The worst moment was one of a number of ‘worst’ moments. I have sat in many courtrooms and seen judges abuse their positions, This judge, Vanessa Baraitser—actually she isn’t a judge at all; she’s a magistrate—shocked all of us who were there. Her face was a progression of sneers and imperious indifference; she addressed Julian…
I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’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. Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was…
Julian Assange, the founding editor of Wikileaks, is being detained in a British top-security prison indefinitely. But in the view of his distraught father, the incarceration of Assange has a deliberate purpose – to kill him. John Shipton flew to Britain from Sydney, Australia, earlier this month in the hope of seeing his 48-year-old son…
It’s not just that the United States has a higher percentage of its people in prison than does any other nation on the planet. (El Salvador — the land that was largely made what it today is, by its US trained-and-equipped death squads — is now number 2 on that measure. In another country the US controls, Honduras, protesters tried to…
British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has just given a speech extolling the virtues of a free media, praising the journalists who’ve been brave enough to expose the truth about wicked governments in the face of tyrannical oppression. While he was preparing to give this speech, without any indication of any self-reflection at all, he defended…
The news that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has been indicted on 17 additional charges under the US Espionage Act and could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison should concern all journalists, the world over. Some, to their credit, have spoken out against the relentless persecution of the white-haired Australian truth-teller. But it’s…
