 As a presentation, that's probably my job to think of the bigger picture and what myself and Claire Daly met during the science back in 2013 in Ecuadorian Embassy. And like just about everyone here today, I'm sure we believe that what's happening to him is a great injustice. But the big picture is that this case just isn't about the science. His individual freedom rights are very important, and we shouldn't forget that, but we have to understand that the persecution of the science is actually an attack on all of us. We need to see what's going on with the science, part of something much bigger, a huge effort to roll back our rights and to dismantle democracy. It didn't start in the last year or two when the science was arrested. It didn't even start 11 years ago when the states vowed to go after them. It started probably 20 years ago. What's happened to the science in Belmarsh is part of a process when the war on terror originally began in probably with the attack on Afghanistan. The events of 9-11 and the U.S. reaction to it have cast a dark shadow over the world, which we live in right now. You could say that we're living in a bit of a shadow. It wasn't just the U.S. and its allies that went to war. That would be bad enough. They said the wars were to spread democracy, but actually the war on terror was a war on democracy. Bush and Blair used the idea of terrorism to commit an assault on civil liberties and the rule of law. There was a legal war against the Iraqi people, left international law and the international system in tatters. They made a mockery out of human rights. They more or less legalized torture. They showed due process rights for terror suspects out the window. It was one thing after another, indefinite detention without trial, extraordinary rendition, atrocities committed by the U.S. military and its allies, the legal mass surveillance of the whole world, the persecution of Muslim minorities at home and the destruction of Muslim majority's countries abroad. They wouldn't have been able to do what they are doing to a science now without pushing Blair's attack on the rule of law. One of the reasons a science legal battle is so difficult is because the U.K. is extortionately so mad. There's no safeguards for the rights of people accused of anything by the U.S. And we wonder why. Well, Blair wanted to make it easier to strip British Muslim suspects of their rights and send them to America if it suited. The science is a victim of the same war on terror laws. It is so much to oppose. The thing that has happened in the last 20 years could not have happened probably without this attack on democracy. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan were crimes against humanity. Those countries are still suffering from the consequence of those wars. And we actually visited Iraq for a week only two weeks ago. And it is just horrific what was done to millions of people in Iraq. And you wonder what far they didn't even ever even end. I mean, to give birth to the new wars in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Syria. There's been a crazy death toll, millions dead and tens of millions displaced. Some of them have tried to come here to find peace in Europe instead of welcome them. We're building higher barters and trying to keep them out. All of this shows that there's something really wrong with our societies. We're supposed to be democracies, but these things couldn't happen in a real democracy. In a democracy, powerful people are supposed to be accountable. They're not supposed to be able to lie and cheat and murder millions of people in illegal wars and get away with it. Real democracies are not capable of cruelty on a mass scale, like what we've witnessed in the last 20 years. That's why Assange is part of this story. He was on the side of the rest of us. He wanted to fix this. Assange is a journalist. Journalism is supposed to be a huge part of democracy. It's supposed to hold people to account. It's supposed to hold power to account. Journalism is supposed to expose the lies of the powerful and supposed to prevent things like Iraq wars from happening. But as we all know, journalists in the mainstream media didn't stop the Iraq war from happening. They didn't expose the lies. In actual fact, there were cheerleaders for us. They cheered on and during the war, most journalists in the mainstream media didn't do their job. They didn't tell us about the war crimes. They helped the governments write their own propaganda for us instead. During the wars, the defense ministries developed the practice of embedded journalism. They put journalists in the units with American and British troops. Most mainstream journalists on the war were just government press releases. They were part of the problem. The public never saw the reality of what was really happening. The government was able to create the impression that by 2010 the wars had been successful and the public was largely apathetic to them. But Assange and WikiLeaks, they changed that and they had an incredible impression and impact by the revelations. They did journalism the way it is supposed to be. Exposing lies and holding power to account. WikiLeaks released thousands of documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They showed thousands of war crimes. They showed secret assassination squads conducting raids on family homes and slaughtered civilians. They showed helicopter gunships open up and indiscriminately massacred women and children from the air. They showed a systematic use of torture by Iraqi security forces and the Americans turning the blind eye. They revealed the location of undisclosed mass graves. They showed us how many people were really killed in the Iraq war. They showed us the prisoner records, the hundreds of people who've been kidnapped and renditioned and then left in Guantanamo Bay and loads of them passed through Shannon Airport, which Irish government didn't want to know and turned the blind eye to as well. They showed us that the wars were really like and exposed to lies and propaganda that was coming from the mainstream media. The volume of revelations is incredible. Thousands of events. This is in exactly north of Baghdad, where the US soldiers conducted a revenge attack on a village forcing dozens of women and children as young as five to get down on their knees inside their house and then shoot them all in the back of their head. I mean, these soldiers who were now war criminals then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. I mean, how bad? I mean, when WikiLeaks documents on this act of savagery was published, the majority in the Iraq Parliament voted to suspend immunity for US troops. This eventually forced Obama to withdraw US troops from Iraq in 2011. WikiLeaks did more in 2010 than almost anyone else in Western world to stop the war on terror, to stand up for its victims and to hold the criminals responsible for its accountable. The Afghanistan and Iraqi files changed the whole story of those wars for the first time in years. The public could see what was going on and opposition to the wars began to go up again. We wouldn't have this without a science. You did what John was supposed to do. The act that as people are supposed to do with the democracy, that's why he's been punished. It's not to do with law. If you couldn't draw these charges at him, they have found other ones. It's not about laws, but power. He stood up to power and everyone saw that. So we're trying to crush him as not just to punish him personally. It's a display. It's a show to everyone. This is what happens if you stand up to power. It's one of the reasons the court case last September was so powerful. The evidence that was heard showed clearly that this isn't a case about what science did or didn't do. This case is about whether we live in a democracy. This is why the ministry was blocking people going into the court. It's why the mainstream media has ignored this case. They don't want anyone to see what this case is really about. I'll finish with Noam Chomsky's witness statement. I believe this statement is very important to historical documents. It's about what I've been talking about, the bigger picture. The fact that it has been written at all shows how bad things have become. Someday, when all this is science is free, children in school will read this statement and understand what it was all about. All of the mainstream media smears what we've forgotten about. And everyone see clearly that science was the victim of a terrible injustice. Noam Chomsky wrote, in my view, during the science, in courageously upholding political beliefs that most of us profess to share has performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who would treasure the values of freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know what their elected representatives are doing. His actions in turn have led him to be treated in a cruel and intolerable manner. Listen, any journalist out there who pretends to even have an interest in democracy, if you ignore the case of Julian Assange, any lip service to democracy is a lot of bullocks.