Interestingly, this is from March, which means it's not even a response to what happened at this hearing(s?) this week.<p><a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-the-assange-hearing-day-6/" rel="nofollow">https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...</a><p>and<p><a href="https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-7/" rel="nofollow">https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...</a>
People don’t care because he’s “a bad guy”.<p>That’s where we’ve got to.<p>Trouble is people aren’t brought up with an understanding of how things should be in a fair and just society. They’re brought up with some mucky mixed up perception that the world is some mashup of Hollywood and what the media says.<p>There’s no moral compass for society any more.<p>My personal take is he’s some sort of weird Russian asset and he’s a net negative for our way of life but I still think he deserves the full protection of the law at every single stage. He shouldn’t be sold out and abandoned by society.<p>It sounds twee but my mother brought me up to care about other people, the less well off and to care about what’s right and justice for all. I think “we’ll theres an awful lot of people in this world who didn’t have my mother. What did they learn?”
It sickens me how little it seems to matter to people in our mainstream discourse whether or not Assange is treated as a human being. After he was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy, and officials said he had behaved erratically there and smeared feces on the walls, etc., the public reaction was along the lines of, “Wow, what a weirdo loser”—rather than, “Oh God, what have we done to this person?” It speaks poorly of our society.
You cannot trust the US concerning extraditions. Just ask Austria:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholam_Weiss" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholam_Weiss</a>
> According to his lawyers, Mr Assange was handcuffed 11 times; stripped naked twice and searched; his case files confiscated after the first day of the hearing; and had his request to sit with his lawyers during the trial, rather than in a dock surrounded by bulletproof glass, denied.<p>Stripped naked and search is standard custody practice. Criminals hide things and are known to smuggle things in and out of court to prison. And remember, he is techincally a criminal. He broke criminal law when he skipped bail. He is being held in custody, it seems fair for standard policies to apply to him. Why would he be any different?<p>It is standard for someone to sit in the dock, why would he deserve special treatment. He is able to confer with his lawyers when he needs to from the dock as many other people have done so in the past and will do so in the future.<p>The only issue I have is them taking his case files, which seems petty. But I suspect there would have been operational reasons, but why those reasons couldn't have been worked around seems odd and again petty.<p>While I think he doesn't deserve to be sent to the US and should not be. The fact, he is a criminal and is in custody because he can't be trusted does mean he should be treated as such a manner.
I can't think of a special reason why the UK would have it in for Julian Assange. I presume they are doing this in order to cow towel to their ally the United States. Do they not realize that the United States is likely to undergo a regime change at the beginning of next year? Do they think the new regime in the US will feel the same way about Julian Assange and will put the same kind of pressure on the UK that the Trump administration presumably has? Do they think that they can reverse course and just apologize for the failure of justice if the US changes administrations?<p>Don't try telling me that the UK government is not a party here and that this is simply a case of a zealous prosecutor and biased judge -- because I'm not fool enough to believe that story.