Decision Expected Today on Assange Extradition Case

Jan. 3 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser is scheduled to announce her ruling on the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States Jan. 4 (note: as of late Sunday, Jan. 3, it is expected that the decision will be announced Monday night). Her ruling, (all but guaranteed to be in favor of the U.S. request), will be subjected to months or years of appeals, during which time it could be expected that Assange will continue to be held in barbaric conditions described as “torture” by Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

What is at stake is not only the life and well-being of Julian Assange, but a decision about the gravest threat to press freedom facing the trans-Atlantic world. Will the absurd Espionage Act so beloved by Barack Obama be used to criminalize the publication, anywhere in the world, of facts which highly placed members of the United States government and intelligence agencies would prefer not be known? Will the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution be upheld?

Consider how this intersects more general proposals to introduce the concept, novel to U.S. legal practice, of labeling some forms of speech by the curious term “hate speech” and therefore both unworthy of protection and even deserving of prosecution. The growing number of young people in America who consider words themselves to potentially be “violence” is an effect of the cultural warfare efforts to create a dictatorial world, in which adherence to pieties advocated by self-proclaimed (but oligarchically appointed) brave warriors for societal advancement will be a

The Espionage Act should be repealed, Assange should be pardoned, and a revitalized sense of the power of dialogue to arrive at universal truths must serve as a much-needed antidote to the fetish-like nominalism making people dumb and dumber.