Courts and Judges

Voices activists Brian Terrell, Kathy Kelly and Sarah Ball outside the Brunswick Courthouse (Photo by Kings Bay Plowshares 7)

What happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most sacred rights. Speak up now or wake up one morning to the silence of a new kind of tyranny. The choice is ours.
— John Pilger, investigative journalist

Dear Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Sajid Javid and Kevin Hollinrake,
I feel compelled to write to you over my extreme concern regarding the health and well-being of Julian Assange.

I was deeply shaken while witnessing Monday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening.

© Reuters / Julia Quenzler
Veteran British journalist John Pilger has blasted the “atrocious” and “appalling” treatment of Julian Assange by a judge who decided this week to reject the whistleblower’s request to delay his upcoming US extradition hearing.

Protesters outside building where Ajit Pai was giving a speech in Washington, DC, December 2017 (From Free Press)

In 2017 Dissident Voice ran my article, “Any White Cop Can Kill a Black Man at Any Time,” which told how St. Louis cop Jason Stockley killed a 24-year-old black man, Anthony Lamar Smith.  Though Stockley claimed he had fired in self defense when Smith pulled a gun on him, evidence showed that he had planted the gun after the killing.  When Stockley was found “not guilty” protests by thousands in St.

It delighted Labour supporters and party apparatchiks who had been falling over each other in murderous ceremony at the party conference in Brighton: Prime Minister Boris Johnson would come to the unwitting rescue with his own version of a grand cock-up.  This involved a now defeated attempt to circumvent parliamentary scrutiny and interference ahead of the Brexit date of October 31 through a prorogation of parliament.

There was something richly amusing in the move: three judges, sitting in Scotland’s highest court of appeal, had little time for the notion that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspension, or proroguing, of parliament till October 14, had been lawful.  Some 78 parliamentarians had taken issue with the Conservative leader’s limitation on Parliamentary activity, designed to prevent any hiccups prior to October 31, the day Britain is slated to leave the European Union.