The case of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks looks bizarre. Much of the data published by the latter can’t be validated, as the mainstream media keeps reminding its viewers. Other details had already appeared on the local media of the involved countries.
In 2010, most Bolivians laughed hard at WikiLeaks’ disclosure that Iran was interested in uranium recently discovered in southern Bolivia; this had been published in the local media since 2007.
Yet, most international readers do not read Bolivian newspapers and were awed by WikiLeaks audacity and accuracy.
In other cases, the data published seemed to be aimed at embarrassing parties in unfriendly relations with the USA, as it was done recently in the case of Syria, when documents showing substantial commercial relations between Syrian leaders and the USA were made public.
Assange may be a CIA agent, or he may have been used by the CIA to advance American interests. This is easy: WikiLeaks accepts anonymous contributions.
On August 16, 2012, Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange; two days later, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa announced that Mr. Assange can stay within his country’s London embassy indefinitely.
However, one day before the Ecuadorian decision was published, British authorities warned that they may try to arrest Mr. Assange after revoking the embassy’s diplomatic status according to a local law known as Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987.
Ecuador may dispute this at the International Court of Justice since this law contradicts the “rule of inviolability” defined in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Meanwhile, a strange standoff is taking place in London. A Western Democracy is openly violating human rights defended by what until a few years ago would have been openly called a “Third World Country.”
 |
Why Ecuador?
Why Ecuador? Why not Bolivia? The argument is relevant. Both countries share much in common, including a very disturbing cooperation with Empire. Ecuador experienced a failed coup d’état in 2010; the event was perpetrated by the police force.
According to Phillip Agee’s INSIDE THE COMPANY: CIA DIARY
, this police force is owned by the CIA. This last event was widely dismissed by Western media. Yet, Venezuelan teleSur news network broadcast in 2011 an incredible report of the event in its program Dossier. There, journalist Walter Martinez did an exceptional job in showing the kidnapping of President Correa by the police. The video shows how a gas grenade is thrown on the president by a police officer, and his gas mask is taken away from his face while he is forcibly taken away. A few hours later, after it was apparent the event had failed, he was released. Then, the commander of the police force resigned. … This military-terror machinery had been trained by the USA, and was designed to perform exactly that: civilian terror for the profit of the Empire… Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression involving institutional assassination and intelligence operations implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. The United States—through the CIA—had planning, coordinative, and supportive roles. Later on, Ecuador and Peru joined the merry party. Two of these countries—Uruguay and Ecuador—are described as little more than CIA substations in the abovementioned book… (excerpt from The Cross of Bethlehem II: Back in Bethlehem
).
Considering this, Assange’s petition and Ecuador’s answer look strange. However, personal considerations decided this case. Ecuadorian police may be serving the CIA, but the country’s actual president is not. Rafael Correa is obviously not an American supporter, having allied himself with Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia.
This is true despite his PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His father was caught smuggling cocaine into the USA and was convicted and sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
Later on, he committed suicide. The Ecuadorian president had publicly said that “…drug smugglers are not delinquents. They are single mothers or unemployed people who are desperate to feed their families.” In this context, Julian Assange request for asylum in Ecuador makes sense.
Why Assange?
No less interesting is the question why Assange? Why does Ecuador endanger its relations with the UK for the sake of freedom of speech? This seems unlikely. President Correa is not exactly a human rights champion.
On 16 February 16, 2012, Panama’s President Ricardo Martinelli granted diplomatic asylum to Carlos Pérez Barriga, one of the directors of El Universo, Ecuador’s largest newspaper. This happened after the ratification of a sentence convicting the newspaper’s directors to three years in prison and the payment of $40 million for the crime of slanderous offenses against President Rafael Correa.
A stand-off developed since Ecuador didn’t let the now Panamanian refugee leave the embassy’s compound. Following international pressure, the offended President Correa pardoned the dangerous criminals. This is not the behavior of someone who respects freedom of speech, or even basic human rights.
Rafael Correa’s reputation as a democratic leader had been put in danger by the incident at the Panamanian embassy just a few months ahead of presidential elections. By giving asylum to Assange, he portrays himself as a protector of human rights, standing proudly against Empire. His parallel standoff against Panama had been dwarfed by this new event. Thus, Ecuador and Assange is a perfect match.
Western Fallacies
Bolivian Newspaper | WikiLeaks’ Old News
We are witnessing an extraordinary event. For the first time, Western Democracies are facing a serious challenge to their eternal chorus “we are democracies, we defend human rights, we have freedom of speech.” For the first time, this is being challenged and everybody can see the extent of the Western kings’ nakedness.
In an odd example of operational efficiency, one of the arguments brought by Mr. Assange in his asylum request was the illegitimate detention conditions of Bradley Manning, a USA Army soldier who leaked confidential information to WikiLeaks. He was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq as is kept since then in almost complete isolation, in violation of his basic rights.
This violation of the law is systemic of the American administration; finding examples is easy. The American government was quick to destroy all evidence of 9/11, to the extent of making sure the towers’ steel would be melted and kept in the possession of the state in the form of a war-ship.
Under the circumstances, any claims by the American government on the issue are nothing but a logical “non sequitur;” the American government is unable to prove even one of its arguments regarding the cause of the collapse, because there is no evidence. The USA took advantage of Western logical fallacies to hide… what?
The UK is not better. In January 2007, the News of the World’s then royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for hacking into the mobile phones of royal aides. Then-editor Andy Coulson resigned but claimed he did not know about the practice. This was the result of a story about Prince William’s knee injury published in November 2005; it indicated that voicemail messages were being intercepted.
In July 2009, The Guardian newspaper reported that NoW journalists had been involved in the hacking of up to 3,000 celebrities, politicians and sports stars’ phones. A series of police inquiries and legal cases have shown the practice was widespread, with implications for the police, celebrities, politicians and even victims of crime and their families.
On July 6, 2011, the Metropolitan Police chief vowed that officers who took payments from NoW publisher News International would be disciplined. That means the British police recognized involvement on the hacking of citizens’ phones. This is a clear violation of article 12 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which defends our Right to Privacy.
The same day the British Prime Minister promised (yet another) full investigation on the institutional crimes. Later, in 2011, it was found that victims of crime and their families – including relatives of the 7/7 bombing victims, murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and the parents of murdered Soham girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman – were among those having had their phones hacked by the police.
The police systematically collected the last personal messages sent from and to the victims. Did the police officers later tell jokes about the sentimental farewells? Are the messages attached to the billboards of every British police station? Did the police suspect the murdered schoolgirls were the masterminds behind the attacks?
Nobody knows why the police performed these ugly violations. Nobody knows if the collected data has been properly destroyed. The police never apologized.
The British police failed to understand they committed crimes against the victims and their country, despite being against British law to intercept voicemail messages on mobile phones. These are not just allegations. The first case of the complex affair was proven in court, and on 10 April 2011 an official apology was made on the NoW website and on page two of the newspaper for intercepting voicemails between 2004 and 2006.
There is no way of denying the crimes. In the awkward UK monarchic system, Elizabeth II is the sovereign. Thus she is the responsible for crimes committed by the state. Before the affair was known, she could allege innocence; since it was proven in court she cannot.
“Wait a minute; Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were jailed. Your claim is outrageous!” royalists may be thinking now while reading these lines and furiously scribbling an answer to me. That’s correct, yet irrelevant. The problem is different.
The British administration is built to enable the easy hacking of phones by the MI5, MI6, and eventually, the entire CAZAB group. That’s true since the days Mary, Queen of Scots, tried to defend herself from the sharp, infected teeth of Queen Elizabeth I and Francis Walsingham. Readers wishing to learn more on this affair can do so in the excellent The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
by Simon Singh.
I am not just making a general claim on the Queen’s responsibility. There is a smoking gun named the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006, which was of course approved by the parliament, government, and queen. The Act forbids the “use of any apparatus, whether or not wireless telegraphy apparatus, for the purpose of interfering with any wireless telegraphy” anywhere within the UK.
Protecting oneself from tracking through a wireless device is simple. I described in The Cross of Bethlehem
how I shielded my pocket PC with a simple Faraday’s Shield; and the dramatic results of this simple action. Yet, the meaning of the act is that protecting your own phone is illegal. That’s strange.
Why does the Act forbid that? Because then you would become invisible to the violating police forces. Again, this is a clear violation of Article 12 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by one of the main countries claiming to defend it. Let’s talk hypocrisy now.
Queen Elizabeth II doubles as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. It is safe to assume that she considers herself a Christian. With all my respect, I want to ask you, where exactly in the New Testament did you learn this behavior? Where did Jesus teach you to brutally violate your flock? Noble monarch, I am not too picky, just give me one verse. Just one and I will delete this article and publicly apologize to you.
You won’t find any such words; you won’t either find any words supporting the Western ongoing rampage along and across the world, killing innocents for centuries in the name of freedoms to be denied the day after they are awarded.
Dear monarch, we are tired. We don’t believe your state-sponsored propaganda about human rights. We don’t believe your talks about democracy. We don’t trust your violent attempts to create Walsingham-styled states in the few free places left. We are tired of double-tongued, serpentine leaders.
Queen Elizabeth II, Monarch of the United Kingdom, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, this is your opportunity to show real leadership and to enter history as a great leader. Recognize the error and faults of your system, and make it a godly place to live in. It is time for you to show some love to your people instead that to the Bank of England.
What we are seeing here are not democracies; neither the UK nor the USA. These are technocracies run by cool-hearted, bank-oriented administrators, who care neither about the legal basis of their regimes nor about being reelected. These are technocracies which are not shy of making false allegations against anyone endangering them. These are technocracies which care not about the violation of rights, unless the victim works for the government. These are technocracies, that compared to them, even Ecuador seems an enlightened society.
Julian Assange helped to expose yet another Western hypocrisy; regardless the truth behind the case, we thank him for that.
Tov Roy, http://www.roitov.com