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.
Many of us have made the mistake of separating the pandemic from the egregious effects of neoliberal capitalism—they are, in fact, deeply enmeshed, as the genesis of the crisis and its differential effects testify.
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…
Identity and emotion appear to be playing a role in politics neither tapped in opinion polls nor understood very well by politicos of the Left, and the centre-Left especially.
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.
On 25 November 2018 former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard appeared on the BBC global news channel's 100 Women series. On the show's website, Gillard was described as having 'used her experience to help advance women and girls around the world through the promotion of education and leadership'. Obviously the women she'd 'helped' didn't include the refugees she attempted to dump on Malaysia, or those refugee women and children imprisoned in the internment camps Gillard…
