Oh, no! Assange is back.............

Well, Julian Assange has welshed!

Now we know more of this miserable character we should not be surprised.

He was supported by a whole raft of celebs, including the egregious John Pilger (another whingeing Aussie) and Jemima Khan, who are now likely to have to whistle for the £240,000 bail money. His wealthy chum who put him up for well over a year in his country house during bail must also be feeling a tad let down by this abuse of hospitality.

His legal case was that the Swedish prosecution was bogus, the courts were not going to be fair to him, and it was all a ruse to get him extradited to the US where he could face the death penalty for espionage. There was also the procedural point that the public prosecutor is not a ‘judicial official’ within the meaning of the EAW legislation, and that an EWA can only be issued by a judge or magistrate, in which event the whole proceedings were fatally flawed.

Taking the latter point first, I have to admit that I raised my eyebrows at the rejection of this line of argument. A public prosecutor is a civil servant, not a member of the judiciary, which makes the EWA even more of an outrage. No wonder the figure of justice is blind!

Extradition to face the death penalty for espionage?

I don’t think so!

When I last checked, the US lawyers were running around like blue-arsed flies trying to find something to stick on him. Espionage is limited to people having an office of profit under the Federal Government?

What, then? Criminal libel, always supposing that this is a crime in the Land of the Free?

And if the Swedish charges are as absurd as they sound, I would have thought his prospects of acquittal were pretty good.

There’s a lot more to be told yet.

So why Ecuador? It has an extradition treaty with the US, so it is an odd and dangerous choice.

It seems that he and the President have things in common.

Assange interviewed him on ‘Russia Today’, a Putin mouthpiece and apparently they got on like a house on fire. El Presidente is also a media baron. Both are, as The Economist describes them, ‘thin-skinned and narcissistic’.

They have a very selective view of freedom of information. President Correa threatens other media outlets. Assange wanted to censor his own biography. He got into a fearful row with Private Eye when he accused Eye and The Guardian of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ when Ian Hislop did a piece about a Wikileaks associate who was a holocaust-denier and wrote anti-Semitic articles. They are both virulently ant-American.

We all may be very tired of a very tiresome individual but one thing is sure.

This will run and run.

why don't they listen to us?