MOSCOW (RT) – John Shipton, the father of Julian Assange, says his son’s prolonged incarceration fits the patterns of “corruption, criminality of enormous depth” by the U.S. and its allies the WikiLeaks’ co-founder 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’s long, drawn-out incarceration and whether he thought it was the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
On December 10, the UK High Court of Justice ruled that Assange could be extradited to the U.S., 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”.
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,” he stated.
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.