PETER HITCHENS: There is still time for us to save Julian Assange from dying in US dungeon 

There is just time for our government to do a good, courageous act that will be recognized as such in decades to come. There is just time for prominent figures in politics and the media to put themselves on the side of justice and freedom, where they should always be.

Julian Assange should not be extradited to the US as such an action will disgrace our country.

When in doubt, they should consider the very similar case of Daniel Ellsberg, who has just passed away. Mr. Ellsberg was castigated, hunted and tried half a century ago when he published documents revealing the grim truth about the Vietnam War. President Richard Nixon mobilized the law to silence and punish him. Ellsberg died a much honored freedom hero. Nixon died in shame and disgrace.

Yet the shadows are quickly closing around Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who enraged the US government by revealing a trove of embarrassing material about her misdeeds.

In a few weeks, he could be put in a van at Belmarsh Prison, the maximum-security fortress where he’s been brutally held for years. And then he can be led onto a plane and flown to the US, where there’s a good chance he’ll be buried alive in some federal dungeon for the rest of his life.

I wrote here in September 2020, “Do we really want the hand of a foreign power to be able to reach our national territory at will and pick out anyone it wants to punish? Are we still an independent country if we allow this? The Americans certainly wouldn’t allow us to treat them this way. It is inconceivable that the US would hand over to us citizens accused of leaking British classified documents. But if Mr Assange is sent to the US to face trial, any British journalist who comes into possession of classified material from the US, even though he has not committed a crime under our own law, will face the same danger.

PETER HITCHENS: When in doubt, they should consider the very similar case of Daniel Ellsberg, who just passed away

“This is a fundamental violation of our national sovereignty and a major threat to our own freedom of the press. I think no English court should accept this demand. And if the courts fall short of their duty, I think any self-respecting Home Secretary should override them.’

Please raise your voice while you still can. This is a political persecution and we must not allow such a thing against anyone on our territory.

Glenda classic that has strangely disappeared

Reading Glenda Jackson’s obituaries made me realize that I must have really seen her on stage before she was a superstar.

PETER HITCHENS: What the hell happened to the 1971 movie Sunday Bloody Sunday, starring Jackson and the great Peter Finch

If only I had known, I might have enjoyed the evening more. It was an insane, ghastly agitprop play called US, about the general badness of America, where (as I remember) everyone was screaming all the time and I was imagining a big cardboard model of a nuclear missile and the burning of a butterfly (later turned out to be fake). Gee, the 1960s were bizarre.

I don’t feel like seeing that again.

But what the hell happened to the 1971 movie Sunday Bloody Sunday, starring Jackson and the great Peter Finch – a great prophecy of the new era that was just beginning?

How come, in an age where we supposedly can watch everything, that such things can just disappear?

A lax law destroys two more lives

Abortion is the only legal medical procedure that intentionally kills a human being. We’ve lied to ourselves about this for decades, using the contemptuous, harsh Latin term “fetus”—instead of acknowledging that what we’re destroying is a future human being.

In almost all cases, I really don’t see why adoption would be any worse than abortion, if the mother really doesn’t want the baby.

So how should we view the case of Carla Foster, a mother of young children who was sent to prison for 14 months for wrongfully aborting her baby, long after our very liberal law allows it? You may be interested to know that in this case the name of the aborted baby was Lily. I think this helps us realize that we are dealing with two people, not just one.

PETER HITCHENS: I think it’s our very lax abortion laws that put Carla Foster in the terrible circumstances that panicked her and then entangled her in an impossible tangle of lies

The abortion lobby thinks the case could hurt the cause and its relentless efforts to make abortion even easier. I hope it harms that cause. I think it’s our very lax abortion laws that put Carla Foster in the terrible circumstances that panicked her and then entangled her in an impossible tangle of lies. That’s why she did something that we know she now deeply regrets.

Those laws encourage women (as well as irresponsible, selfish men) to think that they can behave as they please, and be saved from all consequences, by aborting the resulting child.

If they didn’t think this, I think they’d be more careful in the first place. You cannot blame this sad hard case on the strictness of the law, which is anything but strict. It’s important to know that if only Carla Foster had pleaded guilty sooner, her sentence could have been legally suspended and probably would have been. She was obviously lying because she freaked out and her private life was in a terrible mess and who can’t sympathize with that?

But why was she in this plight in the first place? I believe it’s because abortion is too easy, not because it’s too hard.

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