{"id":30924,"date":"2018-02-13T06:56:06","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T11:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30924"},"modified":"2018-02-13T06:56:06","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T11:56:06","slug":"the-uks-hidden-hand-in-julian-assanges-detention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30924","title":{"rendered":"The UK\u2019s Hidden Hand in Julian Assange\u2019s Detention"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UK\u2019s Hidden Hand in Julian Assange\u2019s Detention<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo by Billy Bob Bain | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It now emerges that the last four years of Julian Assange\u2019s effective imprisonment in the Ecuadorean embassy in London have been entirely unnecessary. In fact, they depended on a legal charade.<\/p>\n

Behind the scenes, Sweden\u00a0wanted to drop the extradition case<\/a>\u00a0against Assange back in 2013. Why was this not made public? Because Britain persuaded Sweden to pretend that they still wished to pursue the case.<\/p>\n

In other words, for more than four years Assange has been holed up in a tiny room, policed at great cost to British taxpayers, not because of any allegations in Sweden but because the British authorities wanted him to remain there. On what possible grounds could that be, one has to wonder? Might it have something to do with his work as the head of Wikileaks, publishing information from whistleblowers that has severely embarrassed the United States and the UK.<\/p>\n

In fact, Assange should have walked free years ago if this was really about an investigation \u2013\u00a0a sham one<\/a>\u00a0at that \u2013 into an alleged sexual assault in Sweden. Instead, as Assange has long warned, there is a very different agenda at work: efforts to\u00a0extradite him onwards<\/a>\u00a0to the US, where he could be locked away for good. That was why\u00a0UN experts argued<\/a>\u00a0two years ago that he was being \u201carbitrarily detained\u201d \u2013 for political crimes \u2013 not unlike the situation of dissidents in other parts of the world that\u00a0win the support<\/a>\u00a0of western liberals and leftists.<\/p>\n

According to a new, limited release of emails between officials, the Swedish director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny, wrote to Britain\u2019s Crown Prosecution Service on 18 October 2013, warning that Swedish law would not allow the case for extradition to be continued.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The UK\u2019s Hidden Hand in Julian Assange\u2019s Detention Photo by Billy Bob Bain | CC BY 2.0 It now emerges that the last four years of Julian Assange\u2019s effective imprisonment in the Ecuadorean embassy in London have been entirely unnecessary. In fact, they depended on a legal charade. Behind the scenes, Sweden\u00a0wanted to drop the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[18512,7745,17165,2001,7746,771,820,2080],"class_list":["post-30924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-britian","tag-ecuadorean-embassy","tag-jonathan-cook","tag-julian-assange","tag-london","tag-sweden","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30925,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30924\/revisions\/30925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}