H/t “Jane in France” in Craig Murray’s blog:
Extract:
For this extradition is a lawless kidnap. I love the rule of law, one of the main guarantees of freedom in the world. I used to think that this was one of the things that made the US a great country. But I have watched the decline of their legal system in dismay, worse even than the decay of our own.
The growth of an imperious, iron-bound security state in Washington DC has been one of the most dispiriting developments in this fast-darkening world.
Mr Assange’s revelations exposed many of these bad things, plainly in the hope of stopping them – injustice, brutality, secret imprisonment, torture and rendition.
The prevention of these things is not some wild revolutionary cause. It is the duty of Christians and conservatives to oppose such wrongs as much as it is the duty of anybody. If not more so.
[…]
There is a final part of this which is deeply alarming. If the UK gives Mr Assange to the US Federal authorities, he passes for ever into a prison system quite different from ours. You may think, and I would agree with you, that our penal system has a lot wrong with it. But the USA’s has different faults. It can be astonishingly cruel to unconvicted defendants, placing them under special measures that mean they are almost wholly cut off from normal human society.
If Mr Assange is then convicted by a US court, and this is statistically very likely, he could face decades in a modern dungeon such as the notorious ‘Supermax’ prison at Florence, Colorado, more or less buried alive with little hope of ever seeing freedom again. He is far from well at the moment. Those who know him fear that this might be more than he could bear.
Mr Assange is not a terrorist, a spy or a killer. There is as far as I know no evidence that any of his disclosures has, in fact, led to any harm being done to anyone.
WikiLeaks redacted documents to avoid such harm, and tried to prevent unredacted publication of material in its possession. The idea that he should face the strong possibility of being entombed alongside terrorist killers does not really meet any test of justice.