There’s all sorts of reports coming out detailing how Julian Assange is basically being tortured while in custody.
Julian Assange is showing all the symptoms associated with prolonged exposure to psychological torture and should not be extradited to the US, according to a senior UN expert who visited him in prison.
Nils Melzer, UN’s special rapporteur on torture, is expected to make his appeal to the UK government on Friday. It comes after Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks, was said by his lawyers to be too ill to appear by video link for the latest court hearing of the case on Thursday.
Assange has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison, London, where he has been serving a 50-week sentence for skipping bail while fighting extradition to the US. He is accused of violating the Espionage Act by publishing secret documents containing the names of confidential US military and diplomatic sources.
After meeting Assange earlier this month in the company of medical experts who examined him, Melzer will say on Friday that he fears the Australian’s human rights could be seriously violated if he is extradited to the US and will condemn what he describes as the “deliberate and concerted abuse inflicted for years” on him.
This whole situation is nuts. All Assange did was publish documents provided to him by sources inside of governments. He is a journalist and in fact one of the few real journalists who has done important reporting over the past few decades.
For his efforts in exposing government wrongdoing, he was setup on fake rape charges and forced to languish inside of Ecuador’s embassy for many years. And since being dragged out of the embassy he is reportedly being tortured.
It boggles the mind that supposed reporters cheered his incarceration. Much of that appears to be out of professional jealousy as they will never be anywhere near the important figure that Assange has become.
But what you see happening to Assange is no different than what the Soviets did to political dissidents. And yet we are told that we live in a vibrant and free society. What a load of bullshit that is. A vibrant and free society would not torture people for simply publishing documents exposing bad things that the government has been doing.
