If there was ever a clear cut case of good versus evil, then surely it is the contest between Julian Assange and most of the world’s governments. They hate him because he exposed their lies, their manipulations, and their routine violations of the most elementary rules of human decency. By publishing virtually the entire corpus of messages sent to and fro between Mordor Washington and their Nazgûl diplomats in the field, WikiLeaks has given us the true history of the world in modern times, or, at least, a good glimpse into its secret underside historians rarely uncover.
The release of the “Collateral Murder” video showing the shooting of journalists and innocents in Iraq by our cackling wise-cracking US military pilots was arguably the tipping point in the public relations battle, after which support for continued prosecution of the war even among the political elites dropped precipitously and never recovered. It was the 21st century equivalent of the infamous photo of a napalmed Vietnamese children running down a road, an icon of another unpopular and utterly immoral war. That’s why Bradley Manning, who probably supplied the video to WikiLeaks, has been held incommunicado for over a year, subjected to treatment the UN defines as torture. He will never get a fair trial in the US.
The US government would dearly love to get its hands on Assange: rumor has it a secret grand jury indictment has already been handed down. And they’ve devised a transparently brazen maneuver, which reeks of covert activities, in order to to get him: accusations of rape have been made by two Swedish “feminists,” at least one of which — a former Swedish consular official in Havana — has ties to Cuban dissidents with CIA connections. I told their story here, here, and here, and won’t go into the rather gruesome details of the “case” against Assange, except to note that the narrative his accusers are spinning reads like something out of a very bad spy thriller, the kind with a sleazy cover and a lurid title. In short, just the sort of thing some overpaid CIA bureaucrat — the kind who’s writing a novel in his spare time — might come up with.
Once the Swedes get their politically-correct hands on Assange, and subject him to a show “trial,” he’ll be extradited forthwith to the US, where his lawyers claim he’s likely to be locked up in Guantanamo. Assange has wisely chosen not to surrender to British authorities — who have been a key cog in the frame-up machine all along — and has taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, seeking political asylum in that country.
Ecuador is already being threatened with all sorts of retaliation by US government insiders and their patsies, and the pressure is on: if Correa grants Assange asylum, expect the Ecuadorian President to be routinely likened to Hugo Chavez, who no doubt has more than one US covert operation aimed at destabilizing his rule, although cancer may get him before Washington does. With Chavez about to go, the War Party will need a quick LAV (Latin American Villain) replacement, and Correa — who was interviewed by Assange in his last broadcast for “Russia Today” — fits the bill.
