Ayatollah Cameron Threatens to Invade Ecuador Embassy

Ayatollah Cameron Threatens to Invade Ecuador Embassy 

Ayatollah Cameron Threatens to invade Ecuador Embassy re: Assange (or, Whitewashing Iran for the US National Security State)

The British government’s menacing of the Ecuadorean embassy in London on Thursday morning, with its threat that its police might well come on to the embassy grounds to arrest wikileaks leader and fugitive Julian Assange, resembles nothing so much as the Iranian regime’s cavalier attitude to the supposed inviolability of embassies. To be sure, Assange does not himself have diplomatic immunity. But the ground on which the Ecuadorean embassy sits is considered in international law to be Ecuadorean territory, and breaching it is tantamount to an invasion.

There is no question in my mind that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have pressured British Prime Minister David Cameron into taking this step. The Obama administration’s reaction to the Wikileaks release of State Department cables with a relatively low level of classification has been astonishingly wrong-headed. The Pentagon Papers case in the 1970s established the principle that the US government had a right to try to keep its documents secret from us, but that if the documents were revealed, they could be freely published and cited by the public.

In contrast, the current stance of the US government is that classified documents remain classified and US government property even if they have been published! And, State Department spokesmen have actually tried to threaten college students about talking about the documents on social media sites, since if they ever wanted to work for the US government, that sort of thing might be held against them.

The Tomdispatch.com site has been banned on US government computers via filtering software because of its use of the Wikileaks cables. These measures are petty and ostrich-like. The cables have been released. Get over it.

By Juan Cole 

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