For years, the UK and Sweden stymied Freedom of Information requests to hide why prosecutors under Keir Starmer pursued the Wikileaks founder. Finally the game may be up After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of... Read More

What‘s been the most significant threat to journalism – the lifeblood of a free society – over the past decade? Maybe we can turn to George Monbiot, the doyen of the British liberal-left, for an answer. He has a weekly column at the Guardian newspaper in which he exposes the abuses of state and corporate... Read More

During an interview back in 2011, Julian Assange made an acute observation about the role of what he called society’s “perceived moral institutions”, such as liberal media: Assange presumably gained this insight after working closely the previous year with both newspapers on the Afghan and Iraq war logs. One of the mistakes we typically make... Read More

Aside from his genuine passion for the environment, Monbiot’s position on every major issue chimes precisely with that of his employer, the Guardian. He is not his own man. He’s owned Guardian columnist George Monbiot is, by his own admission, a very busy man. Dedicated as he is to issues such as soil loss, he... Read More

The enthusiasm with which much of the media and political establishment have characterised Frances Haugen as a “Facebook whistleblower” requires that we pause to consider what exactly we think the term “whistleblower” means. Haugen has brought to the surface a fuzziness in what many of us understand by the idea of whistleblowing. Even Russell Brand,... Read More

There was a fascinating online panel discussion on Wednesday night on the Julian Assange case that I recommend everyone watch. The video is at the bottom of the page. But from all the outstanding contributions, I want to highlight a very important point made by Yanis Varoufakis that has significance for understanding current events well... Read More

There was a hope in some quarters after Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled on Monday against an application to extradite Julian Assange to the US, where he faced being locked away for the rest of his life, that she might finally be changing tack. Washington has wanted Assange permanently silenced and made an example of –... Read More

Faced with a barrage of criticism from some of his followers, George Monbiot, the Guardian’s supposedly fearless, leftwing columnist, offered up two extraordinarily feeble excuses this week for failing to provide more than cursory support for Julian Assange over the past month, as the Wikileaks founder has endured extradition hearings in a London courtroom. The... Read More

In my recent post on the current hearings at the Old Bailey over Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States, where he would almost certainly be locked away for the rest of his life for the crime of doing journalism, I made two main criticisms of the Guardian. A decade ago, remember, the newspaper worked... Read More