ECU Prez Moreno threatens Assange for violating ‘asylum terms’: breaking update
Update at the bottom of the comment stream, and it really sucks. Fuck Moreno, fuck the UK.
From telesurenglish.net, April 2:
“Ecuador says Assange doesn’t have the right to “hack private accounts or phones” nor intervene in the foreign politics.
Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno argued Tuesday that WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has “repeatedly violated” the terms of his asylum in the country’s London embassy and that he will “make a decision in the short term.”
Moreno contends that Assange had hacked the contents of his iPhone (Whatsapp, Telegram) & Gmail and were then published online, now fondly known as the #INA papers, descriptions of which corruption scandal telesur had reported on March 31:
“Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno who is facing a corruption probe brought forward by an opposition lawmaker, relating to an offshore company in a case of illicit enrichment.
Lawmaker Ronny Aleaga told reporters that he received a dossier anonymously filled with documents that will implicate Lenin Moreno and his family in alleged crimes of corruption, perjury and money laundering.
The documents are known as the “INA Papers” that links Moreno and the Chinese company Sinohydro that built the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric dam, which, according to the lawmaker, deposited US$18 million in the offshore company Recorsa.
Recorsa is linked to Ecuadorean businessman Conto Patiño Martinez who transferred money to more than 10 ghost companies in Panama including INA Investments Corp, whose real owner is Edwin Moreno Garces, brother of President Lenin Moreno, according to the leaked documents.”, and so on.
“However, Wikileaks’ website or social media accounts never published press releases or images of President Lenin Moreno’s private life. The page issued a single tweet on March 25, 2019, which reported that a “corruption investigation opened against Ecuador’s President Moreno after purported leaked contents of his iPhone (Whatsapp, Telegram) and Gmail were published. New York Times reported that Moreno tried to sell Assange to the U.S. for debt relief.”
“A United Nations Special Rapporteur on Privacy is due to visit Assange on Wednesday to investigate Ecuador’s spying on the activist. Ecuador filed a complaint with the rapporteur Monday denouncing WikiLeaks and others for reporting on the INA Papers offshore scandal engulfing its president.”
Oscar Grenfell at wsws.org adds a few things to the BS threats story today:
“If he leaves the building, or is expelled from it, Assange will be arrested by British authorities on trumped-up bail charges. Assange would likely face extradition to the US over concocted espionage or conspiracy charges, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment or the death penalty, for his role in WikiLeaks’ exposure of war crimes, illegal diplomatic intrigues and mass surveillance.
In the interview with the Ecuadorian Radio Broadcasters’ Association, Moreno made unsubstantiated and slanderous claims that Assange had been “hacking… private accounts” and “phones.” He blamed the WikiLeaks founder for a corruption scandal currently engulfing his government.” [snip]
“Moreno and the government have not offered any proof for their allegations. They are well aware that Assange does not have internet access, because the government terminated it in March last year. The only “evidence” of WikiLeaks’ ties to the INA papers, provided by Moreno’s supporters, is that the organisation’s Twitter account, which is not controlled by Assange, tweeted reports and media articles about the revelations.” [snip]
“Since coming to office in May, 2017, the Moreno regime has moved to renege on the previous Ecuadorian government’s decision to grant Assange asylum. At the same time, it has rapidly expanded relations with the US.”
[including a memo of military understanding, or some such]
Fidel Narváez, who was Ecuador’s consul to London until 2018, bluntly warned that the interview demonstrated “the government seeks a false pretext to end the asylum and protection of Julian Assange.” Narváez wrote that Moreno was using the INS scandal to “yield to US pressure” on Assange.”
“The discrediting of the Democratic Party allegations (Russiagate Muleller investigtions), however, will not result in any let-up in the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks. Rather, the Trump administration and its nominal Democratic opponents are increasingly converging in their persecution of dissident publishers and whistleblowers, such as Assange and Manning, and a broader assault on civil liberties.”
Elizabeth Vos’s (disobedient media) story is at consortiumnews.com,, and she offers:
“The story (#INAPapers) was first reported by the Ecuadorian news outlet La Fuente in an article titled: “The Offshore Labyrinth of the Presidential Circle.” Ecuadorian media reported that the attorney general’s office has initiated a preliminary investigation and that Aleaga would be summoned on Thursday to “give his version and acknowledge his complaint.
The president of the National Assembly, Elizabeth Cabezas, has also come under investigation after allegedly trying to prevent an investigation into the scandal, the state-owned El Universo newspaper reported.”
“The former consul at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Fidel Narvaez, countered Moreno’s accusation…writing:
““It is absurd that the government of Lenin Moreno intends to link Assange with publications of pages totally unrelated to Wikileaks, or with contents of the New York Times, and it would be ridiculous for the prosecution to investigate a “leak” that does not exist, but only in the false news published by the newspaper that you [Lenin Moreno] direct.”
“In a separate article, translated electronically, Narvaez argued: “Despite being an outrageous accusation, the farce has gone so far that the Ecuadorian National Assembly has issued a resolution to investigate Julian and that it emboldens the government to take measures to ‘Protect national interests.’ In short, the government seeks a false pretext to end the asylum and protection of Julian Assange.”
A week ago: ‘EXCLUSIVE: Ecuador Imprisons US Journalist In Room As Ambassador Tells Assange to ‘Shut up’ and Accept Spying’, Cassandra Fairbanks March 26, 2019, thegatewaypundit.com
“It was meant to be a routine visit by a journalist to another journalist. Instead, I found myself locked in a cold, surveilled room for over an hour by Ecuadorian officials, as a furious argument raged between the country’s ambassador and Julian Assange on Monday.
The room was inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Julian Assange currently lives under the ostensible protection of political asylum. Yet the WikiLeaks publisher was barred from entering the room, where he was supposed to join me for a pre-approved meeting, because he refused to submit to a full-body search and continuous surveillance.
In the fireworks that followed, Assange accused the ambassador of being an agent of the United States government.
The crackdown on visitors was felt before I even entered the embassy. It’s the third time I’ve visited in the past year, and each time the atmosphere seems progressively worse.” (the rest is here, albeit with confusing timelines, imo.)
Here's Ecuador's Communication's Minister on CNN with visual aid to push the conspiracy theory concocted to a) distract from #INApapers corruption, and b) oust Assange. He says 'Assange is ex-president Correa's "troll center" and "hacker"' The evidence? Correa retweeted WikiLeaks pic.twitter.com/emBXTxv5z1
— Hanna Jonasson (@AssangeLegal) April 3, 2019
For good measure Michelena throws President Maduro into his Assange-Correa plot to bring down Moreno and destabilise Latin America (his evidence is a single, factual tweet by @WikiLeaks). Minister Michelena has taken several visual aids to add gravitas.https://t.co/RTffSPWuKa pic.twitter.com/iS6m5RGVVN
— Hanna Jonasson (@AssangeLegal) April 3, 2019
(cross-posted from Café Babylon)
Comments
any excuse to hand him over to Trump
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
well, these ridiculous charges
against assange are are a two-fer: blame him as a distraction from what seem to be pretty serious corruption charges, and please boss tweet.
bolivarian mestizo anti-neoliberal rafael correa must be appalled by all of it, as moreno was kinda next in line for the presidency. his Veep? i've forgotten. apparently correa had need to flee the country to...belgium for fear of arrest on some trumped up charges.
now he's watching moreno get IMF loans, and the resultant austerity isn't pleasing the working people much. oh fie, i just bingled and i found: 'Post-IMF Deal, Ecuador Fires 10,000 Public Officials in 3 Days', telesur, march 19, 2019
The persecution and humiliation of this man
by the UK and, more recently, Ecuador, at the behest of the United States is a national and international disgrace. His sin? Publishing something that came into his hands through no crime of his own, much as the Pentagon Papers, though stolen by Ellsberg, came into the hands of the New York Times, with the Supreme Court upholding the First Amendment right of the New York Times to publish.
Thanks, Obama and Holder and Lynch and Trump and Sessions and Barr. Please remind me about the nature of your sworn duty with respect to the Constitution of the United States.
It's a good thing
Assange doesn't have any children.
They would have been "droned" by now.
Monsters, all of them.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
actually, he has at
least two, and as the story goes, he/they gave julian the embassy cat, which he'd dress up and hold in front of the window for photos. but once the embassy told him they'd no longer put up with the stinky cat mess, nor pay for kitty litter and food (as well as other items for julian), he gave the kitty cat to one of his attorneys to take to his mum for safe-keeping, at least as i remember it. it may even have been attorney jennifer robinson.
well said,
my friend. i wonder what the UN Special Rapporteur meeting will discover, and how the meeting will go. my guess is that it will be a mite different that what cassandra fairbanks described; will he/she be stripped of all communication devices?.
i hadn't included any of this, and thank the gods nothing seems to have come of it, but i'd watched wikiLeaks on twitter describing the path of the plane, and it was indeed flip-city.
'Rendition Plane, Increased Police Presence Raise Fears for Assange',
March 24, 2019, elizabeth vos
his mama was sure flippin' out, but i'd plum forgotten this part, nor do i know what bloomberg means:
"Ecuador Elections
newest tweet from wikileaks:
yeah, with now 5 weeks to collect 65,000 individual contributions. i confess i lost my temper while emailing back and forth with one of those on his 'exploratory committee' over their Donate button still inoperable after what...two weeks? "it'll be fixed by the time "we announce", elijah said. p-phooey.
Gravel let his moment pass. This is not it. Nor was
his very brief 2008 run for the Democratic nomination.
What's the difference between
getting 65k for Gabbard so she can participate in the debates, knowing full well she has no chance, versus getting 65K for Gravel so he can participate in the debates? Gravel is an anti-imperialist which Gabbard is not and is fully against the war OF terror of which Gabbard supports. In other areas, particularly on our undemocratic political system, Gravel would be able to speak out in much franker terms than Gabbard at a debate, so it would seem those who claim to be antiwar and pro-democracy would welcome someone like Gravel.
i agree wholeheartedly
with big al on this. gravel was apparently drafted by a group of millennials searching for an actual anti-imperialist to widen the debate on stage. he'd read close to two-thirds of the ellsberg's pentagon papers into the congressional record at not inconsiderable cost to himself, i'd add, although this is only part of it.
dunno that he'll make it into the debates by now, but we'd hoped he might talk about his visionary book on direct democracy. he'd also tweeted about the fukkery of chelsea manning being in solitary confinement...again...and had noted that neither sanders nor gabbard had uttered a peep in her defense. one subtweeted comment offered that it just might be that as she's still active military, gabbard might have felt constrained to have offered such. phooey on that, of course.
anyhoo, mr. wd and i will each send him a few bucks. gravel No More Wars on twitter. ; )
gotta laugh that the big gravel scandal of the week is that (gasp) 'he's a 9/11 truther'.
a few more wikiTweets
@wikileaks 7h7 hours ago ‘Journalist critical of the 'Collusion' conspiracy craze, @aaronjmate, wins prestigious I.F. Stone award.’ ; )
I saw a tweet last night that said Manafort met with Moreno
Don't remember who tweeted it but I asked if that was before or after he met with Assange at the embassy.
Think about what you were doing 8 years ago and then imagine being in the embassy for that time instead. That he is staying sane says a lot about him. No walks in the sun or rain.. no contact now with people who care about him. This is cruel and unusual punishment of course, but good luck getting people to see this for what it is. Too many still believe that he raped two women even though it was never about rape and besides the charges have been dropped. Propaganda baby. It works.
There were problems with running a campaign of Joy while committing a genocide? Who could have guessed?
Harris is unburdened of speaking going forward.
akin to being in solitary
confinement, not having seen his kids in all those years while they've been growing up, not being in contact w/ them for a year today... but yes, detractors say he has love children all over the world, raped two women in sweden, stinks and wears wears greasy pants (the intrepid interceptor journalists). i guess he's more sane than i would be, but that's not saying much.
hope we hear what the UN special rapporteur has to say, but that should be self-evident, given he's been incommunicado for a year.
but i can almost believe that manafort met w/ moreno for his own reasons, but although i'm too tired to think straight. but that manafort met w/ assange: the guardian, ah ha ha.
i could have kicked myself
after i'd shut down last night, as i suddenly recalled that telesur english had covered the new york times having reported: that manafort had met with moreno in 2017:
given that it was the NY slimes, who knows if any of it's the truth? i'd never clicked into the times link, myself; not even today.
Your posts have been a labor of love of justice, wendy davis.
1. The Obama administration was quite hostile to Freedom of the Press in many ways, from tapping journalists' phones to getting Difi to file a bill seeking to define "publisher" for purposes of protection. (The bill was rather thinly disguised as a federal shield law for journalists, but that was the tail wagging the dog of censorship of non-establishment sources. And, once even Congress refused to touch the definition bit, the Obama administration lost its interest in a federal shield law. You are probably aware of all that, but others may not have been so focused on this side of the Obama administration back then.
2. If I knew how to start an international movement, I would start, "We are Assange," a take off of "I am Spartacus," complete with T-shirts labeled "I am Assange" and masks of Assange's face on a stick, à la Abbie Hoffman and Edward Snowden. Maybe even make sure Edward Snowden had a T-Shirt and the mask and hope he'd wear it on one of his more public appearances.
bless your heart
for envisioning an international movement, including your specific imaginings. but the tragic truth seems to be that few care enough to go to rallies, even at the ecuadorian embassy. i'd covered the first weekend's rallies in australia that the SEP had arranged, and the numbers were so pitiful that i hadn't covered the next weekend's. i'm pretty sure i'm on safe ground saying that the Justice4J vigils arranged consortium news now have very low numbers of views on youtube.
you likely already know that there is a WikiLeaks shop, although no masks. ; ) sigh, as far as snowden, there's a hella lot of bad blood between him (and greenwald) and assange. when i used to write about it at café, few believed me (back when there actually was a commentariat there, lol) until i showed them some bits from the aukland town hall with kim dotcom back in 2014 when he and greenwald burned assange (who'd beamed in by skype on a large screen) once again as 'the bad whitleblower', and they likely missed julian's glowering eyes.
but finally the café denizens got it. thanks for the obomba years reminders re: whistleblowers, too. he was always a 'shifting sands' prez, and people believed whichever portion of his speeches and deeds they'd cared to. "Oh, no; he didn't praise ronald reagan; he'd just noted that he was the most transformative president he could name!" sort of stuff.
time for me to log off,
but given this and the iraq war logs:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25EWUUBjPMo]
small wonder that assange and chelsea manning are anti-war, but all post-modern wars are rich man’ s wars, yes? (modern graphics)but from the late great Santee Sioux talking poet/ alchemist john trudell:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igvhvsj7oKg]
Dreaming about some kind of life
We say it could have been different
But it wasn't because we weren't....
g' night all.
from wikiLeaks on twitter:
and this weirdness from hannah jonnason on twitter 21 hrs ago:
two more from wikileaks on twitter:
@benwolg 32m32 minutes ago
"cw: transphobic bullshit . . . what's fun sometimes is to read the replies to wikileaks tweets about chelsea manning's solitary confinement, in which white men admit that they don't mind the torture and imprisonment of a whistleblower as long as she's a trans woman"
i've noticed the same, and was just talking w/ a friend about it. the burgeoning evidence seems to say that although the term is diffuse, it's just biology.
Margaret's story: 'Why the “T” is Also Important', (then) my.firedoglake
on later edit, and gawd's blood, one from #INAPapeers on twitter
in closing, i'd like to offer this
bob dylan cover to both julian and chelsea, with love and undying respect from of all of us:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbZzAw7Q2ww]
from telesur english
'UK Minister: 'Assange Is a Free Man, He Can Leave The Embassy', april 4
(photo: Members of the press have camped out at the embassy where supports of the Assange have installed multiple banners displaying various forms of a 'Free Assange' slogans.)
from the guardian, double-speak: