Julian Assange extradition: Ecuador 'willing to co-operate' with Britain
Source: The Guardian
Ecuador is still willing to negotiate with the British government over the fate of Julian Assange, despite the Foreign Office's "threat" to arrest the WikiLeaks founder inside its embassy and the "intimidating" police presence in and around the building, according to a senior Ecuadorean diplomatic source.
The South American country's decision to grant political asylum to the 41-year-old Australian, who faces allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, has provoked a bitter political row between Quito and London.
The source complained that the UK government's written warning that it could use the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 to arrest Assange inside the embassy had been accompanied by a large increase in the number of police officers at the Knightsbridge building.
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"In the negotiations with the FCO, Ecuador has been proposing that we would be prepared to accept an undertaking from the UK and Sweden that, once Julian Assange has faced the Swedish investigation, he will not be extradited to a third country: specifically the US. That might be a way out of it and Ecuador has always said it does not want to interfere with the Swedish judicial process; we could facilitate it."
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/17/julian-assange-extradition-ecuador-embassy
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The U.K.'s Corporate Rulers have been ruthless in the joint pursuit of dominion over the world's oil with the U.S. They helped slaughter a hundred thousand innocent people for that goal and also colluded on rendition and torture. They will do--are obviously are doing--whatever the U.S.'s Corporate Rulers ask them to do. They have been clearly contemplating violating an embassy in defiance of the bottom line of international law.
It won't matter what Sweden promises Ecuador. I hope Ecuador realizes this and I hope also that they don't use such a "crocodile promise" as cover to get out of the confrontation. I don't think they will but you never know with governments, even good governments (and Ecuador has a very good government--the best, most stable and most social justice-minded in their history).
There are two quite big issues here. One of them is oil--the oil between the British colony called the Falklands and the Argentine coast and the oil in Ecuador (a member of OPEC) and in countries allied with Ecuador, chiefly Brazil and Venezuela. The Corporate Rulers of the U.S. and the U.K. want control of all this oil, just as they want it in the Middle East, but the new and historic leftist democracy movement in South America (and in parts of Central America and the Caribbean) is determined that this and other resources be used for the benefit of the people who live there, at long last. They reject their previous status as the U.S. "back yard." They seek sovereignty and independence and, what is more, have forged historic unity on this and other matters.
The other is human rights, about which the U.S. and the U.K. are so insufferably hypocritical. They won't prosecute Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld for torturing prisoners, and Blair for colluding with it, or for murdering tens of thousands with "shock and awe" bombing, but they will go after a journalist, Assange, who has done nothing more than the New York Times did with the Pentagon Papers--publish them.
This is only the latest in a vast, bloody panorama of U.S./U.K. violations of human rights throughout the modern era, both internally and externally. Hell, the U.S. just paid out over $7 BILLION to the Colombian military and its death squads to murder thousands of trade unionists and other advocates of the poor, in prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich," and now is doing the same thing in Honduras after helping overturn Honduras' democracy. The list is VERY LONG of direct U.S. human rights atrocities, past and current, and proxy atrocities. The U.K. has not been so overt about it (except in Ireland, and, of course, in Iraq) but, at least since Thatcher, it has been the enthusiastic ally of the U.S. as it has committed horrendous atrocities, such as the 200,000 Mayan villagers slaughtered in Guatemala and the illegal war on Nicaragua in the 1980s.
And both countries, or rather, both countries' Corporate Rulers and the political establishments that serve them have created police states within our once progressive countries, with ever decreasing human and civil rights and ever decreasing democratic governance. Latin America, which is undergoing a leftist democracy revolution--with great advances in human and civil rights, and honest transparent elections and "New Deal"-type governments with policies of social justice--is quite justified in its outrage at being lectured by the U.S., for instance, on human rights. The U.S. couldn't care less about human rights. It violates human rights all over the planet.
What the U.S. doesn't like is truly democratically elected leaders telling corporations what they can and can't do in their countries. The U.S. don't like real democracy. It doesn't like fairness in the marketplace or the media. When a leader like Hugo Chavez tries to create balance in the broadcast media--as we once had here, with the "Fairness Doctrine," wherein private corporations were not allowed to use the public airwaves for self-serving political propaganda (a ban ended by the Reaganites)--our Corporate Rulers scream bloody murder. 'He's violating human rights!' (They mean corporate 'rights.') "He's against free speech!' (They mean corporate speech.) He's a "dictator"! (Who are the dictators, really?) Chavez has combined new licensing requirements for corporate broadcasters with an infusion of resources into public broadcasting, especially community broadcasting. They don't like that. They think it's tyrannical. Har-har!
So, it is with withering irony, I'm sure, that Ecuador (its president being one of these leftist "tyrants"
has accused the U.S. of plotting to violate Julan Assange's human and civil rights. I think their charge is quite true and it is great to see it coming from a government that the U.S. has grievously slandered and has mounted several plots against. Ecuador is speaking and acting for most of Latin America which is sick and tired of U.S. domination and interference and U.S.-sponsored horrors.
This "sex crimes" allegation against Assange has been absurd, on its details, from the beginning, and is such a nothing case that the Swedish prosecutors haven't brought charges, and, when Assange made himself available for questioning, they refused to do so. This is the sort of thing that the Nixonites were seeking when they burglarized Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office--something to smear him with. It is, a) a smear, and b) the way Swedish authorities have devised to get Assange into custody in order to render him to the U.S.
So if Sweden promises not to do that--not to extradite him to the U.S.--and Ecuador buys into it and gives up this persecuted journalist, to whom they have granted political asylum, to Swedish authorities--look out! He will be "rendered" so fast it will make our heads spin and he will never be heard from again. The U.S. has ZERO basis on which to try him, so they won't--or at least not in public. He will probably be suicided. At the least, he will be dumped into the deepest dungeon they can find and completely silenced. And the whole story will slip into the Corporate News "river of forgetfulness."
Does Ecuador want that on their heads? I'm sure they do not. Once they give up Assange, they will have absolutely no power to save him, and they will have lost their point about the U.S. and human rights and their point about Latin American sovereignty will be muddied.
The U.K.'s Corporate Rulers are in a devil's alliance with the U.S. based on greed. It's not so obvious what's in it for Sweden but very probably it is also greed and may have something to do with games Sweden has played as to the Iraq War and other matters. What a dirty game Sweden is playing now! It hints at hidden dirt. I've just recently read that Karl Rove is advising them. How appropriate. Rove goes free after all the crap he did here, and gets in on the kill for Assange, if they succeed. One shudders for Swedish democracy.