Because it is evidence of a crime being committed - i.e. that Assange obtained secret military materials and then illegally published them.
Assange is being held for extradition to face charges in the USA of publishing military secrets. This is a military secret that he published.
The fact of its exclusion demonstrates that the US Government doesn't want its crimes further exposed to the world, and that it doesn't believe that Assange illegally published this material - or else, it would have to be admitted as evidence. This omission demonstrates that he is not being targeted for the reason of publishing military secrets, or else it would have been included in the case as evidence.
Julian Assange is being illegally detained and criminally prosecuted for publishing the fact of America's war crimes and embarrassing the War Coalition.
The USA has, with this omission, essentially admitted guilt for its own war crimes.
It’s one thing to avoid making arguments and another to intentionally omit certain “crimes” because drawing attention to them discredits the moral basis of your argument, while emphasizing “crimes” that are identical except for lacking that baggage. It speaks to a fundamental disinterest in the law and its uniform enforcement.
Well, then its mis-trial time for Julian, because the claim made against him is that he illegally accessed state secrets and published them. However, the Gunship Video is evidence that he legally published the materials obtained - boosting the defence case that Assange is a publisher and therefore protected.
I think the government is looking for an out, because it knows its case is hopeless, and it just gave Assange's team a clue. No doubt the defence is going to latch on the omission of this video, and it will prolong the proceedings - meaning they can keep Julian in limbo longer, and continue to subject him to the depravities of Belmarsh at their discretion.
>However, the Gunship Video is evidence that he legally published the materials obtained
It isn't a binary choice between everything published is either legal or illegal. He could have published some legally and some illegally. People can view this specific video as being published legally while other information was published illegally and therefore only the illegally published information is covered in the indictment.
Indeed, there is very little actual evidence of him having committed crimes in order to function as a publisher - and yet there is massive amounts of evidence of him functioning perfectly well in his capacity as a journalist and a publisher without committing crimes, at all.
Intent matters. Wikileaks was explicit about publishing the documents to document US war crimes and war crimes were indeed documented.
The Pentagon Papers were 4,100 pages. Not every single one of them was individually proof of a war crime. Imagine the US government sued Daniel Ellsberg for the publication of all the parts of the papers that didn't explicitly prove war crimes, but skipped the bits that proved them - that's the equivalent of what is happening here.
Wikileaks intent was not to document war crimes, it was seemingly to reveal all state secrets. They have published countless leaks that have nothing to do with war crimes. Hypothetically let's imagine a scenario in which someone was able to get their hands on every single state secret the US had and published them all. Should that be protected as long as a single misdeed was revealed?
Assange defenders seem to often point to his good deeds as an excuse to ignore his misdeeds. The law doesn't and shouldn't work like that.
>Wikileaks intent was not to document war crimes, it was seemingly to reveal all state secrets.
That is your opinion but its not the truth. Wikileaks own manifesto states:
WikiLeaks is a multi-national media organization and associated library. It was founded by its publisher Julian Assange in 2006.
WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.
War, spying and corruption.
And, that is precisely what it has done: exposed war, spying and corruption.
But those aren't the only things governments want kept secret.
The comment I was responding to said their intent was to reveal war crimes. Spying and corruption are not war crimes. Corruption is an incredibly vague term that Wikileaks can and has used to publish almost whatever they want.
It is also worth noting that revealing war crimes, spying, and corruption is possible with a more targeted approach rather than Wikileaks approach of publishing large batches of semi-related documents. This shotgun approach seems to be done in service of overall transparency rather than revealing the specific wrongdoings that Wikileaks claims it is against. Hence my comment that they seem to care more about revealing secrets in general than specifically war crimes.
Show me anything that Wikileaks released that did not, in some way, involve either a) a war crime, b) corruption, or c) spying.
Wikileaks is not a judiciary body. It never had any intention other than to provide an ill-informed public (remember, the Iraq war was predicated on a lie) with enough data to make its own conclusion. Your authoritarian stance that only the government can decide its own secrets is fundamentally corrupt to the idea of a free, open society.
Also you are reading a lot into my comments. I have never said anything approaching "only the government can decide its own secrets". My belief is simply that secrets are not inherently bad. Revealing a state secret should only be done when the person publishing that information can point to a public good that will result from that information being revealed. How does knowing lunch orders from random DNC employees help reveal war crimes, corruption, or spying?
The government did prosecute Ellsberg under the Espionage Act. The case was dismissed largely due to prosecutorial misconduct on the government's part, in particular apparently illegal wiretaps of Ellsberg, the records of which had "disappeared."
The famous case that got decided on its merits around the Pentagon Papers was the case against the New York Times and Washington Post, and even that only really narrowly deals with prior restraint and not the actual right to publish the documents (so it left the door open to just prosecuting them after the fact).
Popular opinion is in Ellsberg's corner but the law itself is much trickier. It's another of those things that are often being revealed nowadays as things people believe are bedrock principles of American law that are really more of "conventions," things that just aren't done, until they are.
Assange is an even more interesting case, since his position really puts him more in the position of the Times or Post as a publisher. My recollection is that to a significant extent the case hinges upon characterizing his actions as being more of an active participant in the leaking to try to sidestep the freedom of the press issue to some extent.
>The government did prosecute Ellsberg under the Espionage Act
Right. I was trying emphasize the "all the parts of the papers that didn't explicitly prove war crimes, but skipped the bits that proved them" part. In other words, once you remove the known-bad bits then what is left seems innocuous and so it's much harder to prove that a specific leak was a "good" thing.
The intent here seems clear: the US wants to ensure Wikileaks isn't allowed to talk about the actual evidence of warcrimes at the trial. They will claim that because Wikileaks isn't being charged with leaking THOSE documents, they are not relevant.
That is a non sequitur. Per the article: "The prosecution case alleges Assange risked American lives by releasing hundreds of thousands of US intelligence documents."
The video is but one of those secret military materials. No need to include it in the indictment and risk debates or scrutiny on it, it's much more efficient to select bulletproof documents that show beyond doubt that he acted improperly.. of which there are already thousands.
Yeah, we'll hear similar cricket chirping if we ask for an example of all those soldiers and collaborators whose lives and safety were risked by wikileaks. Someone silly might post some decades-old warning from Rumsfeld or whoever about all the thousands of people who will die because some warlord got someone's name off a list published by wikileaks, but that old warning coupled with the war media's interest in arguing their side just underlines the fact that no one has died in such a circumstance.
The fact is, as of today, there is NO EVIDENCE that any American life was put in danger by the leaks.
There IS evidence that a LOT of American lives were put in danger by the war crimes and other crimes against humanity committed in their name.
Basically, every single American alive today is in danger as a result of the war crimes for which they are responsible as citizens of the USA. Invading Iraq put every single American in much more dire danger than Wikileaks ever could.
It’s more boring than that. It’s about making a slam dunk case for the jury. Criminal cases are not tried against a general moral standard. It begins with a reading of the specific statute offended. Including any evidence ancillary to the case, and that will not emotionally sway the jury for your case, undermines your case.
There are several venues for trying “war crime” cases, this is not one of them. I think if anybody really cared about the journalists who died you’d see lawfare leveraging UCMJ, but I’ve yet to see that. Seems the outrage is rather performative.
An un-informed public cannot get outraged about its governments crimes nor serve as the final stop-gap against criminal behaviour by removing those responsible for the abuses of power required to commit crimes against humanity at such scale as we have seen the USA and its War Coalition commit in the last two decades.
This is why publishers are important and should be protected. The Wests' citizens have been utterly scammed into complicity with these crimes against humanity - the imperative to mis-inform, and thus divert the outrage potential, is very, very high in this case.
Presumably the implication is that not mentioning the contents of the video which Assange is accused of illegitimately accessing is like not mentioning in an indictment for a thief that the object stolen was a loaf of bread to feed their starving family.
Whether that is an apt analogy and whether this "failure to mention" represents a deficiency in an indictment is perhaps best left to the reader.
Actually, its best left to the courts. Public opinion and support of Assange has already been diverted through malfeasance on the part of the US military. Omitting this video from their charges is an admission that this is not really about accessing military secrets illegally - but rather, punishing a legitimate publisher for exposing war crimes.
That analogy would be more apt in "not mentioning in an indictment for a thief that in addition to thousands of precious pearls, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, one of the objects stolen was a loaf of bread to feed their starving family."
A better analogy would be a thief broke into my home, and stole cash, jewelry, electronics and also a handgun that had been used in a crime.
The prosecutors are absolutely right to prosecute the thief, but upon discovering that I had the handgun used in a crime they really should look into that too.
> US prosecutors have failed to include one of WikiLeaks’ most shocking video revelations in the indictment against Julian Assange, a move that has brought accusations the US doesn’t want its “war crimes” exposed in public.
There's a reason "war crimes" has to be in scare quotes there.
The magnitude of America's crimes against humanity is scary to comprehend - it is analogous to the situation of 1930's Nazi Germany and that is not hype. The sheer magnitude of the numbers of innocent victims is AN UTTER ATROCITY.
Do you think the American public has the temerity to survive the shock of its own complicity in the murder of literally, millions of innocent people by their own armed forces?
I don't think it will be good for America unless their war criminals are prosecuted - and we all know that isn't going to happen. Trouble is, the evidence of those crimes is not going away ...
A bit like what happened to the WTC in 2001. I mean, what were they doing, navigating those buildings into the path of a couple of innocent planes, eh?
The US military shot a photographer and his assistant who were embedded with group of insurgents without identifying themselves as press either by their attire or by calling the US military hotline designated for just that purpose, one of whom was pointing what could be mistaken for a weapon at US Humvees, from behind cover.
It's an understandable, though regrettable, mistake when you look past Assange's "collateral murder" editorializing.
Your opinion that the murder of innocent civilians and an attack on their children is a 'regrettable, mistake' is utterly abhorrent to anyone who has watched that video and can clearly see, for themselves, that these people were absolutely NO threat to US forces in the area - who shouldn't have been there in the first damn place.
Lied into a criminal war against Iraq, the American people are now complicit in the war crimes committed in their names. What is understandable, though indeed very regrettable, is the American public's general desire to not be held accountable for these crimes against humanity...
This is circular. Your argument that this is "murder" cannot proceed from an assumption of the same.
> Your opinion... is utterly abhorrent to anyone who has watched that video...
I don't think personal attacks are productive. Additionally, there are wide arrays of views on this video. Your argument in support of your view appears to be based on an assumption that it is widely held and then an appeal to popularity, so it is doubly fallacious. Try making your point without assuming that everyone already agrees with you.
> can clearly see, for themselves, that these people were absolutely NO threat to US forces in the area
This isn't apparent from the footage; in fact the audio clearly indicates otherwise. They believed they had arms including an RPG. In any case, that isn't the legal test. Even unclassified ROE materials are clear that national self-defense is not the only lawful basis for the use of force in jus in bello.
The order to murder these people was given long before the camera lens was observable by those who murdered them.
"They could have had a rocket launcher" is an agitprop straw man intentionally proffered in order to minimise the magnitude of the crime committed. I wonder why it is so important for you, personally, to minimise this criminal act?
Let's consider the factors which decided the death sentence of these journalists and their companions (and so many others in the middle east):
1) They were military-age males
Say you have the ability to rain death miles above at whim. Do you think "military-age male" is a robust separator of who lives and who dies? Would you fit in this category? There but for the grace of god go you.
The video doesn't show a mistake at all. It shows a very deliberate action, carried out with great success. That these people were "innocent" in that some westerners cared whether they lived or died is the only reason you're here now defending their murder.
There was nothing to indicate these men were insurgents beyond them being armed. The order to fire was already given before Namir pointed his camera at the humvees. One charitably supposes you wouldn't be quite so cavalier with ending the lives of those around you for similar reasons, so why are you defending it here?
(I'm presuming you're talking about the widely circulated video of an Apache crew firing upon the Reuters? crew. Disregard my comment if you are not.)
Yes it has nothing to do with a patrol taking fire from that area and confusion over a camera one of the journalists was carrying on his shoulder. I agree it absolutely shouldn't have happened but to gloss over these facts if you have watched the video is revisionist in my opinion.
Also you failed to mention the real war crime which was firing at first responders some of who were children.
People perpetually forget that the order to fire was issued before Namir peeked around the corner to take photos of the humvees.
We can go on and on about what the real war crime was but for my money it's that this incident was not unusual. We talk about it a lot because some westerners cared about two people who were killed, but these things happened over and over and over and over and over. Maybe someone wants to go litigate those one by one. Or they can zoom out and see that this lax standard for killing people will inevitably lead to many of these incidents, and that going forward with the policy anyway is a war crime reminiscent of free-fire zones in Vietnam.
You literally said the only thought process that went towards the order to fire was that they were military age males. As I pointed out this was not the case and is still not the case irrespective of if he peeked the corner.
I'm genuinely sorry Namir died and it shouldn't have happened but he knew that he was putting his life at risk let's be honest. On the other hand the passers by in the van who tried to take the wounded to the hospital who also were obliterated were just good Samaritans and I really think you should at least acknowledge them when talking about what happened to Namir as a war crime.
The prosecution case alleges Assange risked American lives by releasing hundreds of thousands of US intelligence documents.
I'm not passing judgement here on Assange or the US's case against him. Just noting that the prosecution case seems to focus on the fact that US intelligence docs being released puts American lives at risk.
The prosecution's case doesn't seem to imply that this video is not evidence of war crimes but that its release doesn't absolve him of the crime of releasing other documents.
The linked article seems pretty light on details so it's difficult to make much out of it directly.
I would argue that the West's willingness to go after Assange, Snowden, Manning, and (sorry to him if he doesn't want to be in this list) Alex Vindman even after their revelations showed serious problems in American foreign policy and behavior. Both Obama and Trump showed a profound disinterest in evidence of a lack of self-restraint and self-governance. That was the test, and I think we have failed spectacularly. Of course, these days, there seem to be much bigger fish to fry, but I worry that "flooding the zone with bs" achieves precisely this constant feeling that this problem cannot be solved because there are more pressing matters.
Apart from climate change, a government incapable of addressing it's own crimes is our biggest threat. Note that I don't expect government to never commit crime, I just expect it to admit to it and take corrective action when it happens.
There is no proof that those leaks have put Americans at risk so far, and many years have passed.
Are you going to believe the government every time they use that excuse? Because they use it every single time some classified document is released exposing their crimes and corruption.
It is going to be very interesting to watch how this trial proceeds - if indeed, Julian doesn't succumb to the Belmarsh torture and perishes, before the trial can run its course.
For those of us who have been paying attention to Julian for decades, the turning of public opinion against him has been a very fascinating lesson in Western hubris.
I think the most important conclusion of all of this is that a) the US government thinks it has what it takes to continue to commit war crimes and other crimes against humanity with impunity, and b) those who pick up the mantel from Julian's passing will have learned a lot from his case.
Most important of all, I believe that c) the leaks will continue. It is going to be a very rough time, given todays climate, for those who continue to slavishly support the US military industrial pharmaceutical complex' crimes against humanity. Julians' heinous treatment just means, when the leaks continue, it'll be with the gloves off. There won't be a loud, obvious flamboyant cult figurehead to depose - more than likely, the leaker strategy going forward from this point onwards, will be a lot more effective.
One can hope, anyway. Until the American people prosecute their war criminals and faces justice for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, and for which they are thus responsible, the American people will continue to suffer as well. A nation ruled by war criminals is a victim of its own cowardice.
The real reason he wasn't disappeared long ago, is that he had access to such gargantuan quantities of very real evidence of very real crimes that he was able to surf the shock wave, and he successfully leaked it in a way that would guarantee some light on the case - clearly not enough, but he did not disappear into darkness after the first war crimes were revealed. His followup was his defence, and the only reason he got caught in a web of intrigue is that he stopped focusing on the mission and got caught in a honeypot.
Julians flamboyance and charisma are the reason the general public are complacent about his torturous treatment. His character was weaponised against him by those with immense resources to do so.
However, you can't dispense with leakers you don't see. And here is the weakness in the US Governments' strategy of disappearing Julian - Its not the leaker: its the leaks.
And since the West has committed war crimes at such stupendous scale, these leaks are not going away.
Ok - but leaks must become public if they are going to be effective, and then they can be traced back to the source and the ‘invisible’ source can be subjected to judicial processes with none of the scrutiny and publicity that Assange is receiving.
Sure, the leaks must become public. But the leakers don't.
And the outrage over the crimes committed is so large that I am fairly confident, within a year, we will see the American public tearing those responsible into shreds. If, that is, America survives another year with its war criminals running free without tearing itself into shreds ...
Any damning enough leak can be declared to be a conspiracy theory with an accompanying half-assed debunking and the well-trained public will ignore it.
The US military and its civilian leadership have been ruinous to world peace. This isn't just my opinion, it's the belief of basically every nation in the world except the US itself[0]. It should be disarmed and turned into a purely defensive force. Drone strikes must end; 90% of their victims are not the intended target[1]. This is not an accident. The lack of regard for civilian life in the countries the US is bombing (currently around seven?) is pervasive and disgusting.
The USA is the #1 perpetrator of criminal atrocity and acts of war against other sovereign states today. By sheer statistics, it is the most important issue for citizens of the free world to address.
>Why is your country (assuming it's not the US) special?
Because actually, the USA has roped most of the Western states into complicity in its war crimes. It isn't Australia, clamouring for its bomb stocks to be replenished so that a core elite establishment can profit from Lockheed Martin or Boeing or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon stock boosts .. much as Australians might wish they could be invited to that party .. These are distinctly American companies and their grip on the war reigns MUST be wrestled from them. The fate of the world depends on it.
This is clearly false considering the crimes Russia and China are committing against their own people and against the world at large. And for USA's war adventures, if anything it uses one of the most restrained (and confused) deployment of force against its enemies - trying to minimize civilian casualties even at a cost of american lives stands in stark contradiction to Russian deployment of force in chechnya and chinese ethnic cleansing war against the uighers. Has America made mistakes? Yes, ofcourse. But we tend to learn from them and try to take corrective actions (like closing gitmo and even withdrawing from conflict zones once it becomes clear that the well intentioned intervention has back fired. Almost universally though, upon such a departure, chaos prevails. In fact, even when we don't intervene, chaos prevails - examples include china's economic games in africa, russian war games in syria and the ethnic cleansing of muslims in burma. I believe (and you can believe what you want), that outside of the iraqi and afghan adventures, American forces are usually deployed for morally justifiable reasons and even the most heinous of atrocities committed as part of such deployments pale in comparison to historic and contemporary use of force by any dominant or super power. And we continue to learn from our mistakes.
Casting the US as a well-intentioned but endlessly stumbling military adventurer is naive at best and naked propaganda at worst. The US has been responsible - intentionally - for atrocities beyond any you mention here. A podcast you might be interested in, assuming you really believe everything you wrote and are operating in good faith: https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/ep-13-the-always-st...
What say you about Libya, where there are now open-air slave markets after the US intervened six years ago?
Americans have absolutely no awareness of the extent and magnitude of the crimes against humanity committed by US forces in countless illegal wars. It is literally too overwhelming for the average plebe to comprehend.
Over TWO MILLION INNOCENT PEOPLE have lost their lives in America's illegal war against Iraq. This is far, far worse than anything done in Crimea, so far. And, that is just one of 12 major military theatres in which America is committing war crimes, daily.
It is utterly disgusting that American citizens have no idea the extent of the crimes committed in their name.
>> American forces are usually deployed for morally justifiable reasons and even the most heinous of atrocities committed as part of such deployments pale in comparison to historic and contemporary use of force by any dominant or super power.
This is such a heinous and disgusting viewpoint. The Nazi's thought their exterminations were justifiable too, you know.
The moment you start making excuses for crimes against humanity and war crimes, you have lost the moral argument, period.
>>And we continue to learn from our mistakes.
I don't think that's the case at all. What has happened is that the intelligence agencies have learned how to mask their military activities and distract the American public so they can get away with crimes against humanity with impunity.
This is going to come back, in the end, to haunt the American public eventually. The millions of innocent deaths are not going un-counted by the rest of the world, even if Americans ignore it.
Who in Western Europe lost their shit? It was quite clear at the time that Europeans welcomed a shift away from NATO, because Europeans are not - generally - as ignorant about the war crimes the US and its allies have committed, as most Americans are. In Europe, they see the refugees and long lines of war orphans walking across European borders to escape American bombs. Germany is even prepared to go it alone, if need be.
It is the old guard in the West (USA, UK, et al.) that wants NATO's iron grip to remain firm, even tighter. Europeans generally are very sick and tired of American atrocities.
Western Europe hopes that Russia is satisfied with taking over Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe doesn't care much about atrocities, in fact, they try hard to get in on some of them (e.g. Polish involvement in Iraq war was fourth largest after US, UK and Australia), to ensure that military alliance with US is strong. For them, Russia is a real threat, and they had recent proofs of that in Crimea and Donbas. Because of that, and unlike the Western Europe, they actually do meet their NATO obligations.
Russia isn't taking over Eastern Europe. I work in the region and have friends all over the Balkan states, from Vienna to Pristina, and nobody in my circle has any misconceptions about what Russia is up to - its very generally accepted that it was all about Russia keeping its one blue-water port and protecting the nuclear base from the Ukraine coup d'etat, while providing support to the Russian population in the region.
On the ground, its a VERY different attitude to the Wests' propaganda on the subject. Nobody expects Russia to invade any country anywhere near the scale that the Western 5-eyes coalition has done, catastrophically, all over the Middle East and Asia.
its very generally accepted that it was all about Russia keeping its one blue-water port and protecting the nuclear base from the Ukraine coup d'etat, while providing support to the Russian population in the region
Sorry, is your argument "Russia invaded and annexed parts of Ukraine in order to further its geopolitical foals"? If so, how is it in any way reassuring to other countries in its vicinity, who soon might themselves find in the way of Russia's geopolitical goals?
What would have prevented russia from moving the base 100-200km farther east?
Sure, relocating is a hassle but annexing foreign territory seems somewhat disproportional a reaction.
The fact that they also had a navy base in the area to protect the nuclear weapons, maybe?
Anyone who has lived in the area knows that it is a Russian stronghold, and has been for hundreds of years.
Remind me again, when did America have a large population of its people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan? I mean, America absolutely demolished these states with its war fighting - by the same standard, shouldn't you be demanding that the world sanction the USA for its illegal invasions and criminal wars?
Russia certainly has a nuclear base in Sevastopol, Crimea. It is a base of the Russian Navy and the main base of the Black Sea Fleet.
Would Americans be fine with annexing Rammstein if Germany went through a coup d'etat and the fascist leaders of the coup decided they wanted to gain access to the nuclear weapons stored there?
I'm pretty sure they would.
So why is it not acceptable for the Russians to protect their weapons of mass destruction from mis-use?
They can protect them. In fact, they can just take them out of Sevastopol. They weapons aren't tied in any way to Sevastopol, the Russians can keep them somewhere else.
Now, of course they want to have base and weapons there, but this is just back to "furthering geopolitical goals".
An indictment sets forth the government’s allegations regarding the charged crimes. The government’s case is that Assange crossed the line from receiving illegally leaked materials to facilitating the illegal leak. The content of the email isn’t relevant to the charged crime except that the information needs to be classified.
The fact that the leaked information contained evidence of arguable war crimes is at most a moral (but not legal) justification. There is a good argument that the government should have exercised its prosecutorial discretion not to pursue this case in that basis. But an indictment does not need to include evidence that might be morally exculpatory. (It doesn’t even have to include legally relevant exculpatory evidence; the prosecutor is just required to disclose that to the defense attorney.) Assange will definitely raise this video and other evidence in his defense.
The Guardian article twists the narrative—alleging the government “failed to include” to evidence, as if it had a duty to do so—to artificially bolster its premise. You can say that the government should hold back in a prosecution because conduct, though technically illegal, was justified. But reasonable people may or may not agree with that. So instead, the author takes it a step further to try and make it look like the government “failed” to disclose information it was obligated to include (conduct that’s much harder to agree with.)
It is highly dangerous for citizens of the 5-eyes' War Coalition states to investigate their own governments war crimes.
THAT is the message being conveyed. And the point of the article is to demonstrate that, indeed, the USA doesn't care about war crimes. It does care about its own PR, however - and that is a very curious conundrum. One wonders why it is so important for the US government to hide their war crimes away and distract the public from the real issue.
It surely isn't for benign purposes. Someone is on the run, here. I wonder when we'll catch them, again ..
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadBecause it is evidence of a crime being committed - i.e. that Assange obtained secret military materials and then illegally published them.
Assange is being held for extradition to face charges in the USA of publishing military secrets. This is a military secret that he published.
The fact of its exclusion demonstrates that the US Government doesn't want its crimes further exposed to the world, and that it doesn't believe that Assange illegally published this material - or else, it would have to be admitted as evidence. This omission demonstrates that he is not being targeted for the reason of publishing military secrets, or else it would have been included in the case as evidence.
Julian Assange is being illegally detained and criminally prosecuted for publishing the fact of America's war crimes and embarrassing the War Coalition.
The USA has, with this omission, essentially admitted guilt for its own war crimes.
The Gunship Video itself.
This is not correct. They could believe this, and believe they have a strong enough case without this specific evidence that they need not include it.
I think the government is looking for an out, because it knows its case is hopeless, and it just gave Assange's team a clue. No doubt the defence is going to latch on the omission of this video, and it will prolong the proceedings - meaning they can keep Julian in limbo longer, and continue to subject him to the depravities of Belmarsh at their discretion.
It isn't a binary choice between everything published is either legal or illegal. He could have published some legally and some illegally. People can view this specific video as being published legally while other information was published illegally and therefore only the illegally published information is covered in the indictment.
The US Government, by omitting this video from evidence, is making a tacit admittance that he is a publisher.
(He is a journalist and this trial is a sham.)
This doesn't, at all, follow.
> Either he IS a journalist/publisher and thus protected from prosecution for revealing evidence of real crimes
Not if he himself committed crimes to get the evidence.
Why would you expect the prosecution to make the defense case?
The Pentagon Papers were 4,100 pages. Not every single one of them was individually proof of a war crime. Imagine the US government sued Daniel Ellsberg for the publication of all the parts of the papers that didn't explicitly prove war crimes, but skipped the bits that proved them - that's the equivalent of what is happening here.
Assange defenders seem to often point to his good deeds as an excuse to ignore his misdeeds. The law doesn't and shouldn't work like that.
That is your opinion but its not the truth. Wikileaks own manifesto states:
WikiLeaks is a multi-national media organization and associated library. It was founded by its publisher Julian Assange in 2006.
WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.
War, spying and corruption.
And, that is precisely what it has done: exposed war, spying and corruption.
But those aren't the only things governments want kept secret.
It is also worth noting that revealing war crimes, spying, and corruption is possible with a more targeted approach rather than Wikileaks approach of publishing large batches of semi-related documents. This shotgun approach seems to be done in service of overall transparency rather than revealing the specific wrongdoings that Wikileaks claims it is against. Hence my comment that they seem to care more about revealing secrets in general than specifically war crimes.
Wikileaks is not a judiciary body. It never had any intention other than to provide an ill-informed public (remember, the Iraq war was predicated on a lie) with enough data to make its own conclusion. Your authoritarian stance that only the government can decide its own secrets is fundamentally corrupt to the idea of a free, open society.
Also you are reading a lot into my comments. I have never said anything approaching "only the government can decide its own secrets". My belief is simply that secrets are not inherently bad. Revealing a state secret should only be done when the person publishing that information can point to a public good that will result from that information being revealed. How does knowing lunch orders from random DNC employees help reveal war crimes, corruption, or spying?
>How does knowing lunch orders from random DNC employees help reveal war crimes, corruption, or spying?
Right, corruption never happens during lunchtime.
The famous case that got decided on its merits around the Pentagon Papers was the case against the New York Times and Washington Post, and even that only really narrowly deals with prior restraint and not the actual right to publish the documents (so it left the door open to just prosecuting them after the fact).
Popular opinion is in Ellsberg's corner but the law itself is much trickier. It's another of those things that are often being revealed nowadays as things people believe are bedrock principles of American law that are really more of "conventions," things that just aren't done, until they are.
Assange is an even more interesting case, since his position really puts him more in the position of the Times or Post as a publisher. My recollection is that to a significant extent the case hinges upon characterizing his actions as being more of an active participant in the leaking to try to sidestep the freedom of the press issue to some extent.
Right. I was trying emphasize the "all the parts of the papers that didn't explicitly prove war crimes, but skipped the bits that proved them" part. In other words, once you remove the known-bad bits then what is left seems innocuous and so it's much harder to prove that a specific leak was a "good" thing.
The intent here seems clear: the US wants to ensure Wikileaks isn't allowed to talk about the actual evidence of warcrimes at the trial. They will claim that because Wikileaks isn't being charged with leaking THOSE documents, they are not relevant.
The video is but one of those secret military materials. No need to include it in the indictment and risk debates or scrutiny on it, it's much more efficient to select bulletproof documents that show beyond doubt that he acted improperly.. of which there are already thousands.
Are there? Got a reference to some of these bulletproof documents?
EDIT: crickets ..
There IS evidence that a LOT of American lives were put in danger by the war crimes and other crimes against humanity committed in their name.
Basically, every single American alive today is in danger as a result of the war crimes for which they are responsible as citizens of the USA. Invading Iraq put every single American in much more dire danger than Wikileaks ever could.
There are several venues for trying “war crime” cases, this is not one of them. I think if anybody really cared about the journalists who died you’d see lawfare leveraging UCMJ, but I’ve yet to see that. Seems the outrage is rather performative.
This is why publishers are important and should be protected. The Wests' citizens have been utterly scammed into complicity with these crimes against humanity - the imperative to mis-inform, and thus divert the outrage potential, is very, very high in this case.
Whether that is an apt analogy and whether this "failure to mention" represents a deficiency in an indictment is perhaps best left to the reader.
The prosecutors are absolutely right to prosecute the thief, but upon discovering that I had the handgun used in a crime they really should look into that too.
Sure, the prosecutors can and should refer the case of the smoking gun to their colleagues from a crime unit.
But the thief still goes to prison for stealing cash, jewellery and electronics.
There's a reason "war crimes" has to be in scare quotes there.
Do you think the American public has the temerity to survive the shock of its own complicity in the murder of literally, millions of innocent people by their own armed forces?
I don't think it will be good for America unless their war criminals are prosecuted - and we all know that isn't going to happen. Trouble is, the evidence of those crimes is not going away ...
http://psr.org/blog/resource/body-count
https://airwars.org
“I believe the perception caused by civilian casualties is one of the most dangerous enemies we face.”
U.S. General Stanley A. McCrystal in his inaugural speech as ISAF Commander in June 2009.1
A bit like what happened to the WTC in 2001. I mean, what were they doing, navigating those buildings into the path of a couple of innocent planes, eh?
It's an understandable, though regrettable, mistake when you look past Assange's "collateral murder" editorializing.
Lied into a criminal war against Iraq, the American people are now complicit in the war crimes committed in their names. What is understandable, though indeed very regrettable, is the American public's general desire to not be held accountable for these crimes against humanity...
This is circular. Your argument that this is "murder" cannot proceed from an assumption of the same.
> Your opinion... is utterly abhorrent to anyone who has watched that video...
I don't think personal attacks are productive. Additionally, there are wide arrays of views on this video. Your argument in support of your view appears to be based on an assumption that it is widely held and then an appeal to popularity, so it is doubly fallacious. Try making your point without assuming that everyone already agrees with you.
> can clearly see, for themselves, that these people were absolutely NO threat to US forces in the area
This isn't apparent from the footage; in fact the audio clearly indicates otherwise. They believed they had arms including an RPG. In any case, that isn't the legal test. Even unclassified ROE materials are clear that national self-defense is not the only lawful basis for the use of force in jus in bello.
"They could have had a rocket launcher" is an agitprop straw man intentionally proffered in order to minimise the magnitude of the crime committed. I wonder why it is so important for you, personally, to minimise this criminal act?
1) They were military-age males
Say you have the ability to rain death miles above at whim. Do you think "military-age male" is a robust separator of who lives and who dies? Would you fit in this category? There but for the grace of god go you.
The video doesn't show a mistake at all. It shows a very deliberate action, carried out with great success. That these people were "innocent" in that some westerners cared whether they lived or died is the only reason you're here now defending their murder.
2) they were in an group of armed men on a battlefield and were pointing the long barrel of a telephoto lens at American Humvees from behind cover.
Yes it has nothing to do with a patrol taking fire from that area and confusion over a camera one of the journalists was carrying on his shoulder. I agree it absolutely shouldn't have happened but to gloss over these facts if you have watched the video is revisionist in my opinion.
Also you failed to mention the real war crime which was firing at first responders some of who were children.
We can go on and on about what the real war crime was but for my money it's that this incident was not unusual. We talk about it a lot because some westerners cared about two people who were killed, but these things happened over and over and over and over and over. Maybe someone wants to go litigate those one by one. Or they can zoom out and see that this lax standard for killing people will inevitably lead to many of these incidents, and that going forward with the policy anyway is a war crime reminiscent of free-fire zones in Vietnam.
I'm genuinely sorry Namir died and it shouldn't have happened but he knew that he was putting his life at risk let's be honest. On the other hand the passers by in the van who tried to take the wounded to the hospital who also were obliterated were just good Samaritans and I really think you should at least acknowledge them when talking about what happened to Namir as a war crime.
This is the first comment.
Mods should reles ips and provide community the evidence we need to identify government agents in this thread.
I'm not passing judgement here on Assange or the US's case against him. Just noting that the prosecution case seems to focus on the fact that US intelligence docs being released puts American lives at risk.
The prosecution's case doesn't seem to imply that this video is not evidence of war crimes but that its release doesn't absolve him of the crime of releasing other documents.
The linked article seems pretty light on details so it's difficult to make much out of it directly.
Failing to prosecute legitimate war crimes puts American lives at risk.
This is duplicity at its finest.
Assange is not really on trial here. The Wests' public opinion of American war criminals is, however.
Apart from climate change, a government incapable of addressing it's own crimes is our biggest threat. Note that I don't expect government to never commit crime, I just expect it to admit to it and take corrective action when it happens.
I agree with you, with one caveat: it is the people who must prosecute the governments crimes. Lets see if America today is brave enough to do so...
Are you going to believe the government every time they use that excuse? Because they use it every single time some classified document is released exposing their crimes and corruption.
For those of us who have been paying attention to Julian for decades, the turning of public opinion against him has been a very fascinating lesson in Western hubris.
I think the most important conclusion of all of this is that a) the US government thinks it has what it takes to continue to commit war crimes and other crimes against humanity with impunity, and b) those who pick up the mantel from Julian's passing will have learned a lot from his case.
Most important of all, I believe that c) the leaks will continue. It is going to be a very rough time, given todays climate, for those who continue to slavishly support the US military industrial pharmaceutical complex' crimes against humanity. Julians' heinous treatment just means, when the leaks continue, it'll be with the gloves off. There won't be a loud, obvious flamboyant cult figurehead to depose - more than likely, the leaker strategy going forward from this point onwards, will be a lot more effective.
One can hope, anyway. Until the American people prosecute their war criminals and faces justice for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, and for which they are thus responsible, the American people will continue to suffer as well. A nation ruled by war criminals is a victim of its own cowardice.
Quiet leakers will surely FB dispensed with quietly and much less pleasantly than Assange.
Julians flamboyance and charisma are the reason the general public are complacent about his torturous treatment. His character was weaponised against him by those with immense resources to do so.
However, you can't dispense with leakers you don't see. And here is the weakness in the US Governments' strategy of disappearing Julian - Its not the leaker: its the leaks.
And since the West has committed war crimes at such stupendous scale, these leaks are not going away.
And the outrage over the crimes committed is so large that I am fairly confident, within a year, we will see the American public tearing those responsible into shreds. If, that is, America survives another year with its war criminals running free without tearing itself into shreds ...
[0] https://chomsky.info/the-greatest-threat-to-world-peace/
[1] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-comp...
Why not do this with all militaries? Why is your country (assuming it's not the US) special?
>Why is your country (assuming it's not the US) special?
Because actually, the USA has roped most of the Western states into complicity in its war crimes. It isn't Australia, clamouring for its bomb stocks to be replenished so that a core elite establishment can profit from Lockheed Martin or Boeing or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon stock boosts .. much as Australians might wish they could be invited to that party .. These are distinctly American companies and their grip on the war reigns MUST be wrestled from them. The fate of the world depends on it.
What say you about Libya, where there are now open-air slave markets after the US intervened six years ago?
Over TWO MILLION INNOCENT PEOPLE have lost their lives in America's illegal war against Iraq. This is far, far worse than anything done in Crimea, so far. And, that is just one of 12 major military theatres in which America is committing war crimes, daily.
It is utterly disgusting that American citizens have no idea the extent of the crimes committed in their name.
https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/
http://airwars.org
This is such a heinous and disgusting viewpoint. The Nazi's thought their exterminations were justifiable too, you know.
The moment you start making excuses for crimes against humanity and war crimes, you have lost the moral argument, period.
>>And we continue to learn from our mistakes.
I don't think that's the case at all. What has happened is that the intelligence agencies have learned how to mask their military activities and distract the American public so they can get away with crimes against humanity with impunity.
This is going to come back, in the end, to haunt the American public eventually. The millions of innocent deaths are not going un-counted by the rest of the world, even if Americans ignore it.
It is the old guard in the West (USA, UK, et al.) that wants NATO's iron grip to remain firm, even tighter. Europeans generally are very sick and tired of American atrocities.
On the ground, its a VERY different attitude to the Wests' propaganda on the subject. Nobody expects Russia to invade any country anywhere near the scale that the Western 5-eyes coalition has done, catastrophically, all over the Middle East and Asia.
Sorry, is your argument "Russia invaded and annexed parts of Ukraine in order to further its geopolitical foals"? If so, how is it in any way reassuring to other countries in its vicinity, who soon might themselves find in the way of Russia's geopolitical goals?
Because Russia's nuclear base, that had been there for decades, is still in Russia's hands and was not taken over by Ukraine fascists.
I mean, that's as good a reason as any. I don't see America invading other countries to protect its nuclear bases.
Anyone who has lived in the area knows that it is a Russian stronghold, and has been for hundreds of years.
Remind me again, when did America have a large population of its people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan? I mean, America absolutely demolished these states with its war fighting - by the same standard, shouldn't you be demanding that the world sanction the USA for its illegal invasions and criminal wars?
The double-standards are astonishing!
Would Americans be fine with annexing Rammstein if Germany went through a coup d'etat and the fascist leaders of the coup decided they wanted to gain access to the nuclear weapons stored there?
I'm pretty sure they would.
So why is it not acceptable for the Russians to protect their weapons of mass destruction from mis-use?
Now, of course they want to have base and weapons there, but this is just back to "furthering geopolitical goals".
Meanwhile I've been. Up banned.
Again, opinion here is being managed by government agents with approval from the mods.
The fact that the leaked information contained evidence of arguable war crimes is at most a moral (but not legal) justification. There is a good argument that the government should have exercised its prosecutorial discretion not to pursue this case in that basis. But an indictment does not need to include evidence that might be morally exculpatory. (It doesn’t even have to include legally relevant exculpatory evidence; the prosecutor is just required to disclose that to the defense attorney.) Assange will definitely raise this video and other evidence in his defense.
The Guardian article twists the narrative—alleging the government “failed to include” to evidence, as if it had a duty to do so—to artificially bolster its premise. You can say that the government should hold back in a prosecution because conduct, though technically illegal, was justified. But reasonable people may or may not agree with that. So instead, the author takes it a step further to try and make it look like the government “failed” to disclose information it was obligated to include (conduct that’s much harder to agree with.)
THAT is the message being conveyed. And the point of the article is to demonstrate that, indeed, the USA doesn't care about war crimes. It does care about its own PR, however - and that is a very curious conundrum. One wonders why it is so important for the US government to hide their war crimes away and distract the public from the real issue.
It surely isn't for benign purposes. Someone is on the run, here. I wonder when we'll catch them, again ..