Tag: Free Julian Assange

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

UPDATE:

At the present time, currently 4PM US East Coast time on October 28, 2019, there are at this minute 4,792 readers in 81 countries reading my website, www.paulcraigroberts.org

During October, a quarter of a million people have made a half million visits to this website.  These are only the visits to this website.  The number does not include the visits to my columns carried on scores of other websites both in English and in Foreign translation where my writings are republished.

Yet, in the past two days as of 4pm today, only 450 people have signed the petition to free Julian Assange from his unlawful imprisonment that is posted on my website.

Continue reading “We must act now to save Julian Assange and the Rule of Law”

Guest Post by Craig Murray

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’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated ageing. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he has lost over 15 kg in weight.

But his physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration. When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both. I will come to the important content of his statement at the end of proceedings in due course, but his difficulty in making it was very evident; it was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.

Continue reading “Assange in Court”

Guest Post by Chris Hedges

LONDON—On Friday morning I was in a small courtroom at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh Prison and dressed in a pale-blue prison shirt, appeared on a video screen directly in front of me. Assange, his gray hair and beard neatly trimmed, slipped on heavy, dark-frame glasses at the start of the proceedings. He listened intently as Ben Brandon, the prosecutor, seated at a narrow wooden table, listed the crimes he allegedly had committed and called for his extradition to the United States to face charges that could result in a sentence of 175 years. The charges include the release of unredacted classified material that posed a “grave” threat to “human intelligence sources” and “the largest compromises of confidential information in the history of the United States.” After the prosecutor’s presentation, Assange’s attorney, Mark Summers, seated at the same table, called the charges “an outrageous and full-frontal assault on journalistic rights.”

Continue reading “The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange”

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer Per Samuelson has told the press that “Assange’s health situation on Friday was such that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him.”

This jarring revelation has been reported by a small handful of outlets, but only as an aside in relation to Sweden refusing Samuelson’s request for a postponement of a scheduled hearing regarding Assange’s detention en absentia for a preliminary investigation of rape allegations. The fact that the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder is so ill that he can’t converse lucidly is itself far more significant than the postponement refusal, yet headlines mentioning Samuelson’s statement focus on the Swedish case, de-emphasizing the startling news from his lawyer.

Continue reading “Assange Is Reportedly Gravely Ill, And Hardly Anyone’s Talking About It”

Authored by Lee Camp via MintPressNews.com,

Julian Assange is a dick. It’s important you understand that.

Assange and WikiLeaks revealed the American military’s war crimes, the American government’s corruption and the American corporate media’s pathetic servile flattery to the power elite. So, if you’re a member of our ruling class, you would view those as textbook examples of dickery.

In a moment I’m going to list all the ways Julian Assange changed the world by being a dick.

In an evolved and fully realized society, the oligarchy would see Assange as a dangerous criminal (which they do), and the average working men and women would view him as justice personified (which they don’t). We would celebrate him even as the mass media told us to hope for his downfall—like a Batman or a Robin Hood or an Ozzy Osbourne (the early years, not the cleaning-dog-turds-off-his-carpet years).

Continue reading “18 Ways Julian Assange Changed The World”

Guest Post by James Risen

A true democracy does not allow its government to decide who is a journalist. A nation in which a leader gets to make that decision is on the road to dictatorship.

That is why the new U.S. indictment of Julian Assange is so dangerous to liberty in America.

The Trump administration has charged Assange under the Espionage Act for conspiring to leak classified documents. The indictment, released yesterday, focuses on his alleged efforts to encourage former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents to him and WikiLeaks about a decade ago.

Continue reading “The Indictment of Julian Assange Under the Espionage Act Is a Threat to the Press and the American People”

Via ZeroHedge

Assange Hit With Espionage Act Violations As DoJ Unveils 17 New Charges

The worst fears of Julian Assange’s legal team have just been realized.Just as Wikileaks’ editor in chief anticipated, the DoJ has revealed that a grand jury in Virginia has returned a new 18-count superseding indictment against Assange that includes violations of the Espionage Act stemming from his role in publishing the classified documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, as well as his original charge of conspiring to break into a government computer, per the New York Times.

The DOJ said with the indictment that Assange will face a maximum of 10 years for each of the 17 Espionage Act violations, plus the five-year penalty for his earlier hacking charge.

Continue reading “This is the man that you thought was better than hillary”

Authored by Thomas Neuberger via Down With Tyranny blog,

Before…

…and after images of the van that came to pick up the bodies of eleven men shot to death by circling American helicopters in Iraq in 2007.

Both children in the van were wounded.

“Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle,” said one of the pilots.

“That’s right,” replies another. From the video Collateral Murder.

Continue reading “Why Everyone Who Counts Wants Julian Assange Dead”