Julian, Ecuador and What is Wrong With This Picture

Last week Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Engand over the last few days has made threats and overtures to take Assange by force and extadite him to Sweden.

This concerns the United States because Assange is the man responsible for WikiLeaks. Last year Wikileaks was responsible for the release of hundreds of classified United States documents and cables. This included U S Army documents whose origins were traced back to Private Bradley Manning. Manning now sits in a small solitary cell as he awaits trial for very serious treason offenses.

I do not purport to understand the whole situation. In America folks like Micheal Moore and other obvious liberals defend Manning and Assange on issues of free speech. I am a free speech advocate too but I do not understand how this can be asserted in this case. If you are in the military and you steal or release classified information it does not seem to me that you can claim free speech as a reason.

We can all agree or disagree on if information should be classified. We can state that we do not feel that Manning is being treated in the spirit of justice that we feel proper. That said what could he possibly have thought was going to happen if he was caught.

As to Assange. The safe haven allowed by embassies is well known. We certainly would not want China to invade our embassy should we hold a dissident, with that in mind encouraging Great Britain to take Assange by force is a bad idea and a bad precedent. He will not be going far, and frankly the United States case against Assange is much less strong. After all The New York Times released The Pentagon Papers and no one lined up to defend Nixon on that case. Assange is not a United States citizen. We do not have to like him but I am not sure that we really have much legal basis to pursue him.

That said I am not sure why being liberal such as Moore makes one want to have my countries classified documents released.

It is a conflict I do not quite understand the origin of.