John Shipton, the father of Julian Assange, told RT his son’s prolonged incarceration fits the patterns of “corruption, criminality of enormous depth” by the US and its allies that Assange exposed.
On the latest episode of RT’s On Contact, host Chris Hedges asked the 78-year-old father of the renowned publisher to share his thoughts on Julian Assange’s long, drawn-out incarceration and whether he thought it was the US and allies’ plan to just let his son wither away behind bars, not intending to ever end the legal saga.
Shipton responded by saying that he thought it would be wrong to conflate the responsibility of the US and the UK, where the WikiLeaks’ co-founder has been kept in a maximum-security prison since April 2019 while awaiting a decision on his extradition to the US. Assange’s father emphasized that authorities in London were just as guilty, and should not be seen as simply doing Washington’s bidding.
“It’s always been thought that the UK is a proxy for the intentions of the United States. That, in fact, is wrong. The actual torture is committed by the institutions of the crown prosecuting service, the foreign and colonial office, and the judiciary. It’s actually committed by those people … who then go home and have a glass of wine.”
Shipton pointed out that the kind of harsh treatment and protracted incarceration of Assange mirrors, albeit on a smaller scale, the overall patterns of “murders, corruption, criminality of enormous depth and conviction by the United States and its NATO allies,” which was exposed for the whole world to see by Assange and WikiLeaks.
The father of the jailed publisher went on to describe the ever-growing amounts of the “most vicious hatred, the most unscrupulous slander, calumny and lies that have surrounded Julian like a tornado in these 13 years.”
Shipton told Chris Hedges that it is the wide and unrelenting support for Julian Assange from lawmakers and ordinary people alike, from all across the world, that keeps him going and gives him strength to continue to fight for his son’s freedom.
When asked to illustrate recent instances of humiliation at the hands of the British authorities that Assange has had to go through, his father recounted how in September, during a court hearing, Julian was placed in a “glass box,” which had only a tiny slot in it, through which Assange could communicate with his lawyers.
However, to do so, the WikiLeaks’ co-founder had to kneel each time, while the lawyers on the other side had to stand on their toes. When Assange and his defense team asked to let him sit next to his lawyers, the judge refused, with that “farce” continuing for three weeks. Understandably, Assange’s father found it too painful to go into detail about his son’s gradual physical and mental decline over the years.
Shipton concluded by saying that WikiLeaks’ revelations may have contributed to the ending of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, which were once deemed “endless,” describing this as the “gifts of Julian, of Chelsea and of WikiLeaks to the people of the United States and to people of the United Kingdom and Australia.”
On December 10, the UK High Court of Justice ruled that Assange could be extradited to the US, overturning a previous decision by a lower court. The case was remitted back to Westminster magistrates court, while Assange’s team announced it would appeal the decision. Stella Moris, Assange’s fiancée, dismissed the ruling as a “grave miscarriage of justice.”
Watch the full interview here:
