The ruling by the High Court in London permitting Julian Assange to appeal his extradition order leaves him languishing in precarious health in a high-security prison. That is the point.
If the bastards have already driven Julian to put an antipsychotic into his brain, they've, by definition, already destroyed his psychological health. May every one of the warmongering a-holes from Dubya and Cheney through the entire Obama, Trump and Biden administrations burn in the hottest fires of hell for this murder of an yet another innocent, who also happens to be the most significant journalist of this century.
Perhaps those criminals of war are already suffering of remorse. (I overheard in the vines that Dubya is so repented that he decided to wash out his guilt with alcohol and is planning to be born again for the seventh time)
“Julian committed the empire’s greatest sin — he exposed it as a criminal enterprise.”
Until very recently, I, too, believed this. Now perhaps we are past this point. I don’t expect this persecution to cease because too many people have too much invested in it. But it could easily cease if the lords of Washington realized that, from their own perspective, this is no longer necessary.
The government does whatever it wants — without exception and without accountability. There is no longer a need to punish or deter anyone who might report about their actions. Nothing stops them: not the press, not the public, not the courts. The evil business as usual continues unabated.
Cf. Edward Snowden’s disclosures. In the end, what has come of them? In the end, nothing of any substance. I admire Snowden and Greenwald. Sadly, Snowden sacrificed his liberty in vain. The public does not care.
Yes and no........both Julian and Snowden made immense sacrifices, and both are still being persecuted. But had they not stood up, did what they have done, we'd be even more in the dark....perhaps things aren't any better, but more of us in the heart of Empire know what they brought to light for us.
The genocide in Gaza is another wake up call.......I don't exactly think that America is stronger today than she was 20 years ago. On the contrary, more lights are shone daily on the grim reality that the United States is the evil empire...the source of the majority of the world's weapons of mass destruction, and no lighthouse on the hill.
In fact, her billionaires will continue to persecute the very best and brightest of their own citizens............until there are so many in the streets that is becomes ineffective. It is sad that it takes so much sacrifice to bring down soft fascism, but that doesn't mean its invulnerable.....or that people don't care.
The reason of the people's apathy is because of indoctrination and the acceptance of an abusive government. Following I share a segment of GLENN GREENWALD's lecture "The Surveillance State" Socialism 2012, Rosemont, Illinois 28 June 2012 (downloaded from Alternativeradio.org):
"That’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless before this omnipotent government/corporate institution does to people, it convinces them that the tiny
little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live, so they no longer even realize they’re being imprisoned. Rosa Luxemburg put that best. She said, “He who does not move does not notice his chains.” You can acculturate people to believe that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipation. That is what this surveillance state most insidiously does: By training people to accept their own conformity, believing that they are actually free, they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited."
In this lecture Greenwald mentions the great difference in reaction from the people and the congress in the mid-seventies when the Watergate investigation revelated that our government was spying on us. The Church committee was created and as a result laws like FISA were stablished to limit the surveillance power of the government but thirty years later.... "There was a similar controversy in the mid-2000s, in 2005, when The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do exactly what Frank Church warned against, which is spying on the communications of American citizens. The outcome of that was not new laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses; it was exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the support of President Obama and most of the supporters of his in the Democratic Party, as well as almost all Republicans, basically gutted that law, repealed it in its core, and made it much, much easier for the government to eavesdrop on American citizens without constraints, and then immunized the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program."
Pitiful injustice. Sickening injustice, but no politicians to the rescue. Nothing i can say to change anything, seems like you can't either, Chris, but let's not stop trying.
I am dumbfounded as to how people can turn a blind eye to this crime. Julian stood up to the tyranny of a super power and because of this is being sacrificed at its alter.
Basically the rules never apply to the US. Bush should have been charged with war crimes for the Iraq war. Now they are slowly killing Assange simply because he exposed their crimes. The NYT should also be charged as they printed Assange’s information.
Further, Netanyahu is upset, and therefore Biden as well, that he is charged with war crimes. He says how can you compare what Hamas did Oct 7th to their slaughter of innocent women and children. He is missing the point. Hamas performed an atrocity of terrorism and should be held accountable. But this does not excuse the war crimes committed by Netanyahu
Without endorsing the event, I resist using the term ‘act of terrorism’. It was an act of war, designed to capture hostages, and destroy as many soldiers and settlers as possible. Given their hideous record of violence, settlers are fair targets. Hamas, for better or worse, is all the military that Gaza has, and are far less interested in terrorism than they might once have been. They are a guerrilla army, and behave as one. Conversely, in my opinion, both the bombing of Hiroshima, and the destruction of Gaza meets the standard for terrorism because there was no credible military goal, only murder and destruction, like suicide bombings on, literally, an industrial scale.
Hamas conducted a rid, considered praise-worthy by everyone who believes in the - a I understand those who are knowledgeable cc. international law - right of those heeld under illegal occupationn to resist and revolt: see, e.g., Scott Ritter, Miko Peled.
Hi Barbara, you can always edit your original post by clicking on those three dots to the right of your post. It took me some time to figure that out. I’ve had to use it a few times now. Thanks for your post.
You might still be in the American camp if you expect 70 years of dispossession to be swallowed whole with no efforts to fight back. Hamas performed an act of terrorism??? Yes, but it was more than prevoked, and it was carried out by men who had no where near the fire power of the force they were going up against.
Perhaps we could argue that the victims were innocent.........but even that becomes questionable when you picture prosperous settlements that close to an apartheid wall........or music festivals being held within that same proximity.
Colonialism may seem like an innocent take over of land not being properly used by the indigenous population....but that too is a bit of a white wash, a simplification and a willful blindness.
So we watch our language.......call a resistance movement 'terrorists', and continue to pretend that the retaliation is justified............and not only jusitified, but carried out against an equal opponent. THE WAR BETWEEN HAMAS AND ISRAEL.....is the language of the squatters. Hamas is no more = to Israel, than the French Resistance of World War II was equal to the military might of the Third Reich.
It was the resistance that won in the end of course.......but not without a lot of outside help. That same help today........goes to the occupying power. Had it been like that in WWII....those French 'terrorists' would today be a sad historical footnote.
Assange has given his life to the cause of free speech and will soon be a martyr to it if the administrative murder continues and he is not released; his sacrifice will place him among the greats like Gandhi and Mandela. And the British Government will have murdered him on behalf of people who claim they are protecting us by saving us from the truth of what they do.
Our society is to be founded on conspiracy, exactly what Julian tried to prevent. No “theory” is required. We are to remain a larger fractal of a person without a memory.
Thank you for this revealing account of the agony to which Julian Assange has been and continues to be subjected: that his powers of mind, heart, and imagination remain, or remained, formidable, at least through his composition, and delivery to the world, of his missive to KC3, seems miraculous and deserving of redoubled, and equally ingenious efforts on his behalf, such as you and many others are making.
But something that I feel is being overlooked is the case made by Jonathan Cook, that the relentlessness and viciousness of this persecution, arise from fears, on the part of those who exercise control over "media" and those who operate within its permissible confines ( including, perhaps especially including , those five v. slow to, perfunctorily one might say, pronounce in J.A's behalf ), of Julian's visionary invention of a means for those making disclosures to be protected, while making the disclosures freely available: as one of J.A.'s supporters put it in a round-table held after the earlier hearings, Julian posed the threat of transforming "media" into a gift culture . .
Like every right wing government the cruelty IS the point. MAGA makes a virtue out of cruelty Old Testament style. Cruelty is embedded in what is now late stage capitalism where everything is a commodity to be extracted from.
It only means,UK was and still is in the pocket of us. They know what they are doing and they are hoping Julian will die in prison. They are as much a genocidal criminal country as us. All we can do is continue to protest just like we are doing for Palestine.
Few journalists demonstrate Hedges' independence. I'm grateful for his coverage of the witch hunt targeting Assange, who I've compared to Daniel Ellsberg (who helped end the American war on Vietnam by forcing transparency despite Washington's efforts to suppress it). A post exploring that comparison explains why "The 'collateral murder' video should disturb anyone, particularly journalists who are themselves implicated in what is at least an incident, and perhaps a disturbing pattern, revealing violent attacks on the press by unaccountable military actors. Yet most editors in the United States could not be bothered to observe even attacks on their own rights and independence." https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/editors-or-propagandists.
Readers concerned about these patterns might consider supporting organizations focused on exposing them, including Defending Rights & Dissent (full disclosure: I led an organization from 2010-2015 that helped form DRAD in a 2015 merger and continue to serve on its Board of Directors). The organization's website is https://www.rightsanddissent.org/ and the staff publish an informative Substack at https://rightsdissent.substack.com/. Earlier today, Policy Director Chip Gibbons appeared on Democracy Now! to explain why "This is a victory for Julian Assange in that...his case lives on to fight another day. But he’s not out of Belmarsh [Prison] yet, and he’s not in the clear yet....This could still end in him being sent to the U.S. And the [people] who can stop this [are] Joe Biden and Merrick Garland." https://www.democracynow.org/2024/5/20/assange_extradition_chip_gibbons
I was outside the High Court in London yesterday and along with everyone else 'celebrated' the news of the temporary relief that Julian would not be handed over to those who conspired to kidnap and murder him. But as Chris has so brilliantly articulated, the punishment is in the endless process. Speaking to Craig Murray after the event, I suggested that we should be having a parallel campaign to get Julian out of the hell hole that is Belmarsh prison even while his case goes on. Apparently this is in the hands of the British Home Secretary and bizarrely, the prison authorities? Would love your thoughts on this, Chris.
Vote the bums out, the rot goes down to the city council levels, where they fall over themselves to provide tax breaks and exemptions for the surveillance capitalists providing whatsapp coordinates, to kill poets, journalists, and their families with drones, tanks, neighborhood destroying bombs for tent cities, AI, and bulldozers, and then censoring the atrocities, while amplifying the troll farm lies through algorithms.
Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so. The technical term for this is a "beard".
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind. For that matter, Tony Blair's baleful influence over Labour or Trump over Team R are also examples.
It is outrageous that Julian Assange has been in prison for five years even though he has not been convicted of a crime. Even worse he is in solitary confinement in very cruel, harsh conditions. This demonstrates that the US is just as bad as the totalitarian governments that it is always criticizing, as Chris Hedges points out its purpose is to break him and cause him to die in captivity. What kind of a country do we have?
I just mentioned this point in my comment but allow me to repeat it here.
The US may be yelling and shouting all they want, but in practice, it has only been England (say UK) that factually has kidnapped and imprisoned Julian Assange and has now been torturing him for over five years.
The responsible entities and persons should be prosecuted for this. That's in my view what is missing in Chris Hedges' "point". Sue England for torture!
As so many have pointed out here, Including Mr. Hedges, that is the intention. Keep Julian Assange locked up until he slowly dies. He will have a couple of days in the news feeds as people mourn him and that will be that. if he is lucky, Julian's remains get shipped back to Australia and he will become another footnote in history. This is the American way. Do all of the things of empires and cover it up with chafe in the media. Something they learned to do in WWII and perfected through the decades. Now that the U.S. and its billionaire shadow government owns the majority of all of the news media in the west, this is what people should expect now. This is how a fascist government controls its people. Anyone who denies that the U.S. is not a mildly fascist country now must be living under a rock or only watches/listens to main stream news. The worst news (for them) is that the U.S. is now being called out by the rest of the world for its human rights abuses, both physically and economically. The end of the U.S. as we know it is coming soon, one way or another as the current government is now unsustainable anymore. The wolves are closing in.
I'm more sanguine about this than you Chris. I realise that some party's including the prosecuter are trying to play a vicious game of cat & mouse with Mr Assange because they imagine that will cause their 'betters' to see 'em in a better light.
However no amerikan prez can really afford to be entangled in Mr Assange's case because at a time in history when every vote for genocide joe must be carefully husbanded and the other one trump, will be spending the next 4 years attempting to burnish a tarnished legacy , neither see any upside in prosecuting Mr Assange. It may well have been close to the top of the scum greedies agenda in 2012 but in 2024 it has fallen well down in that order since ukraine's parlous position, the zionist entity's demise along with problems in West Africa, plus huge complications in Sudan are above any one of which, let alone all of 'em spell massive hits on their grubby income.
Mr Assange may even be granted bail before the appeal. His previous 'skipping' could be overlooked as shorty sunak strives to not be the lowest scoring prime minister to ever go for election.
of course knowing the greedy scum by their history tells us to expect the worst, I cannot help but feel the tide may have turned on this as it has on so much else.
Be honest, this time last year how many amerikans imagined that zionism would fall so low in public estimation?
Amal Clooney is one of the legal experts who recommended that the chief prosecutor of the world's top war crimes court seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and leaders of the militant Hamas group.
Couldn't these same people also just prosecute the responsible persons for Julian's torturing?
Wouldn't that be more direct than go after the US that is actually just yelling and screaming while it's England (say UK) that is factually torturing Julian Assange?
If the bastards have already driven Julian to put an antipsychotic into his brain, they've, by definition, already destroyed his psychological health. May every one of the warmongering a-holes from Dubya and Cheney through the entire Obama, Trump and Biden administrations burn in the hottest fires of hell for this murder of an yet another innocent, who also happens to be the most significant journalist of this century.
Well said
Perhaps those criminals of war are already suffering of remorse. (I overheard in the vines that Dubya is so repented that he decided to wash out his guilt with alcohol and is planning to be born again for the seventh time)
“Julian committed the empire’s greatest sin — he exposed it as a criminal enterprise.”
Until very recently, I, too, believed this. Now perhaps we are past this point. I don’t expect this persecution to cease because too many people have too much invested in it. But it could easily cease if the lords of Washington realized that, from their own perspective, this is no longer necessary.
The government does whatever it wants — without exception and without accountability. There is no longer a need to punish or deter anyone who might report about their actions. Nothing stops them: not the press, not the public, not the courts. The evil business as usual continues unabated.
Cf. Edward Snowden’s disclosures. In the end, what has come of them? In the end, nothing of any substance. I admire Snowden and Greenwald. Sadly, Snowden sacrificed his liberty in vain. The public does not care.
Yes and no........both Julian and Snowden made immense sacrifices, and both are still being persecuted. But had they not stood up, did what they have done, we'd be even more in the dark....perhaps things aren't any better, but more of us in the heart of Empire know what they brought to light for us.
The genocide in Gaza is another wake up call.......I don't exactly think that America is stronger today than she was 20 years ago. On the contrary, more lights are shone daily on the grim reality that the United States is the evil empire...the source of the majority of the world's weapons of mass destruction, and no lighthouse on the hill.
In fact, her billionaires will continue to persecute the very best and brightest of their own citizens............until there are so many in the streets that is becomes ineffective. It is sad that it takes so much sacrifice to bring down soft fascism, but that doesn't mean its invulnerable.....or that people don't care.
The tide is turning.
The reason of the people's apathy is because of indoctrination and the acceptance of an abusive government. Following I share a segment of GLENN GREENWALD's lecture "The Surveillance State" Socialism 2012, Rosemont, Illinois 28 June 2012 (downloaded from Alternativeradio.org):
"That’s one of the things that constantly surveilling people and constantly communicating to them that they’re powerless before this omnipotent government/corporate institution does to people, it convinces them that the tiny
little box in which they live is really the only box in which they want to live, so they no longer even realize they’re being imprisoned. Rosa Luxemburg put that best. She said, “He who does not move does not notice his chains.” You can acculturate people to believe that tyranny is freedom, that their limits are actually emancipation. That is what this surveillance state most insidiously does: By training people to accept their own conformity, believing that they are actually free, they no longer even realize the ways in which they’re being limited."
In this lecture Greenwald mentions the great difference in reaction from the people and the congress in the mid-seventies when the Watergate investigation revelated that our government was spying on us. The Church committee was created and as a result laws like FISA were stablished to limit the surveillance power of the government but thirty years later.... "There was a similar controversy in the mid-2000s, in 2005, when The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been using the NSA to do exactly what Frank Church warned against, which is spying on the communications of American citizens. The outcome of that was not new laws or new safeguards to constrain these sorts of abuses; it was exactly the opposite. In 2008, the Democratic-led Congress, with the support of President Obama and most of the supporters of his in the Democratic Party, as well as almost all Republicans, basically gutted that law, repealed it in its core, and made it much, much easier for the government to eavesdrop on American citizens without constraints, and then immunized the nation’s telecoms that had participated in that illegal program."
Yeah, we have been domesticated.
Humans are herd animals to rival any sheep or lemming.
Pitiful injustice. Sickening injustice, but no politicians to the rescue. Nothing i can say to change anything, seems like you can't either, Chris, but let's not stop trying.
I am dumbfounded as to how people can turn a blind eye to this crime. Julian stood up to the tyranny of a super power and because of this is being sacrificed at its alter.
Basically the rules never apply to the US. Bush should have been charged with war crimes for the Iraq war. Now they are slowly killing Assange simply because he exposed their crimes. The NYT should also be charged as they printed Assange’s information.
Further, Netanyahu is upset, and therefore Biden as well, that he is charged with war crimes. He says how can you compare what Hamas did Oct 7th to their slaughter of innocent women and children. He is missing the point. Hamas performed an atrocity of terrorism and should be held accountable. But this does not excuse the war crimes committed by Netanyahu
Without endorsing the event, I resist using the term ‘act of terrorism’. It was an act of war, designed to capture hostages, and destroy as many soldiers and settlers as possible. Given their hideous record of violence, settlers are fair targets. Hamas, for better or worse, is all the military that Gaza has, and are far less interested in terrorism than they might once have been. They are a guerrilla army, and behave as one. Conversely, in my opinion, both the bombing of Hiroshima, and the destruction of Gaza meets the standard for terrorism because there was no credible military goal, only murder and destruction, like suicide bombings on, literally, an industrial scale.
Hamas conducted a rid, considered praise-worthy by everyone who believes in the - a I understand those who are knowledgeable cc. international law - right of those heeld under illegal occupationn to resist and revolt: see, e.g., Scott Ritter, Miko Peled.
that should be "raid", not "rid"
Hi Barbara, you can always edit your original post by clicking on those three dots to the right of your post. It took me some time to figure that out. I’ve had to use it a few times now. Thanks for your post.
I tried it and my cat died. What did I do wrong?
You might still be in the American camp if you expect 70 years of dispossession to be swallowed whole with no efforts to fight back. Hamas performed an act of terrorism??? Yes, but it was more than prevoked, and it was carried out by men who had no where near the fire power of the force they were going up against.
Perhaps we could argue that the victims were innocent.........but even that becomes questionable when you picture prosperous settlements that close to an apartheid wall........or music festivals being held within that same proximity.
Colonialism may seem like an innocent take over of land not being properly used by the indigenous population....but that too is a bit of a white wash, a simplification and a willful blindness.
So we watch our language.......call a resistance movement 'terrorists', and continue to pretend that the retaliation is justified............and not only jusitified, but carried out against an equal opponent. THE WAR BETWEEN HAMAS AND ISRAEL.....is the language of the squatters. Hamas is no more = to Israel, than the French Resistance of World War II was equal to the military might of the Third Reich.
It was the resistance that won in the end of course.......but not without a lot of outside help. That same help today........goes to the occupying power. Had it been like that in WWII....those French 'terrorists' would today be a sad historical footnote.
Assange has given his life to the cause of free speech and will soon be a martyr to it if the administrative murder continues and he is not released; his sacrifice will place him among the greats like Gandhi and Mandela. And the British Government will have murdered him on behalf of people who claim they are protecting us by saving us from the truth of what they do.
Our society is to be founded on conspiracy, exactly what Julian tried to prevent. No “theory” is required. We are to remain a larger fractal of a person without a memory.
Thank you for this revealing account of the agony to which Julian Assange has been and continues to be subjected: that his powers of mind, heart, and imagination remain, or remained, formidable, at least through his composition, and delivery to the world, of his missive to KC3, seems miraculous and deserving of redoubled, and equally ingenious efforts on his behalf, such as you and many others are making.
But something that I feel is being overlooked is the case made by Jonathan Cook, that the relentlessness and viciousness of this persecution, arise from fears, on the part of those who exercise control over "media" and those who operate within its permissible confines ( including, perhaps especially including , those five v. slow to, perfunctorily one might say, pronounce in J.A's behalf ), of Julian's visionary invention of a means for those making disclosures to be protected, while making the disclosures freely available: as one of J.A.'s supporters put it in a round-table held after the earlier hearings, Julian posed the threat of transforming "media" into a gift culture . .
Like every right wing government the cruelty IS the point. MAGA makes a virtue out of cruelty Old Testament style. Cruelty is embedded in what is now late stage capitalism where everything is a commodity to be extracted from.
I have no use for MAGA but Biden, not Trump is president and he could free Assange with a stroke of the pen.
MAGA is still here and in power in many states. MAGA is more than Trump, it is ideology bordering on religious fanaticism .
All of which is beside the point. Biden is the only person now who can free Assange. He does not do so.
It only means,UK was and still is in the pocket of us. They know what they are doing and they are hoping Julian will die in prison. They are as much a genocidal criminal country as us. All we can do is continue to protest just like we are doing for Palestine.
Few journalists demonstrate Hedges' independence. I'm grateful for his coverage of the witch hunt targeting Assange, who I've compared to Daniel Ellsberg (who helped end the American war on Vietnam by forcing transparency despite Washington's efforts to suppress it). A post exploring that comparison explains why "The 'collateral murder' video should disturb anyone, particularly journalists who are themselves implicated in what is at least an incident, and perhaps a disturbing pattern, revealing violent attacks on the press by unaccountable military actors. Yet most editors in the United States could not be bothered to observe even attacks on their own rights and independence." https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/editors-or-propagandists.
Readers concerned about these patterns might consider supporting organizations focused on exposing them, including Defending Rights & Dissent (full disclosure: I led an organization from 2010-2015 that helped form DRAD in a 2015 merger and continue to serve on its Board of Directors). The organization's website is https://www.rightsanddissent.org/ and the staff publish an informative Substack at https://rightsdissent.substack.com/. Earlier today, Policy Director Chip Gibbons appeared on Democracy Now! to explain why "This is a victory for Julian Assange in that...his case lives on to fight another day. But he’s not out of Belmarsh [Prison] yet, and he’s not in the clear yet....This could still end in him being sent to the U.S. And the [people] who can stop this [are] Joe Biden and Merrick Garland." https://www.democracynow.org/2024/5/20/assange_extradition_chip_gibbons
I was outside the High Court in London yesterday and along with everyone else 'celebrated' the news of the temporary relief that Julian would not be handed over to those who conspired to kidnap and murder him. But as Chris has so brilliantly articulated, the punishment is in the endless process. Speaking to Craig Murray after the event, I suggested that we should be having a parallel campaign to get Julian out of the hell hole that is Belmarsh prison even while his case goes on. Apparently this is in the hands of the British Home Secretary and bizarrely, the prison authorities? Would love your thoughts on this, Chris.
Vote the bums out, the rot goes down to the city council levels, where they fall over themselves to provide tax breaks and exemptions for the surveillance capitalists providing whatsapp coordinates, to kill poets, journalists, and their families with drones, tanks, neighborhood destroying bombs for tent cities, AI, and bulldozers, and then censoring the atrocities, while amplifying the troll farm lies through algorithms.
Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so. The technical term for this is a "beard".
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind. For that matter, Tony Blair's baleful influence over Labour or Trump over Team R are also examples.
It is outrageous that Julian Assange has been in prison for five years even though he has not been convicted of a crime. Even worse he is in solitary confinement in very cruel, harsh conditions. This demonstrates that the US is just as bad as the totalitarian governments that it is always criticizing, as Chris Hedges points out its purpose is to break him and cause him to die in captivity. What kind of a country do we have?
I just mentioned this point in my comment but allow me to repeat it here.
The US may be yelling and shouting all they want, but in practice, it has only been England (say UK) that factually has kidnapped and imprisoned Julian Assange and has now been torturing him for over five years.
The responsible entities and persons should be prosecuted for this. That's in my view what is missing in Chris Hedges' "point". Sue England for torture!
As so many have pointed out here, Including Mr. Hedges, that is the intention. Keep Julian Assange locked up until he slowly dies. He will have a couple of days in the news feeds as people mourn him and that will be that. if he is lucky, Julian's remains get shipped back to Australia and he will become another footnote in history. This is the American way. Do all of the things of empires and cover it up with chafe in the media. Something they learned to do in WWII and perfected through the decades. Now that the U.S. and its billionaire shadow government owns the majority of all of the news media in the west, this is what people should expect now. This is how a fascist government controls its people. Anyone who denies that the U.S. is not a mildly fascist country now must be living under a rock or only watches/listens to main stream news. The worst news (for them) is that the U.S. is now being called out by the rest of the world for its human rights abuses, both physically and economically. The end of the U.S. as we know it is coming soon, one way or another as the current government is now unsustainable anymore. The wolves are closing in.
I'm more sanguine about this than you Chris. I realise that some party's including the prosecuter are trying to play a vicious game of cat & mouse with Mr Assange because they imagine that will cause their 'betters' to see 'em in a better light.
However no amerikan prez can really afford to be entangled in Mr Assange's case because at a time in history when every vote for genocide joe must be carefully husbanded and the other one trump, will be spending the next 4 years attempting to burnish a tarnished legacy , neither see any upside in prosecuting Mr Assange. It may well have been close to the top of the scum greedies agenda in 2012 but in 2024 it has fallen well down in that order since ukraine's parlous position, the zionist entity's demise along with problems in West Africa, plus huge complications in Sudan are above any one of which, let alone all of 'em spell massive hits on their grubby income.
Mr Assange may even be granted bail before the appeal. His previous 'skipping' could be overlooked as shorty sunak strives to not be the lowest scoring prime minister to ever go for election.
of course knowing the greedy scum by their history tells us to expect the worst, I cannot help but feel the tide may have turned on this as it has on so much else.
Be honest, this time last year how many amerikans imagined that zionism would fall so low in public estimation?
Amal Clooney is one of the legal experts who recommended that the chief prosecutor of the world's top war crimes court seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and leaders of the militant Hamas group.
Couldn't these same people also just prosecute the responsible persons for Julian's torturing?
Wouldn't that be more direct than go after the US that is actually just yelling and screaming while it's England (say UK) that is factually torturing Julian Assange?
(see my comment for some more detail)