It is being increasingly larded with heavy twists and turns, a form of state oppression in slow motion, but the Julian Assange extradition case now looks like it may well move into the middle of the year, dragged out, ironically enough, by the prosecution. Curiously, this is a point that both the prosecutors, fronted by the US imperium, and the WikiLeaks defence team, seem to have found some inadvertent agreement with.
LONDON — Another slot of judicial history, another notch to be added to the woeful record of legal proceedings being undertaken against Julian Assange. The ailing WikiLeaks founder was coping as well as he could, showing the resourcefulness of the desperate at his Monday hearing. At the Westminster Magistrates Court, Assange faced a 12-minute process, an ordinary affair in which he was asked to confirm his name, an ongoing ludicrous state of affairs, and seek clarification about an aspect of the proceedings.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claims he’s ‘slowly dying’ in a UK jail and is often tranquilized and kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. He made the disturbing revelations in a phone call to his friend Vaughan Smith on Christmas Eve.
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On November 27 this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, delivered an address to the German Bundestag outlining his approach to understanding the mental health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
As Australian activist John Pilger recounts his visit to the world’s most abused US/UK political prisoner, Julian Assange, he gives us the brutal details of how the friends and families of political prisoners also face punishment, gauntlets, humiliation. And he tells of the terrible conditions and terrible treatment meted out to Assange, and the weakened, vulnerable state in which he finds his friend. But as he was leaving, Pilger looked back to see Julian Assange sitting with a raised fist in the air. Not beaten. Still defiant.
To those candidates who are putting themselves forward as MPs to become a voice within the UK Parliament — would you stand up for Julian Assange and for those who. in speaking truth, have the audacity to challenge the dialogue of power?
Bulgaria, it appears, is a captured state. I’ll get to that in a minute. I first heard about Jock Palfreeman, an Australian serving a lengthy prison sentence in Bulgaria, through a fellow Australian. The context was a message from my friend Kamala that was straightforward, to the effect of, “would you write a song about Jock?”
Newspapers and other media in the United States and Britain have recently declared a passion for freedom of speech, especially the right to publish freely. They are worried by the “Assange effect”.
It is as if the struggle of truth-tellers like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning is now a warning to them: that the thugs who dragged Assange out of the Ecuadorean embassy in April may one day come for them.
“The Swedish people should be ashamed of the way they’ve been played by the CIA.”
Craig Murray reacts to the prosecutor dropping the rape case against Julian Assange which he believes was a “political fit up from the start.”
