 we have this extraordinary discussion of the assurances. Now, the first is the whole debate, the whole discussion about the fact that the United States government provided these assurances, not at the hearing, not at the time when the judge made her judgment, but months after, in the context of an appeal, it seems to me that they were spending an enormous amount of time, first trying to argue that these assurances are not evidence. Well, they found somewhere an authority they could rely on to say that. First, it's a high court authority, so we'll see what the Supreme Court has to say about that. But the other thing was, they came up with this extraordinary, I thought utterly ludicrous attempt to excuse the decision of the United States not to give those assurances earlier. And at one point, they almost seem to be blaming Assange himself for the fact that those assurances were given later than they arguably should have been, which is they said that, you know, Assange brought all sorts of issues, he contested so many different points in the extradition request that it would be unreasonable to expect that the United States might, you know, have to anticipate a scenario where he was potentially challenging the prison conditions that he might be sent to in the United States. I mean, that is firstly, completely ludicrous to throw the whole weight of that back on Assange himself. But it is also, I mean, obviously, an entirely wrong. Anybody who'd been following the case at all, who was supposed to be familiar with the case would have known right from the outset that the question of the prison conditions which Assange would be sent to would be a central issue. So of course, the United States had all the warning it needed or the notice it needed to bring up this issue at the hearing. So again, you see this strained attempt to find rationalizations and excuses for the United States and again, implied criticism of the judge suggested that it was the judge's job to do the United States's work for them to actually say, well, you know, I think Mr. Assange would be in serious danger if he was sent to the United States but I noticed that the United States hasn't given any assurances about that. So I'm actually going to delay making a decision one way or the other until the United States can offer me assurances. Again, that seems to me to throw the weight for the delay, the blame for the delay or rather the blame for the fact that the assurances weren't given sooner on the judge herself. So everybody's to blame, the judge was to blame Assange and his legal team were to blame for the fact that there was this delay in the assurances. The only party apparently, which is not to blame is the United States, which, you know, the mightiest power in the world, which couldn't bring itself to give assurances, wasn't ready to give these assurances to the lower court judge at the hearing when of course, as we all know, it could have been. I mean, it has Alice in Wonderland logic that I have to say defies understanding, at least it defies my understanding and we'll see what Gareth Pierce and Assange's very powerful legal team have to say about this in the application they made to the Supreme Court, which we now know they're going to make because, well, they've confirmed as much. Again, her stressor point, the assurances were not before the lower court. So there should have been a much more involved in debate if they're going to accept those assurances, firstly, as to why there were these reasons for delay and notice there's no real discussion of this apart from these as a bizarre attempts to blame other people. And then a coherent explanation of why they were accepting the assurances and note two important things. Firstly, they list the assurances, they don't go through the assurances in detail. They don't go through the cases in detail. We're going to discuss Mendoza and these other cases in detail. They don't actually undertake what one would have expected of thorough and detailed discussion of the assurances themselves and explain why they are going to accept them and why they think that the arguments that they should not be accepted are wrong. They don't, for example, look at the details of the Mendoza case and of the other cases which had been brought to them. Now that, again, is very remarkable given that they've just accepted that if he's going to be sent to the United States, his medical condition and the prison conditions there are such as might put him in danger. You would have thought that there would in that kind of situation be a detailed discussion and analysis of the assurances to explain why they were being accepted and we come to the actual conditions in which the hearing itself was held. So we have a hearing, the hearing where the judgment is read out, the High Court reads out its judgment. The lawyers are actually told not to come and they are told that no submissions will be accepted. What submissions? There can only be one conceivable set of submissions that I can think of and that would have been an application to the High Court for permission to appeal the judgment to the Supreme Court, to the UK Supreme Court because that's the usual practice. First, you apply to the court that's made the decision for permission to appeal to the higher appeal court. Then if that application is refused, you go to the appeal court and you, in this case, the Supreme Court and you ask the Supreme Court for permission. Well, the whole scenario looks as if it was intended to physically prevent an application like that being made on Friday. Why did they do that? Well, first of all, they know that they can't prevent an application for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court. The only reason I can think of is that if they were going to refuse an application for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, they would have had to do that, which they did not do in any adequate way in their own judgment and explain in detail why they were accepting the assurances. They didn't want, in other words, to carry out that discussion of the previous cases, cases like Mendoza.