EN LA MIRA     

"THE HOUR OF THE KNIFE"

What are the real reasons for the arrest and raid against Julian Assange. Freedom of information right is dangerous?

By Dany Smith

A disturbing silence invaded the embassy of Ecuador in London, something worried his most illustrious and complicated guest who from the upper window of the house on 3rd Street, 3 Hans Cres in Knigthbridge of the British capital looked anxiously at what It happened on the street. At one point several cars and cars of the British police were parked in the front of the building and with a hurry, more than a dozen plainclothesmen accompanied by metropolitan "bobbies" penetrated the doors of the legation. The government of Quito, under pressure from Washington, had suddenly ceased the asylum of the creator of the site "Wikileaks" and released his hand allowing the British police forces (with the safe presence of US agents) to enter the building to arrest him.

Freedom of information had received a stab wound. There is no other way in which this arbitrary act can be described. Julian Assange for years was in the sights of the US State Department and his British colleagues from the Foreign Office who after intense negotiations with the current neoliberal government of Ecuador, was handed over on a silver platter by the government of Lenin Moreno.

The motives for his capture are none other than to show who exposed the abominations and aberrant violations of human rights that the US and its allies committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the endless pressure actions and veiled threats through channels diplomats to governments that did not want to follow their directives. It also caused great annoyance the revelations about the network of pederasty that is known as the "Pizza-Gate", the ventilation of the compromising emails of Hillary Clinton linked on dirty issues in Libya and the established with the renowned Zionist John Podesta.

The issue "Chelsea Manning" was undoubtedly the straw that overflowed the glass and annoyed the mood of the influential neoconservative sectors in Washington. Bradley Manning was an officer of the US military who filtered thousands of documents to Julian Assange which after being discovered by an intelligence investigation inside the unit where he was working, was arrested and convicted of "conspiracy" in 2013 to 35 years of prison where he was until 2017.

There was no lack of suggestions that he be executed for treason. Also before Obama left the White House, he signed his pardon in 2017 and went free where he presented himself with a change in his life as a transsexual, now called Chelsea Elisabeth Manning. Likewise, with the arrival of Trump and under the pressure of the Republican hawks, his freedom was rendered ineffective and Manning returned to prison.

It is a warning that the neocon sector and its allies in the war party want to make public to terrorize the seekers of the truth conditioning the freedom of information and the press. An article by Glen Greenwald in "The Intercept" exposes this situation with clear clarity.

Perhaps one of the most controversial revelations of "Wikileaks" has been the telephone and cybernetic espionage activities carried out by the NSA and the CIA on mobile phones of leaders of allied countries such as Germany, Italy and France, causing undeniable damage in the trust that lasts until today.

It was thanks to the work of Assange and his collaborators (including Manning), that world public opinion was able to access some of the darkest and most compromising secrets of Washington's foreign policy. One of the most forceful and perhaps most graphic of the fury against humanity, was that massacre captured live during the occupation of Iraq in 2007 by the cameras of a US helicopter "Apache", where it can be seen as a group of men and Iraqi children who were gathered in a Baghdad neighborhood, after being lighted with the sights of the device, are deliberately machine-gunned, causing a true massacre and even repeating the attack on vehicles trying to rescue the wounded.

The scenes were so perfidious and disgusting that they only boosted that memory by the images already present in the minds of the Iraqis and who traveled the world who could see in their own flesh what American democracy meant, with filming and abominable photographs taken a few years before (2004) in the “Abu-Graib” Concentration Camp, controlled and run by the Americans.

The worst of that was that thanks to one of his own military (Manning) and perhaps many others who remain hidden in anonymity and who helped to ventilate the uncomfortable and illegal practices of torture and other aberrations carried out by sinister groups of military and private contracted tasks (led by the CIA), I provide “Wikileaks” with access to that black hole of intelligence operations that the conventional media would not have-and would not dare-ever penetrate. Do not forget that in these dirty businesses were involved many respected civilian professionals of academic rank, doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists and psychologists who collaborated in these dirty matters, including officials who as the head of the CIA, currently occupy functions in the administration of Trump.

This also touches the former NSA agent Eduard Snowden, who after revealing how the agency operated illegally through social networks like Facebook, was able to flee quickly and take refuge in the Russian Federation where he undoubtedly has greater guarantees that the State Department American and the CIA cannot influence the Kremlin government.

The images of a Julian Assange dragged from his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy by a dozen men, cannot be more opprobrious for the already decrepit image of the nonexistent North American democracy. For a long time, the power structure in the US has been co-opted by this sector that lives on the pain of others, the promotion of crises and wars where private interests call them, without scruples of those who may be harmed by their actions. Here we have already seen it, there are no differences between democrats or republicans; Some, like others, carried out bloody aggressive campaigns on sovereign states, thus participating to a greater or lesser extent, of the most detestable humanitarian crises of the late twentieth century and those that currently shake several regions of the globe.