Julian Assange Free the Truth John Pilger
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DH0s8hGLS6A
Nov 28 Julian Assange - Free the Truth - John Pilger describes his visit with Julian Assange earlier on Thursday:
"I spent two hours with Julian today in Belmarsh prison and I'd like to give you a glimpse of what that experience was like and what Julian has to endure. I arrived very early in the morning at what is called a visitor center here. Here you give up your passport, your wallet, credit cards, medical cards, phones, keys, pen, paper everything. I need two pairs of glasses I had to choose which pair stay behind. I left my reading glasses - from here on I couldn't read. Just as Julian couldn't read for the first few weeks of his incarceration. His reading glasses were sent to him but inexplicably they took months to arrive.
There are large TV screens in the visitor center the TV is almost always on and the volume is turned up.
Game shows, commercials for cars, and pizzas, and funeral packages, even Ted they seemed perfect for a prison-like visual valium.
I joined a queue of sad anxious people mostly poor women and children and grandmothers. At the first desk I was fingerprinted if that's the word for biometric testing. Both hands pressed down I was told a file on me appeared on the screen. I could now cross to the main gate which is set in the walls of the prison.
Last time I was at Belmarsh it was raining hard, my umbrella wasn't allowed beyond the visitor center. I had the choice of getting drenched or running like hell. Grandmothers have the same choice.
At the second desk an official behind wire said 'what's that?' my watch I said guiltily. 'Take it back', she said. So I ran back through the rain returning just in time for my hand to be fingerprinted biometrically and tested again in preparation for a full-body scan. This was followed at each stop - we all shuffled into what is called a sealed place, squeezed behind the yellow line. Pity the claustrophobic among us. One woman squeezed their eyes shut.
We were then ordered into another holding area again with iron doors shutting in front of us and behind us. 'Stand behind the yellow line' said a disembodied voice then another electronic door another holding area another desk another chorus of show your finger. Then we were a long room, we're in the long room was with squares, we were where we were told to stand one at a time.
Two men with sniffer dogs arrived and worked us front and back. The dog sniffed our backsides and slobbered on my hand. Then the last door was opened to a new order to hold out your wrists. A laser branding was our ticket into a large room where the prisoners sat waiting in silence opposite empty chairs.
On the far side of the room was Julian wearing a yellow armband over his prison clothes as a remand prisoner is entitled to wear his own clothes. But when the thugs dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy last April they prevented him from bringing a small bag he had with his personal effects and some clothes in it. His clothes would follow they said but like his reading glasses they were mysteriously lost.
Julian is confined to what they call healthcare. It's a curious almost mocking term. It's not really a prison hospital but a place where he can be isolated and spied on. They spy on him every thirty minutes they would call this suicide watch.
In the adjoining cells are convicted murderers and further along is a mentally ill man who screams through the night. Last night he screamed all night. Julian calls this with his wicked black humor 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.
His one assured social gathering is the weekly service in the chapel. The priest a kind man has become a friend. The other day a prisoner was attacked in the chapel while hymns were being sung.
When we greet each other I can feel his ribs. His arm has no muscle, he is lost perhaps 10 to 15 kilos in weight since April. When I first saw him in Belmarsh what was most shocking was how much older he looked.
'I think I'm going out of my mind' he said then. I said to him 'No you're not - look how you frighten them.'
Julian's intellect resilience and sense of humor are I believe protecting him but for how long I don't know. Today he spoke with his hand over his mouth so as not to be overheard.
There are cameras above us and all about us. On the walls are happy clappy slogans exhorting the prisoners to keep on keeping on. He's still denied a laptop with which to prepare his case against the extradition.
The only exercise he has is on a small bitumen (asphalt?) patch. And on the walls are more happy-clappy nonsense exhorting the prisoners to enjoy the blades of grass beneath your feet. But there is no grass not a single blade. That must be their little joke.
The inhumane pettiness of Belmarsh sticks to you like sweat. If you lean too close to the prisoner a guard tells you to sit back as he did today to me. If you take the lid off your coffee cup a guard tells you to replace it. If you go to the toilet - you're body searched and told to hold your mouth open as I was told today.
Today a prisoner on the other side of the room and a woman visiting him had a row or what might be called a domestic. During the course of which the prisoner told the guard to f--- off. This was the signal for 20 guards mostly large extremely overweight men and women to pounce on him and hold him onto the floor then drag him out as we watched.
When it was time for the rest of us to go the guards came around shouting to us 'Time!' and we began that the long journey out to a fingerprinting, more yellow lines, more sealed areas.
On 12th of December there will be an election of a new government in Britain. There has been no mention during the campaign of the journalist and publisher in Belmarsh prison who is Britain's political prisoner. I now I don't use that expression lightly, I don't use it as agitprop. It's a fact.
The extradition treaty between Britain and the United States includes one vital section that says and I paraphrase it - no one shall be extradited if the offense which he or she is said to have committed is in any way political. 17 charges concocted against Julian Assange by the United States are based on the 1917 Espionage Act, which was and remains a political law enacted to chase after conscientious objectors during the First World War. That's not in dispute. It's an exclusively political law and it's being used against a journalist and a publisher not only to silence them but to intimidate the media and all truth tellers right across the world.
The indictment against Julian refers to co-conspirators. Well The Guardian is a co-conspirator, today the Daily Telegraph is a co-conspirator, the New York Times is a co-conspirator, El Cajon Spain is a co-conspirator, Der Spiegel in Germany is a co-conspirator, The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia is a co-conspirator - all of them and many others publish the leaked evidence of US war crimes of which WikiLeaks was the source. The US may have come for only one of them - Julian Assange but the warning could not be clearer. They can come for the rest. If free journalist, free people, and I dare say free governments allow this outrage to continue against justice and democracy.
If Labor if Labor should win the election or form a coalition based on a hung parliament - the new government can act decisively. When the extradition is trial is over Diana abbott -if she is to be home secretary will have the power to grant asylum to Julian Assange. And this and this she must do or whoever is a Labour Home Secretary this that person must do and this Jeremy Corbyn must do in the name of justice, of free speech of free journalism and freedom itself.
Thank you.
~ John Pilger
St Pancras New Church, Euston Road, London NW1 2BA United Kingdom