Julian Assange: UK considers talks with Ecuador minister

[steve2470]

Source: BBC News

The UK government is considering a request from Ecuador to hold talks on the future of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the Foreign Office has said.

It confirmed Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patino, who will visit Mr Assange this month, had offered to meet Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Mr Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for a year, having been granted political asylum there.

He faces extradition to Sweden over sex allegations, which he denies.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22746347

[midnight]

1. 3 Million to guard Julian Assange... That is a lot of information they must feel is yet to be

released.... Makes me wonder what more....

[riderinthestorm]

2. +1. K and R nt

[Peace Patriot]

3. Ecuador asked for a written guarantee that Assange will not be extradited to the U.S....

...before they will agree to Assange being extradited to Sweden for "questioning" on the absurd, flimsy, obviously trumped up, obviously CIA-or-allied-honey trap "sex allegations."

Sweden refused. They would not give that guarantee.

By the way, the BBC's use of the phrase "sex allegations" is an improvement over the corporate media's "charges of rape and sexual molestation," endlessly repeated to slander Assange.

What truly merits repeating--and is NEVER repeated by the corporate press--is that Assange has made himself available for questioning by Swedish authorities on many occasions, starting in Sweden itself. In the first instance, the Swedish prosecutor DROPPED THE CHARGES as having NO MERIT and told Assange he could leave Sweden. The subsequent instances were in London and in the Ecuadoran embassy, where a replacement prosecutor decided to hunt, harass and destroy Assange but REFUSED to question him, despite Assange's agreement to be questioned when he was on his own in London and the Ecuadoran embassy's and Assange's agreement to the questioning on the Ecuadoran embassy premises. Why did they refuse to question Assange in all of these instances? Because they don't really give a ~!@#$ about the "sex allegations"; they want Assange IN CUSTODY in order to RENDER HIM to the U.S. for burial in a U.S. dungeon like Bradley Manning.

That is the issue here, none other: punishment of Assange on the unspoken charge of JOURNALISM.

The U.K. has put itself in the middle of this CIA dirty op as a U.S. lapdog once again. Their first lapdog act, of course, was their collusion on slaughtering at least A HUNDRED THOUSAND innocent Iraqis, in order to steal their oil, incurring the deaths of thousands of U.S. and U.K. soldiers and inducing a second Great Depression; then their collusion on U.S. torture dungeons around the world. When is the leadership of the U.K. going to stand up as moral and authentic human beings and stop being lapdogs? Hard to say. Maybe never. They seem to have the same problem that we do--the "military-industrial complex" running the government on behalf of the 1%--but without the mechanism of ES&S/Diebold 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines as the final blockade to reform. (As far as I know, they don't have this grave problem, on top of everything else, like we do.)

In any case, maybe the sheer cost of trying to arrest this valiant JOURNALIST and render him to the CIA "for questioning" will be decisive for the U.K. Not a moral or authentic stance but at least the right one.

What Ecuador wants, no doubt, is to fly Assange to Ecuador, where he has merited asylum and where he should be living free (although he never will be living truly free again, with our secret government after him).

As for moral and authentic, consider Ecuador's leaders, who have little or nothing to gain by granting asylum to Assange, and did it ANYWAY because it was the right thing to do.

Jeez. When was the last time we could feel proud of our leadership for doing the right thing in international relations? For more than half a century, and to this day, they are backing--funding, "training," writing the "talking points" for--every fascist cause in Latin America, including, recently, on Obama's watch, two fascist coup d'etats (Honduras and Paraguay), and a second attempt in progress in Venezuela.

It is appalling.

[Peace Patriot]

4. For a lesson in corporate news propaganda, consider this BBC phrase, "sex allegations,"

compared to what we see from the Associated Pukes, Rotters and the rest of the "Big Liars"--"charges of rape and sexual molestation."

No.1: There have been NO CHARGES. That is a damned lie. There can't be any "charges" because there is NO CASE. They are playing with our minds on this one--using the word "charges" to imply that there are official charges against Assange and that Assange is evading arrest on a valid case. Assange has NOT been charged with sex crimes. I repeat: Assange HAS NOT BEEN CHARGED WITH SEX CRIMES. The endless repetition of "charges of rape and sexual molestation" is strictly propagandistic and designed for the foul purpose of smearing and ruining Julian Assange, a courageous and pioneering journalist who doesn't toe the corporate news line that U.S. wars, and U.S. torture, and U.S. corporate looting and plundering are okay, and vast U.S. secrecy about these crimes is okay. They are not okay. He has used his brilliant organization, Wikileaks, to expose them. For THAT, he is being smeared as a "rapist," in one of the foulest abuses of laws designed to protect women that I have ever seen.

No. 2: The proper--accurate, non-propagandistic--word is ALLEGATIONS. Allegations have, indeed, been made, but they are flimsy and meritless. I've been on the BBC's case--and have called them the BBCons--for their exceedingly biased coverage of the Latin American Left (um, need I say, biased against the Left?), but I believe in giving credit where credit is due. This may be the ONLY article I've seen from the corporate press (and the BBC is, unfortunately, part of the corporate press) that does not smear Assange as a "rapist."

No. 3: So, there are two things woefully wrong with the typical phase, "charges of rape and sexual molestation." NO CHARGES have been filed. And, the description of what allegedly took place between Assange and two women in Sweden doesn't even come close to constituting "rape" or "molestation" by any reasonable standard. This is a false and trumped up allegation that is being falsely portrayed as a crime, time and again, in virtually every corporate news article, in order to justify the harassment and ruination of a courageous journalist for the "crime" of journalism.

Assange has put the writers of corporate news articles to shame. He has defied U.S./corporate power and U.S./corporate lying. They are not permitted to do this, and they damn well know it, even at the BBC, which got defunded and downsized by Tony Blair & Co. over the Iraq War and the David Kelly assassination. Assange's example of courageous journalism may nettle corporate news writers. That may be one reason they keep repeating this smear. The main reason, of course, is that their bosses are in cahoots with U.S./U.K. corporate ruler aggression, and they simply don't permit real journalism.

It's important to understand nuances like "charges" versus "allegations," and "charges of rape and sexual molestation" vs "sex allegations," in order not to be brainwashed by corporate news disinformation campaigns (--for instance, the WMDs that weren't in Iraq, and Hugo Chavez "the dictator&quot . And it's important to NOTICE when a news organization is making an effort to be fair, in a situation where everybody else is lying. Credit to the BBC.

[sabrina 1]

5. Excellent summation of this nasty plot to silence an award-winning International News Org.

Three years now since the plot went into effect. The Swedish Prosecutors, the new ones installed after the case was dismissed, were given the opportunity to explain why they needed to talk to Assange at all, considering he did talk to the Swedish Police and remained in Sweden in order to talk to them, but was told eventually that he could leave. Exactly then was when they claimed he needed to return, and lied about how he left.

From the start the Swedish prosecutors had little credibility after that first lie, or at least not correcting it.

Anyone, and many have, following this story knows that Wikileaks published a leaked CIA document just months before all this began, wherein the CIA discussed how to stop him. They settled on 'getting him involved in a sex scandal'. That was in order to get the 'left' turned off, using women once again for political purposes.

And they also know that it was one month after Assange revealed in an interview that Wikileaks had damaging material about a Big Bank, thought to be, although he did not name it in the interview, Bank of America which Wikileaks planned to release in Jan of the following year. That material was stolen later and was never released.

Wikileaks had released information on Iceland's corrupt banking system revealing to the people there why their economy had collapsed. As a result Iceland's government was thrown out for complicity with the banks, bankers and politicians arrested and charged. Wikileaks had refused demands to hide that information. No doubt other news media had the info but complied with requests to hide it.

The biggest threat posed by Wikileaks was not the Embassy cables, which Gates stated were merely somewhat embarrassing, nor the War Logs, because no one much cares about war crimes anymore, it was the revelation one month before the 'sex allegations' by Assange that Wikileaks had damaging info on the Banks.

It's way past time to end this charade and start going after the Economic Criminals who are no doubt behind the persecution of Wikileaks.