A Mental Illness Claim !

Julian Assange is an Australian who engaged in investigative journalism.  He convinced an American soldier tasked with  information transmission to make copies of material marked " Top Secret " and later released this to embarrass the United States government

To some, Assange is a hero.  That released material contained evidence of American criminal activities by their military in which innocent people were killed. The perpetrators  were never brought to justice and the killings were covered up.  The American government was infuriated and sought an arrest order against Assange and for a while he became an international identity.

While he was in Sweden it was suggested that Assange committed rape.  The American government urged Sweden to have Assange brought into that country to face the charge and Assange expected once he set foot on Swedish soil he would be transferred to America and spend the rest of his life in prison.

He was arrested in Britain and fought that extradition order.  When he lost that legal battle the Ecuadorian embassy in London offered him asylum.  He spent years as their guest, holding press interviews from a balcony just metres from surrounding British police.  He was still in the embassy when Sweden dropped all interest in those rape charges, but the British were continuing criminal action over the fact that he had skipped bail when he sought embassy protection.

Eventually, his mind deteriorated to the extent that the embassy asked police to remove Assange. He is now held in London's  Belmarsh prison where he spends twenty-three hours a day confined to his cell.  Two Australian members of parliament who have visited him claim he has been subjected to psychological torture. They report that he is "disoriented ", " dehumanised " and " depersonalised " .

Assange was the founder of WikiLeaks, a news gathering outfit that sought to bring state secrets to the notice of the public.  As such, he became the enemy of governments of all political persuasions that have secrets they do not want the public to know hidden in their archives.  It was the intent of Wikileaks to probe and obtain those secrets and to air them in the public media.

To say the Americans are seeking Assange as sheer vindictive spleen long after the serving soldier who stole the information has served a sentence and been rehabilitated puts the Australian government in an awkward position.  To demand Assange be released on mental health grounds would be seen by some as supporting information espionage and we have our own dirty little secrets hidden away in the archives.

Whatever view individuals hold on Wikileaks, Assange does not deserve to spend the rest of his life locked away in a remote American prison.  The information he released held the United States accountable for criminal actions their forces unleashed which killed innocent people - and which was carefully covered up by high government officials.  Assange has credibility because the information he released was the truth.

If the world does nothing and Assange is swallowed by the American justice machine it would simply condone more of the same by the American military  !