Thirty former US officials have come forward to reveal aggressive spying on Assange and his associates by the CIA, including the outlining of options for Julian’s abduction or assassination.
Extradition would be denied because Julian was weak, not because he was right. We should have been happier, given we have worked and waited for Julian’s freedom for ten years, but having worked on this campaign for ten years, we couldn’t quite believe it was over. And it’s not.
Embarrassing the powerful is the harm for which the publisher is on trial, while those who have committed the crimes revealed are free to strike again, to profit again and to continue killing in cold blood.
After waiting handcuffed in the holding cells, he is placed in a glass box at the back of the courtroom. Then he is forced back into the Serco van to be strip-searched back at Belmarsh to face another night alone in his cell.
I have only ever known Julian Assange in detention. For nine years now, I have visited him in England bearing Australian news and solidarity. To Ellingham Hall I brought music and chocolate, to the Ecuadorian embassy I brought flannel shirts, Rake, Wizz Fizz and eucalyptus leaves, but to Belmarsh prison you can bring nothing - not a gift, not a book, not a piece of paper. Then I returned to Australia, a country so far…
Within moments of Julian Assange entering a UK courtroom on 11 April 2019, what has been obvious for almost a decade was confirmed: the US government has always intended to extradite and prosecute this publisher for publishing.
Pine Gap is visible from commercial flights in and out of Alice Springs - travellers are occasionally warned that taking photos of the facility is illegal. Climbing the steep ridges of the MacDonnell Ranges or hiring a helicopter offer ways of seeing the thirty-three antennas, nineteen covered by white radomes, which Desmond Ball and colleagues described in 2016 as 'significant elements in Australian political culture...an iconic place in the Australian imaginary that vies with Uluru…
