Recently, an Icelandic journalist revealed that the key witness in the trial against Julian Assange committed perjury. Here’s the English version of the original article published in Iceland.
A simple blog post cannot cover everything which has been wrong with the Assange trial even before this information about a key witness giving false testimony became public. So I’ll just address one point: The Espionage Act of 1917, the law under which the United States government is prosecuting Assange, should be taken off the books. Either the Supreme Court should declare it to be unconstitutional (it IS unconstitutional, the government has used the Espionage Act to violate the first amendment many times, including when it was first used in 1917 to put antiwar activists in prison merely because they expressed opposition to the United States joining the war in Europe, as I discussed in this post), or Congress should repeal it. Either way, that law needs to be burned in a blazing trash fire.
However, what truly inspired this post is not the revelation that a key witness committed perjury and the case against Assange has collapsed. It’s the lack of coverage of this development in mainstream English language media. If it were covered even somewhat widely in ‘mainstream’ news media, I would have blogged about something else this week.
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The Notes Which Do Not Fit 