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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
First up today is Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel.
EmptyWheel.net is her great blog.
The topic, of course, Julian Assange and the diplomatic standoff.
Marcy writes that it exposes precisely the same side of the U.S. and U.K. as the WikiLeaks cables themselves.
Welcome back to the show, Marcy.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Yeah, this is just like the kind of thing that you would read about in the WikiLeaks, huh?
Yeah, I mean, it just seems like another misplay on the part of the U.K. and the U.S. when it didn't have to be that way.
But nevertheless, they tried to be bullies, and that's precisely why, if you believe the chat logs of Bradley Manning, that's precisely why Bradley Manning leaked the cables in the first place.
Right.
Now, the top of the hour news, it's Fox News.
So, I don't know, you make it out what you will, but they said that the Brits are considering revoking Ecuador's diplomatic status.
So then that way, I guess, it won't be a violation of their sovereignty when they send in the SWAT team.
Right.
What happened was, and this is why I think the Brits overreached.
You think?
A little bit?
Well, I mean, you know, there are definitely two sides to whether, you know, to how serious the rape allegations are in Sweden, to, you know, how cooperative Assange has tried to be with Sweden.
But once you get to the point of asylum, then you would think that it would be treated as asylum.
Now, as soon as Assange went to the Ecuadorian embassy, as soon as they allowed him in, then it seemed like there would just be a standoff.
You know, he'd be stuck there, but he'd have no way of getting out, and then eventually there would be some kind of quiet solution.
But instead, what we now have, because what happened was, the British sent this letter to Ecuador in Quito, not even in London.
They sent this letter and said, oh, by the way, we have this 1987 law which allows us to revoke your status as embassy so we can lock in there and get Julian Assange.
And that was what pushed the Ecuadorians to kind of rattle up the language and say, well, you know, you're treating us like a colony and blah, blah, blah.
And I think it made, and then, of course, some bands with cops showed up last night and some occupied people showed up last night.
So it upped the ante when the British didn't need to up the ante.
And I think whether rightfully or not, I mean, I think people rightly say there's little chance that the Brits are going to walk in there and take Julian Assange, although there have been reports that the British have decided to do that because they're being pressured by the United States to do it.
In any case, I think a lot of people rightly think that this is just going to be a standoff.
But the British could have had a standoff in any case.
And instead, they decided to make it into a standoff where the Ecuadorians can rightly say that the British have overstepped, the British have made threats, et cetera, et cetera.
I've got to tell you, your phone sounds so terrible.
Can you – I'm not sure if it's digital distortion or if it's just – do you have Sprint or something?
No, I don't have Sprint.
It's usually pretty good.
Do you want to try me on Skype?
Well, hell, you know what, I'll tell you what.
I'll let you go and I'll call you back during the break and we'll try to work it out then.
Okay, sounds great.
Okay, sorry.
Bye.
All right, everybody.
Well, so it's just a technological type of thing.
We'll work it out.
It's no big deal.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
Hey, it's the show.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Marcy Wheeler.
We're going to try again to make the telephone work.
And then, yes, obviously, I need to work on my rig where I can use Skype.
It seems like I had to work that out a long time ago.
But anyway, I think we actually have a better phone connection now.
Let's try this.
Marcy, hi.
Marcy, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me back, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
You actually do sound much better, so I think we will be able to go ahead and proceed.
Sorry about that earlier.
Yeah, yeah, no problem.
We'll blame the technological service providing corporation there.
You know, once you have so many back doors for the NSA to tap into everybody's stuff, it kind of degrades the quality of the network, you know?
Blame Verizon.
Yeah, must be.
All right, so the public face of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is what?
Hole up inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, correct?
Sleeping on an air mattress at night, yes.
And now yesterday, late yesterday, it was announced that the Ecuadorian government would go ahead and grant him asylum, at which point the British National Police, I guess the MI5 or whoever, have surrounded the place, or Scotland Yard, they've surrounded the place and threatened to raid it and arrest this guy and send him off to Sweden to answer some date rape charges.
Right, right.
Well, yeah, that's what they say, but as I said, there's at least one report that they're doing this at the behest of the Americans, not of the Swedes, in which case you've got to believe it has nothing to do with the rape case, but instead has everything to do with WikiLeaks.
And we'd be fools to believe this was about date rape, right?
Well, you know, that's part of the underlying problem, because, yes, there is a legal process there, yes, Assange did go and appeal the extradition order, but, you know, you don't see the Met, I think it was the Met, it was Scotland Yard that showed up, you don't see them going to embassies to try and enforce extradition orders like this, so obviously the stakes here are much bigger.
And maybe it's just that the powers that be want to make sure Assange is embarrassed by facing these rape charges, but it certainly doesn't look like it.
So do you suspect that he won't even be taken to Sweden at all if the British cops do raid the place?
I guess, really, first, is it going to have much effect if they really just completely, if the Brits just override Ecuador's supposed sovereignty at their embassy there and treat them this way?
Does that have a long-lasting whatever other effects in their relationships with other states and so forth?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's why it's so foolish that they sent this letter, because I think what we'll probably see is at least another, probably another several months of standoff, of Assange sleeping on an air mattress in the Ecuadorian embassy.
I think we would have seen that anyway.
So why did the Brits send this letter and give Ecuador the opportunity to not only sound aggrieved, but also to kind of up the political ante?
So now he's on the phone with all these other Latin American governments saying, you know, the Brits want to treat us like colonies again.
And so I think it was, you know, from a completely, you know, I don't think it's right or wrong to extradite Assange to Sweden or even differently to the United States.
I mean, I think it was just a badly played political hand on the part of the Brits, because now they live down.
And they're going to get probably the same outcome, which is just this standoff.
Yeah.
Now here's what's kind of confusing about this to me.
I mean, I know that the rule of law pretty much is just a joke used, a joke played on the population to justify the power of the state, that they can really pretty much do whatever they want.
But in this case, it seems pretty cut and dry that there are no American laws that you could really use against Julian Assange.
Right.
I mean, even the Espionage Act, it addresses espionage, not journalism.
And this is just journalism.
I mean, this is what The New York Times and The Washington Post do, you know, on their good days anyway, is exactly this kind of thing.
And, you know, oftentimes even when it comes to WikiLeaks stories, they publish the WikiLeaks documents, too.
And so what is it that the grand jury is even after here?
They keep, you know, leaking that they want to prosecute this guy.
They want to get him and get their hands on him and do something to him, shut him up, stop him somehow.
And yet they don't really have a leg to stand on.
And no actual, you know, Bar Association committee believes so.
Right.
No real experts in America believe that they have the real legal standing to do anything to this guy.
Do they?
Outside of maybe the Federalist Society or whatever.
Well, I mean, the argument they were making was that there was technological assistance given to Manning that then made the role of WikiLeaks much greater.
So in other words, I forget what it was, I know it's come out in the Manning hearings, but they basically gave Manning a way to encrypt the stuff that he was sending and that made them spies as opposed to journalists.
The other thing, of course, is the assumption that they're trying to pressure Manning to cooperate.
In other words, make some kind of deal with Manning such that he'll turn in Assange and somehow be able to make a case in that way.
So it's not, you know, I sort of imagine that if Assange were extradited and if the rape charges in Sweden did hold up, he'd be there in a place where he wouldn't have access to the press, wouldn't have easy access to his lawyer, and from that then the U.S. would be in a much stronger position to trump up whatever charge against Assange they want.
But, you know, that's sort of probably the way they're thinking.
I don't think that any, I mean, I say this, but I also didn't expect that the Brits would make what could be perceived as threats so as to up the political ante on this, but I don't think that the Brits would ever directly extradite Assange to the United States because that would, you know, make the whole facade into a facade and delegitimize it even more than it already is.
Well, and there's already plenty of reason to believe, right, to turn him on over once they're, you know, have him under their excuses.
Well, you know, they have done that.
They also have cooperated with us on rendition, so, you know, who knows what kind of process the United States would use with Assange because they've called him a spy, which, you know, again, puts him into a different, in post-9-11 thinking that puts him into a totally different approach to legal issues than, you know, if they're just going to treat him as a wayward journalist.
But, yeah, there's no reason to think the Swedes wouldn't extradite Assange if there were a legitimate charge.
You know, we'll see whether there's ever a legitimate charge.
Yeah.
E-mailer writes, ask Marcy about the precedent of Cardinal Minzenti, the Catholic Church bigwig who spent 15 years in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest during the Cold War.
The Soviet-backed Hungarian regime finally let him go.
What would the Brits have said if the Soviet SWAT team had invaded the U.S. Embassy to capture the Cardinal?
Well, the other thing is, everyone's like, oh, this is a really serious rape charge.
Why, you know, why are you defending asylum for this guy on a rape charge?
The Brits didn't turn over Pinochet, right?
He was charged.
I mean, he was accused of far more egregious kinds of rape and murder and all sorts of crimes, and yet the British allowed him to take refuge in an embassy as well.
So, you know, you really sort of need to be asking.
There are lots of precedents.
I pointed out that in 1991 Saddam Hussein did respect the sanctity of our embassy, and there's lots of American space because that murderous dictator, you know, respected the sanctity of embassies.
That's why we don't want to, I mean, that's why the British should be really careful about even threatening to abuse the sanctity of the Ecuadorian embassy because there are lots of repercussions that come from that.
Yeah.
You know, the Americans and the Brits especially like to call themselves the international community and the leaders of the world and the people who set the moral standard and all these kinds of things, but it seems to me like that PR has got to be wearing really thin for even, you know, populations with short memories who would like to give us some kind of benefit of the doubt.
It's such bloody hypocrisy all day, and I mean in the literal sense, not in the way the Brits use the term.
Yeah, and again, I mean, that's sort of my point is if WikiLeaks are so detrimental to the United States, they're detrimental, I mean, partly because it exposes us on some legal grounds, but largely because it embarrasses us and makes us look like big bullies.
I mean, that's what was so embarrassing about all those WikiLeaks tables.
Right.
So how is this different?
How is, you know, Bigfooting this issue when it, you know, could have easily at least been put into a standoff that it'll probably be anyway when all it does is make you look precisely like the bully that, you know, that you didn't want the cables to come out to expose you as.
Right.
Well, I mean, I guess that's kind of the joke, right?
When you have that much power, all irony just completely escapes you.
That's why they have to spend so much money on these PR firms.
They have to rent a sense of what might this look like because they can't think of it themselves at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's the PR firm people.
They still fail anyway.
And to some degree, you know, the notion is we are so powerful that we don't have to worry about the political ramifications of Bigfooting this.
And at some point the tide is going to turn there.
I mean, at some point people are, you know, that's why I think it's so interesting that Ecuador started calling all of the other Latin American countries because, you know, Latin America, most of Latin America, not Colombia, but most of Latin America already thinks that the U.S. and the U.K. are big bullies.
And this is not going to help.
Well, and, you know, that might be all for the best really.
Anyway.
All right.
We're over time.
Thank you very much for your time as always.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks for persisting, Scott.
Take care.
That's Marcy Wheeler, everybody.
Emptywheel.net is where you can find her great blog.
And we'll be right back.
