[Update-1] Assange’s Narrow Escape, Ecuador Election Result

Ecuador asks for Assange “safe passage” after investigation dropped | Miami Herald |

The government of Ecuador said WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange should be granted safe passage to the South American nation after Swedish authorities dropped their investigation of him.

Assange has been holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy for five years avoiding extradition to Sweden where he was wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual assault. Prosecutors eventually interviewed him at the embassy in November. Sweden dropped the investigation on Friday.

In a series of tweets, Ecuador Foreign Minister Guillaume Long questioned the delays.

“Ecuador regrets that it took Swedish Prosecutor more than four years to carry out this interview. This was a wholly unnecessary delay,” Long wrote. “The European arrest warrant no longer holds. The UK must now grant safe passage to Mr. Julian Assange.”

Assange ‘arbitrarily detained’ in embassy, U.N. panel to say | U.N.O.H.C.R. – Feb. 2016 |

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been subject to ‘arbitrary detention’ during the 3-1/2 years he has spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid a rape investigation in Sweden.

Assange, who enraged the United States by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, appealed to the panel saying he was a political refugee whose rights had been infringed by being unable to take up asylum in Ecuador.

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○ Chelsea Manning Walks Back Into a World She Helped Transform | Wired |

The former computer hacker denies allegations of a 2010 rape in Sweden, saying the charge is a ploy that would eventually take him to the United States where a criminal investigation into the activities of WikiLeaks is still open.

His leaks laid bare often highly critical U.S. appraisals of world leaders from Vladimir Putin to the Saudi royal family.

Britain said it had never arbitrarily detained Assange and that the Australian had voluntarily avoided arrest by jumping bail to flee to the embassy. But the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled in Assange’s favour, Sweden said.

“Should I prevail and the state parties be found to have acted unlawfully, I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me,” Assange, 44, said in a short statement posted on Twitter.

Sweden shuts down Julian Assange rape investigation

In a statement on its website, the Swedish prosecution authority said that the “Director of Public Prosecution, Ms Marianne Ny, has today decided to discontinue the investigation regarding suspected rape (lesser degree) by Julian Assange”.

“With the consideration that all options of moving the investigation forward are now exhausted it appears that – in light of the views expressed by the Supreme Court (Högsta domstolen) on the proportionality of remanding someone in absentia – it is no longer proportional to maintain the decision to remand Julian Assange in his absence and maintain the European arrest warrant,” Ny wrote in her notification to Stockholm District Court.

“I have therefore today lifted the decision to remand Julian Assange in his absence,” she added.

In a press conference later in the day, Ny elaborated that it was not possible to formally serve Assange with notice of the suspicions against him, a prerequisite under Swedish law if the investigation was to progress further:

“Ecuador granted legal assistance and made it clear that all measures would be performed with full voluntary participation of Mr. Assange (…) Formal issues are important in a legal system in terms of legal certainty, it is important to be able to serve the suspect with suspicions. The decision to discontinue the investigation is not because we’ve been able to make a full assessment of the evidence, but because we didn’t see possibilities to advance the investigation. So we won’t make any statements on the issue of guilt”.

Preliminary investigation against Julian Assange is being shut down – but British police are threatening to seize him

Swedish prosecutors drop Julian Assange rape investigation | The Guardian |

With the threat of extradition to Sweden removed, the Australian, 45, could potentially opt to leave the embassy.

However, Assange’s lawyers have repeatedly said that he would not do so without assurances that he willnot face extradition to the US over possible espionage charges, linked to Wikileaks’ publishing activities – the basis on which Ecuador granted him asylum.

The Metropolitan police in London said Assange would also face immediate arrest for breaching his bail conditions by entering the embassy, after a warrant was issued when he failed to attend a magistrates court after entering the embassy.

“The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the embassy,” the statement said.

    The MPS will not comment further on the operational plan. The priority for the MPS must continue to be arresting those who are currently wanted in the Capital in connection with serious violent or sexual offences for the protection of Londoners.

[Update-2] Value of Whistleblowers under the Obama administration and war on journalists

Continued below the fold …
For the useful idiots today who deny the value of whistleblowers under the Obama administration and the media publication, a memory jolt …

Bradley Manning and the denial of collateral deaths in attacks by US Forces during the illegal war on the Iraqi people:

Collateral Murder and the After-Life of Activist Imagery

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released ”Collateral Murder”: a video showing a July 12, 2007 US Apache attack helicopter attack upon individuals in a Baghdad suburb. Amongst the over twelve people killed by the 30mm cannon fire were two Reuters journalists. The following is the statement published by WikiLeaks on their website in conjunction with the release of the video:

    WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers.

WikiLeaks has been the genesis of a broad range of stories over the years: from illegal waste dumping in the Ivory Coast, to money laundering by Swiss banks, to the most famous war documents from Iraq and Afghanistan. And, while it would be an exercise in futility to attempt to gauge which of these leaks has had the greatest impact, I think it is fair to say that the Collateral Murder video is one of the best-known and most widely recognized results of the ongoing WikiLeaks project. This, I would argue in turn, is because — unlike the hundreds of thousands of pages of material released by WikiLeaks — Collateral Murder is visual evidence of the gross abuse of state and military power. To me, it is this visuality which touched so many nerves: one can read endless accounts of, and reports on, the brutality of war, yet there are very few combinations of words which can generate the feeling one gets from watching a human shot with high-powered helicopter cannon-fire while lying injured and defenseless on the ground. These particulars image were, in many ways, the crystallization of the horrors of war.

I would also say that the first few weeks after the release of Collateral Murder, in conjunction with the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, reflected the power of these images. Three years ago I wrote the following in an article for Le Monde Diplomatique:

    As a researcher, it struck me that the period shortly after the release of the “Collateral Murder” video, the “Afghanistan War Logs” and the “Iraq War Logs” illustrated the potential impact of the WikiLeaks-mainstream media collaboration. This was a rare and exciting (albeit short) period of political, professional and cultural introspection, particularly in the United States. US foreign policy and military spending, civilian deaths and possible war crimes in Iraq, journalistic under-performance after 9/11, and government transparency were all thrust into the open as topics for consideration. It appeared, during this short time, that WikiLeaks may have done something that I had thought near impossible: inserting a radical critique of US military and geo-political power into mainstream popular discourse (particularly in the US). Granted, The Guardian and The New York Times are not the newspapers of choice for many in the US and UK. Far from it. Yet the very presence of the material on their front pages opened up the possibility that the murky world of US power might now be forced to concede ground to transparency advocates.

[Author Christian Christensen – Stockholm University]

○ CPJ: Confirmed cases of journalists killed in Iraq by U.S. Forces
○ Global Witness: Murder of ecology activists with impunity in today’s nation states

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