By Eric Margolis
"....Just about everyone knows that Washington is behind efforts to corral Assange and ship him to America for trial though his alleged misdeeds were all done outside the US.
We are seeing the relentless extension of US law abroad: under this new doctrine, those who commit acts deemed hostile to the US can be arrested or kidnapped overseas – even if they had never visited the United States.
Ecuador is defying a very angry Uncle Sam by sheltering Assange. A storm of Yankee fury will fall on this small Latin American leftist republic that is friendly to Venezuela, Cuba and, gasp, Iran.
Latin America may rally behind plucky Ecuador as traditional anti-Americanism and claims of Yankee bullying are aroused.
Ecuador’s populist president, Rafael Correa, is likely to emerge as a new Latin American hero. EU critics will lambaste Britain as a human rights violator and American toady.
Looking back over the whole Wikileaks business, it’s difficult to conclude that the US was seriously damaged or endangered by the emails released by edited Wikileaks. There was nothing life-threatening or earth-shaking in them. But the leaks were terribly embarrassing for Washington, revealing to the public its often muscular exercise of power, strong-arming other nations, and often dim opinions of so-called allies – nothing we professional journalists didn’t already know.
Assange was a crusading journalist who succeeded in exposing the dirty underwear of big government. His Wikileaks showed that the US-led war in Afghanistan was truly lost, contrary to Washington’s cheery spin – just a much as the famed "Pentagon Papers" of the 1970’s revealed and debunked official the lies about the Vietnam War. At the time, Daniel Ellsberg, the patriotic official who released the "Pentagon Papers," was also denounced as a traitor....."
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