Solitary confinement

Day X Marks the Calendar: Julian Assange’s “Final” Appeal

Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter.  For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant.  “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition.  […]
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Political Prisoners in the United States, 2022

There are many ways to define what is a political prisoner. The most well-known cases are those the national security state framed-up, or imprisoned with extreme sentences for an offense because of their political activism, such as George Jackson. Each period of struggle by the working class and oppressed peoples against ruling class control results some […]

The persecution of Julian Assange

The British home secretary, Priti Patel, will decide this month whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States, where he faces a sentence of up to 175 years – served most likely in strict, 24-hour isolation in a US super-max jail. He has already spent three years in similarly harsh conditions in […]
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Off to the Supreme Court: Assange’s Appeal Continues

With December’s High Court decision to overturn the lower court ruling against the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, lawyers of the WikiLeaks founder immediately got busy.  The next avenue of appeal, strewn less with gold than obstacles, would be to the Supreme Court.  The central question remained: Should the publisher be extradited […]

Colleyville Hostages: Blowback for US Torture, War Crimes

The official version of the 11-hours hostage-taking in Colleyville, Texas, on January 15, makes it seem pretty straightforward and limited. Early that Saturday morning, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker allowed a stranger into the synagogue to get warm, later identified as Malik Faisal Akram, 44, a British national of Pakistani descent who had come to the US […]

Aafia Siddiqui, Political Prisoner

The media coverage of the hostage-taking at a synagogue in Texas has been predictably hysterical, Islamophobic and inaccurate about Aafia Siddiqui, the apparent political cause of the hostage-taker Malik Faisad Akram.  According to his family in England he has “mental health issues.”  He was “said to have” weapons and explosives.  He was “said to have” […]
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The Hounding of Julian Assange Leaves Honest Journalism with No Refuge

It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows. His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it […]

A Day in the Death of British Justice

The pursuit of Julian Assange for revealing secrets and lies of governments, especially the crimes of America, has entered its final stage as the British judiciary – upholders of ‘British justice’ – merge their deliberations with the undeterred power of Washington. I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London with […]
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Guantanamo Past the Point of All Shame

https://worldbeyondwar.org/guantanamo-past-the-point-of-all-shame/ U.S. high schools should teach courses on Guantanamo: what not to do in the world, how not to make it even worse, and how not to compound that catastrophe beyond all shame and recovery. As we tear down Confederate statues and continue brutalizing victims in Guantanamo, I wonder if in 2181, had Hollywood still […]

The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed

Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in […]
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