 Managing editor of Consortium News, Joe Lauria. Give him a round of applause. You gotta kiss him. All right, how's that? All right, I'll try to keep my mouth there and not move my head. Randy asked me to do an impersonation of Fidel Castro in terms of how long he wants me to speak. And I have quite a few things to say here. By first opening here, this building I used to visit every week for about 10 years to get a briefing from the British Ambassador to the United Nations, because in this building is not only the consulate but the UN mission. And I was a correspondent for 25 years down there at the UN. So I got a real sense and insight into thinking of British diplomacy and its role in the world and the influence it has. And it might be playing a game of letting people think, as Randy does, that they're a colony of U.S. I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that at all. British diplomats are probably the best in the world and so are their spies. They've been in this game a very, very long time. What came clear to me and what I think is very obvious, even from the case of Julian Assange, is that the United Kingdom is not another vassal of the United States like Germany or France, which reluctantly goes along with orders coming from Washington. We'll see Macron making noise as he goes to see Putin in Moscow. He talks about new security architecture for Europe. And then what happens? Her Prime Minister, sorry, her Chancellor also says things, we're not going to send weapons, but ultimately they concede to the U.S. They let that pipeline be destroyed. Britain may have been involved in that destruction. The thing is, we don't know that for sure, but we do know that British government, when it's lost its empire, really at the Suez crisis, when Eisenhower stepped up and stopped it, that's when they realized that they better join the United States in running a joint empire. And being as clever as they are, they're not just taking orders, in my view, from the United States. For example, in the First Gulf War, remember Margaret Thatcher said publicly to George H.W. Bush, don't go wobbly about attacking Saddam Hussein. This is the British Prime Minister talking to the President of the United States in public, telling him to grow a backbone and attack Iraq. In the Second Gulf War, Germany and France voted against the authorization of the invasion down at the Security Council. That was one of the rare instances where a European so-called vassal stood up to the United States. Dougal pulling France out of NATO being another, but he was Germany and France voting with China and Russia not to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Guess which permanent member the only one voted with the United States? Very good. Great Britain. And why? Because it was planned to join the invasion of its former colony, Iraq, all along. Blair was not Bush's poodle, as is often thought. The plans were in there to invade, and they took part. They couldn't do it alone. They needed the United States with them, not saying that Britain drove that, but they had an equal part in driving that invasion, the Downing Street memo, etc. All this talk about 45 minutes since Saddam can have a missile in Trafalgar Square and all that rubbish that we were told. So coming to Julian Assange, we have to understand that this journalist is being persecuted not just by the United States, but by Great Britain. Why? Because they want him crushed. I'm talking about Whitehall. Assange crushed as much as the United States does for revealing crimes of state. They took an active part in the operation to arrest Julian Assange from the Ecuador Embassy in London. And how did they do that? Well, it was called Operation Pelican. And this is from Declassified UK's reporting in the last few days. The Home Office had eight staff. The Cabinet Office had seven staff working on a secret operation to arrest Julian Assange in April 2019. The Ministry of Justice, which runs the courts, they won't say if their staff was involved in this Operation Pelican. The Foreign Office at first refused to say if its premises were used for the operation. And they lied. A junior minister from the Foreign Office lied to Parliament saying that they weren't involved. And now it's been revealed that, yes, they had several officers working on this case from the Foreign Office. And Ian Duncan, who was Foreign Minister for the Americas, for Europe and the Americas from 2016 to 2019, he ran this UK campaign to force Assange out of the Embassy. As a minister in Parliament, he made his opposition to Assange very well known. He called Julian Assange a miserable little worm in a speech to the House of Commons. In his diaries, Duncan refers to, quote, the supposed human rights of Julian Assange. He admits in his book, just arranging an article in Daily Mail, a hit piece on Assange in the Mail that was published the day after Julian was arrested. Duncan watched the UK police pulling Julian Assange out of that Embassy. From his operation room in the Foreign Office, he watched a live feed. And they were wearing ties, his team. And the ties were adorned with little pictures of pelicans for Operation Pelican. And they had a drink to celebrate the arrest of Julian Assange. Afterwards, Theresa May, who was the Prime Minister at the time, announced to the House of Commons that he'd been arrested and it was a loud cheer. I don't know if it only came from the Conservative backbenchers. It could have also been Labour, I wouldn't be surprised. Duncan, the next day or a couple of days later, flew to Ecuador to thank President Lenin Moreno, the new government of Ecuador that lifted the political asylum of Julian Assange. He thanked him and brought a beautiful porcelain plate from the Buckingham Palace gift shop. I just want to say that the independence of the British judiciary is at stake in this case. Assange waits a decision from the High Court on his application to appeal the extradition order as well as aspects of the lower court ruling. The Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett is the judge who will decide whether to accept that appeal. And guess what? Alan Duncan and Judge Burnett are good friends. They had lunch together. They went to their birthday parties. So we want to know is this an independent judiciary in Britain? I'll tell you that. It's clear that the image of British justice and justice itself is on the line in the case of Julian Assange. If he's extradited, the whole world will know the British role in this tragedy and this travesty. Thank you very much.