Wikileaks: Ecuador is Being Run By “Criminals & Liars.” Assange’s Entire Legal Defense Given To The United States
By
Arjun Walia
from Collective Evolution
Arjun Walia
from Collective Evolution In Brief
- The Facts:Three weeks
before the U.S. deadline to file its final extradition request for
Assange, Ecuadorian officials are travelling to London to allow U.S.
prosecutors to help themselves to
Assange's belongings. - Reflect On:How do the global elite have the right and power to do what they do to people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden? Do we really live in a democracy when small groups of people in power can basically make decisions that go against the majority?
What’s
happening with Julian Assange is heart-breaking. He’s a hero, just like
Edward Snowden. Government secrets are kept, not to protect ‘national
security’ as commonly claimed, but rather to protect political and
corporate interests. After all, the United States is evidently run by a
small group of corporations. These corporations have a huge influence
when it comes to dictating government policy, and they do not like those
who disclose their secrets. For years, Wikileaks has been leaking
documents that’ve exposed major corruption within multiple governments,
including the United States and basically the entire western military
alliance. They’ve exposed that our world operates very differently than
how it’s been presented, and they’ve never had to retract a single
story. They exposed the invisible government, or “the real menace of
Republic,” a term coined by John F. Hylan, former Mayor of New York
City. Hylan has said that the “invisible government, which like a giant
octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation.” He
exposes the ones “who virtually run the United States government for
their own selfish purposes.” (source)
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Transparency is what Julian Assange is
all about, and the American empire and even the global empire have
been desperately trying to keep their secrets and prosecute anyone or
anything that threatens their secrecy. That’s what this is all about.
And they proved that with Chelsea Manning.
It’s not just people like Assange who
are being demonized and hunted, it’s alternative media as well. The war
on ‘fake news’ that’s been happening for the last little while
has resulted in alternative media outlets being labeled as ‘fake’, even
if they’re presenting credible information and sources. Any media outlet
who even questions a controversial issue has been labeled as ‘wrong’ or
‘fake.’
What is happening to Assange is
extremely unjust, and should serve as a massive ‘wake up’ call for
anyone who isn’t already ‘awake.’ Truth and free press threaten the
ability of the global elite to continue their cycle of creating problems
and then proposing solutions in order to achieve their desired outcome.
Some of the biggest leaks WikiLeaks has made were when they
revealed the connections between terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda
and ISIS to the western military alliance, and more specifically to the
US government. Current presidential candidate and Congresswoman at the
time, Tulsi Gabbard, even introduced a bill to stop this from happening.
We saw arms deals and the
funding/support of terrorist organizations that the US claimed to be
fighting against. This is a great example of how the global elite funds
and creates a problem in order to justify a desired outcome (in this
case it was heightened national security measures back home to protect
people from ‘the war on terror’ and justify their infiltration of
another country for ulterior motives).
I could go deeper into this, but the
bottom line is that the arrest of Julian Assange comes at the hands of
the criminals around the globe he was exposing, and it’s ironic that
they are using their power and influence over mainstream media to
portray Assange as the one who needs to be put behind bars.
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The Latest Update On Assange
Below is the latest update from the Wikileaks team via a recent press release.
Three weeks before the U.S. deadline to
file its final extradition request for Assange, Ecuadorian officials are
travelling to London to allow U.S. prosecutors to help themselves to
Assange’s belongings.
Neither Julian Assange nor U.N.
officials have been permitted to be present when Ecuadorian officials
arrive to Ecuador’s embassy in London on Monday morning.
The chain of custody has already been
broken. Assange’s lawyers will not be present at the illegal seizure of
his property, which has been “requested by the authorities of the United
States of America.”
The material includes two of his
manuscripts as well as his legal papers, medical records and electronic
equipment. The seizure of his belongings violates laws that protect
medical and legal confidentiality and press protections.
The seizure is formally listed as
“International Assistance in Criminal matters 376-2018-WTT requested by
the authorities of the United States of America.” The reference number
of the legal papers indicates that Ecuador’s formal cooperation with the
United States was initiated in 2018.
Since the day of his arrest on April 11,
2019, Mr. Assange’s lawyers and the Australian consul made dozens of
documented demands to the embassy of Ecuador for the release and return
of his belongings, to which they received no response.
Earlier this week the UN Special
Rapporteur on Privacy, who met with Mr. Assange in Belmarsh prison on
April 25, asked to be present to monitor Ecuador’s seizure of Assange’s
property. Ecuador inexplicably refused the request, despite the fact
that since 2003, Ecuador has explicitly committed itself to granting
unimpeded open invitations for UN special rapporteurs to investigate any
aspect of their mandate in Ecuadorian jurisdiction.
The seizure and transfer of Mr.
Assange’s property to the U.S. is the second phase of a bilateral
cooperation that in January and February saw Ecuador arranging U.S.
interrogations of past and present Ecuadorian diplomats posted to the
embassy of Ecuador in London while Mr. Assange was receiving asylum. The
questioning related to the U.S. grand jury investigation against
Assange and WikiLeaks. As part of phase one of the cooperation, the
United States also asked Ecuador to provide documents and audiovisual
material of Assange and his guests, which had been gathered during an
extensive spy operation against Assange inside the embassy.
On Friday, President Lenin Moreno
initiated a state of emergency that suspends the rights of prisoners to
“inviolability of correspondence, freedom of association and assembly
and freedom of information” through Executive Decree 741.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks said:
“On Monday Ecuador will perform a puppet show at the Embassy of Ecuador in London for their masters in Washington, just in time to expand their extradition case before the U.K. deadline on 14 June. The Trump Administration is inducing its allies to behave like it’s the Wild West.”
Hrafnsson continued:
“Ecuador is run by criminals and liars. There is no doubt in my mind that Ecuador, either independently or at the behest of the US, has tampered with the belongings it will send to the United States.”
Baltasar Garzon, international legal coordinator for the defence of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, said:
“It is extremely worrying that Ecuador has proceeded with the search and seizure of property, documents, information and other material belonging to the defence of Julian Assange, which Ecuador arbitrarily confiscated, so that these can be handed over to the agent of political persecution against him, the United States. It is an unprecedented attack on the rights of the defence, freedom of expression and access to information exposing massive human rights abuses and corruption. We call on international protection institutions to intervene to put a stop to this persecution.”
Lawyer for Mr. Assange, Aitor Martinez,
whose confidential legal papers were photographed with a mobile phone by
embassy workers as part of a spy operation against Mr. Assange in
October 2018, said:
“Ecuador is committing a flagrant violation of the most basic norms of the institution of asylum by handing over all the asylee’s personal belongings indiscriminately to the country that he was being protected from–the United States. This is completely unprecedented in the history of asylum. The protecting country cannot cooperate with the agent of persecution against the person to whom it was providing protection.Ecuador has now also refused a request by the UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy, Joe Cannataci, to monitor and inspect the cooperation measure. Ecuador’s refusal to cooperate with the UN Special Rapporteur defies the entire international human rights protection system of the United Nations. Ecuador will from now on be seen as a country that operates outside of the system of safeguards of rights that defines democratic countries.”
Ecuadorian defence attorney for Mr. Assange, Carlos Poveda, said:
“In the face of countless abuses, and acting on provisions in domestic legislation and international human rights instruments, the defence has challenged the execution of this measure. All applications have been rejected. While the prosecution office proclaims its commitment to human rights protections, there has been no transparency and the investigation is conducted in secret. Without justification, and absent of all legal criteria, the measure shows the interest in obtaining information that the United States can use to proceed with its flagrant persecution. Meanwhile Ecuador has hinted that it too intends to proceed with investigations. Meanwhile, to date our criminal complaints of espionage against Julian Assange remain unprocessed, despite the gravity of the facts reported.”
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