MIKE HEAD—Last Friday, under the guise of partially restoring Assange’s right to access the internet and receive visitors, Moreno’s government sought to impose a new “special protocol” that provides a pretext for terminating the asylum that the previous Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa granted him in 2012. Anyone seeking to visit Assange would have to give the Ecuadorian embassy three days’ notice and wait for written authorisation by the head of the embassy, which could be arbitrarily refused or cancelled without any reason being given. Visitors would have to provide the Ecuadorian authorities with full ID details and either hand over or clear all mobile phones and other communications devices.
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P. GREANVILLE—Stephen Colbert and the recently dethroned Les Moonves typify the hypocrisy of hardcore centrist liberals. These are the folks that talk incessantly of morality, doing the right thing, are wedded to identity politics and racialism, but when push comes to shove, money and power always talk louder. Colbert made his reputation as a smirking, insolent subsidiary of Jon Stewart, cultivating the image of a rebel, speaking truth to power, yada yada. Later, as inheritor to the uber profitable Late Night Show franchise once presided by Johnny Carson, the man instantly became an apologetic CIA-asskissing, Democrat Russiagater and fervent neoliberal.
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ERIC ZUESSE—If this peaceful path to ending the prelude to WW III — to avoiding the jump off a nuclear cliff — succeeds, then the world will be able to continue debating who was right and who was wrong in all of this. But, otherwise, that debate will simply be terminated by the war itself, and everyone will end up losing.
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In general, spying is boring. And for purposes of drama and what they’re doing, The Americans makes it be something different than that. For example, the most prominent real-life Russian illegal of the sort we see on the show was a guy named Rudolph Abel. He was a KGB colonel who was arrested in the late-fifties. And what he did was work in New York as a photographer. I think his apartment was in Brooklyn. And he didn’t kill anybody [laughs], he didn’t run around plotting this and that. He worked as a photographer and met his agents wherever he was supposed to, and in fact, his whole purpose was to remain anonymous.
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CRAIG MURRAY—When the same extremely careful phrasing is never deviated from, you know it is the result of a very delicate Whitehall compromise. My FCO source, like me, remembers the extreme pressure put on FCO staff and other civil servants to sign off the dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD, some of which pressure I recount in my memoir Murder in Samarkand.
