A really good piece - P123 - thanks! The US Govt case is so utterly inept that it’s practically unbelievable that the whole thing has not been thrown out of court already. Indeed, the blatant injustice and obvious bias of the trial is plain for all to see - as Craig Murray’s excellent day to day reporting has shown. It’s beyond shocking.
And the point that Mercouris raises - that the US Govt has decided that being a foreign journalist offers zero protection in law from being extradited is something that all journalists around the world should be terrified of.
In this case, the silence is truly deafening…
Thanks for the excellent post mate.
PS - I had mistakenly reposted above, but was then able to go in and delete my post as a duplicate! It’s nice having an editable board! 
Yes the MSM silence about the precedent being set against themselves is both terrifying & baffling.
It has to be said that despite the underhand attempts by the US, with the connivance of the Judge, the tables have been effectively turned as it is really the US that is being exposed for what it is, and not just by the absurd charges, but also with even the limited testimonies that have been heard so far; just the the last two days has informed countless people of the inhuman depravity of isolation in US prisons; it’s an abomination & blight on the civilised world; Assange life is at stake, but the US is also on trial here, and the world & the history books can only deliver it a guilty verdict.
Yes! Absolutely correct. That makes it even more criminal that it’s not being widely reported for the world to see it…
You and I and a the handful of people who post here and similar sites have seen it. It needs to be on the BBC, Sky news, Channel 4 (where the hell is John Snow??) and ITV.
That would be real exposure. It would all start to fall apart…
Well, at least I think that Craig’s blog is being widely circulated. The more people who can see it the better!
Craig is also confident that when the case goes to appeal, the extradition request will be thrown out as obviously a political scam. I hope to god he’s right. He lays his faith on senior judges who can’t be career-threatened in the way the likes of Arbuthnot and Baraitser can. Hope to heaven he’s not being naive… Anyway, he’s doing historically-crucial yeoman service right now, and deserves every support. (I’m even sending him money myself! )
The problem as I understand it, and I’m hoping that I’ve got this wrong, is that the appeal process can literally take years, and that would mean that Assange would still be held in isolation in Belmarsh all this time ? So solitary confinement here or in a supermax is still the same thing, Assange will continue to be tortured & destroyed.
Craig Murray’s reporting in these circumstances has been impressive. I don’t know the process like he does, but don’t appeals usually have to be based on errors in law or procedural flaws?
A huge amount of money has been spent by the US legal team and (presumably myriad helpers) micro-spinning the ‘political scam’ aspects so that individually they can be accepted as ‘legitimate’ by a compliant judge claiming to act within the range of ‘legitimate’ judgement. The volume of little, or large, advantage-seeking outrages that have been produced suggests that those advantages that are allowed to pass through for later exploitation would mostly get under the radar of appeal material, and that that would be one of the aims of the US legal team. The volume itself is the main outrage, but in order for this to be an appeal issue I imagine that Assange’s legal team would have to force the issue in real time, and raise a legal objection to the conduct of the trial itself, more or less stopping the show - a difficult thing for a professional team to do. They may not be able to see that the writing has already dried on the wall, or such travesties of justice would not already be happening.
The procedural flaws, on the other hand, are objective realities. Probably most judges at the most senior level would have balked at the conduct of the trial generally, and the blatant interference in Assange’s defence capacity that has taken place, if they had encountered this in their own courts. But catch-up in appeals is a hard game to win. It can always be back-claimed (however ludicrously) that these did not have a material influence on the trial judgement, or that those are/were matters of legitimate legal opinion.
In my view most of the strain in the transparent sidelining of the legal process in subservience to the interests of the US government is being borne by Baraitser and Arbuthnot, and once allowed to seal up this legal can of worms the scope for opening it up again will be very limited.