Nigeria, May 21 -- It was faint, but there was more than just a flicker of hope. In the tormented (and tormenting) journey the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange, has endured, May 20, 2024 provided another pitstop. As with many such stops over the years, it involved lawyers. Many of them.

The occasion was whether the UK High Court of Justice would grant Assange leave to appeal his extradition to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 hewn from the monstrous quarry that is the Espionage Act of 1917. He is wanted for receiving and publishing classified US government materials comprising diplomatic cables, the files of those detained in Guantanamo Bay, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Any computed sentence, glacially cal...