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Ethiopian journalist faces life in prison
June 29, 2012
An Ethiopian journalist and blogger faces life imprisonment after being convicted of terrorism charges at the Lideta Federal High Court in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, yesterday.
Eskinder Nega was arrested in September 2011 for publishing articles online about the Arab Spring and questioning the Ethiopian government’s use of anti-terrorism laws.
US news service Bloomberg reported that Judge Endeshaw Adane said Nega and five other journalists, who were tried in absentia, had used ‘the guise of freedom’ to ‘attempt to incite violence and overthrow the constitutional order’.
According to Bloomberg the journalists were accused of having links to a US-based opposition group, Ginot 7, an organisation labelled ‘terrorist’ by the government.
Nega is the latest journalist to be tried under what human rights groups describe as ‘draconian’ anti-terror legislation introduced in 2009 by the Ethiopian government. Activists fear the law is being used to stifle legitimate political dissent and have reported that more than 150 people have been arrested using the legislation in the last year including journalists, politicians and students.
Christine Assange Interview Pt. 2: Asylum in Ecuador and the future of Wikileaks
June 28, 2012
As Wikileaks founder Julian Assange enters the ninth day in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, his mother, Christine Assange continues to be an outspoken advocate for free press and free information. Christine herself has become an information powerhouse of sorts, spending her days recapping facts of the case to various media outlets because information is power and will be the ultimate key to Julian’s freedom, she insists.
“What we’ve got is an information war,” Christine said. “People can support Julian on the principle of the matter, but they are much more authentic if they can argue the full facts.”
She speaks to her son regularly, reassuring that he is in “good spirits” and being treated very well in the embassy. Christine adds that surprisingly, he’s more relaxed than she’s seen him in a long time.
Even with financial blockades, extradition threats, house arrest without any criminal charges and even politicians advocating his assassination, Julian still has a “fighting spirit,” Christine said. Supporters around the world are powering him to keep Wikileaks alive to spearhead the fight for transparency, she said. The world needs whistleblowers like Julian exposing horrific American war crimes, especially in the time of the Barack Obama, a “rogue dictator.”
“Through the Wikileaks cables, the United States revealed themselves to be global tyrants,” Christine said. “Because they couldn’t discredit the cables, they had to pressure for a financial blockade on Wikileaks.”
Since December 2010, MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, PayPal and Western Union have all prevented customers from donating to Wikileaks, blocking 95 percent of its donations.
During Julian’s stay at the embassy, Christine said he’ll be working on the case fighting against Valitor, an Icelandic company that processes Wikileaks’ donations, over suspension of financial services. The case is the first of many against various other banking blocks. The financial blockades have cost Wikileaks nearly $20 million in donations.
Ecuador’s ambassadors have been welcoming of Julian, and hopes of her son being approved for political asylum are high; however, she still stresses the importance of political pressure.
In the nine days since Julian has took refuge in the embassy, more than 10,000 emails of support have poured into Ecuador’s US and UK embassies. Just Foreign Policy, a civil liberties activist group, has also sent a letter advocating asylum for Julian to Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa. The letter included signatures of directors Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, activist Noam Chomsky and actor Danny Glover.
Christine urges free information advocates to write a letter of support, spread information online, but most importantly, take the fight for information out onto the streets. If we don’t fight for a free press, we will lose it altogether, she said.
“Get off Twitter, and get to that rally,” Christine said. “We need bodies in the streets. There’s lots of support online, but the average person doesn’t see that. We need thousands of people on the street supporting what Julian is doing.”
If asylum isn’t granted, Christine said her son will apply for political asylum elsewhere and appeal to the Court of Human Rights. But even if Julian ends up in the hands of the United States justice system, she assures Wikileaks will continue.
“Pandora’s box is open and will not be shut,” Christine said. “This is the new way information is going to be spread.” -G. Razo
(Source: thepeoplesrecord.com)
![“A life in Ecuador - these are friendly, generous people - is much better than a life behind bars in the United States … under Guantanamo Bay-like restrictions which they routinely apply to people accused of espionage. You can’t speak, can’t communicate, because I might communicate some password or something. And this is a routine matter that is applied in these sorts of circumstances.
[Ecuador’s] free speech issues are certainly no worse than the ones in the UK - and this is a country with hundreds of secret gag orders, so let’s keep things in perspective. But I would enjoy campaigning for the rights of journalists in Ecuador.
There’s been a lot of tussles between the US and Ecuador, which is one of the reasons why Ecuador, I presume, would be happy to grant me asylum because they understand the difficulties when you square off with the United States.” - Julian Assange in his first interview from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Listen to the interview here. Read the transcript here.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m600fdFiyB1r6m2leo1_500.jpg)
“A life in Ecuador - these are friendly, generous people - is much better than a life behind bars in the United States … under Guantanamo Bay-like restrictions which they routinely apply to people accused of espionage. You can’t speak, can’t communicate, because I might communicate some password or something. And this is a routine matter that is applied in these sorts of circumstances.
[Ecuador’s] free speech issues are certainly no worse than the ones in the UK - and this is a country with hundreds of secret gag orders, so let’s keep things in perspective. But I would enjoy campaigning for the rights of journalists in Ecuador.
There’s been a lot of tussles between the US and Ecuador, which is one of the reasons why Ecuador, I presume, would be happy to grant me asylum because they understand the difficulties when you square off with the United States.” - Julian Assange in his first interview from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Wikileaks launches crusade against financial blockade
June 21, 2012
The world`s most famous whistleblowing website WikiLeaks is suing Valitor, formerly VISA Iceland, over suspension of financial services. The hearing is taking place before the Icelandic courts in Reykjavik on Thursday.
In a statement published on its website WikiLeaks announced the case is the first in a series of suits over the “unlawful” banking blockage.
WikiLeaks asserts that the financial blockade has been imposed by Visa Iceland on DataCell, the Iceland-based company processing donations for WikiLeaks, after the site published leaks in December 2010.
“Julian Assange was working in Iceland the winter of 2009-2010. After that, WikiLeaks actually produced a tremendously important leak which exposed corruption within Iceland. It shed light onto why the entire banking system of Iceland collapsed in 2008,” WikiLeaks press spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson explained to RT. He added that WikiLeaks has been “starved of 95 per cent” of its funds.
DataCell signed an agreement with Valitor in June 2011, but after a short period of processing donations for WikiLeaks, Valitor terminated the agreement and closed the gateway, even though it had been previously tested and certified by the company.
Valitor has cited alleged violations by Datacell for collecting donations for a third party. Datacell, however, insists that Valitor was fully aware of the final recipient of donations.
Julian Assange’s right to asylum
June 20, 2012
If one asks current or former WikiLeaks associates what their greatest fear is, almost none cites prosecution by their own country. Most trust their own nation’s justice system to recognize that they have committed no crime. The primary fear is being turned over to the US. That is the crucial context for understanding Julian Assange’s 16-month fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, a fight that led him to seek asylum, Tuesday, in the London Embassy of Ecuador.
The evidence that the US seeks to prosecute and extradite Assange is substantial. There is no question that the Obama justice department has convened an active grand jury to investigate whether WikiLeaks violated the draconian Espionage Act of 1917. Key senators from President Obama’s party, including Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, have publicly called for his prosecution under that statute. A leaked email from the security firm Stratfor – hardly a dispositive source, but still probative – indicated that a sealed indictment has already been obtained against him. Prominent American figures in both parties have demanded Assange’s lifelong imprisonment, called him a terrorist, and even advocated his assassination.
For several reasons, Assange has long feared that the US would be able to coerce Sweden into handing him over far more easily than if he were in Britain. For one, smaller countries such as Sweden are generally more susceptible to American pressure and bullying.
For another, that country has a disturbing history of lawlessly handing over suspects to the US. A 2006 UN ruling found Sweden in violation of the global ban on torture for helping the CIA render two suspected terrorists to Egypt, where they were brutally tortured (both individuals, asylum-seekers in Sweden, were ultimately found to be innocent of any connection to terrorism and received a monetary settlement from the Swedish government).
Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Swedish law permits extreme levels of secrecy in judicial proceedings and oppressive pre-trial conditions, enabling any Swedish-US transactions concerning Assange to be conducted beyond public scrutiny. Ironically, even the US State Department condemned Sweden’s “restrictive conditions for prisoners held in pretrial custody”, including severe restrictions on their communications with the outside world.
Assange’s fear of ending up in the clutches of the US is plainly rational and well-grounded. One need only look at the treatment over the last decade of foreign nationals accused of harming American national security to know that’s true; such individuals are still routinely imprisoned for lengthy periods without any charges or due process. Or consider the treatment of Bradley Manning, accused of leaking to WikiLeaks: a formal UN investigation found that his pre-trial conditions of severe solitary confinement were “cruel, inhuman and degrading”, and he now faces capital charges of aiding al-Qaida. The Obama administration’s unprecedented obsession with persecuting whistleblowers and preventing transparency – what even generally supportive, liberal magazines call ”Obama’s war on whistleblowers” – makes those concerns all the more valid.
No responsible person should have formed a judgment one way or the other as to whether Assange is guilty of anything in Sweden. He has not even been charged, let alone tried or convicted, of sexual assault, and he is entitled to a presumption of innocence. The accusations made against him are serious ones, and deserve to be taken seriously and accorded a fair and legal resolution.
But the WikiLeaks founder, like everyone else, is fully entitled to invoke all of his legal rights, and it’s profoundly reckless and irresponsible to suggest, as some have, that he has done anything wrong by doing so. Seeking asylum on the grounds of claimed human rights violations is a longstanding and well-recognized right in international law. It is unseemly, at best, to insist that he forego his rights in order to herd him as quickly as possible to Sweden.
Assange is not a fugitive and has not fled. Everyone knows where he is. If Ecuador rejects his asylum request, he will be right back in the hands of British authorities, who will presumably extradite him to Sweden without delay. At every step of the process, he has adhered to, rather than violated, the rule of law. His asylum request of yesterday is no exception.
Julian Assange has sparked intense personal animosity, especially in media circles – a revealing irony, given that he has helped to bring about more transparency and generated more newsworthy scoops than all media outlets combined over the last several years. That animosity often leads media commentators to toss aside their professed beliefs and principles out of an eagerness to see him shamed or punished.
But ego clashes and media personality conflicts are pitifully trivial when weighed against what is at stake in this case: both for Assange personally and for the greater cause of transparency. If he’s guilty of any crimes in Sweden, he should be held to account. But until then, he has every right to invoke the legal protections available to everyone else. Even more so, as a foreign national accused of harming US national security, he has every reason to want to avoid ending up in the travesty known as the American judicial system. -Glenn Greenwald
Julian Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador
June 19, 2012
WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has asked for political asylum in Ecuador and officials in the South American nation are considering his request, its foreign minister said on Tuesday.
“Ecuador is studying and analyzing the request,” Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters in Quito.
Assange faces extradition to Sweden for questioning over alleged sex crimes after Britain’s top court said last week that it had rejected a legal request to reconsider his case.
Assange and his supporters fear when he arrives in Sweden, he will be handed over to the United States to face espionage and conspiracy charges.
New Wikileaks cables reveal U.S. targeting Julian Assange
THE WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange remains the target of a US government criminal investigation and the subject of US-Australian intelligence exchanges, Australian diplomatic cables obtained by the Herald reveal.
Australian diplomats have closely monitored the US Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks over the past 18 months. The embassy in Washington reported ”a broad range of possible charges are under consideration, including espionage and conspiracy”.
The diplomats dismiss Mr Assange’s claims that the US investigation is politically motivated retribution for WikiLeaks’ publication of leaked US military and diplomatic reports. They instead highlight US prosecutors’ claims that the alleged leaker, Bradley Manning, dealt directly with Mr Assange and ”data-mined” secret US databases ”guided by WikiLeaks’ list of ‘most wanted’ leaks”.
