Citizens Party's Robbie Barwick speaks for imprisoned whistleblowers at the electoral office of Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus
Last Thursday 19 December 2024, Robert (Robbie) Barwick, the lead Citizen's Party (https://citizensparty.org.au) candidate for the Senate in Victoria, spoke to a protest outside the Mordialloc electoral office of the federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. Robbie spoke in support of David McBride and a number of of other whistleblowers who had been unjustly prosecuted by Mark Dreyfus's department. He also spoke in support of former US Marine Corps pilot, Daniel (Dan) Duggan who fought in the First Gulf War of 1991.
As Australia agrees to host a second US military base among the 800 to 1000 US bases and installations round the world, it also stands almost silently by as the US pursues Julian Assange's extradition to the bowels of the bent and fractured US legal system. This appalling system is now poised to outlaw free speech indefinitely in the United States and wherever its tentacles reach around the globe.
Friday, 17 June. In a horrible clown-world, the UK government has approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US to face criminal charges, despite an original British judge ruling that he should not be deported due to risk of suicide and a warning by his lawyer that he still remains a risk - and the fact that he has committed no crime.
The UK Home Secretary Priti Patel can now sign off on Julian Assange’s extradition to the US at any moment. Extradition will mean that Julian faces the potential of 175 years in prison for exposing US war crimes and corruption.
Only the British Home Secretary can stop his extradition now.
"What should happen is every newspaper and journalistic entity should pull out of the United States and you should have a massive sanctioning of the United States. No American should be welcome in any sporting event, much as they're trying to do to other nationalities, including Russian. The only way to stop this devouring of the world is to stop the devourer of the world, and to sanction it, and to withdraw from it. And ignore it and turn away from it.
This household had a moment of great joy last night, to hear that Judge Vanessa Baraitser, presiding at the Magistrate's court, has disallowed Julian Assange's extradition on medical grounds. She found there was a high risk of his suiciding if confined in a US prison. However, she apparently threw out the grounds of public interest (protection of journalists); political persecution, and oppression. She also seems to have upheld the honouring of the UK treaty obligations to the United States, as the only public interest matter. For some of us, her decision on medical grounds, that Assange would probably suicide in US prison conditions, is equivalent to preventing the extradition of a prisoner to Nazi Germany, on grounds that they would probably not survive the concentration camps. The US prison system actually allows major corporations to benefit from slave labour of prisoners; it conducts secret trials; and it holds prisoners indefinitely without trial - as in Guantanamo Bay prison. The war crimes and international surveillance of governments and private individuals that Julian Assange exposed show the United States as a totally rogue state. It is not even a party to the International Criminal Court. Julian Assange's defense team called the UK treaty obligations with this rogue state into question. We need an international media and state denunciation of state alliances with the United States, but that would, ironically, require journalists to run the danger of being pursued by this rogue state, just as Julian Assange has been. One hopes that a defense of Julian Assange against the US appeal would benefit from a higher court looking again at the points of law disallowed by Judge Baraitser. 
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