Barraitser's 'compassion' towards Julian Assange a ploy to avoid judicial scrutiny of the United States' illegal war on journalism?

Apologies to those who may have been looking at the article above for the attached PDF file of the flyer I handed our yesterday at the 6.30pm Vigil [1] for Julian Assange at Flinders Street Station yesterday (Friday). The PDF file contains 2 landscape oriented A4 pages. [2] Footnotes [1] The time for the start of the vigil was mistakenly given as 7:30pm, rather than 6:30pm, my apologies, This will be corrected. [2] Two pages are necessary in order to, quickly and without too much trouble, print off the flyer on both sides of an A4 sheet (for example, at Officeworks). The laser printer allows the selection of the double-sided print option. This causes each A4 sheet to be automatically fed back into the laser printer after the first side is printed and then sent to the output tray. If the PDF file contains only one landscaped A4 page, and not two, it will be necessary to take the A4 sheets from the out tray after the first side is printed, then feed them back in - considerably more effort.

The following is from Assange vs the violence of imperial 'humanitarianism' (24/1/21) an Al JAzeera opinion piece:

In the United Kingdom court decision sparing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from extradition to the United States (for now, pending appeal), the intimately symbiotic relationship between humanitarianism and violence was evident once again.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that it would be “oppressive” to extradite Assange – but not because of the injustice of the US government’s campaign of retribution against him for exposing its massacres, misrepresentations and manipulations, but rather due to the fragility of Assange’s mental health.

The same “justice” system that has eviscerated Assange’s mental wellbeing with prolonged psychological torture, in the assessment of the UN special rapporteur on torture, now poses as his hope for salvation.

Like a large-scale governmental version of Munchausen by proxy, the state mystifies its own role in producing the pathology in question, then attempts to extract moral capital from exhibiting a modicum of care. Structural violence creates the need for humanitarianism, which mitigates some of the excesses of violence, ensuring the flourishing of both violence and humanitarianism.

Judge Baraitser not only declined to find that the US’s prosecution of Assange is for political “offences” – and therefore barred by the UK-US Extradition Treaty – but held that there is no judicially enforceable barrier against political extraditions at all: “the defence has not established that the UK-US treaty confers rights on Mr Assange which are enforceable in this court” since the treaty is “not yet incorporated into domestic law”. Perversely, according to this judgement, Assange (and other extradition targets) are subject to the treaty, but precluded from invoking its protections.

The fact that Assange revealed damning truths about state atrocities that would otherwise have remained concealed was also dismissed as irrelevant. “The defence have not established that the principle of the ‘right to truth’ is a legal rule that is recognised in either international law or domestic law.”

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