As we have recently observed in media alerts (here and here), the state-corporate media, including and especially BBC News, have been complicit in keeping the public largely ignorant about the case of Julian Assange. Likewise, the case’s likely terrifying implications for further limiting public knowledge about what governments and big business actually get up to. As founder of WikiLeaks, Assange has probably done more than anyone in at least a generation to expose the war crimes of the US and its allies.
The revelations that the CIA had plans to kidnap or even kill Assange, almost entirely ignored by BBC News, has prompted concerned calls from advocates of ‘press freedom’ (such as it is in the West). The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Knight First Amendment Institute, Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders are among the signatories of a letter demanding that the case against Assange be dropped.
Next Wednesday, a substantive U.S. appeal hearing will be heard at the High Court in London. Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, the High Court judge who reversed an earlier court order to bar the U.S. from appealing Assange’s medical issues, will preside over the hearing. According to Consortium News legal analyst Alexander Mercouris:
‘It is highly unusual for a judge who has already ruled in favour of one party to continue on the bench. In most cases, fresh judges would be brought in who have had no part in earlier rulings for either side.’
To be continued