September 30
GUEST: John Shipton, political activist, citizen of Australia, and the father of Julian Assange, talks about the campaign to free his son from the grips of Belmarsh Prison and the possible extradition to the United States.
Julian Assange’s father and brother
I have always thought that Julian's crimes began and ended with the exposure of the violence and ugliness of US war crimes in Iraq. But many of the leaks simply exposed the kleptocracy that runs our country and both major parties. Well maybe that's the same thing. We have a well entrenched oligarchy that makes most of its money invading other countries and stealing their resources. The rule of the very richest perhaps brings with it these perpetual war crimes. How else to enlarge the empire? Certainly not by being nice in the Third World.
However, I have come to discover another of Julian's supposed crimes. Rather than beg for mercy, he has refused to give into an elite class of rulers that that is very used to getting its own way. To see the United States appear in am English court with its bogus claims and World War I Sedition Act mentality sort of tears away at its most important strength, its invincibility. Yes, it is almost comical that a supposedly civilized country would insist on the right to kill people in a foreign land, and then try to do away with the journalist who reports on it. And not even a journalist from the United States. The empire insists on the right to pursue anyone in the world who documents its carnage. The exposing of the video from Iraq is the crime, but so to is the revelation of the empire's hubris.
If anyone wants to argue that the US empire is any better than the ruthless empires of history, the CIA's plot to assassinate Assange completely undermines that logic. The pretense of legality, of a judge sitting in court and pursuing justice, is destroyed by this look at the machinations of our criminal world dominance. The United States doesn't want to judge Assange; it wants to kill him.
