 A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice. And this is why we are here today. Yes, all of us who know and admire Julian decry his prolonged suffering and the suffering of his family. Yes, we demand that the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him be ended. Yes, we honor him for his courage and his integrity. But the battle for Julian's liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher. It is the most important battle for press freedom of our era. And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating not only for Julian and his family, but for us. Tyrannies invert the rule of law. They turn the law into an instrument of injustice. They cloak their crimes in a foe legality. They use the decorum of the courts and trials to mask their criminality. Those such as Julian who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous. For without the pretext of legitimacy, the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence. The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law. The rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wollin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations. I was in the London courtroom with Julian when he was being tried by Judge Vanessa Beretzer, an updated version of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, demanding the sentence before pronouncing the verdict. It was judicial farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen under the US Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Julian and the embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Julian is being held in this high security prison so the state can, as Niels Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture, in hopes will lead to his psychological, if not physical, disintegration. The US government directed, as my friend Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to Beretzer. Beretzer adopted them as their legal decision. It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lou Bianca. Now I know many of you here today like to think of themselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative. It is the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not in a functioning democracy be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance. This truth terrifies those in power. The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate controlled legislative judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media are illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished as many of us have been to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth as Julian, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power and you are hutted down and persecuted. Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq war logs in October 2010 which documented numerous U.S. war crimes including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the collateral murder video. The routine torture of Iraqi prisoners the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to the U.S. checkpoints. The towering civil rights attorney, Len Weingrass and my good friend Michael Ratner who I would later accompany to meet Julian in the Ecuadorian embassy met with Julian in a studio apartment in central London. Julian's personal bank cards had been blocked. Three encrypted laptops with documents detailing U.S. war crimes had disappeared from his luggage en route to London. Swedish police were fabricating a case against him in a move Michael Ratner warned that was about extraditing Julian to the United States. WikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and political wine glass told Julian. As we learned in the Pentagon papers case the U.S. government doesn't like the truth coming out and it doesn't like to be humiliated no matter if it's Nixon or Bush or Obama Republican or Democrat in the White House the U.S. government will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets and if they have to destroy you in the First Amendment and the rights of publishers with you they are willing to do it. We believe they are going to come after WikiLeaks and you Julian as the publisher. Come after me for what asked Julian? Espionage wine glass continued. They're going to charge Bradley Manning with treason under the Espionage Act of 1917. We don't think it applies to him because he's a whistleblower not a spy and we don't think it applies to you either because you are a publisher but they are going to try to force Manning into implicating you as his collaborator. And that is the question. They came after Julian not for his vices but for his virtues. They came after Julian because he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians because he exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys aged between 14 and 89 at Guantanamo because he exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia and the U.K. spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints and personal passwords part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included the eavesdropping on U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Because he exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military regime. Because he exposed that George W. Bush Barack Obama and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime and that they authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations including those of U.S. citizens in Yemen and that they secretly launched missile, bomb and drone attacks on Yemen killing scores of civilians. Because he exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. And that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform. Because he exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy the British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party. Because he exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permits the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers smartphones and antivirus software allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images and private text messages even from encrypted apps. Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths they came after Julian they had come after all who dared rip back the veil on power. Red Rosa now is vanished too, Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rose and Luxembourg was murdered she told the poor what life is about and so the rich have rubbed her out. We have undergone a corporate coup d'etat where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state where even habeas corpus no longer exists where we as citizens are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power ones to be used, fleeced and discarded to refuse to fight back to reach out and help the weak the oppressed and the suffering to save the planet from ecocide to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class to demand justice to live in truth is to bear the mark of Cain those in power must feel our wrath and this means constant acts of mass civil disobedience it means constant acts of social and political disruption for this organized power from below is the only power that will save us and the only power that will free Julian politics is a game of fear it is our moral and civic duty to make those in power very, very afraid the criminal ruling class has all of us locked in its death grip it cannot be reformed it has abolished the rule of law it obscures and falsifies the truth it seeks the consolidation of its obscene wealth and power and so to quote the queen of hearts metaphorically of course I say off with their heads you can see people travelling from literally the other side of the world to come and join today's event in solidarity with Julian Assange and Stella Morris so I'm very grateful for you Chris thank you for your words words are very important they sustain us they sustain us in this long journey in this long journey Julian Assange has been persecuted for the last 10 years at least and there may be many, many years to go before we see him free but we will see him free we believe in human rights we are on the right side of history Wikileaks work is a work for the good of humanity we have faith in that and we thank you for coming all the way from America Free Julian Assange!