The future of Julian Assange | Trump asked the extrad …

There are crucial hours for Julian Assange. This morning he was expelled from the Ecuador Embbady in London. President Lenin Moreno is busy with the announcement. Beyond the justification based on alleged violations of an impossible protocol (not only could Assange not say anything, but the media that he had founded, WikiLeaks, could not say anything either), had been Arrested for strictly political reasons, since Moreno he wants to get closer to the United States and Great Britain and to move away from the anti-imperialist legacy of his predecessor, Rafael Correa.

Detention in Britain should not last long. He is accused of committing an undeliverable offense, in violation of the conditions of his parole, on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by the Swedish Government under an investigation. on alleged badual crimes that have already been filed and in which Assange has never been charged. If the United States had not intervened, the founder of WikeLeaks would have remained free after appearing before the judge, having declared and paid the fine. But the United States has requested the extradition of Assange in order to face charges of treason and espionage because of the mega-filtration of diplomatic cables known as Cablegate. A grand jury meeting in Alexandria, Virginia, perhaps in the district where more military, spies and police live together per square meter across the country, has complained against Assange for alleged conspiracy with his source , Chelsea Manning, to extract the cables. and make them known. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison and forgiven by Obama after seven years. Much of Manning's trial focused on whether WikiLeaks had been a pbadive receiver of the cables or whether it had conspired in one way or another to obtain them.

It is true that the border between investigative journalism and terrorism is very thin because of theft of secret information, as between espionage and diplomacy is very thin, it It would be hypocritical to say that journalists are mere recipients. pbadive secrets that they want to tell us. Explaining to a source how to send a document in a safe and anonymous way is not the same as preparing a criminal plan to squelch a government. Thus, at least Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, he understood, and that is why he refused to prosecute Assange. And he told The Washington Post that he could not judge Assange without clashing with the first amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression. With the Trump government, things started well because WikiLeaks' Hillary Clinton publications helped him win the election. The President tweeted today "I love WikiLeaks." But things quickly changed when the Assange site released "Vault 7," the largest CIA document filtering of the agency's history. Subsequently, the Trump government defined WikiLeaks not as a means of communication, but as a "hostile non-governmental intelligence service" and the Alexandria inquiry grew in scale with new measures and summonses from witnesses, including Manning, who refused to testify and that is why he returned to prison a month ago.

Trump was encouraged to request the extradition of Assange and promote a historic trial and followed by everyone. This will be another chapter in Trump's fight against his country's media and human rights organizations and freedom of expression. No one can escape the fact that virtually every media outlet in the world has published Assange's alleged information and that several of these media, including the New York Times, The Guardian El País and Page 12, were partners with WikiLeaks in various projects. of publication.

In addition, this judgment will serve as a general debate on what it means to be an internet journalist, social networks, media concentration and mega – filtering, the limits of the right to freedom of expression. inform in democratic societies, of the meaning of the concept of privacy in it was hypertransparence.

Trump is ready to give this debate. Everything seems to indicate that this is the type of fight that he likes the most. And we know that Assange has been preparing for a long time at this time.

Beyond geopolitical failures, in a day like this, one can not help but think that beyond the icon, it is the human being. A tender, lively, timid in his way, obstinate, authoritarian ingenious, lover of French cheese and Argentine malbec, that publishes is not afraid to face the Pentagon or burn bridges with China, the Russia and the European Union completely isolated, who spent six years and ten months in atrocious isolation, watched, spied, sometimes in secret. I have learned a lot from him. Once we talked for fourteen hours in a row – fourteen hours! – With him and his father, John Shipman, in the conference room of the Embbady. On another occasion, he started a sentence that I never forget: "Getting information is easy," he said. "What is difficult, it is to publish it."

@santiodonnell