So the vicious, entitled, bullying and thoroughly incompetent Priti Patel has decided that Julian Assange should be extradited to the US.

From Peter Oborne (of all people) in the Guardian:

Julian Assange’s supposed crime was to expose atrocities committed by the US and its allies, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, during the war on terror. He shone a light on the systematic abuse dealt out to prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. He revealed the fact that more than 150 entirely innocent inmates were held for years without even being charged.

Once safely in US hands, it’s all but certain that Assange will spend the rest of his life in jail.

He published a video of helicopter gunmen laughing as they casually massacred unarmed Iraqi civilians in an attack that killed around 15 people, including a Reuters photographer and his assistant.

The US declined to discipline the perpetrators of that atrocity. But they are pursuing Assange to the ends of the earth for revealing it took place.

So Assange will rot in a US jail because he embarrassed the US government. Because he exposed the dreadful things the US had done in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Baghdad by releasing "classified" documents (not documents that threatened national security but documents which revealed actions that no civilised country should condone).

Whenever I hear Americans bleating about threats to their "free speech," I think of how they would go to the ends of the earth to put Assange behind bars - for exercising the most important "free speech" of all, the free speech that exposes government wrongdoings. A keystone of democracy. But campaigning for free speech suddenly halts when that free speech gets just a little embarrassing. So I hope that Julian's appeals are successful. He's already been incarcerated, in effect, for ten years. Time for him to be freed to lead a deserved normal life.