{"id":145941,"date":"2019-10-28T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=145941"},"modified":"2019-10-23T10:01:09","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T09:01:09","slug":"that-we-live-under-a-dictatorship-is-now-unquestionable-the-assange-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/10\/that-we-live-under-a-dictatorship-is-now-unquestionable-the-assange-case\/","title":{"rendered":"That We Live under a Dictatorship Is Now Unquestionable: The Assange Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

23 Oct 2019 – <\/em>What else can we call it when a publisher does what the New York Times<\/em> did when it published the Pentagon Papers and was ruled by the Supreme Court in 1971 (New York Times Co. v. United States<\/em>) to have been protected by the First Amendment, but the publisher this time has been kept for years in various types of imprisonment without trial, and by now has been so destroyed that, in this, his first court appearance to defend himself, he seems to have been drugged, but for whatever reason \u201cWhen asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both.\u201d \u201cIt was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.\u201d The event occurred on October 21st.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

One of the few pictures of zombie-like Julian Assange being transferred to the hospital wing of Her Majesty\u2019s Belmarsh prison, the British version of Guantanamo.
Image from\u00a0Medium<\/p><\/div>\n

Here (with boldface being used by me only to highlight especially the names of the principal persons<\/strong> at the hearing) are more highlights from the account that was provided on October 22nd by the whistleblowing former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, under the headline \u201cAssange in Court”<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser<\/strong>, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe charge against Julian is very specific: conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs, the Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe key points at issue were that Julian\u2019s defence was requesting more time to prepare their evidence; and arguing that political offences were specifically excluded from the extradition treaty. There should, they argued, therefore be a preliminary hearing to determine whether the extradition treaty applied at all. The reasons given by Assange\u2019s defence team for more time to prepare were both compelling and startling.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe evidence to the Spanish court also included a CIA plot to kidnap Assange, which went to the US authorities\u2019 attitude to lawfulness in his case and the treatment he might expect in the United States. Julian\u2019s team explained that the Spanish legal process was happening now and the evidence from it would be extremely important, but it might not be finished and thus the evidence not fully validated and available in time for the current proposed timetable for the Assange extradition hearings. For the prosecution, James Lewis QC<\/strong> [Queen\u2019s Counsel] stated that the government strongly opposed any delay being given for the defence to prepare.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThere were five representatives of the US government present.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cLewis actually told the judge he was \u2018taking instructions from those behind\u2019.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe US government was dictating its instructions to Lewis, who was relaying those instructions to Baraitser, who was ruling them as her legal decision.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cBaraitser then capped it all by saying the February hearing will be held, not at the comparatively open and accessible Westminster Magistrates Court where we were, but at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, the grim high security facility used for preliminary legal processing of terrorists, attached to the maximum security prison where Assange is being held. There are only six seats for the public in even the largest court at Belmarsh, and the object is plainly to evade public scrutiny.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAssange\u2019s defence team objected strenuously to the move to Belmarsh, in particular on the grounds that there are no conference rooms available there to consult their client.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cFinally, Baraitser turned to Julian and ordered him to stand, and asked him if he had understood the proceedings. He replied in the negative, said that he could not think, and gave every appearance of disorientation. \u2026 He became increasingly confused and incoherent.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI have been both cataloguing and protesting for years the increasingly authoritarian powers of the UK state, but that the most gross abuse could be so open and undisguised is still a shock.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cUnless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Mr. Fish \/ Truthdig<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s yet more that\u2019s in Murray\u2019s account which would shock any intelligent reader, but those excerpts constitute what I consider its main points.<\/p>\n

As regards whether the U.S. Government is a dictatorship: there have, by now, even been some rigorous quantitative social-scientific analyses of that question, and all of the evidence points clearly to a \u201cYes\u201d answer to it<\/a>, concerning at least that particular Government.<\/p>\n

We thus clearly have come to live in a totalitarian state: the U.S.-and-allied Deep State. To call this a \u2018democracy\u2019 is to insult that magnificent word. Some authentic revolutions have been sparked by tyrannies that aren\u2019t as vile as this one.<\/p>\n

The military-industrial complex (MIC) didn\u2019t entirely control the U.S. Government back in 1971 when the MIC\u2019s absolute right of censorship was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case; but, now, after 9\/11, it finally does, and thus democracy has become totally eliminated in today\u2019s America.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 <\/em>They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/a>,<\/em> of\u00a0<\/em>Christ\u2019s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity<\/a>, and\u00a0of<\/em>\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 Oct 2019 – The military-industrial complex didn\u2019t entirely control the U.S. Government back in 1971 when its absolute right of censorship was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case; but, now, after 9\/11, it finally does, and thus democracy has become totally eliminated in today\u2019s America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[229,910,120,276,942,487,378,651,234,291,91,444,287,985,380,1109,911,454,572,249,639,292,70,126,118,172,921,113,75],"class_list":["post-145941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-activism","tag-big-brother","tag-conflict","tag-democracy","tag-ecuador","tag-human-rights","tag-journalism","tag-justice","tag-media","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-nonviolence","tag-power","tag-social-justice","tag-solutions","tag-spying","tag-surveillance","tag-sweden","tag-torture","tag-trump","tag-uk","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war","tag-west","tag-whistleblowing","tag-wikileaks","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}