Julian Assange’s extradition trial has assumed an air of unreality as attorneys debate the patently obvious, such as whether or not Assange has been accused of a political crime. From Elizabeth Farrelly at smh.com.au:
Even in my bleakest moments I’m glad I’m not Julian Assange. Seven years trapped inside the embassy opposite Harrods, with fake news in the air and police in the bushes. (Yes, I was there. I saw them). That alone would send me mad.
Follow that with 10 months’ solitary in what former British diplomat Craig Murray calls Britain’s Lubyanka, the ultra-grim high-security Belmarsh Prison. There, Assange has been subject to such harassment, arbitrariness, strip searches and abuse that both the UN Special Rapporteur and a group of more than 60 British doctors were impelled to protest his “torture” and his fellow inmates petitioned for his release from solitary. And now a bizarre hearing-cum-trial-by-public-opinion ending in possible extradition, a potential 175-year penalty and likely death in a harsh foreign jail. Why? For telling the truth.
We’re familiar with people being chewed up and spat out by a government-media mobocracy. Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Richard Jewell, details such a story. Accused of planting the 1996 Atlanta bomb (when in fact he’d saved people), Jewell was eventually cleared, but not before his life was ruined.
Assange is charged with espionage. His life and psyche are already in tatters because such accusations, regardless of outcome, propel you into the nightmarish geopolitical stratosphere where law, politics and public opinion merge into a toxic soup.
