Stuart Littlewood writes:

This morning [12 October] I was catching up as usual on the ever-reliable Craig Murray’s day-to-day reports of what passes for a trial at the Old Bailey under the shabby standards now governing British justice. I’m talking of course about the trial to extradite Julian Assange which is nearing its nauseating climax.

Murray has been extraordinarily dedicated and resourceful in bringing out the truth from a cruelly “fixed” process to which public access has been suppressed.

Here is an extract from his piece “Where is my final Assange report?” which for me sums up the disgraceful performance put on to appease the American administration in its lust for revenge for having its vile secrets exposed. Murray’s words are a chilling indictment.

… In that courtroom, you were in the presence of evil. With a civilised veneer, a pretence at process, and even displays of bonhommie, the entire destruction of a human being was in process. Julian was being destroyed as a person before my eyes. For the crime of publishing the truth. He had to sit there listening to days of calm discussion as to the incredible torture that would await him in a US supermax prison, deprived of all meaningful human contact for years on end, in solitary in a cell just 50 square feet.

Fifty square feet. Mark that out yourself now. Three paces by two. Of all the terrible things I heard, Warden Baird explaining that the single hour a day allowed out of the cell is alone in another, absolutely identical cell called the “recreation cell” was perhaps the most chilling. That and the foul government “expert” Dr Blackwood describing how Julian might be sufficiently medicated and physically deprived of the means of suicide to keep him alive for years of this.

I encountered evil in Uzbekistan when the mother brought me the photos of her son tortured to death by immersion in boiling liquid. The US government was also implicated in that, through the CIA cooperation with the Uzbek Security Services; it happened just outside the US military base at Karshi-Khanabad. Here was that same evil paraded in the centre of London, under the panoply of Crown justice.

And who is the Justice Secretary responsible for this nasty charade? Robert Buckland. If anyone deserves a good smacking he surely does.

And so does the journalism profession if they still have the nerve to call themselves that. The Assange case is about journalism – true journalism; why weren’t the mainstream insisting on access and covering it?