Julian Assange urges US to end Wikileaks 'witch-hunt'
Mr Assange called for the US government to "renounce its witch hunt against Wikileaks"
Julian Assange has urged the US to end its "witch-hunt" against Wikileaks, in his first public statement since entering Ecuador's London embassy.
He also called for the release of Bradley Manning, who is awaiting trial in the US accused of leaking classified documents to the Wikileaks site.
Mr Assange spoke from a balcony at the embassy and thanked Ecuador's president, who has granted him asylum.
He faces extradition to Sweden over sexual assault claims, which he denies.
The 41-year-old said the United States must also stop its "war on whistleblowers".
He added: "The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff or our supporters.
"The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.
Mr Assange also said the United States was facing a choice between re-affirming the "revolutionary values it was founded on" or "dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark".
The show for today is over, but the stand-off at the Ecuadorean embassy and the diplomatic row over Julian Assange's fate are not.
Britain says it won't grant the Wikileaks' leader safe passage so he can go to Ecuador, but it has had to back away from a warning it made last week that it could find a legal basis to enter the embassy and arrest Mr Assange.
That deeply riled not only Ecuador, but other countries in South America. It also provoked doubts about its legality. Given the potential international ramifications, it's highly unlikely British police will storm into the ground-floor mission.
But neither is it likely that Britain or Sweden will give the guarantees that Ecuador and Mr Assange want - that he won't face onward extradition to the US.
So for now the stalemate continues. Police are posted at both the front and back of the Ecuadorean embassy to ensure Julian Assange doesn't escape - and Britain is faced with a costly security operation.
The US is carrying out an investigation into Wikileaks, which has published a mass of leaked diplomatic cables, embarrassing several governments and international businesses.
Alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning, 24, an intelligence analyst in the American army who served in Iraq, is alleged to have leaked US government cables to the whistle-blowing website. He is set to face a court martial.
In an interview for US television in 2010, Mr Assange denied any knowledge of Pte Manning.
Mr Assange began his speech by thanking his supporters, many of whom have been holding a vigil outside the building in Knightsbridge.
Speaking of the visit by police officers to the embassy on Wednesday, Mr Assange said: "Inside this embassy after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape. But I knew there would be witnesses and that is because of you.
"If the UK did not throw away the Vienna Conventions the other night it is because the world was watching and the world was watching because you were watching."
It is an established international convention that local police and security forces are not permitted to enter an embassy, unless they have the express permission of the ambassador.
The Foreign Office has said it remained committed to reaching a "negotiated solution" but following its obligations under the Extradition Act, it would arrest Mr Assange if he left the embassy.
'Binding obligation'
In 2010, two female ex-Wikileaks volunteers accused Mr Assange, an Australian citizen, of committing sexual offences against them while he was in Stockholm to give a lecture.
Mr Assange claims the sex was consensual and the allegations are politically motivated.
In a statement issued after the Ecuadorean decision to grant Mr Assange political asylum, Foreign Secretary William Hague said the UK was under a "binding obligation" to extradite him to Sweden.
Julian Assange talking with his legal adviser Baltasar Garzon Julian Assange has been talking with his legal adviser Baltasar Garzon inside the Ecuadorean embassy
Mr Assange entered the embassy after the UK's Supreme Court dismissed his bid to reopen his appeal against extradition and gave him a two-week grace period before extradition proceedings could start.
Ecuador's president Rafael Correa has suggested Mr Assange could co-operate with Sweden if assurances are given that there would be no extradition to a third country.
Shortly before Mr Assange delivered his speech, his legal adviser Baltasar Garzon said the Australian had told lawyers to carry out "a legal action" protecting "the rights of Wikileaks [and] Julian himself".
Mr Garzon, a former judge, did not give specific details of the action but said it would also extend to "all those currently being investigated".
Barrister and former government lawyer, Carl Gardner, said Mr Assange's options were now severely limited.
"There's no legal action he can take now. All he can do is make these public calls for people to do things he would like them to do and play a waiting game with the British authorities.
"The British government is likely to think that time is on their side. It's Julian Assange who is stuck in this embassy. It's the Ecuadoreans who have the problem of him on their hands and perhaps one of them is likely to tire of the situation before Britain."
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In responce to Assange's news statement, the US put out this:
State Department: The U.S. does not recognize the concept of ‘diplomatic asylum’
By Josh Rogin
Siding with the Brits in their escalating feud with Ecuador about the status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the State Department declared today that the United States does not believe in the concept of ‘diplomatic asylum' as a matter of international law.
Ecuador dragged Britain into an emergency meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States Friday at OAS headquarters in Washington, calling for a foreign ministers' meeting following the British threat to go into the Ecuadoran embassy in London and get Assange, who is wanted for questioning in connection with sexual assault charges in Sweden.
Ecuador formally granted Assange political asylum Thursday, but today the State Department said the United States doesn't agree that such a thing exists.
"The United States is not a party to the 1954 OAS Convention on Diplomatic Asylum and does not recognize the concept of diplomatic asylum as a matter of international law," the office of Spokesperson Victoria Nuland said in a Friday statement. "We believe this is a bilateral issue between Ecuador and the United Kingdom and that the OAS has no role to play in this matter."
That statement is a shift from the stance the State Department took yesterday, when Nuland said that Washington would stay out of the dispute and that the American position was that the Brits were making decisions based on British, not international law.
"This is an issue between the Ecuadorans, the Brits, the Swedes," Nuland said Thursday. "It is an issue among the countries involved and we're not planning to interject ourselves."
The United States can only formally grant asylum to political figures once they actually are on U.S. soil, as dictated by the Refugee Act of 1980. But the U.S. has a long record of protecting political targets inside U.S. embassy complexes, most recently with Chinese blind dissident Chen Guangcheng last December.
That might seem like a distinction without a difference to many. However, Chen never sought or was granted asylum; he simply asked to study in the United States and the Chinese government eventually assented.
In 1989, the U.S. granted "temporary refuge" to Feng Lizhi, a leader of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, who fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and stayed there for 384 days before Chinese authorities allowed him to go to the United States, but officially only for "medical treatment."
Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana sought refuge in 1967 via the U.S. Embassy in India and was eventually granted U.S. citizenship.
In the first place, the warrant that Sweden has sought for Assange, has some very suspicious parts to it. One of them, is if the two women in question thought it was a rape issue and not the consensual sex that Julian claims, why didn't they press for this at the start when they knew he planned to leave Sweden? It was quite some time later that one and then the other joined in this. Next thing you should know, is that Sweden has an unusal law about sex. It is considered there that without use of a condom it is considered sexual assault. Sweden is the only country I know of with this law. The women in question always had the option to say 'no, not without the condom'. But no one hears of that.
Another item in all this is that Sweden prosecutors want to talk to Assange, is the claim. Yet they don't want to talk to him so bad as to make a trip to the UK to do so. He's offered twice, once through the time on bond in the UK and again while he is in the Ecuadoran Embassy to talk to them and both times they are not interested in doing so under those circumstances which leads more than one to think there is something more behind it than just the publicly claimed reason is they want to talk to him.
The US has long observed the sanctity of diplomatic embassies. There was all sorts of hue and cry over the bombing of the US Embassies in various parts of the Middle East and why the local police forces weren't doing more to protect them. Eventually it led to removing the people working in those embassies and closing them down, because their security wasn't observed. The people working there had become targets to and from work.
If you don't believe the US thinks embassies are granted certain protections, then what about the Russian Embassy built in Russia for the US? At the time there was a real stink over it. The US contracted various Russian businesses to build the embassy for them. At near the end of completion it was found out that the whole structure was hopelessly embedded with spying apparatus, buried in the the entire structure to listen in on what was going on and what concerns the Americans would have over things. The embassy was never used for it's intended purpose and the US never moved in.
Diplomats themselves are granted certain immunities. Time and again in the US, those who have broken laws within the US have been let go, because of that immunity and allowed to return to their countries. Strauss-Kahn could have walked free without facing the charge of rape within the US had he chosen to.
During the Cold War time and again, both the US and Russia have observed diplomatic immunity and embassy sanctity on both sides. So the claim of not being a signatory of a treaty does not mean it hasn't been observed. That coupled with the claim this is between others and not anything of it's interest is disingenuous and a weasel out.
Last I would call attention to the Obama administration who has used the Espionage Act to prosecute whistle blowers time and again, for releasing confidential info, not flattering to this administration. He's used it 6 times which is double of all the rest of the presidents of the US throughout it's history. At the same time, leaks to the press that are beneficial are never pursued.
Wikileaks released info on the war in Afghanistan showing the killing of civilians, a claim the US at the time denied more than once. It also released what became known as Cablegate. A list of dirty deeds pulled by the US in other countries. While unflattering it was not extremely damaging. The fear the US had of exposure of some of its foreign operatives never materialized as Wikileaks used several major newspapers to edit what should be and should not be released to protect them. Not the mark of someone wishing the US all the damage it could reap.
I personally think that Assange has named it correctly with the term 'witch hunt'.