Filthy British Dogs to Assault Ecudorian Embassy

[86Dùde]

Britain Blows A Fuse Over
Assange Ecuador Asylum

By Dave Lindorff
8-16-12

The concerted and orchestrated campaign to capture Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and ultimately to hand him over to the tender mercies of a kangaroo court in the US, where he would likely be tried for spying and other possibly capital offenses, continues as Britain threatens the Ecuadoran Embassy with a police assault.

According to the newspaper the Australian, a News Corp. property and Australian flagship of media baron Rupert Murdoch, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino says he and the Ecuadoran ambassador received a written message yesterday from the British Foreign Office warning that Britain might send police to “assault” the country’s embassy and forcibly remove Assange so as to hand him over to Sweden to face questioning on several controversial sexual assault claims made by women there.

Although the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, passed in 1961 and signed by Britain, Sweden and the US, along with nearly every country in the world, clearly grants embassies the status of being considered the official territory of the country represented by the embassy, thus putting them beyond all laws of the host country, Britain is citing a 1987 UK law that states that when a foreign nation ''ceases to use land for the purposes of its mission or exclusively for the purposes of a consular post,'' the Vienna Convention no longer applies, and the building is no longer beyond the reach of British police.

The text of the threatening UK letter, released by the Ecuadoran government, reads:


“You need to be aware that there is a legal base in the UK, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, that would allow us to take actions in order to arrest Mr Assange in the current premises of the Embassy.

“We sincerely hope that we do not reach that point, but if you are not capable of resolving this matter of Mr Assange’s presence in your premises, this is an open option for us...

“...We need to reiterate that we consider the continued use of the diplomatic premises in this way incompatible with the Vienna Convention and unsustainable and we have made clear the serious implications that this has for our diplomatic relations.”

A letter sent to the government of Ecuador by the British Embassy in Quito was even more explicit, saying:

“We must arrest Mr. Assange and extradite him to Sweden. Should you grant him asylum, and then request safe passage for him, we will refuse it. We consider Assange’s use of diplomatic premises to be incompatible with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and not sustainable. Under the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act of 1987, we have a legal basis to arrest Mr. Assange inside your embassy. If you cannot resolve the issue of Mr. Assange’s presence on your premises, then this route is open to us.”



Clearly, this threat is ridiculous on its face, given that the <http://untreaty.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/9_1_1961.pdf>Vienna Convention is unambiguous in stating that embassies are inviolate. As Article 22 of the Convention puts it:


1.The premises of the mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not enter
them, except with the consent of the head of the mission.

2.The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises
of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the
mission or impairment of its dignity.

3.The premises of the mission, their furnishings and other property thereon and the means of
transport of the mission shall be immune from search, requisition, attachment or execution.


There's not a lot of wiggle room left there for sending police barging into an embassy to grab someone. The British government’s assertion that somehow the Ecuador Embassy, by granting Assange asylum from deportation to Sweden and possibly to the US (which reportedly has a secret sealed indictment waiting for him), is “misusing” its embassy grounds and is thus not protected by the Vienna Convention is both absurd and dangerous. The ability of embassies to grant people asylum without fear of invasion by forces from the host country has been recognized for centuries, with its roots going back to the Greeks and Egyptians, and even at the coldest period of the Cold War, it was honored by rival states like Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union. If Assange, whose most serious “crime” at this point is skipping out on bail in Britain, can be rousted from asylum in a foreign embassy, what does that mean for those people charged with “crimes” in countries like China or Cuba who may in the future seek asylum from persecution or prosecution in a British or a US embassy?

How would the late astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, an acknowledged intellectual mentor to many of the young activists in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, who after the brutal government crackdown holed up with his wife for months in the US Embassy in Beijing, have fared under such a warped interpretation of the Vienna Convention? How would Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident in China who escaped house arrest and fled to the US Embassy, have fared?

It’s significant that last year, the US government, including even President Obama at a press conference, tried to claim that Raymond Davis (whom they all knew was a contract agent and paid killer from the CIA), was immune from arrest and prosecution in Pakistan even after he had brazenly slaughtered two young men on motorcycles, shooting them both in the back and then executing them with point-blank shots to the head, all in a crowded street in broad daylight. Their argument: he worked either for the US Consulate in Lahore or the US Embassy in Karachi. And he was nabbed at the scene of the crime. He wasn’t even on protected consular grounds. (In the end, Pakistan let Davis escape the country, after the US paid death payments to Davis’s victims’ families in accordance with Sharia law.)

Actually, when it comes to use of an embassy or a consulate “in a way incompatable with the Vienna Convention,” the US and Britain, which post CIA agents or MI6 agents undercover as diplomats in most of their foreign embassies, and which have long used their so-called diplomatic “pouches” (which in the US case can often be entire shipping containers!), immune from customs inspections, to transport weapons to favored terrorist groups inside countries like Chile or Iraq or Iran, are really guilty of using their embassies and consulates in ways that are "incompatible" with the Vienna Convention.

During the US occupation of Iraq, there were a number of solid reports of weapons being smuggled into the country via diplomatic pouch to both countries for use by Iraqi operatives working outside the law, and for smuggling onward to groups inside Iran. Just <http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/08/16/256477/us-smuggles-weapons-to-iran-via-iraq/>today, Iran’s PressTV reports that the US Consulate in the southern Iraqi city of Basra was found to have obtained, through diplomatic pouch, a shipment of light and heavy weapons intended for smuggling to terror groups operating inside of Iran. At one point during the occupation, several British agents operating out of the British Consulate in Basra, were caught by Iraqi police driving a car while dressed in local arab garb. Found in the car were guns, RPGs, and bombs and wiring. They were arrested, but were later rescued by British military forces who stormed the police station. No arrests were made by Iraqi police of any British consular personnel following this incident, because of the Vienna Convention.

Why would Britain risk destroying that same Vienna Convention, which has been around since 1961, and even longer in other legal iterations, over such a minor case as ducking out on bail, particularly as Assange has never even been charged with a crime in Sweden, where a British Court says he has to be deported on an Interpol warrant? (He’s just wanted in Sweden at this point only for questioning, technically). After all, Britain is no longer a global power, and stands to lose a lot if its own embassies no longer can count on protection under the Vienna Convention.

The answer to that would seem to be that it is the US, which despite its denials seems to desperately want to get Assange and prosecute him for leaking secret cables, which is behind this farce. The US, unlike Britain, is a global power to reckon with, and does not have to worry overmuch about its embassies being over-run (bombed maybe, but aside from the Iranian US Embassy occupation, which was not entirely government sanctioned, there has not been a US Embassy taken over by government action, and there is unlikely to be). The costs to the host country would simply be too great.

As Ecuador has told Britain, an assault on an embassy is technically an act of war, as embassies are viewed legally as the territory of the home country they represent.




http://rense.com/general95/britain.html

[Guido]

It's really awesome to see Ecuador telling Uncle Sam (via the British government) to fuck off and for all the right reasons -- to save the first 21st century political hero (Assange) from political persecution in the USA.

Congrats to Ecuador for exceptional courage -- they will certainly be made to pay in the usual ways, involving extortion, or maybe even a coup, like the one that failed in Venezuela a few years ago.

Pretty much all of South (and Central) America is now directly or indirectly telling Uncle Sam to take the Monroe Doctrine and shove it up its ass -- finally. Good for them.

Coincidentally, the exceptions to this rule (Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, which accept foreign domination) are basket-cases.

For now, Ecuador leads the world.

[Guido]

Imperial Affront

by CHRIS FLOYD


It is apparent that the nation of Ecuador will now be in the frame for what American foreign policy elites like to call, in their dainty and delicate language, “the path of action.” Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange on Thursday for one reason only: the very real possibility that he would be “rendered” to the United States for condign punishment, including the possibility of execution.

None of the freedom-loving democracies involved in the negotiations over his fate — Britain, Sweden, and the United States — could guarantee that this would not happen … even though Assange has not been charged with any crime under U.S. law. [And even though the sexual misconduct allegations he faces in Sweden would not be crimes under U.S. or UK law.] Under these circumstances — and after a sudden, blustering threat from Britain to violate the Ecuadorean embassy and seize Assange anyway — the government of Ecuador felt it had no choice but to grant his asylum request.

As we all know, some of America’s top political figures have openly called for Assange to be put to death for the crime of — well, what was his crime, exactly, in American eyes? His crime is this: he published information leaked to him by a whistleblower — exactly as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, Fox News, etc., etc., do on a regular basis. Some American leaders and media blowhards have demanded he be executed for “treason,” although, as an Australian citizen, he cannot commit treason against the United States. Others say his leaking of classified documents (none of them remotely as sensitive as, say, the much-celebrated Pentagon Papers from the Vietnam Era) has put “American soldiers in danger” — even though America’s own military and intelligence officials have repeatedly stated that no one has been harmed from the publication of documents on Wikileaks.

No one has been physically harmed, that is. Of course, great harm has been done to the pride of the puffed–up poltroons who strut and preen atop the imperial battlements, thinking themselves the lords of all the earth and the apple of every little peon’s eye. Their crimes and lies and third-rate minds were exposed — in their own words — by Wikileaks: and it is for this that Assange must pay. (And be made an example of to all those who might do likewise). Our imperial elites (and their innumerable little yapping media sycophants on both sides of the political fence) simply cannot bear to have American power and domination resisted in any way, at any time, for any reason, anywhere, by anyone. It offends their imperial dignity. It undermines their extremely fragile, frightened, frantic egos, which can only be held together by melding themselves to an image of monstrous, implacable, unstoppable power.



It also — and by no means incidentally — threatens to put a slight crimp in their bottom line, for the American system is now thoroughly militarized; the elite depend, absolutely, on war, death, terror and fear to sustain their economic dominance. As the empire’s chief sycophant, Thomas Friedman, once put it: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” You really can’t put it any plainer than that. The only path to prosperity is through domination by armed force. Others must die, must suffer, must quake in fear, to preserve our comfort. This is Modern American Militarism in a nutshell: the ruling ideology and national religion of American society today.

Anything or anyone who threatens this dominance — or just disagrees with it, or simply wants to be left alone by it — is automatically judged an enemy of the imperial state. You must accept the system. You must get with the program. You cannot question it. The beliefs or religion or ideology of the resister (or perceived resister) do not matter in the slightest. Even the impact (or lack of impact) of the resistance doesn’t matter. It is resistance that it is the crime. It is the refusal to acknowledge the greatness and goodness of the strutters on the battlements, and the legitimacy of their armed domination over the earth, and over you.

It is not enough that you obey; you must be seen to obey. You must obey cheerfully, without complaint — just ask any of thousands and thousands of your fellow citizens who have been tasered or beaten or arrested for failing to show due deference to a police officer or security guard or any of the many other heavily armed figures out there who can stop us, hold us, put us away — or put us down — on the merest whim.

Although Britain is acting as the beard in this case, the government of the Nobel Peace Laureate is clearly driving the action. It is simply inconceivable that Washington will not find ways to punish Ecuador for this act of lèse–majesté. What form it will take remains to be seen (although it could begin with covert backing for Britain’s violation of the Ecuadorean embassy in London). But the fragile, frantic strutters will not let this pass.

[86Dùde]

This post is full of win.

[BooRadley]

I don't think they'll do it. If GB violates the Ecuador embassy, how will British diplomats function in other parts of the world, where governments no long see the British embassy as off-limits?

Assange is fucked, one way or another, though. He told truths. That's "treason" here. (Although the insanity of saying that he committed "treason" against a foreign country is beyond explanation).

I hope he can sneak out to Eq., but I doubt it. The British govt. seems to pretty much do as it's told by Uncle Sam.

[86Dùde]

The U.S. has their backs so they can pretty much do as they wish. They wouldn't even be doing this if Obama wasn't pressuring them. Jackboots all.