BILL VAN AUKEN—The frame-up of Bini is bound up with the Moreno government’s retaliation against the exposure of the president’s and his family’s involvement in a massive corruption scandal involving the funneling of millions of dollars in bribe money from a Chinese construction contractor into an offshore shell company named after the president’s three daughters.The publication of the so-called INA papers exposing this corruption was widely reported and prompted the initiation of a congressional investigation in Ecuador before WikiLeaks called attention to the scandal on its Twitter account last month. The Moreno government seized on the tweet to accuse WikiLeaks and Julian Assange personally—despite the intense surveillance and conditions approaching that of solitary confinement in the London embassy—of having hacked the phones and social media accounts of Moreno and his family to secure the evidence of corruption.
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CHRIS HEDGES—Britain will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if Britain as well lacks one.Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he was put in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his health steadily deteriorated.
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TUCKER CARLSON—Julian Assange embarrassed virtually everyone in power in Washington. He published documents that undermined the official story of the Iraq War and Afghanistan. He got Debbie Wasserman-Schulz fired from the DNC. He humiliated Hillary Clinton by showing that the Democratic primaries were, in fact, rigged.Pretty much everyone in Washington has reason to hate Julian Assange. Rather than just admit that straightforwardly, “he made us look like buffoons, so now we are sending him to prison!”
