Britain's Foreign Secretary has cocked a snoot at a UN legal panel's conclusion that Julian Assange's three-and-a-half year refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London is a case of “arbitrary detention” and a “deprivation of liberty.” 

A Swedish appeals court rejected on Thursday an appeal by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to revoke a detention order issued by prosecutors in 2010 over allegations of sexual assault.

By Jeff Cohen
London—On Friday, I visited Ecuador's embassy here in the capital of the former British empire and saw a building surrounded by a phalanx of cops, with several of them at the front door. The embassy is in an upscale neighborhood near Harrods department store. The intimidating police presence was ordered by a Conservative government that waxes eloquent about the need to respect (British) embassies overseas.

By Memet Uludag—Irish Anti War Movement
It was the year of 1998, the former Chilean military dictator, mass murderer and torturer Pinochet had arrived to UK, a country he called his “most favoured country in the world”. No wonder why he would choose Britain as his favourite place. He was kept there under a very comfortable house arrest, effectively under the protection of the British government. Court trials, endless diplomatic debates and meetings with his favourite person, Thatcher, kept Pinochet in Britain safe and well until he was allowed to return to Chile in 2000 and to die in his comfortable military hospital bed some years later.

by Robert Stevens
Please do all you can to support this heroic “world citizen.” The comparison of the treatment of Assange vs. Pinochet is as revealing as it is monstrous. The former an eloquent advocate of freedom in the truest sense of the word. The latter a promulgate promoter of inquisition and vicious torture who ordered the butchering of thousands of his fellow Chilean citizens. Imagine family members forced to watch the heinous torture of totally innocent loved ones. Pinochet made Caligula proud. That the “leaders” of the US will prosecute Assange in such an arrogant and lawless manner speaks volumes of that nations’ descent from liberal democracy to “terror dungeon dictatorship.” Little wonder that today we find our world in such unparalleled peril."

The US deserves nothing but rebuke and intense scorn.

By David Swanson
The reason people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the world have been influenced to some extent by the work of Wikileaks is that they have read or heard about the material that Wikileaks has helped to make public.  The CBS program "60 Minutes” has just published video of an interview with Wikileaks' Julian Assange—with the video focused, of course, on Assange himself, with almost no substantive content related to the massive crimes and abuses that have made news around the globe.

Although this is an opinion column, the content of this piece requires no comment.

Go here