We used to wonder how ‘ordinary’ people could be part of the whole apparatus which sent people to death camps in Germany, how normalised people can become when they confine themselves to their immediate task and deliberately blank out the implications of what they are doing. It seemed so beyond any human norms that it was often chalked up as some kind of aberration, a collective hypnosis.

Not now, though. We now see exactly the same sort of chilling behaviour every day in this charade of a hearing.

The sheer vindictive sadism on display, and which is institutionalised in the process is breathtaking. The way they treat witnesses, who are usually far better informed and professional than these medieval inquisitors, is a grotesque, insulting farce. Everything Dobbin and Lewis say only adds to the evidence that these people belong in in some kind of De Sadean hell. Their technique, as Craig points out, is the crudest form of bullying, threatening and lying behaviour, demanding absurd levels of memory feats which they themselves are of course not obliged to perform. Their logic is bizarre, implying that if there is a trillion to one chance that Assange will not be treated in exactly the same way as all previous inmates in these torture chambers, then the witness is a liar and a fraud. There is nothing remotely legal or judicial about their ridiculous, time-wasting posturing and bullying.

When you read about the conditions that Assange is likely to face, I would defy anybody to say they would want to continue living under such circumstances – a living death, merely prolonging the most brutal, cruel sadistic for life, with no hope of redemption. Their argument about the suicide rates is even more grotesque – the prisoners are held in such conditions of deprivation that it is a triumph for the authorities that they cannot even find the means to commit suicide. What a perversion of any remnant of humanity.

This is depravity of a scarcely believable kind, that they participate in subjecting a human being, one who has no record of violence, and is extremely vulnerable, to a living hell worse than death, no contact with any other person, no facilities, no communication. No person can survive that in any sense worth surviving. What an epitaph for justice and humanity. We know from history how depraved human beings can become, we just didn’t think we would see this so coolly and heartlessly dished out in the middle of London, to the vast indifference of nearly the entire population.