Julian Assange

Moris presented a powerful defence of Assange and of democratic rights. Bolton ranted and raved about the “right” of the American government to destroy ...

“During his time in the Bush administration and later the Trump administration he sought to undermine the international legal system, sought to ensure that the US is not under the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. All of them are using the pursuit of Assange to set a precedent for far broader victimisations, especially targeting widespread opposition to war. Assange will receive “due process,” says the US state operative, as he proclaims his hope that the journalist is locked in a cell with the key effectively thrown away. Instead it was the outcome of Guardian journalists recklessly publishing the password to the tranche in a book. The segment underscored what is at stake in the fight for Assange’s freedom. Moris called on viewers to participate in a human chain protest for Assange’s freedom around the British parliament this Saturday, October 8, at 1 p.m. Bolton, unbelievably, responded: “Well, I think that’s a small amount of the sentence he deserves.“ Bolton then spouted a series of false generalities, which he made no attempt to substantiate. It was about US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he revealed tens of thousands of civilian deaths that had not been acknowledged before.” WikiLeaks, Moris noted, had withheld 15,000 documents from the US army’s Afghan war logs, and had been criticised by some for extensive redactions of the Iraq war logs. Moris, who is herself a widely-respected human rights lawyer, explained: “Julian faces a potential sentence in the United States of 175 years for doing journalistic work. Morgan began by noting that Assange has been locked up in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison, a “very high security” and “grim” facility, for almost four years, following seven years of arbitrary detention at Ecuador’s British embassy. On the one hand, Assange’s wife Stella Moris outlined the dire precedent that the US is seeking to establish by prosecuting a journalist for publishing true information.