Breaking: Possible Hand-Over Of Julian Assange To The UK May Be Imminent

If this proves to be true, it would be a complete betrayal of the principal of political asylum and Ecuador will be excoriated for it, internationally. Not that I think the new administration would care too much about that.

https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/0...-of-julian-assange-to-the-uk-may-be-imminent/

 

Good!

 

i dont know i like him as a critic

 

HOW MANY YEARS HAS HE BEEN THERE????Enough is enough kick his butt out!!!Let him go to Sweden and face the music for his actions.Swedish prison may be better than his embassy quarters.

 

The Swedes gave up hope of ever getting him into court and dropped the charges. Some had already lapsed due to the statute of limitations. He is still wanted in the UK on charges related to skipping bail.

 

Seems to me to be a BS charge, but Assange ****ed up by not getting to safe refuge more quickly.

 

Yes, I expect every embassy in London was queuing up to offer him sanctuary from a vindictive government.

 

Well, innocent until proven guilty is dead in the water with some.

 

There is zero doubt about the bail offence. He breached his conditions.

The sexual assault/rape charges will never see the inside of a court because Assange chose to hide in an embassy until some expired & the rest were dropped when the prosecution decided they would never get the defendant into court. Given the lengths Assange has gone to in avoiding Swedish justice he has forgeone the presumption of innocence.

 

The problem with Assange, Snowden, Manning and similar people, for those who believe in civil liberties and are not reflexive state-worshippers, is this: on the one hand, we don't want the state to be able to do things with impunity. On the other, the legal and pre-legal norms that we like, were designed for internal conflicts, in peacetime. But the US, and the West in general, is in a kind of --- 'war' is not quite the word, but something between 'war' and 'peace' --- with a very nasty non-state force.

So I don't want the FBI to be intercepting the phone calls or reading the emails of people who are advocating anarchism, or religious theocracy, or Scientology or any other horrible or crazy idea ... but I feel differently about people whose phone calls and emails may, realistically, be concerned with how to blow me up.

And when Snowden or Assange or Manning unveil the secret work of the CIA/FBI/etc. and don't appear to be aware of the harm they may be doing to the people trying to thwart the bomb-makers, my civil-libertarian impulses necessarily are subordinate to my desire not to be blown out of the sky while flying, or having my legs blown off at a marathon.

Of course this doesn't immediately translate to a principled sophisticated political position -- it's just where I'm starting from. And I think this is true for a lot of people, on the Left and the Right, who would ordinarily reflexively favor 'whistle-blowers'.

 

Julian Assange to be handed over to UK officials: Report.....


Ecuador officials are planning to withdraw asylum protection for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and hand him over to British authorities.

Lenin Moreno, Ecuador's president, met with British officials in London Friday to finalize the agreement, according to the Intercept.

He has stayed in hiding out of concern that he would be sent to the U.S. to be prosecuted for publishing classified documents that were leaked by Chelsea Manning. WikiLeaks has also been at the center of the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

During the last three months, Assange has been blocked from accessing the Internet, with officials saying that he violated an agreement not to intervene in state affairs. He angered Spanish officials when he tweeted support for separatist leaders in Catalonia who sought to secede last year.

Moreno, who was elected in May, has called Assange an "inherited problem" and a "stone in the shoe.".....snip~

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/julian-assange-to-be-handed-over-to-uk-officials-report


The jig is up, and Assange has nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

 

Assange is a hero who exposed war crimes by the Bush and Obama administration. Obama promised to protect whistle blowers during his "promise progressives everything before the election then tell them to **** after the election" campaign, only to prosecute more whistle blowers than any other president.

 

Obviously he thinks he will be proven guilty. That's why he's been holed up in an embassy for six years.

 

Whereas you would have surrendered to your power-abusing persecutors and faced a trumped-up charge in a kangaroo court in Sweden? Like ****ing hell you would!

 

If I was innocent I would have done that rather than live in a bathroom in an embassy for 6 years. Of course, I'm not a sexual predator, so I wouldn't be concerned.

I also don't have sympathy for sexual predators, rapists, mass murderers or dictators. I wouldn't expect you to understand.

 

You have obviously decided he's guilty, even though there isn't a shred of evidence, and are unconcerned that he has been denied access to due process without the certainty of ending up in a US penitentiary - or dead. As I so often say 'One cannot rationalise with a closed mind', therefore there's nothing more to be said, other than I note your bigotry.

 

Clearly, you have no idea of the issues. If found guilty for failure to surrender to a bail condition is such a minor offence that, at worst, he might face 3 months prison - but would probably get off completely as a court would take into consideration time served. That is his only crime in the UK.

His fear was, in fact, that Sweden would extradite him to the US to face a political trial there. Sweden has now dropped all actions following their interview with him in the London Ecuadorian Embassy. The UK, however, refused to allow him freedom that ultimately led a UN panel to declare he was being subjected to "arbitrary detention".

 

It seems likely that the deal cut by Ecuador and the UK over withdrawing his political asylum and then expelling Assange from their London embassy, involves a guarantee from the UK not to extradite Assange.

If true, this may involve him being imprisoned for a period of up to a year, maybe longer, while his case filters through the courts here, but after that he would be free. If Greenwald is accurate, that is. Otherwise, it's going to be a titanic battle between the UK court and the government to determine if he can be extradited, and that could go on for a very long time, with Assange locked in prison for all of that.

But as Greenwald makes clear in the below article, Assange has been effectively imprisoned for eight years without being charged or convicted of a single crime, and I'm hopeful the British judge would view this with considerable sympathy. At least tye should under normal circumstances. In anything as politically charged as this anything is possible.

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/21...-and-hand-him-over-to-the-uk-what-comes-next/

 

It's become guilty until proven innocent for so many these days. It turns 1000 years of British legal precedence on its head.

 

No. He thinks he will be railroaded regardless of his innocence.

He is probably right.

 

Do you believe it should be a punishable crime (in and of itself) to violate bail conditions? Even if it turns out that the cause for which the original bail was set turns out to be very weak, or if the other country seeking to extradite drops the charges?

Seems like a trumped up charge to me.

 

He would have happily faced the music and stood to answer the charges there, but he was afraid the U.S. would seek to have him extradited (or possibly had already made secret arrangements) and that Sweden would hand him over. At least in the U.K. public opinion was on his side and politicians wouldn't want to anger the voters by having him be handed over to the U.S.

Then you have to ask yourself why the U.K. went to so much trouble to surround the embassy, spending millions of Euros over several years to grab him if he leaves the building. Why would they do that unless they were under pressure from the U.S. to make sure he got extradited?
Why are the police still stationed outside the embassy, even though now we know what the charges actually stemmed from (not using a condom! of all the silliest things in the world) and those charges were ultimately dropped.

Hasn't he suffered enough all those years inside that embassy? If it was really only for a violating terms of bail charge, why is the U.K. so intent on punishing him? Unless that's only a thinly veiled pretext.

 

He did the crime. The only reason the charges were dropped or the statute of limitations ran out is because he breached his bail and hid in an embassy for 6 years. So, he has profited from the crime by avoiding trial in Sweden - the whole purpose of jumping bail. The charge is legit & he should face it like anyone else.

Quite why people think Assange should get a pass when it comes to breaking laws & facing trial is beyond me. It is almost as bizarre as claiming his choice to remain in the embassy for 6 years amounts to being 'effectively imprisoned' by anyone but himself. It is as if anything to do with Assange exists in some parallel universe where laws don't exist and choice = compulsion.

 

We already found out what the "rape" charge was for. It was because a woman that he slept with accused him of taking off his condom without her knowing until after the fact. (And circumstantial testimony from another female witness that he had an affair with, corroborating the liklihood of this type of behavior from him).

In Sweden this is categorized as "sexual violation" under the law.

The charges were later dropped, when upon further examination it was found that both women had reason to be bitter at him and therefore weren't the most reliable witnesses.

(That and the statute of limitations was soon approaching)

 

The trial in Sweden would have been for taking off a condom without permission.

No "rape", as we know it in other sane and rational countries, occurred.