RTThu, 11 Apr 2019 09:38 UTC
Exclusive video shows whistleblower and Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange being carried out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London by force, before being shoved into a police vehicle.
Assange had been living in the embassy for the last seven years protected by political asylum.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has spent the last six years. Ecuador's president has announced that the country has withdrawn asylum from Assange.
The eviction follows
reports that the Australian founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblowing portal would be handed over to British authorities.
Ecuador denied the reports and said it had no intention of stripping him of his protected status, but apparently another decision was made by Quito.That's only a day after WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson claimed that an extensive spying operation was conducted against Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. During an explosive media conference Hrafnsson alleged that the operation was designed to get Assange extradited.
Assange's relationship with Ecuadorian officials appeared increasingly strained since the current president came to power in the Latin American country in 2017.
His internet connection was cut off in March of last year, with officials
saying the move was to stop Assange from "interfering in the affairs of other sovereign states."
The whistleblower garnered massive international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks released classified US military footage, entitled 'Collateral Murder', of a US Apache helicopter gunship opening fire on a number of people, killing 12 including two Reuters staff, and injuring two children.
The footage, as well as US war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 200,000 diplomatic cables, were leaked to the site by US Army soldier Chelsea Manning. She was tried by a US tribunal and sentenced to 35 years in jail for disclosing the materials.
Manning was pardoned by outgoing President Barack Obama in 2017 after spending seven years in US custody.
She is currently being held again in a US jail for refusing to testify before a secret grand jury in a case apparently related to WikiLeaks.
Assange's seven-year stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy was motivated by his concern that he may face similarly harsh and arguably unfair prosecution by the US for his role in publishing troves of classified US documents over the years.
His legal troubles stem from an accusation by two women in Sweden, with both claiming they had a sexual encounter with Assange that was not fully consensual. The whistleblower said the allegations were false. Nevertheless, they yielded to the Swedish authorities who
sought his extradition from the UK on "suspicion of rape, three cases of sexual abuse and unlawful compulsion."
In December 2010, he was arrested in the UK under a European Arrest Warrant and spent time in Wandsworth Prison before being released on bail and put under house arrest.
During that time, Assange hosted a
show on RT known as 'World Tomorrow' or 'The Julian Assange Show', in which he interviewed several world influencers in controversial and thought-provoking episodes.
His attempt to fight extradition ultimately failed.
In 2012, he skipped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy, which extended him protection from arrest by the British authorities.
Quito gave him political asylum and later Ecuadorian citizenship.Assange spent the following years stranded at the diplomatic compound, only making sporadic appearances at the embassy window and in
interviews conducted inside. His health has reportedly deteriorated over the years, while treatment options are limited due to his inability to leave the Knightsbridge building.
In 2016, a UN expert panel ruled that what was happening to Assange amounted to arbitrary detention by the British authorities. London nevertheless refused to revoke his arrest warrant for skipping bail. Sweden dropped the investigation against Assange in 2017, although Swedish prosecutors indicated it may be resumed if Assange "makes himself available."
Assange argued that his avoidance of European law enforcement was necessary to protect him from extradition to the US, where then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that arresting him is a "priority." WikiLeaks was branded a "non-state hostile intelligence service" by then-CIA head Mike Pompeo in 2017.
The US government has been tight-lipped on whether Assange would face indictment over the dissemination of classified material. In November 2018, the existence of a secret indictment targeting Assange was seemingly unintentionally confirmed in a US court filing for an unrelated case.
Last year, a UK tribunal refused to release key details on communications between British and Swedish authorities that could have revealed any dealings between the UK, Sweden, the US, and Ecuador in the long-running Assange debacle. La Repubblica journalist Stefania Maurizi had her appeal to obtain documents held by the Crown Prosecution Service dismissed on December 12.
WikiLeaks is responsible for publishing thousands of documents with sensitive information from many countries. Those include the 2003 Standard Operating Procedures
manual for Guantanamo Bay, the controversial detention center in Cuba. The agency has also released
documents on Scientology, one tranche referred to as "secret bibles" from the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard.
Comment: So the Pathocrats finally got their man.
Assange now faces being 'extraordinarily renditioned' to the US on whatever trumped up charges U.S. authorities can come up with.
Freedom of the press is dead. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do may be used against you in our secret courts...
Watch now as liberals smugly squirm with faux-righteousness about this development. Being anti-freedom (the moniker 'liberal' is an ideological mask disguising their innate totalitarian tendencies), they will be unable to hold back their glee that Assange is about to 'get what he deserves' for his part in stopping one of their kind - Hillary Clinton - from becoming US president in 2016.
In a sign of the times, the Kremlin has called on the Anglos to "
respect Assange's rights," something that would certainly happen in Russia these days, but is extremely unlikely given the anglosphere's totalitarian drift. From the safety of his political asylum in Russia, Ed Snowden
tweeted that
"Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom."UPDATES 15:30 CETUK police have confirmed Assange was arrested with a view to
extraditing him to Beast Central - the USA.
Ecuador's govt reports that it has
revoked the citizenship it had granted Assange in 2017. Which just goes to show that citizenship of most countries is worthless under a One World Government.
Assange's mother has
cursed Ecuador's president Lenin Moreno as a "dirty, deceitful, rotten traitor."
Here's footage of Assange being
hauled before Westminster Magistrates Court in London:
And a thumbs-up for the cameras:
Assange has plead not guilty to the charge of 'failing to surrender to bail'... based on charges the Swedes brought against him... which have long since been dropped.
The US government
has piped up too, saying that it wants Assange to face a charge of "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion" - specifically, they allege that Assange helped Chelsea Manning get the files that became the
Afghan War Documents leak and
Iraq War Documents leak, which Wikileaks then published in 2010.
UPDATES 12:30 EDTPamela Anderson, a close friend of Assange, has responded with this:
Kim Dotcom:
Former MI5 agent Annie Machon
told RT: "This is an egregious violation of so many rights under international law."
The response from so-called
journalists has been fairly-toextremely disgusting. They're practically gleeful. Perhaps they're just resentful and jealous: Assange, after all, is more of a journalist than all of them combined.
Assange has pled
not guilty to failing to surrender to bail, on charges which were subsequently
dropped in Sweden. (And he's facing extradition to the States for involvement in a 'crime' for which his alleged co-conspirator Chelsea Manning was
pardoned.) The UK court found him
guilty. Sentencing will be on May 2. Swedish prosecutors are considering
re-opening the original rape allegation case. A shower of quislings, the whole lot of them.
The UK Foreign Office says it is "
grateful" to Moreno for his actions, which came after "extensive dialogue" between the UK and Ecuador. Alan Duncan, minister of state for Europe and the Americas, said: "I look forward to a strong bilateral relationship between the UK and Ecuador in the years ahead... it is absolutely right that Assange will face justice in the proper way in the UK." Justice for what? Telling the truth? Prime Minister May also '
welcomed' the news, saying "no one is above the law". Ecuador, incidentally, got a $4.2 billion credit overdraft extension
from the US-controlled IMF exactly one month ago.
Here's May announcing the arrest in Westminster parliament, to the cheers of delight from Our Dear Leaders of the UK:
No wonder most of the British electorate has had it with the Dictatorship of the Parliamentariat.
The ACLU's Ben Wizner
warns that any prosecution against Assange for WikiLeaks in the U.S. "would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations. Prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public interest." Glenn Greenwald asks what will prevent other countries from doing the same to US journalists?
A UN human rights expert plans on
meeting with Assange:
Joe Cannataci, a UN special rapporteur on the right to privacy, was scheduled to meet Assange on April 25, along with special rapporteur on torture, Prof Nils Melzer, to investigate the treatment of the whistleblower.
In a statement sent to RT.com in the aftermath of Assange's arrest, Cannataci said that the arrest of the 47-year-old will not stop his efforts to assess Assange's claims that his privacy has been violated.
"All it means is that, instead of visiting Mr Assange and speaking to him at the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London, I intend to visit him and speak to him wherever he may be detained," he said. [...]
"Wherever he may be held, or may be located, my mandate will follow," Cannataci said. "The work of the mandate of the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to privacy in the case of Mr Assange will continue uninterrupted until we shall be in a position to report on our findings, whatever they may be."
President Trump, who owes Wikileaks, big time, has apparently
told reporters today that: "
I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing." That probably means he's distancing himself from the arrest because he doesn't want any heat from it, but it could also mean that he's saying he had nothing to do with pushing for Assange's arrest, which means it came from the One Worlders upstairs...
The judge they stitched up for Assange's case has clearly been well-chosen: District Judge Michael Snow
branded the WikiLeaks founder a
"narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest," and described his behavior as "
shameful."
By the way, the thing Assange was carrying when he was dragged out was Gore Vidal's
The History of the National Security State:
"The people have no voice because they have no information," Vidal warned in the book.
If you have any power in this travesty of justice, I trust you know in your heart and mind that you cannot condemn fake news and Julian Assange in the same breath.
Yours most sincerely