Asylum for Assange
It looks like our “good friend” Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame has found a new friend. As in the leftist president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa.
Reportedly, Assange has been offered “political asylum” by Ecuador. He’s now hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
As a practical matter I’m not sure exactly what good this will do Assange. Since he’s not an Ecuadorean citizen, I’m not sure Great Britain is under any obligation to honor any type of “diplomatic status” Ecuador might grant to Assange – or to recognize any “passport” granted him expeditiously by Ecuador (Assange is an Australian citizen, if I recall correctly). Nor are they obligated to allow helicopter flights to/from the Ecuadorian embassy to any airport. So there remains that pesky detail of getting from the embassy to any international airport in order to leave Great Britain. Plus the fact that international airports in Great Britain are under British jurisdiction.
Hey, if Assange wants to live the rest of his life at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London I guess that’s OK. But given Assange’s reputed arrogance and “winning personality” I’m guessing the Ecuadoreans will tire of him fairly soon.
Still, there could be advantages in Assange ending up in Ecuador. I understand it’s easy to get lost in the jungle, or in the mountains, in parts of South America. And those so lost often are never heard from again.
I’d personally shed no tears if Assange ended up fertilizing trees in a South American rainforest or on some Andean mountainside. But that’s just me.
Category: Shitbags, Terror War
Well, the Colombians reached out into Ecuador with some drones for some FARC commander a few years back. Ecuador isn’t as safe as Assmange might think.
Yeah, South America can be a dangerous place. Bad roads, lots of violent people, jungles, police who sometimes can be convinced to “look the other way”, guns for hire, lots of poverty, machismo, endemic corruption . . . .
Sounds like just the place for a highly-recognizable, abrasive, and arrogant gringo activist whose mission is to “show the world every government’s secrets” to take up residence. He’ll fit right in.
The story I read on this had a picture of Ass mange looking more smug than usual…just made me want to sock him in the cock….if he had one…
Assange is Austrian, not Austrailian.
@4 LebbenB
He’s from down unda mate….
I wonder what his buddy Miss Manning thinks about that as he/she sits in the jailhouse while this tool gets asylum?
@5. My apologies to Austria, then.
Britain has indicated they will arrest Assange the minute he steps foot outside the embassy.
It could get interesting if Britain decides to follow their law regarding deactivating embassy status in order to forcefully enter the embassy and take him.
I’ll give a paycheck…uh, retirement check to see the Brits do that! I really wish they’d extradite him to Phoenix so I could take him “camping” in the Big Horn mountains S/W of here. Lots of mean, nasty critters who would love to take a healthy bite outta his a$$!
Something that might be mentioned is the fact that, at this point, Assange’s asylum isn’t really about the alleged sex charges in Sweden, or the cable leaks anymore. Assange already went through the extradition process in the U.K., lost, and instead of being willing to abide by the court’s ruling decided to jump bail and seek sanctuary in the Ecuadoran embassy.
Still another factor at a deeper level is that if you go through what are alleged to be the chat logs between Assange and Manning, it’s fairly evident that not only was Assange willing to receive the cables provided by Manning but also offered to help him crack passwords that would have given Manning access into parts of the system where he wouldn’t normally be allowed.
And it seems to me that’s one of the real smoking guns in all of this. It tends to move beyond the level of whistle-blowing about things you might be exposed to during a working day, as bad as that might be when it involves classified information, on into a conspiracy to steal stuff that can no longer be considered a “leak” at all.
According to the articles that I have read, Britain has stated plainly that the minute he leaves the embassy, he will be arrested. They are, apparently, quite serious about his publicly thumbing his nose at them and refusing to abide by the legal decisions of the courts. To Britain, Assange is just a criminal on the run and he will be scarfed up.
So it’s likely that Ecuador has granted him political asylum purely as political cover for themselves and to gain some street cred with the regular South American Yankee-Go-Home crowd.
They’ll probably give him a few days or a couple week’s more R&R there, then pack him up and hand him over to the Brits.
That’s my take on the situation, anyway. He’s such a crapweasely crapweasel that I doubt anyone could put up with him for very long.
I hope there are no young girls around the embassy.
I doubt if he can do a “József Mindszenty”. As pointed out so well by the above commentators the Ecuadorians will tire of him quickly. Even if he makes S. A. being the celeb anti-hero there ain’t what he thinks it is.