Spanish police on Friday arrested Hugo Carvajal, a former general and close ally of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, on drug trafficking charges on an arrest warrant issued by the United States, a police spokeswoman said.

The spokeswoman would not provide further details about the charges against Carvajal. In 2008, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Carvajal for “materially assisting the narcotics trafficking activities” of Colombia’s FARC rebel group.

A court spokesman said Carvajal would appear before Spain’s High Court on Saturday. The court needs to decide within 24 hours of his arrest whether he will be jailed pending a decision on his extradition or if he will be set free.

The U.S. Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Carvajal, head of military intelligence from 2004 to 2008,denounced Chavez’ successor Nicolas Maduro in February and gave his support to Juan Guaido, who in January invoked the constitution to become Venezuela’s interim president. Guaido was later recognized by the United States and dozens of governments, but Maduro remains in office with support of the military and has denounced Guaido as a U.S. puppet.

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), in its 2008 statement, said Carvajal’s assistance to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia included protecting drug shipments from seizure by Venezuelan anti-narcotics authorities and providing them with weapons.

Carvajal also provided FARC with official Venezuelan government identification documents that allowed its members to travel to and from Venezuela, OFAC said.

In 2014, Carvajal was arrested on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba on a U.S. drug trafficking warrant, but the Dutch government accepted Venezuela’s argument that he had diplomatic immunity because he had been nominated consul to Aruba.

In an interview with the New York Times published in February, Carvajal said any dealings he had with drug traffickers resulted from his role investigating them as intelligence chief.

Carvajal said he had met with FARC members in 2001 to engage them as a government negotiator in the kidnapping of a Venezuelan businessman, a trip that had been approved by presidents in both Venezuela and Colombia.
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Key figures in Britain’s opposition Labour Party said Friday the government should oppose the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on charges of conspiring to break into a Pentagon computer.

Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said in a tweet that the U.S. is trying to have Assange extradited because he exposed “evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Diane Abbott, Labour’s spokeswoman for domestic affairs, said the government should block the extradition on human rights grounds. She said the U.S. case against Assange is about the “embarrassment of the things he’s revealed about the American military and security services.”

The politicization of Assange’s case reflects the wide interest in the legal future of a man hailed by some as a heroic whistleblower standing up to governments, and condemned by others as a willing stooge who helped the Russians boost the campaign chances of President Donald Trump, who had showered praise on WikiLeaks in 2016 and welcomed its release of Hilary Clinton’s campaign emails.

Assange faces what is likely to be a titanic struggle to fend off extradition to the U.S. — and possibly a second extradition request from Sweden on rape allegations.

Police arrested the WikiLeaks founder Thursday at the Ecuadorian embassy in London after Ecuador withdrew his asylum. He is in British custody awaiting sentencing for jumping bail in 2012.

U.S. Justice Department officials seek to put Assange on trial for allegedly conspiring to break into a classified government computer at the Pentagon. The charge was announced after Assange was taken into custody. If found guilty, Assange faces a maximum five years in prison.   

It is also possible that Assange, 47, will face an extradition request from Sweden if prosecutors there decide to pursue allegations of rape and sexual misconduct against him.

Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 after he was released on bail in Britain while facing extradition to Sweden on the allegations. He had stayed inside the embassy building for nearly seven years.

Swedish prosecutors dropped the case against Assange in 2017, saying at the time there was no prospect of bringing him to Sweden because of his protected status inside the embassy. The allegations by two women have not been tested in court and Assange has denied wrongdoing.

Assange received a verbal rebuke in his first London court appearance Thursday afternoon when District Judge Michael Snow found him guilty of breaching his bail conditions.

“Mr. Assange’s behavior is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests,” Snow said.

Assange’s next court appearance was set for May 2 via prison video-link in relation to the extradition case, a process that involves several layers of appeal that could take several years.

Extradition lawyer Ben Keith said the court will not assess the evidence against Assange in an effort to determine his guilt or innocence, but will scrutinize whether the offense he is accused of in the U.S. would be a crime in Britain.

“The most likely outcome is that he will be extracted to the United States,” he said.

Britain is bound by law not to extradite a suspect to a country where he or she could face execution for the crime, but this is not an issue at the moment because the crime Assange faces does not put him at risk of capital punishment, he said.

In rare cases where U.S. law would allow the death penalty, such as first-degree murder or terrorism, U.S. officials typically facilitate extradition by providing assurances to Britain that capital punishment would not be sought, Keith added.

If Sweden also makes an extradition request, it would be up to Britain’s Home Secretary to determine which would take priority. Typically the first request made — in this case from U.S. officials — would be acted on first, but officials have some leeway.

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday he has no knowledge of the website WikiLeaks, after the whistleblowing site’s founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in Britain.

The 47-year-old Australian national had been living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, but was ejected Thursday and taken into custody by British police.

Ecuador said Assange had broken asylum conventions by continuing to interfere in other countries’ affairs through the publishing of confidential information.

 

WATCH: Trump Denies Knowledge of WikiLeaks

Trump was questioned by reporters on the arrest Thursday.

“I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing,” Trump said. “I know there is something to do with Julian Assange, and I’ve been seeing what’s happened to Assange. And that would be a determination, I would imagine, mostly by the attorney general, who’s doing an excellent job. So, he’ll be making a determination.”

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump repeatedly referred to WikiLeaks after it published hacked emails from the Democrat National Committee. He once declared, “WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks,” at a rally in Pennsylvania.

In 2010, WikiLeaks published a cache of more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan, obtained by former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning. They detailed civilian casualties, along with details of suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Manning was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and jailed in 2010. She was released in 2017, but was jailed again in March 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury about WikiLeaks.

​Asylum in embassy

Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy after facing rape charges in Sweden, which have since been dropped. He predicted then that he would face extradition to the United States.

“As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all our societies,” Assange told a crowd of supporters from the balcony of the embassy.

The United States accuses Assange of conspiring with Manning to access classified information on Department of Defense computers and has requested his extradition from Britain.

Freedom of the Press

Freedom of the press is protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, so the precise charges against Assange will be key, said legal analyst Caroline Mala Corbin of the University of Miami School of Law.

“If you break the law while you gather information, that is not protected by the free speech clause. If, however, you publish information — even if someone else has illegally obtained it — the free speech clause does come into play,” she told VOA.

Assange supporter and prominent human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said Assange must be afforded the rights of other journalists.

“It smacks of double standards, and it has the whiff of a vendetta against WikiLeaks and against Julian Assange,” he said.

British judges will now decide whether to fulfill the U.S. extradition request.

Geoffrey Robertson, an attorney who has represented Assange in the past, said Assange could face up to 40 years in prison if he is extradited to the United States.

“I have faith in the British justice system, and I think he will argue that this is a breach of his right of freedom of speech,” Robertson said.

Assange will first face sentencing for failing to surrender to authorities on sexual assault charges in 2012.

Meanwhile, one of the Swedish women who accused Assange of rape has requested the case be reopened, further complicating the legal case against him.
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Pro- and anti-Brexit supporters have vowed to step up their campaigns after European Union leaders have given Britain a six-month extension to Brexit, averting the immediate danger of Britain crashing out of the bloc with no deal. However, it could mean Britain having to take part in EU elections scheduled in May, and there are still few signs that lawmakers will vote on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal, further prolonging the political chaos. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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Less than a month before Donald Trump was elected as the U.S. president in 2016, he said, “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” as the anti-secrecy group released another cache of emails hacked by Russian operatives from the computers of Democratic officials that were damaging to Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks,” Trump said four days before the election.

But on Thursday, the Justice Department that is part of Trump’s administration accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of conspiring in 2010 with former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to disclose hundreds of thousands of confidential military records from the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 250,000 secret State Department cables.

Assange was arrested by British police in London Thursday, and unceremoniously hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy where he had been living in asylum for nearly seven years. It was an arrest British authorities said was at the behest of the United States, which wants to put him on trial on the computer hacking charge, and possibly other allegations.

The actions of the 47-year-old Assange, the one-time Australian hacker using his genius IQ to tap into the databases of high-profile organizations, have often been met with such conflicting assessments. Depending on what he has been disclosing over the last decade, he has been hailed as a champion of truth or vilified as a publicity seeker endangering lives of people by disclosing confidential information.

Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006, but his first worldwide notoriety occurred four years later, with the release of the first documents Manning stole from U.S. government computers, with what U.S. prosecutors say was Assange’s help to Manning to crack a password and gain access to the files.

Some of the video footage WikiLeaks released captured the world’s attention, showing U.S. soldiers killing 18 Iraqi civilians from a helicopter.

In May 2012, the British Supreme Court ruled he should be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault, accusations Assange has long denied and said were the result of consensual sexual relations with two women.

A month later, he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, with the Quito government granting him asylum there.

Sweden eventually dropped the assault investigation, but Assange remained at the embassy, fearing that if he walked out Britain, would detain and then extradite him to the U.S., which is what the U.S. is now trying to do. Britain had charged him with failing to surrender to a court in 2012 and said if he left the embassy, he would be arrested.

Ecuador also grew weary of Assange’s behavior at the diplomatic mission and his role in the disclosures of more documents, especially insider files from the Vatican released earlier this year, and granted British authorities the right to enter its compound on Thursday after he had spent nearly seven years there.

Plainclothes officers grabbed Assange as he shouted in protest, “UK must resist!” and hustled him into a waiting police van.

In parliament, to a round of cheers, British Prime Minister Theresa May said of Assange’s arrest, “No one is above the law.”

Assange’s lawyers say he will fight extradition to the U.S.

Assange’s U.S.-based attorney, Barry Pollack, criticized the Justice Department charges, saying they were “an unprecedented effort by the United States seeking to extradite a foreign journalist to face criminal charges for publishing truthful information.”
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Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published an analysis on the Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse scandal, blaming it on the sexual revolution of the 1960s and church laws that protected priests.

The essay immediately raised eyebrows, seeming to interfere with or even contradict Pope Francis’ own efforts to confront one of the most critical issues facing the church.

One church historian called Benedict’s essay “catastrophically irresponsible,” because it conflicted with Francis’ own efforts to lead the church out of the sex abuse crisis.

Benedict in 2013 had said he planned to retire to a lifetime of penance and prayer and would leave Francis to guide the church.

U.S. church analysts said the essay, published in the German monthly Klerusblatt, was both flawed in content and problematic on universal church level, exacerbating existing divisions in the church that have emerged between supporters of Francis and Catholics nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrine-minded papacy.

In his introduction, Benedict said both the Vatican secretary of state and Francis had given him permission to publish it. The Vatican press office confirmed it was written by Benedict.

In the essay, Benedict traced the start of the clergy abuse crisis to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, citing the appearance of sex in films in his native Bavaria. He also blamed the crisis on failures of moral theology in that era, as well as church laws that gave undue protection to accused priests.

Benedict wrote that during the 1980s and 1990s, “the right to a defense [for priests] was so broad as to make a conviction nearly impossible.”

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict reformed those laws in 2001 to make it easier to remove priests who abused children. Benedict took a hard line against clerical sex abuse as the Vatican’s conservative doctrine chief, and later as pope, defrocking hundreds of priests accused of raping and molesting children.

“Why did pedophilia reach such proportions? Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God,” he wrote.

Francis has blamed the scandal on a clerical culture in the church that raises priests above the laity.

Villanova University theologian Massimo Faggioli said the essay was thin in its analysis by effectively attributing the scandal to the sexual revolution. He said it omitted key cases, such as the Legion of Christ founder’s pedophilia, which began well before then.

“If a pope emeritus decides to stay silent, it’s one thing and can be defended. But speaking and telling a tiny part and a very personal version of the story, it’s hard to defend,” he said on twitter.

“Everything we know in the global history of the Catholic abuse crisis makes Benedict XVI’s take published yesterday very thin or worse: a caricature of what happened during in the Catholic Church during the post-Vatican II period — with all its ingenuities and some tragic mistakes,” he tweeted.

Church historian Christopher Bellitto questioned if Benedict, who turns 92 next week, was being manipulated by others. He said the essay undermined Francis’ own efforts to steer the church out of the crisis.

Bellitto said the essay omitted the critical conclusions that arose from the pope’s February sex abuse summit in Rome, including that “abusers were priests along the ideological spectrum, that the abuse predated the 1960s, that it is a global and not simply Western problem, that homosexuality is not the issue in pedophilia.”

“It is catastrophically irresponsible, because it creates a counter-narrative to how Francis is trying to move ahead based on the 2019 summit,” he said. “The essay essentially ignores what we learned there.”

David Gibson at Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture agreed with that assessment.

“For a retired pope to try to undo the critical work of a sitting pope and on such a crucial issue seems … bad,” he said.
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Swedish prosecutors said on Thursday they have received a formal request to reopen the rape investigation closed in 2017 involving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, from the legal counsel representing the alleged victim.

“Following today’s media reports that Julian Assange has been arrested in London, the legal counsel in Sweden has requested that the Swedish preliminary investigation regarding rape be reopened,” the authority said.

The request has been assigned to Deputy Chief Prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson, it added.

“We will now look into the matter and determine how to proceed. We cannot pledge any time frame for when a decision will be made,” Persson said in the statement.
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