.
“Today’s ruling is an alarming setback for press freedom in the United States and around the world, and represents a notable escalation in the use of the Espionage Act in the ‘War on Whistleblowers’ that has expanded through the past several presidential administrations,” one of those press advocacy organizations, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement Friday.
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