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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is a little like asking why Burma wasn't consulted in the extradition. The simple answer is: Ecuador simply isn't a party to this controversy, and so the way they see things isn't material.

Yes, I think the issue here is that Ecuador wants to start a political controversy. There is prima facie evidence, compelling and voluminous, that the principals Ecuador is "standing up for" in granting asylum are very much at odds with the principals Ecuador is itself governed by. Occam's Razor more or less demands that we look for motives other than press freedom principals.

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"The simple answer is: Ecuador simply isn't a party to this controversy, and so the way they see things isn't material"

On the contrary, Ecuador's independence from the controversy makes them seem more impartial and credible.

Why not poll all the countries before allowing extradition?

Equating the due diligence Ecuador _supposedly_ did before making the decision to grant asylum with "a poll" is unfair.

Honestly many of your responses to comments on this thread seem very unfair. And I'm not talking about the content of them but the manner in which you respond. You have a very good way of cheapening legitimate points that have been made.

If you say so. I find dubious any assertion that Ecuador is making a principled stand for transparency. The Correa administration took office in 2007 and almost immediately seized major television stations and revoked licenses for additional TV and radio stations. It sentenced the directors of newspapers to prison time simply for allowing columns critical of Correa to be printed. It charged journalists with crimes for writing books critical of the administration, "pardoned" them, and then had its corrupt judiciary "overturn" those pardons and levy farcical fines against those journalists.

The idea that Ecuador as a disinterested third party is somehow objective or fair about the Assange incident is to my eyes laughable. The Correa administration is despicable.

Correa's view, not that I know enough to endorse it or not, is that Ecuador's press is dominated by corporate influence. This creates a situation not unlike in the US, where the mainstream media is not always fair in its reporting.

In fact, the wikileaks cables even showed something about how Ecuador's media was happy to attack the government, but not the actually powerful corporate interests.

Therefore, going after "the press" in Ecuador may have been more about ending libellous attacks from corporate special interests rather than some sinister intolerance of legitimate criticism. Not that this makes restricting speech okay, but it does help to explain it.

>Ecuador simply isn't a party to this controversy

They became a party to it the moment they granted him political asylum.

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