The arrest of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London raises quite a few questions not only about the manner of the action against him but also about the man himself. For the last seven years, till his arrest, Assange had been ensconced in the embassy thanks to Ecuador providing him with asylum. In all this time, he was never able to step out of the building.
His fear was that he would, if he emerged from the embassy, be extradited to Washington on charges relating to the release of thousands of secret US government documents into the public domain by Wikileaks, the organization he has headed for years. There was too the matter of the rape charges brought against him by two women in Sweden, charges he has consistently denied.
Assange's arrest was clearly a bad turn of events for him, given that so long the Ecuadorean government had remained unwilling to place him in danger by asking him to leave its London embassy. President Lenin Moreno, newly elected, appeared to have second thoughts following his interaction with the US authorities.
The result is what we have now seen happen. It must also be a matter of clear relief to the British government, which had for the last seven years expended an enormous amount of money every day to keep watch on the embassy just in case Assange did not escape. Even so, the question which comes up is whether the manner of Assange's arrest was at all necessary. He has a long legal fight ahead in the UK during which his lawyers will make the case for him not to be extradited to the US.
In these past three years, Assange's credibility among liberal circles in the West has been dented by the clear glee with which Wikileaks released purloined e-mails relating to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in the US, a bad move which seriously damaged the chances of Mrs. Clinton's winning the White House. The result of that thoughtless act is that Julian Assange now appears to have no friends left. He is now on his own.
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