"Ecuador is open for business"
==============================

"Ecuador is open for business" is the headline John Kiriakou has cited as the moment his concern about Julian Assange's position sharpened into fear.

The letter

Kiriakou has said that a few months before the July 2018 conversation he delivered a letter to the Ecuadorian ambassador to the United States, asking the ambassador to ask his government to let Assange have internet access. 

The article

The very next day, by his account, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal headlined "Ecuador is open for business." Its subject was the Ecuadorian government's approaches to the Trump administration to improve and enhance business ties. 

Kiriakou has said this sent a chill up his spine, because it made him think and fear that Assange might be used as a pawn so that the Ecuadorian government could make a little money. He described this as troubling him very deeply, and as something he had not been worried about a few months earlier. 

The change in his assessment

He had initially read the suspension of Assange's internet access and visitors as temporary, a point being made, which would be relaxed within a week. It was not. He said the persistence of the suspension worried him for one set of reasons and the Journal article for another. 

Kiriakou expressed hope that the policy remained temporary, and noted that former President Rafael Correa had expressed disappointment in Lenín Moreno's policy toward Assange. 

He added a related judgement about extradition: that the British are, in cases like this, essentially puppets of the United States, and that it should be assumed the United States had told them it wanted Assange the moment he stepped out of the embassy. 

See also

- Julian Assange
- Assange And Solitary Confinement
- Seventy-two denied motions
- Wikileaks as a System
