Assange allegations deeply fishy with dangerous undertones

I’ve always said the allegations (not actually criminal charges) against Julian Assange seemed like a jack-up and a smear campaign. What do you think?:

2) The process by which Assange was accused, cleared, and then re-accused of these incidents beggars belief. Two women went to a Stockholm police station one Friday afternoon in August 2010, to either (and here accounts vary) report Assange for s-xual misconduct, or inquire as to how he could be forced to take an STI test. Only one woman, Sofia Wilen, gave a statement, saying that the morning after a s-xual encounter with Assange, he had initiated s-x while she was asleep, and without a condom; by her own testimony, she said that she then gave consent to continue the act.

3) While her statement was being given, police had already contacted a prosecutor to issue an investigation warrant for arrest. When Wilen was informed of this, she refused to sign her own evidence statement, saying that she had been pushed into making a complaint by people around her. The next day, the senior prosecutor for Stockholm rescinded the warrant, saying that there was nothing in the statement suggesting a crime had occurred.

4) By Monday, that decision had been appealed, with the two women now represented by Claes Borgstrom, a big wig in the Social Democratic party, and drafter of the 2005 s-x crimes laws under which Assange was being accused — laws that many had said were unworkable. The second complainant in the affair, Anna Ardin, now changed her story. She had been interviewed the day after Wilen had told of a rough but consensual s-xual encounter with Assange, but suggested he had torn a condom off during s-x.

5) In the weeks between the Stockholm prosecutor rejecting Wilen’s statement as evidence of a potential crime, and the appeal, Ardin’s story changed, and her account of rough consensual foreplay became an accusation that Assange had pinned her down with his body during s-x to prevent her applying a condom. This became the basis for a new accusation — s-xual coercion — which would have been sufficient as a felony, should the appeal prosecutor not reinstate Wilen’s r-pe accusation. In that week, tweets were deleted and blog posts changed to remove any suggestion that Ardin had thought Assange’s behaviour to her consensual.

6) The prosecutor to whom the appeal was made — Marianne Ny — was a former head of the “Crime Development Unit”, whose specific brief was to develop new applications of s-x crimes laws, in areas where they had not previously been applied. She had previously spoken of remand as a form of de facto justice for men accused of s-x crimes, whom the courts would otherwise let free.

7) The European arrest warrant, and the Interpol red notice under which Assange is being extradited, was issued with a speed and seriousness usually reserved for major violent criminals, rather than someone simply wanted for further questioning, without a charge being present.Source

Who Is Sofia Wilén?

Sofia Wilén is one of the Swedish women who has accused Julian Assange of rape, for which he was arrested. It has been suggested that Wilen is fairly impressionable and that she was convinced by Anna Ardin to press charges for rape.

Evidence is mounting that Sofia Wilén and her associate Anna Ardin pre-planned “revenge” on Julian Assange by setting him up for false rape allegations. The primary mastermind behind the setup is thought to be Ardin.

Interestingly, the mainstream media has yet to pick up on the fact that Sofia Wilén and her friend Anna Ardin, two friends, seem to have conspired against Assange. Whether this scheme goes deeper than two individuals, to the level of government involvement is yet to be seen.

Evidence is emerging that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been setup on false rape charges by two radical feminists. The most significant evidence for this claim is the “coicidence” that both accusers are friends, and one of them posted about how she had been “thinking about some revenge.”

The first accuser is Anna Ardin, a well known radical from Sweden for her feminism views on how men achieve social dominance through sex. Last January, Ardin posted a blog entry titled ‘7 Steps to Legal Revenge by Anna Ardin’, which includedthe statement, I’ve been thinking about some revenge over the last few days….

The second rape accusation against Julian Assange came from a woman named Sofia Wilén, a friend for Anna Ardin. Wilén is the lesser known of the two.

Wilén and Ardin are now suspected of plotting a scheme to “get revenge” and falsely accuse Julian Assange of rape.Source

Assange: Sofia Wilen – The Silent Accuser.
at Huffington Post
“The second accuser, Sofia Wilen, 26, is Anna’ friend. Here is a video of an Assange press conference where one can see the girls together. Those present at the conference marveled at her groupie-li ke behavior. Though rock stars are used to girls dying to have sex with them, it is much less common in the harsh field of political journalism . Sofia worked hard to bed Assange, according to her own confession ; she was also the first to complain to police. She is little known and her motives are vague. Why might a young woman (who shares her life with American artist Seth Benson) pursue such a sordid political adventure?”

Source

Related articles

• Rundle: Assange makes his escape into a diplomatic storm (crikey.com.au)
• Assange’s great escape?, Murdoch’s big play: ConsMedia and Kohler Inc, why editorial charters don’t work, media spotlight on Athens, Gillard’s EU lecture (media.crikey.com.au)
• Noam Chomsky tells Julian Assange: Humanity ‘like lemmings going over the cliff’ (artemamat.wordpress.com)
• 2011-03-04 Jennifer Robinson: Brief to Canberra meeting of MPs re Julian Assange (insomniacanonymous.wordpress.com)
• Julian Assange: Ecuadorean ambassador flies home for talks on WikiLeaks founder – Telegraph.co.uk (telegraph.co.uk)

Julian Assange rejects police request to surrender for breaking bail terms

Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, has said that he will ignore a request by the police to give himself up because he fears that the US has secret plans to extradite him to Washington.

He said he had been advised that he was within his rights to ignore an extradition notice that was presented to him at the Ecuadorean embassy on Thursday.

During a telephone interview on BBC2′s Newsnight, he was asked if he intended to give himself up. “Our advice is that asylum law both domestically and internationally in the UK takes precedence to extradition law, so the answer is almost certainly not,” he said.

Assange has been asked to present himself to police on Friday to begin the process of extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and indecency.

His refusal means that he will continue to take refuge in the embassy while the Ecuadorean government decides whether to accept his request for asylum. Even if they do so, Assange is likely to face a long stay at the embassy as he will be unable to leave without being arrested.

Assange said he had evidence that the US had secret plans to force him to face trial in America. “In the US, since at least the beginning of 2011, a US grand jury has been empanelled in Washington. It has been pulling in witnesses, forced testimony from those witnesses, subpoenaed records from Google, from Twitter,” he said.

He submitted recordings to the BBC of American politicians and talkshow hosts calling for his death as evidence of the prejudice against him.

When asked if he had anything to say to the women who have accused him of rape and indecency, he replied: “I am simply not charged. That’s all. That’s all that is important in this matter. What has been said to date is sufficient.”

Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy last week after British courts upheld Sweden’s right to request his extradition to answer the accusations made by two women he met while on a trip to Sweden. Both agreed to spend the night with him but later went to the police to complain about his behaviour. Assange left Sweden before he could be questioned by police.

Assange’s supporters see the extradition as a cover for a subsequent extradition to the US to face charges over the release of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. A succession of British courts have found that Sweden has followed the correct procedure in issuing a European arrest warrant for Assange and ruled that Britain must comply with it.

Before the Newsnight interview, a police spokesman said: “The Metropolitan police have this morning, Thursday 28 June, served a surrender notice upon a 40-year-old man that requires him to attend a police station at a date and time of our choosing. This is standard practice in extradition cases and is the first step in the removal process.”

He said Assange remained in breach of his bail conditions. “Failing to surrender would be a further breach of conditions and he is liable to arrest.”

It is understood that Assange has been ordered to present himself at Belgravia police station at 11.30am on Friday.

This week, a letter signed by leading US figures in support of Assange’s application for political asylum in Ecuador was delivered to the embassy. Among its signatories were film-makers Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, actor Danny Glover, authors Naomi Wolf and Noam Chomsky, comedian Bill Maher, and Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst turned whistleblower, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Robert Naiman, policy director at the Just Foreign Policy campaign group, delivered the letter to the embassy on Monday, along with a petition signed by more than 4,000 Americans urging President Rafael Correa to approve Assange’s request for asylum.

The letter, which has been posted online, states that its signatories believe Assange has good reason to fear extradition from the UK to Sweden “as there is a strong likelihood that once in Sweden, he would be imprisoned, and then likely extradited to the United States”.

Adding that the US government “has made clear its hostility to WikiLeaks”, it says Assange could face the death penalty in the US if he was charged and found guilty under the Espionage Act.

“We also call on you to grant Mr Assange political asylum because the ‘crime’ that he has committed is that of practising journalism,” says the letter to Correa. “Because this is a clear case of an attack on press freedom and on the public’s right to know important truths about US foreign policy, and because the threat to his health and wellbeing is serious, we urge you to grant Mr Assange political asylum.”

Source

Related articles

• Julian Assange, Pursued for the Crime of Practicing Journalism (dissenter.firedoglake.com)
• Prominent Americans urge Ecuador to accept Julian Assange’s asylum request (guardian.co.uk)
• Everyone’s Assange (counterpunch.org)
• Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuadorian embassy in London (guardian.co.uk)
• Assange ‘being buoyed by support’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Steve Beckow – Wikileaks’ Julian Assange Seeks Asylum In Ecuador Embassy – 20 June 2012 (lucas2012infos.wordpress.com)
• Assange faces arrest for breaching bail conditions (abc.net.au)
• Julian Assange has ‘no idea’ if asylum bid will succeed (guardian.co.uk)

I don't agree with what you say

I haven’t met Julian Assange in person. So I don’t know if he is a nice guy or not. I don’t know if he has pets,kids,a white fence house or a sports car.And I really don’t care..

What I do care about is that he fought for MY right to read hidden information.MY right to knowledge.MY right to know what is my in this global society.MY right to understand I have been used,manipulated,fooled and hypzotized by all those government games.

For this very reason I am defending-along with others- Assange’s right to Freedom and Information and all that that they try to take away from him.

I may not agree with him.. but he protected my right to awareness and this is freedom.

He may not agree with what I say but I bet he will protect my right to say it.

If persons like him didn’t exist,the ones claiming he is a terrorist would never have the luxury of saying so in public

Assange will end up in Venezuela

Ecuador said Assange had expressed fears that if sent to Sweden he would be extradited to the United States where he believes he could face criminal charges punishable by death.

“I genuinely believe, and I know him well, that he fears for his life,” said Vaughan Smith, who hosted Assange at his country mansion for 13 months after the Australian was freed on bail in December 2010.

Leftist Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said his government is analyzing whether there are enough grounds to grant political asylum to Assange.

“Our constitution does not permit the death penalty. The right to due process is guaranteed,” Correa told Venezuela’s Telesur television network. “We have to analyze if these rights have been infringed, if a request for the death penalty exists.”

Correa said Ecuadorean officials will take “as long as they need to” before making a decision.

“Meanwhile, Mr. Assange will stay in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, under the protection of the Ecuadorean state,” he said.

By diplomatic convention, British police cannot enter the embassy without authorization from Ecuador. But even if Quito granted him asylum, he has no way of travelling to Ecuador without passing through London and exposing himself to arrest.

“He has breached one of his bail conditions which was to be at his bail address between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. every day … He is subject to arrest under the Bail Act,” said a spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police.

Censorship

Legal experts said it was unclear what would happen to a 240,000-pound ($377,000) deposit provided by Assange’s supporters, including a number of celebrities, to secure his bail.

Asked by Twitter by Britain’s Guardian newspaper whether she was on the hook, socialite Jemima Khan tweeted back: “Yes. I had expected him to face the allegations. I am as surprised as anyone by this.” Khan declined to say how much she had paid.

Assange, whose unpredictable behavior and love of the limelight have cost him the support of some former friends and colleagues, lost a long-running legal battle last week to avoid extradition from Britain to Sweden.

His 11th-hour decision to seek refuge in the embassy was more reminiscent of Cold War espionage dramas than the British legal process. The dramatic move drew widespread criticism.

“He is asking for protection of freedom of expression for journalists, but he is asking for asylum in a country that is basically censoring newspapers,” Frank La Rue, U.N. special investigator for freedom of expression, told Reuters.

Correa has clashed with journalists since he took office in 2007, accusing a “media dictatorship” of undermining his rule. Opponents accuse him of seeking to silence dissenting voices.

Assange expressed sympathy with Correa’s war on media while interviewing him on Russia Today, an English language TV channel sponsored by the Kremlin that employs Assange.

“Let’s get rid of these false stereotypes depicting wicked governments persecuting saint-like and courageous journalists and news outlets. Often, Julian, it’s the other way round,” Correa said during the interview.

“President Correa, I agree with your market description of the media. We have seen this again and again, that big media organizations that we have worked with … have censored our material against our agreement,” Assange said in response.

“Club of the PErsecuted”

WikiLeaks made a huge impact in 2010 by working with prestigious newspapers in several countries that published some of the material it had obtained, but later fell out with them.

Assange has been criticized for agreeing to host his own chat show on Russia Today, given the Russian authorities’ own dubious record on freedom of speech.

After disregarding diplomatic protocol by publishing cables that were supposed to be confidential, Assange is now relying on diplomatic convention to shield himself from a legal extradition process. Critics pointed to the irony.

“Getting too enamored of the idea that Julian Assange is a whistleblower misses the reality that confidentiality on the part of governments is not all bad,” US human rights ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe told reporters in Geneva.

Assange’s decision to appeal to Ecuador, which briefly offered Assange residency at the height of the WikiLeaks furor in November 2010 before backing off, follows his Russia Today interview with Correa, posted on YouTube on May 22.

“Cheer up. Welcome to the club of the persecuted,” Correa told Assange at the end of the 25-minute interview, during which the pair traded flattering comments and jokes.

Assange praised Correa for getting more done for his country than President Barack Obama was achieving for the United States.

Neither US nor Swedish authorities have charged Assange with anything. Swedish prosecutors want to question him about allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women, former WikiLeaks volunteers, in 2010. Assange says he had consensual sex with the women.

Having exhausted all possible avenues offered by the British courts, Assange’s only option to keep fighting

————————————————————————————————————————————–

Pr. Correa is very buddyish to Assange.Both men seem to like each other.What pr.Correa doesn’t like is all those hidden or exposed cables he showed his anger for in his 25 minutes interview with Julian Assange.
The only Ally for J.Assange,the only truthful honest ally with a common enemy is Chavez,Hugo Chavez president of Venezuela.
Take my word because I am south American and I know how deals are done over there.
Assange will be living ” la vida loca ” soon enough in Caracas.

Obvious as the sun: Assange interviewing Correa

The most wanted man in the world

Julian Assange is the founder of Wikileaks and as you have probably heard, he’s publicly posting a large number of uncensored intelligence documents he’s received. Happily, most of them haven’t done a lot of damage. However, the same can’t be said for the information he’s released about Afghan informants:

THE Australian founder of WikiLeaks has been forced to defend his decision to publish tens of thousands of uncensored intelligence documents as condemnation grew over the exposure of Afghan informants.

The names, villages, relatives’ names and even precise GPS locations of Afghans co-operating with NATO forces could be accessed easily from files released by WikiLeaks, The Times revealed this week.

Human rights groups criticised the website and a US politician said the security breaches amounted to a ready-made Taliban hit list.

…He claimed many informers in Afghanistan were “acting in a criminal way” by sharing false information with NATO authorities and said the White House knew informants’ names could be exposed but did nothing to help WikiLeaks vet the data.

Mr Assange insisted any risk to informants’ lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information.

…Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said: “Real people die when sources and methods are revealed. Clearly people who are co-operating with us are now at risk. That is precisely one of the reasons we’ve been so concerned about this leak.

“The whole campaign is about convincing Afghans that it’s worth taking the risk to come and work with us to take a stand against the repression and brutality of the Taliban.” A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai predicted the leak would cause “a big disaster in the future”. Siamak Heraway said: “We worry about this. We will see informants being assassinated by the Taliban; we will see a massacre.”

George W. Bush never took leaks of sensitive classified material seriously and Obama is following in his footsteps, but the reality is that these leaks can lead to big body counts. When we alert the enemy to techniques we use to get information out of them, track them, or our sources — people can die as a result.

That’s why, at a minimum, government employees who leak this sort of information to the press should spend the rest of their lives breaking big rocks into smaller rocks in a federal penitentiary. In a case like this, where informants who risked their lives to help us may be killed along with their families, the people responsible for leaking the information deserve to be hung for treason.

In Assange’s case, he’s not an American and so he has no constitutional protection. Moreover, he’s going to get a lot of people killed. Can we do anything legally about someone from another country leaking this information? Maybe not. Can we have a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around his skull the next time he appears in public as a warning? You bet we can — and we should. If that’s too garish for people, then the CIA can kill him and make it look like an accident.

Either way, Julian Assange deserves to die for what he’s done and he should be killed to send a message loud enough to convince other people not to publish documents like this in the future.

“Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?” Sarah Palin wants him hunted down and brought to justice, saying: “He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”

The American airwaves quiver with the screams of parlor assassins howling for Julian Assange’s head. Jonah Goldberg, contributor to the National Review, asks in his syndicated column, “Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?” Sarah Palin wants him hunted down and brought to justice, saying:

“He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”

Assange can survive these theatrical blusters. A tougher question is how he will fare at the hands of the US government, which is hopping mad. The US attorney general, Eric Holder, has announced that the Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into the latest Assange-facilitated leak under Washington’s Espionage Act.

Asked how the US could prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, Holder said, “Let me be clear. This is not saber-rattling,” and vowed “to swiftly close the gaps in current US legislation…”

In other words the espionage statute is being rewritten to target Assange, and in short order, if not already, President Obama – who as a candidate pledged “transparency” in government – will sign an order okaying the seizing of Assange and his transport into the US jurisdiction. Render first, fight the habeas corpus lawsuits later.

Interpol, the investigative arm of the International Criminal Court at The Hague, has issued a fugitive notice for Assange. He’s wanted in Sweden for questioning in two alleged sexual assaults, one of which seems to boil down to a charge of unsafe sex and failure to phone his date the following day.

This prime accuser, Anna Ardin has, according to Israel Shamir, writing on this CounterPunch site, “ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba…Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities.”
It’s certainly not conspiracism to suspect that the CIA has been at work in fomenting these Swedish accusations. As Shamir reports, “The moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service.”

The CIA has no doubt also pondered the possibility of pushing Assange off a bridge or through a high window (a mode of assassination favored by the Agency from the earliest days) and has sadly concluded that it’s too late for this sort of executive solution.

The irony is that the thousands of diplomatic communications released by WikiLeaks contain no earth-shaking disclosures that undermine the security of the American empire. The bulk of them merely illustrate the well-known fact that in every capital city round the world there is a building known as the U.S. Embassy inhabited by people whose prime function is to vanquish informed assessment of local conditions with swaddling cloths of ignorance and prejudice instilled in them by what passes for higher education in the United States, whose governing elites are now more ignorant of what is really happening in the outside world that at any time in the nation’s history.

The reports in the official press invite us to be stunned at the news that the King of Saudi Arabia wishes Iran was wiped off the map, that the US uses diplomats as spies, that Afghanistan is corrupt, also that corruption is not unknown in Russia! These press reports foster the illusion that U.S. embassies are inhabited by intelligent observers zealously remitting useful information to their superiors in Washington DC . To the contrary, diplomats – assuming they have the slightest capacity for intelligent observation and analysis — soon learn to advance their careers by sending reports to Foggy Bottom carefully tuned to the prejudices of the top State Department and White House brass, powerful members of Congress and major players throughout the bureaucracies. Remember that as the Soviet Union slid towards extinction, the US Embassy in Moscow was doggedly supplying quavering reports of a puissant Empire of Evil still meditating whether to invade Western Europe!

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WikiLeaks Grand Jury Colleagues and henchmen

The Investigating Officer at Bradley Manning’s Article 32 pretrial hearing has been a career prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice since 2002, the year he received his license; and the U.S. Department of Justice has an ongoing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

As late as April 2012, Eric Holder, the Attorney General for the Justice Department – and the U.S. official who authorized the grand jury currently empaneled in Alexandria, Virginia, investigating WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and others for espionage (18 U.S.C. 793); conspiracy (18 U.S.C. 371); and embezzling, stealing, purloining, or knowingly converting U.S. Government property – (U.S.C. 641), called the Investigating Officer at Manning’s Article 32 Pretrial hearing, Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, his “colleague”:

And I want to recognize my colleagues across the Justice Department…the National Coordinator for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction Strategy, Paul Almanza.

At Manning’s Article 32 pretrial hearing, David Coombs, Manning’s lead defense counsel asked Almanza, “Are you aware the Department of Justice has a case against my client?” Lt. Col. Paul Almanza replied nonchalantly, “Yes.”

Almanza certainly was.

Almanza is the National Coordinator for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction Strategy at the Justice Department. In fact, he even admitted to Coombs that he advises trial attorneys in the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), where he has worked his entire life, and where, Tracy Doherty-McCormick, a WikiLeaks Grand Jury Prosecutor also works.

After becoming the Investigating Officer in U.S. v Pfc. Bradley Manning, Almaza even sent email to Manning’s defense counsel using his doj.gov email address.

On the first day of Manning’s Article 32 pretrial hearing, Coombs, moved the Investigating Officer to recuse himself because of his obvious bias, arguing that the Department of Justice is attempting to get a plea from his client, Manning, in order to go after Julian Assange.

On the right side of the Court gallery, someone from the Justice Department grimace. Almanza refused adding, “I don’t believe I am biased.”

Wikileaks Forum

Assange faces arrest

Assange found a home?

Ecuador has offered Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, residency in the country.

Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas said his country’s government wanted to invite Mr Assange to Ecuador to give him the opportunity to speak publicly.

He said Ecuador was concerned about some of the alleged American activities revealed by Wikileaks.

Earlier this year Sweden refused an application from Mr Assange, who is Australian, for residency there.

“We are open to giving him residency in Ecuador, without any problem and without any conditions,” Mr Lucas said.

“We are going to try and invite him to Ecuador to freely present, not only via the internet, but also through different public forums, the information and documentation that he has,” he said.

Mr Lucas added: “We think it would be important not only to converse with him but also to listen to him.”

Wikileaks says it has more than 1,600 cables that originated from the US embassy in the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, the contents of which have not yet been disclosed.

Mr Lucas said Ecuador was “very concerned” by information revealed by Wikileaks linking US diplomats with spying on friendly governments.

He said the offer to Mr Assange would not affect relations between Ecuador’s left-leaning government and the US.

On Monday, the authorities in Australia said they were looking into whether Mr Assange had broken any laws there.
Brazilian revelations

The Spanish paper El Pais says that, according to a secret cable released by Wikileaks, US intelligence operatives wanted to know whether the Argentine president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was taking medication to deal with her “nerves and stress”.
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner President Fernandez’s husband died of a heart attack in October

The message asked: “How do Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s emotions affect her decision-making and how does she calm down when distressed?”

The state department cable, dated some 10 months ahead of the death in October of her husband – the former president, Nestor Kirchner – also asked whether she shared his “adversarial view” of politics.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez praised Wikileaks and called on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to resign following the latest Wikileaks revelations.

“Somebody should study Mrs Clinton’s mental stability”, he said and added: “It’s the least you can do: resign, along with those other delinquents working in the state department.”

Another document published by Wikileaks, dated January 2008, detailed Brazil’s co-operation with the US on counter-terrorism.

In it, the then US ambassador to Brazil, Clifford Sobel, informed Washington that the police often arrested individuals with links to terrorism but charged them with drugs or customs offences so as not attract media attention.

Brazil has a sizeable Arab population and has publicly denied taking part in counter-terrorism operations.

Source

Wikileaks' Julian Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador embassy

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is seeking political asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, the country’s foreign minister has said.

“Ecuador is studying and analysing the request,” Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters in Quito.

On 14 June, Britain’s Supreme Court dismissed Mr Assange’s bid to reopen his appeal against extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes.

He has denied the allegations, saying they are politically motivated.

The Supreme Court has given him until 28 June before extradition proceedings can start.

Swedish prosecutors want to question Mr Assange over allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two female former Wikileaks volunteers in mid-2010 but have not filed any charges.

Mr Assange, whose Wikileaks website has published a mass of leaked diplomatic cables that embarrassed several governments and international businesses, claims the sex was consensual.
‘Minimum guarantees’

Associated Press quoted Mr Patino as telling reporters Mr Assange had written to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa saying he was being persecuted and seeking asylum.

Mr Patino said that the Australian had claimed “the authorities in his country will not defend his minimum guarantees in front of any government or ignore the obligation to protect a politically persecuted citizen.”

Mr Assange said he would not be protected from being extradited to “a foreign country that applies the death penalty for the crime of espionage and sedition,” Mr Patino said.

The anti-secrecy campaigner fears extradition to Sweden may lead to him being sent to the US to face separate charges relating to Wikileaks, for which he could face the death penalty.

But Swedish authorities have said the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) would intervene if Mr Assange was to face the prospect of “inhuman or degrading treatment or an unfair trial” in the US.

Mr Assange could still take his case against extradition to the ECHR and has until 28 June to make the move.

Wikileaks has posted an alert on its Twitter feed: “ALERT: Julian Assange has requested political asylum and is under the protection of the Ecuadorian embassy in London.”

It said Ecuador had offered Mr Assange asylum as early as November 2010.

Source