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Julian Assange Advised Edward Snowden to Avoid Latin America, Despite "Negative PR"

posted by martyb on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:22PM   
from the staying-safe dept.

takyon writes:

Julian Assange has said in an interview that he persuaded Edward Snowden to avoid seeking asylum in Latin America due to the CIA's reach, and that he fears assassination himself:

Julian Assange has said he advised the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden against seeking asylum in Latin America because there he could have been kidnapped and possibly killed. The WikiLeaks editor-in-chief said he told Snowden to ignore concerns about the "negative PR consequences" of sheltering in Russia because it was one of the few places in the world where the CIA's influence did not reach.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Times, Assange also said he feared he would be assassinated if he was ever able to leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought asylum in 2012 to avoid extradition.

[...] WikiLeaks was intimately involved in the operation to help Snowden evade the US authorities in 2013 after he leaked his cache of intelligence documents to Glenn Greenwald, then a journalist with the Guardian. Assange sent one of his most senior staff members, Sarah Harrison, to be at Snowden's side in Hong Kong, and helped to engineer his escape to Russia – despite his discomfort with the idea of fleeing to one of the US's most powerful enemies.

"Snowden was well aware of the spin that would be put on it if he took asylum in Russia," Assange told the Times. "He preferred Latin America, but my advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences, because my assessment is that he had a significant risk he could be kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders. Kidnapped or possibly killed."

Assange also outlined his own fears of being targeted. He said that even venturing out on to the balcony of Ecuador's embassy in Knightsbridge posed security risks in the light of bomb and assassination threats by what he called "unstable people". He said he thought it was unlikely he would be shot, but that he worried that if he was freed he could be kidnapped by the CIA. "I'm a white guy," Assange said. "Unless I convert to Islam it's not that likely that I'll be droned, but we have seen things creeping towards that."

Here's an example of the CIA's alleged influence in Latin America.

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Original Submission

• Assange and Evo Morales grounding Assange and Evo Morales grounding (Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:04PM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:04PM (#229872) Journal

  http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/28/assange_on_the_untold_story_of [democracynow.org]

  So it’s the week of the oil conference. A number of presidential jets are flying back, and we are considering one of these. And so, we then—our code language that we used deliberately swapped the presidential jet that we were considering for the Bolivian jet. And so we just spoke about Bolivia in order to distract from the actual candidate jet. And in some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that on open lines to lawyers in the United States. And we didn’t think much more of it. We had engaged in a number of these distraction operations in the asylum maneuver from Hong Kong, for example, booking him on flights to India through Beijing and other forms of distraction, like Iceland, for example. We didn’t think this was anything more than just distracting.

  But the U.S. picked up a statement, a supportive statement made in Moscow by President Evo Morales, and appears to have picked up our codeword for the actual operation, and put two and two together and made 22, and then pressured France—successfully pressured France, Portugal and Spain to close their airspace to President Evo Morales’s jet in its flight from Moscow to the Canary Islands for refueling and then back to Bolivia. And as a result, it was forced to land in Vienna. And then, once in Vienna, there was pressure to search the plane.

  So, it’s really a quite extraordinary situation that reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States and what it claims are its values of human rights and asylum and the rights to asylum and so, and respecting the rule of law, the Vienna Convention. Just a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity. And they got it wrong. They spent all that political capital in demanding this urgent favor to close the airspace, which was humiliating to those Western European countries, and they got it wrong.

  AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken to President Morales about what happened?

  JULIAN ASSANGE: I’ve spoken to his ambassador and conveyed what had happened. Interestingly, the ambassador to the United Kingdom was involved in Portugal, so he was actually—at that time, in 2013, he was involved in the whole incident.

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• Re:Assange and Evo Morales grounding (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:39PM

  by opinionated_science (4031) on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:39PM (#229882)

  thanks for posting that. The times article is paywalled and I cannot be bother to find away around it....

  Parent