The witness quotes a couple of statements by a former warden of ADX Colorado. In case anyone's interested in finding a source for at least one of those, it appears in a New York Times article:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-toughest-federal-prison.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-...</a><p>(caution: contains some fairly unpleasant reading)<p>Edit / clarification: only one of the two quotes appears in the NYT article.
Is there anyone who has changed their mind in either direction on Julian Assange's actions, guilt, or how different governments are acting, after reading, over the last few years, any of these posts or comments therein?
A couple observations (as someone who who doesn't really follow Assange but stumbled upon this article):<p>- In the UK, publishing the transcript of a public hearing is a crime - "NB this is not a precise transcript. It would be illegal for me to publish a transcript (of a “public” court hearing; fascinating but true)." - IMO something is deeply broken with this, needs to be changed and potentially people who created this system need to be punished (for taking steps to undermine democracy).<p>- Publishing evidence of (war) crimes (this is what Assange did, right?) somehow appears to be a crime. What happened to failure to report a crime? Shouldn't instead people not publishing this be punished?<p>- A video call is too high tech for the UK government; also moving to a different courtroom where it would work is impossible because they'd have to carry over too much paper. They do everything on paper - linking to some other piece of paper means making a physical copy - "Are you saying that I should have repeated his affidavits and all the other evidence in my statements? My statements would have been thousands of pages long." - Hello, we have the internet and hyperlinks, can we pls use them? To me this feels like the courts are designed as a DoS attack on people's attention.<p>- Some US prisons are designed as death penalty without having to go through the legal trouble of saying it out loud - "Suicides in jail are increasing by 18% a year."<p>- Assange seems like a political prisoner - "Eric Lewis than gave testimony on the change of policy towards prosecuting Assange from the Trump administration." - Why does a president have this power? What happened to the 3 branches of government? Maybe this is a US thing, seems very broken.<p>- It's not even a public process, except in name - "Public access continues to be restricted and major NGOs, including Amnesty, PEN and Reporters Without Borders, continue to be excluded both physically and from watching online." - Why is everything not recorded and at least transcript posted online by default?
It's disappointing that publishing about war-crimes is a bigger deal than doing it for governments. Why even governments have this right in first place? It's fundamentally wrong.