The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange
Chris Hedges
The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange
/ Truthdig
LONDON-On Friday morning I was in a small courtroom at Westminster
Magistrates' Court in London. Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh Prison and
dressed in a pale-blue prison shirt, appeared on a video screen directly in
front of me. Assange, his gray hair and beard neatly trimmed, slipped on
heavy, dark-frame glasses at the start of the proceedings. He listened
intently as Ben Brandon, the prosecutor, seated at a narrow wooden table,
listed the crimes he allegedly had committed and called for his extradition
to the United States to face charges that could result in a sentence of 175
years. The charges include the release of unredacted classified material
that posed a "grave" threat to "human intelligence sources" and "the largest
compromises of confidential information in the history of the United
States." After the prosecutor's presentation, Assange's attorney, Mark
Summers, seated at the same table, called the charges "an outrageous and
full-frontal assault on journalistic rights."
Most of us who have followed the long persecution of Assange expected this
moment, but it was nevertheless deeply unsettling, the opening of the final
act in a Greek tragedy where the hero, cursed by fortuna, or fate, confronts
the dark forces from which there is no escape.
