I follow the blog written by Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador with long experience of the UK’s deep state. When he wrote recently about the deteriorating state of health of Julian Assange, the Australian publisher of Wikileaks, currently detained in solitary in high-security Belmarsh prison, with inadequate access to documents and lawyers to defend himself against extradition to the USA, I decided to join the rally supporting him in Trafalgar Square, London. Hardly anyone showed up on Saturday, November 16th – at best 60 people.
This non-news is itself news. The more I pursued the question of why Assange has so little public support, the more disturbing and complicated the story became. If you want to follow this up with a single further source, I recommend prize-winning, independent journalist Jonathan Cook’s blog.
What Assange has done
In 2006, Assange established Wikileaks, a platform for whistle-blowers. By leaking US war logs and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables supplied in 2010 by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, he exposed human rights abuses, atrocities and war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wikileaks, the self-proclaimed “intelligence agency of the people,” protected Manning’s anonymity (correct journalistic practice). The platform undermines Western powers’ control over information.
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