US-backed Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno reneged on asylum agreements made with naturalized citizen Julian Assange, leading to his arrest on Thursday, but how exactly did relations with the whistleblower end up here?

Moreno won a narrow victory in 2017 to become president of Ecuador, having served as vice president under his predecessor Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2013 as part of the center-left PAIS Alliance. Much like Assange, Moreno was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, for championing the rights of the disabled (he is the only world leader who uses a wheelchair).

When he rose to power Moreno quickly locked horns with Assange, eventually revoking his internet access in March 2018 while also reducing the security detail at the embassy as a result of their ongoing spat. Moreno alleged that Assange had installed electronic distortion equipment in addition to blocking security cameras at the embassy. Their deteriorating relationship culminated in Moreno’s withdrawal of asylum granted to the whistleblower on April 11, 2019.

READ MORE: Exposing ‘collateral murder’ and mass surveillance: Why the world should be grateful to Assange

“Today I announce that the discourteous and aggressive behavior of Mr Julian Assange; the hostile and threatening declarations of his allied organization against Ecuador, and especially the transgression of international treaties, have led the situation to a point where the asylum of Mr Assange is unsustainable and no longer viable,” Moreno said in a video statement shortly after Assange’s arrest.

The writing had been on the wall for a long time, however.

Following his 2017 election, Moreno quickly moved away from his election platform after taking office. He reversed several key pieces of legislation passed under his predecessor which targeted the wealthy and the banks. He also reversed a referendum decision on indefinite re-election while simultaneously blocking any potential for Correa to return.

He effectively purged many of Correa’s appointments to key positions in Ecuador’s judiciary and National Electoral Council via the CPCCS-T council which boasts supra-constitutional powers.

Moreno has also cozied up to the US, with whom Ecuador had a strained relationship under Correa. Following a visit from Vice President Mike Pence in June 2018, Ecuador bolstered its security cooperation with the US, including major arms deals, training exercises and intelligence sharing.

Following Assange’s arrest Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the first place, described Moreno as the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” saying he was guilty of a “crime that humanity will never forget.”

READ MORE: ‘Greatest traitor in Ecuadorian history’: Ex-President Correa slams Moreno over Assange’s arrest

Despite his overwhelming power and influence, however, Moreno and his family are the subject of a sweeping corruption probe in the country, as he faces down accusations of money laundering in offshore accounts and shell companies in Panama, including the INA Investment Corp, which is owned by Moreno’s brother.  

Damning images, purportedly hacked from Moreno’s phone, have irreparably damaged both his attempts at establishing himself as an anti-corruption champion as well as his relationship with Assange, whom he accused of coordinating the hacking efforts.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was earlier evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested by British police, should be treated properly, a Kremlin spokesman has said.

“Undoubtedly, we hope that all his rights will be respected,” Dmitry Peskov told journalists when asked if Russia could grant asylum to Julian Assange. Earlier in the day, the WikiLeaks founder was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and arrested by Met Police.

READ MORE: Julian Assange arrested after Ecuador tears up asylum deal

Simultaneously, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno proclaimed that he had withdrawn political asylum for Assange, citing alleged violation of international norms and misconduct at the embassy. He said the UK should ensure that he is not extradited to a country where he may face inhumane treatment or capital punishment.

Some observers, however, said the carefully worded statement by Moreno does not rule out Assange being extradited to the US.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks itself blamed “powerful actors,” such as the CIA, for running a “sophisticated” campaign to scapegoat Assange.

UK authorities welcomed the news. Assange was “no hero and no one is above the law. He has hidden from the truth for years,” Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has tweeted.

Meanwhile, former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa (who granted asylum to Assange) labeled Moreno a ‘traitor’ following the arrest.

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While Facebook claims to have deleted thousands of pages to prevent meddling in the Indian elections, the American company’s selective deletions have led at least one man to ask: Who is watching the election watchers?

A little over a week ahead of the beginning of elections in India this Thursday, Facebook raised some eyebrows when it announced that it had removed a number of politically oriented pages as a part of its “election integrity” efforts. The social media giant removed 138 pro-opposition pages that had over 200,000 followers for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” While they only removed 15 pro-government pages, as it turned out, those pages had a far wider reach with millions of likes.

Given the apparent imbalance, it is all the more concerning that the purge was conducted with assistance from the US-based Atlantic Council, a think tank that receives millions of dollars in funding from the US State Department and NATO allies.

Indian defense analyst and security expert Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is one of the people extremely concerned with the impact the American private company could have on India’s elections. He has even filed a criminal complaint with police in New Delhi, describing Facebook’s actions as an act of war, and an attack on the country’s sovereignty.

Speaking to RT, Iyer-Mitra blasted the social network for their glaring double standards: while making extensive efforts to protect American elections from foreign actors in the wake of the alleged “Russian meddling” scandal, the company seemingly had no qualms about letting a state-department-linked think tank act in place of Indian election officials.

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Ecuador’s former president Rafael Correa has slammed his successor Lenin Moreno for “allowing” police to arrest Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, calling the action “a crime humanity will never forget.”

Whereas the former Ecuadorian leader has been highly critical of his one-time political ally for a long while, Thursday’s arrest of Wikileaks co-founder and editor was a betrayal of a higher order, it has been suggested.

Tweeting shortly after the arrest, which saw a white bearded Assange being dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy by several men and stuffed into a police car, Correa said that things had gotten far more serious than Moreno’s alleged corruption.

The harsh words didn’t stop there. After Moreno announced that he had made a “sovereign decision” in giving Assange to British police, Correa responded by calling the decision a “scoundrelly,” “cowardly” and “heinous” act which is the “fruit of servility, vileness and vengeance.”

Correa initially offered Assange asylum while still president in 2012, fearing the whistleblower would face the death penalty if extradited to America, where he was wanted for espionage.

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Fellow whistleblower Edward Snowden has responded to the arrest of Julian Assange in London, tweeting that the images of Ecuadorian authorities handing him over to UK police were a “dark moment for press freedom.”

In the tweet, Snowden said the images of a publisher of “award-winning journalism” being dragged out of the embassy would “end up in the history books.”

“Assange’s critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom,” he wrote.

Assange was arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Thursday morning, just days after WikiLeaks had said his removal from the building was imminent following a withdrawal of asylum from Quito.

The whistleblower, who has released hundreds of thousands of authentic documents and diplomatic cables, had been living in exile at the embassy for the last 6 years.

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Julian Assange’s arrest was not a sudden development, cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek told RT. Instead it was well planned and the final step in a long and ugly smear campaign against the WikiLeaks founder.

After sheltering in London’s Ecuadorian embassy for six years, Assange was dragged out of the building by British police on Thursday morning. The arrest comes after Ecuador’s new pro-US president withdrew Assange’s asylum claim, and after WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson claimed that an extensive spying campaign was conducted against Assange, designed to get him out.

“I was not surprised,” Zizek told RT. “The problem for me is how people will simply accept this as the result of the long, systematic, character assassination campaign.”

The first step in the campaign, Zizek said, was to connect WikiLeaks – an independent journalistic outlet known for leaking classified materials, which also prides itself on having never published false information – with Russia and Vladimir Putin. The next step was “character assassination.” Assange, Zizek said, was painted as “arrogant,” “paranoid,” and even a rapist, despite Swedish authorities dropping all charges against him in 2017.

Then the gossip against Assange sank to an “incredibly dirty personal level, that he doesn’t clean his toilet, that he smells bad and so on. Can we imagine anything lower?” WikiLeaks has argued the same, calling Assange the victim of “a sophisticated effort to dehumanize, delegitimize and imprison him.”

Assange’s arrest, Zizek continued, has “nothing to do with vengeance.” Rather, the WikiLeaks head was made an example of in the ongoing fight to clamp down on the free flow of information. Just like the European Union’s new copyright directive threatens to censor almost all free expression online, neutering organizations like Wikileaks is a step towards controlling what information we can and cannot access.

“All our lives today are somehow regulated through digital media,” he said. “So it’s absolutely crucial who controls this digital media. This is the greatest threat to our freedom.”

“We are not even aware of it as we don’t experience it as unfreedom. It’s not like the old days of the police state, where you look over your shoulder and see a man following you. You feel totally free, but your every move is registered and you’re subtly manipulated.”

“Wikileaks embodied resistance to this,” Zizek added.

Assange’s lawyer Jen Robinson confirmed on Thursday that Assange’s arrest was made in relation to a US extradition request. Assange is accused of conspiring with US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning – herself currently behind bars in Virginia for refusing to testify against WikiLeaks – to leak classified footage of US military war crimes in 2010. This footage showed a US Apache helicopter gunship opening fire on and killing 12 people, including two Reuters staff.

“I wouldn’t blame Ecuador too much,” Zizek concluded. “Ecuador was under terrible pressure from the United States. Forget about these B-level countries. This is all about the United States.”

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Assange was taken into custody at a central London police station, and the arrest was made at a US extradition request, the Met Police have confirmed, saying he will appear at London Magistrates’ Court.

Julian Assange has been “further arrested on behalf of the United States authorities after his arrival at a central London police station,” the Metropolitan Police confirmed. The US cited the Extradition Act while filing the request, they informed.

“He will appear in custody at Westminster Magistrates’ Court as soon as possible,” the statement reads. A car apparently carrying Assange has arrived at the court earlier.

Earlier in the day, Jen Robinson, one of Assange’s legal team, alleged that the arrest was linked to a US extradition request. “Just confirmed: Assange has been arrested not just for breach of bail conditions but also in relation to a US extradition request,” she tweeted.

Meanwhile, barrister Geoffrey Robertson, another Assange’s lawyer, said he may face a heavy prison term if extradited to the US. “America is hellbent on putting him in prison for a very long time to deter those who publish material about the behaviour of its armed forces,” he told BBC News.

The charges for Assange carry up to 45 years in prison. While this is “not the death penalty … But it may in effect be the death penalty for someone of Assange’s age and health problems.”

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Ecuador’s Foreign Minister has announced that the country has suspended Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s Ecuadorean citizenship, which he was granted at the end of 2017.

Ecuador has stripped Julian Assange of Ecuadorean citizenship, foreign minister Jose Valencia said on Thursday, after Ecuador withdrew his political asylum in its London embassy.

Assange, an Australia native, held Ecuadorian citizenship since 2017.

Meanwhile, Marise Payne, foreign minister of Assange’s home country, said he will continue to receive “the usual consular support from the Australian Government.” Consular officers will seek to visit Assange at his place of detention.

Separately, the Latin American country’s interior minister accused Assange and WikiLeaks of intervening in Ecuadorean affairs. He said “people close to him, including two Russian hackers,” are living in Ecuador.

The Metropolitan Police forcibly removed the 47-year-old WikiLeaks founder from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and arrested him, after president Lenin Moreno said his country took “a sovereign decision” to withdraw political asylum.

WikiLeaks said the Ecuadorian government’s actions were in violation of international law. In turn, the former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, called Moreno “the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history.”

The arrest was welcomed by the UK government, despite public criticism. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow hoped that Assange’s rights would not be violated. A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the UK of strangling freedom.

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Julian Assange is a pioneering whistleblower in the digital-age, speaking truth to power like no one before him managed on such a significant scale. As he sits in a London jail cell, here’s why we should be grateful for his work.

By setting up the international non-profit organization WikiLeaks in Iceland in 2006, Assange irrevocably shifted the balance of power in the online era.

From humble beginnings as a master coder and hacker, caught by Australian authorities in 1995 but escaping a prison term, to the foremost publisher of sensitive, embarrassing and potentially dangerous material for the world to see, Assange’s storied career as a publisher and whistleblower has captured headlines, and the global public’s attention for years.

RT takes a look back at the key moments in Assange’s career that remind us why the world owes him such a debt of gratitude.

The early years

In 2007, WikiLeaks published emails exposing the manuals for Camp Delta, a controversial US detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba which was the focal point for the US war on terror and the final destination for those captured as part of its extraordinary rendition campaign.

The following year the whistleblowing site posted emails from vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo email account, again exposing the newfound weakness of the political class in the digital age.

‘Collateral murder’

In a move that would reverberate online and across the world for years, in April 2010 WikiLeaks published footage of US forces summarily executing 18 civilians from an Apache attack helicopter in Iraq. It was an almost unheard of revelation of the brutality of war and the low price of human life in modern conflict.

Diplomatic cables

2010 was a very busy year for Assange as in July WikiLeaks published more than 90,000 classified documents and diplomatic cables relating to the Afghanistan war.

Later, in October 2010, the organization published a raft of classified documents from the Iraq War. The logs were referred to as “the largest leak of classified documents in its history” by the US Department of Defense, according to the BBC. WikiLeaks followed that up in November by publishing diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world.

The Guantánamo Files and Spy Files

In April 2011, WikiLeaks published classified US military documents detailing the behavior and treatment of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. This leak would be followed, once again, by a vast trove (250 million) of US diplomatic cables.

Throughout this sequence of widely-praised leaks, Assange invited a global audience behind the curtain of international diplomacy and warfare to expose the hidden truths of global power dynamics in a way which would forever change the power structure and landscape, affording a platform to analysts like Chelsea Manning to expose potential war crimes and misdeeds by the US military at large.

Assange and WikiLeaks would also help fellow whistleblowers like Edward Snowden to seek refuge from predatory US authorities, providing aid and comfort to those who risked everything in the pursuit of truth, exposing some of the most egregious mass surveillance programs the world has ever known.

DNC leak

As the 2016 US presidential election loomed, WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee, which exposed the preferential treatment shown to then-candidate for president Hillary Clinton over her competitor Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. Assange boldly informed CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the release was indeed timed to coincide with the Democratic National Convention.

In October that same year, WikiLeaks began publishing emails from Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, which shed light on the inner workings of the Democratic nominee’s political machine.

These included excerpts from Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street, politically-motivated payments made to the Clinton Foundation, her consideration of choosing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates or his wife as a potential running mate, her desire to covertly intervene in Syria, her intention to ring-fence China with missile defense batteries if it did not curtail North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Legacy

Following his arrest on the morning of April 11, 2019, Assange’s future remains unclear. He likely faces extradition to the US where it was inadvertently revealed that he has been charged under seal in a US federal court. Former Assange collaborator Chelsea Manning has been imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with the court in relation to the case.

Assange’s legal battle is only just beginning, it seems, but the international following he has forged will undoubtedly grant him a place in the pantheon of history’s champions of truth.

He remains a true digital pioneer, paving the way for so many to follow in his footsteps and expose the untold misdeeds of the powerful, be they political figures or entire militaries. Assange has defiantly shown what a powerful tool digital technology can be and how easily the dynamics of power can be shifted in the 21st century by those brave enough. Unfortunately, he also showed the consequences of wielding such power in the face of such overwhelming international and political opposition.

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Ecuador has withdrawn an asylum it granted to Julian Assange, the country’s president declared as the WikiLeaks founder was being evicted from Ecuadorian embassy where he was hiding for the last six years.

The Ecuadorian government has decided “to withdraw the diplomatic asylum of Julian Assange for a repeated violation of international conventions and a protocol of coexistence,” president Lenin Moreno has said in a televised speech on Thursday. 

Assange was arrested by the British police inside the Ecuadorian Embassy around the time that the statement was released. He took refuge in the London embassy seven years ago to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted in connection with sexual assault allegations that were later dropped.

Moreno has accused Assange of “violating the norm of not intervening in internal affairs of other states.” He continued: “The patience of Ecuador has reached its limits on the behavior of Mr Assange.”

The world-renowned whistleblower installed “electronic and distortion equipment” at the embassy, blocked CCTV cameras, and also “confronted and mistreated guards.” Softening his tone, the president added that he had requested the UK to guarantee that Assange will not be extradited to countries where he may face torture or the death penalty.

Blasting the decision by Moreno, Wikileaks tweeted that the arrest was “in violation of international law.”

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