Unless he kills himself, not a chance. He's done his damage, unlike Epstein who had whole houses of closets with skeletons in them; nobody wants him dead.
Epstein is either still alive and retired to some other island, OR, Maxwell is actually the Puppet Master and he was a fall guy. - I think the 2nd is the most likely option, given her family history, and that she hasn't been epstiened.
And she is likely to get off, under the excuse of being controlled and in an abusive relationship.
There's a 0% chance that Epstein is alive and a 0% chance she walks on those charges. Miscarriages of justice do happen but for the most part life is not a poorly written TV drama.
In 2012, when she was home secretary, Theresa May stopped Gary McKinnon's extradition to the USA, on the grounds that he was a high suicide risk, and therefore the extradition violated his human rights. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon). If only I had similar expectations of our current home secretary.
If you are Home Secretary your job is basically to be a humungeous authoritarian piece of shit, because if something happens due to the country's security being breached in whatever manner, your head is on the chopping block.
If we’re talking about murder veiled in suicide then this has a good point but what about an individual’s right to end their own life, to choose how their life should end?
Heard an intesting analysis of this on BBC news. The court was more or less bound to accept the 'assurances', as they were an underlying predicate for the whole extradition framework. To challenge that would be to unpick a lot more politics.
I'm not sure the judges were naive enough to believe the US government, but they probably had no choice.
Having just recently got out of jail, I can tell you it is infinitely easy to kill yourself. You would not believe the ingenuity of some of those attempts and successes.
If the institution gets a hint that you are suicidal you will be placed in some sort of anti-suicide cell, which generally means that you are in solitary, you wear a paper or foam suit with no other clothing, you have no bed linen or any paper materials in your cell, and all your food comes on foam trays without any cutlery and has to be eaten with your fingers.
I also failed to mention the light in the cell will be set to bright and will be on 24x7 and your cell will almost certainly have a completely glass door and you will be under camera and guard surveillance 24x7 to make sure you don't do anything stupid. If you are very lucky, some of these cells have a small wall in front of the toilet so you can at least get a tiny amount of privacy - they'll only be able to see you from the waist up.
there is no way he will ever be free. it's just 1 man vs multiple governments. US gov is in no rush to bring it to trial. they'll keep him in solitary to die waiting for a trial that will never come
If he does eventually leave UK, we should all pray he does actually appear in USA at some point. Lots of "enemies" just disappear.
This man is not a USA citizen, and was not in USA when he did the journalism that so offends the USA deep state. He will be extradited for purely political "crimes". Let's not pretend anymore that any of us live in societies governed by laws.
LOL. I've been waiting almost 9 years on a 120 day Speedy Trial. While you are 100% technically correct (minus COVID extensions), the defense team will need a bunch of extensions to go through everything and file motions. And that is where the delays will come from - the prosecutor and judge will make sure any motions take years to process and he'll languish in jail for infinity.
He won't get a bond either because of all the stuff that happened with the Bolivian Embassy.
Agreed. But "in front of a jury quickly" might be forensically a better idea than "wait in jail for years" while the prosecutor drags things out. [Edit: assuming that his team are confident in getting at least one vote to acquit from somebody angry]
Personally, I don't think we should extradite him simply because it's arguably a political 'crime'. The US/UK extradition treaty is so one-sided, though, and British extradition law so Executive-friendly, that that is essentially an impossible case to win if the Secretary of State wants to extradite.
Exactly, with this relatively low support for extradition it would be surprising to see a jury conviction. And that's with abuse of the jury selection process, presumably in both directions.
I think it's a little silly to extrapolate from a general opinion poll to a trial result. An honest poll on this subject would result in about 99% "I don't know much of anything about him", and jury selection is intended to find people without a set opinion already.
I've seen "non peripheral issues" blocked by hostile judges in plenty of cases, especially cases when classified information comes into play. I hope you're right, but think the USA will make sure this is heard by a judge who will happily toe their line.
Almost 50% of Americans voted for Trump. Almost 50% did it again a second time.
It's not that Voting for Trump is in any way related to being against Assange (It's my understanding that Wikileaks is well liked within that community), but I've learned to to speculate on what Americans might do.
I've taken to just expecting the worst possible outcome from any decision.
Trump's feelings could get hurt at some perceived slight at any moment, and he could suddenly turn his cult against Assange on a dime, just like he did with Netanyahu. Like if he got the idea in his fat head that Assange didn't do enough to help him overturn the election that he lost due to his own incompetence and corruption.
‘F*ck Him!’ Trump Reportedly Furious With Netanyahu Congratulating Biden, Hasn’t Spoken to Him Since
>Former President Donald Trump is reportedly livid with Benjamin Netanyahu. At issue? Congratulations that former Israeli Prime Minister expressed to President Joe Biden following the 2020 general election.
>This is according to a new book from Axios writer Barak Ravid who reports:
>>Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu were the closest of political allies during the four years they overlapped in office, at least in public. Not anymore. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” Trump said of the former Israeli prime minister. “F*k him.”
>>What he’s saying: Trump repeatedly criticized Netanyahu during two interviews for my book, “Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.” The final straw for Trump was when Netanyahu congratulated President-elect Biden for his election victory while Trump was still disputing the result.
>“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. … Bibi could have stayed quiet,” Trump is quoted by Ravid as saying. “He has made a terrible mistake.”
Almost 50% of Americans voted for Biden. Almost 50% did it again a second time.
It's not that Voting for Biden is in any way related to being against Assange (It's my understanding that Wikileaks is well liked within that community), but I've learned to to speculate on what Americans might do.
I've taken to just expecting the worst possible outcome from any decision.
The jury will be sequestered to avoid media influence. This is common practice in high-profile cases.
The judge will set firm boundaries for what the jury can and cannot consider in their deliberations and while the jury is actually free to use any criteria they want, it will be very heavily implied that they cannot. The court will do everything in their power to make the jury believe they must convict based on the evidence presented and the rule of law.
Similarly the court will put significant limitations on what can and cannot be presented as evidence. US's commission of war crimes is (arguably) irrelevant as regards the crime in question, so I won't be surprised to see that bringing it up will not be permitted.
The internet has predicted the imminent assassination of every prominent opposition politician, journalist and speaker for as long as I've been online and it's never happened. Glenn Greenwood is fine, Sy Hersh is fine, Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul are fine. Meanwhile Julian Assange was happy to have people believe the DNC leak came from Seth Rich despite knowing he got it from Russia.
They apparently plan to stick him in the court in East Virginia, which is effectively an intelligence court given the group of people who live in that region and the political bias. He will not receive a fair trial.
>Will he be tried by a common jury or a military one? No way a common jury finds him guilty.
Neither. This is the Espionage Act, so he's going to the spy court. Those doors will be closed and the jury will consist of people who work for the government. The court case will be over way way faster than you might expect.
>No, he isn’t going to a FISA court, those don’t try criminal cases…
Never said he was. He's going to the spy court in virginia. It's obviously not something you list on wikipedia.
FISA is too monitored. The court he'll be going to always sides with the government.
Assange is going to the same place Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, Paul Manafort, various terrorists.
I wonder if Assange will ever see if he is guilty or not. Epstein treatment incoming. Though I do believe he will be treated properly, no enhanced torture or anything.
Thanks for making that short summary for the people who have not followed the saga since the beginning. I believe wikileaks bother many/much more people (remember paypal and visa not taking donation for the site) but what you added is short and concise to put someone up to speed quickly.
He mentioned a single thing that Assange has done. That's not bringing people up to speed. Its disingenuous because its a more complicated situation than that one thing describes. And that statement stands whether a person supports him or is hell bent on seeing his life permanently ruined or ended.
Sure, it's more complicated, but that the basic truth. That's why everything stated. Then people can dig all the details and the 10 years of twist and turns.
Its a tiny part of the basic truth that leaves out any criticism of Assange. It doesn't entirely revolve around the leaking of a single video of a US helicopter killing civilians.
There is absolutely tons of justified criticism of Assange. And there are tons more details about the crimes he reported on. But going into all of that requires a massive article that doesn't fit into a short comment; this stuff is documented elsewhere.
Despite all of Assange's many flaws, it boils down to this: he reported on war crimes, those crimes go unpunished and uninvestigated, but the US wants to punish Assange, severely, despite the fact that he is not American and never even set foot there.
It's pure journalism. And why would he even have to worry about the laws of a country he wasn't in when he did the activities anyway? It's like worrying about whether what one is doing is legal in Bhutan.
War crimes would generally refer to breaching international treaty and/or conventions.
The "Patriot" Act rebranded torture/abduction so as to not fall foul of these. "Advanced interrogation techniques" ....
> War crimes would generally refer to breaching international treaty and/or conventions
Understood. But there are international laws and conventions with no binding effect, and there are those ratified and incorporated into the domestic bodies of law of its members. I’m curious if Assange’s allegations are in respect of the former or the latter.
> (a) Offense.—
Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
> (b) Circumstances.—
The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act).
> (c) Definition.—As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct—
(1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party;
(2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907;
(3) which constitutes a grave breach of common Article 3 (as defined in subsection (d)) when committed in the context of and in association with an armed conflict not of an international character; or
(4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians.
If a terrorist is hiding amongst civilians and is engaged, is the collateral damage a war crime? If an operator attacks someone she believes to be a terrorist in a war zone but ends up being civilian is it a war crime?
There are not easy questions to answer when you consider the difficulties of operating in war. Many times, people in those situations are moving on incomplete or even incorrect information and lives of their fellow soldiers hang in the balance. It’s easy to look back at hindsight and judge it harshly but in the moment, put yourselves in their shoes, what would you have done?
> just to be clear, the perpetrators of those barbarous war crimes, and their superiors, never had to face justice.
This is the big one. I can totally see how Assange handled some of the data irresponsibly, and I can understand if he deserves a firm slap on the wrist for that. But they're asking for 175 years for this, while the war crimes he reported on go unpunished, and that is the real injustice here.
The US clearly doesn't care about war crimes anymore, but it does not tolerate criticism of crimes committed in service of the government.
"Can't we just drone this guy?" -- about Julian Assange from the candidate in the 2016 presidential election that got the largest share of the popular vote
That war hawk has been openly calling for Assange to "answer for what he's done" for years; ever since he showed people just how bought she is with her own campaign manager's emails.
And on this "who has lied more" chart, we can see Hillary is up there in the hundred of verified lies area, while Assange and Wikileaks are on 0 verified lies.
No, it refers entirely to the despicable sentiment expressed above by 'seoaeu. Once upon a time Americans would have pretended to value speech and journalism enough to feign concern at the prospect of vote-for-every-war chickenhawks assassinating a news editor via remote deathdrone just to distract from and cease reporting of their own crimes. Many Americans no longer pretend to value freedom: the masks are coming off.
That loathsome comment wasn't even [flagged]! Good grief.
Assange reported on information. That's what journalists do. Hillary sabotaged her own campaign by the actions she/her team/the DNC took. You can't put the blame on the journalist.
So if I post something criticizing China's policies towards, say, Tiawan or the Uyghurs, I must include some criticism of a random terrible US policy or I'm a hypocrite? Do I need to also include a criticism of, say, Russia's policies towards the Ukraine or is it only the US?
This depends. When it is reported as a news or one simply wants to discuss details sure there is no need to bring other's wrongdoings.
But when it is used as at least partial propaganda (and it often does) in line of "look at good us and bad them" or comes from the government / affiliates then they better look in the mirror first. One thief has no standing criticizing the other. The fact that one had stolen $1000 and the other went for $2000 does not make much difference.
Imagine the level of whataboutism to cherry-pick Assange's case as being morally equivalent to the large-scale enslavement and genocide of the Uyghurs.
I'm disgusted by what is happening to Assange. But what China is doing to the Uyghurs is Medieval. Even if you ignore the Uyghur situation, China has tens of thousands of political prisoners for every one Assange the USA has.
At least they should clean their own house first. Let say by punishing everyone who participated in or voted for wars and voted for politicians who voted for them...
History gets rewritten constantly. An example: Julius Caesar, hero, martyr or villain? Ask an Italian or a French, probably two different versions. But also ask to an Italian 50 years ago (probably a hero, maybe even a martyr) or today (maybe a war criminal to be judged in the International Court of Justice.)
Of course a correct judgement should apply the mindset of when the facts happened.
I hear you, but why do we have to reduce this guy, of all people, to mere labels. Just reading story of him coming to power makes you gasp in awe at the sheer force of will and confidence that you are being destined for something greater.
I dunno, I just like dislike this kind of, whats the word, reductionist approach to a human being. Million things made Julius the man that he was. If he ever had avocados, would we consider him proto-vegan?
As Frank Herbert said: "History is written by the historians". And they are part of the system. Just look at history books which are thought in schools.
History is fiction in the not-fiction area. 95% is missing taken to the grave in silence and the 5% that is allowed to be there is embellished according to a reinforcing narrative agenda of a kind that sells enough copies to make it worthwhile.
You are partly right. Only _some_ Nazis and _some_ Japanese military leaders. The others lived on to become, for example "Americas most loved war criminal".
Since I don't understand this, I will ask it here and maybe someone can give me a clear answer.
What exactly does this mean for Julian Assange? I mean, in terms of this repetitive circle of going to court and then coming back empty handed.
How often can Assange's defense team appeal these decisions and at what point can we expect the "final" decision to be made? E.g. Julian is either released or he is extradited.
This was the US government's appeal because the US lost at first instance. However Assange will now also have his own cross-appeal because even though he won at first instance, the court rejected all but one of his arguments.
Aside from that, it will go to the Court of Appeal and/or to the UK Supreme Court.
The people are just the cells of the same beast since ancient times. Empire. In all shapes and forms, it devours what it grew in and becomes the same brutish atrocity over and over again.
And it stays alive as "wannabe big" again dream long after. This is why britains elite aligns so flawlessly with the atrocities of the usa imperial bloom. The institutions recognize themselves from 100 years ago, when the trampled and maimed people like ghandi.
It's the same people/culture in the State Department, DOJ, and intelligence agencies who pushed that Clinton-funded Steele Dossier into the system to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
Assange has exposed them time and again and they want payback.
The histrionics, conspiracy theories and outright lies in this thread are outrageous. The US justice system is not the same as despotic countries like Russia or China.
Reality Winner will be released from prison soon. Chelsea Manning, who leaked the info to him, the actual whistleblower who broke the laws, is a free woman. (Could you imagine if Chelsea tried to transition to a woman in Russia or China or other nations that are coming up in this thread in comparison? Just goes to show how fundamentally different these societies are, that she could transition to a woman while incarcerated!)
If Assange hadn't played his games avoiding the court for the better part of a decade, the dude would probably already have done his time and be free.
Although it's entertaining to read the astronomically terrible takes in this thread, I did hope to see a little more intelligence in this community.
Why would he do any time at all? Because the people who actually should be doing time are the people in power so they are somehow immune?
Also, Chelsea could transition to a woman without prison too. The fact that they ended/will end in prison while people who actually committed crimes that these two (and Snowden) exposed speaks volumes about how fundamentally different USA is.
Well "throwaway21", interesting that every time this topic comes up, brand new accounts come out of the woodwork. I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but I would point out that Wikileaks exists as part of a new realm of state-funded and state-coordinated private intelligence services created to retain plausible deniability. When certain state funded operations come up, the comment sections do always seem to fill with oddly named brand new accounts, on this website and many others! What a weird coincidence.
As per his crimes, he is charged with a relatively minor criminal offense stemming from his assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers -- a crime that would also be charged in any other western nation. Imagine hiding from a 5 year max sentence for 10 years. Oof.
As for Reality, she really could not have transitioned in Russia and China regardless of prison, that was the point you missed. But as to her crime, yes I do think that the idea of classification and state secrets have merit and that members of the military who violate that can be punished.
A whole paragraph dedicated to how anonymous internet commenters could be fake spin delivery vehicles, then the suggestion that Assange has been charged with "a relatively minor criminal offence", completely eliding a bunch of politically-motivated now-dismissed sexual assault charges that were the actual impetus for him to hide in a foreign embassy for years.
It'd be one thing if he was hiding from a "5 year max" charge of "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
Julian Assange getting away with his sexual assault of a woman due to his politics is very reminiscent of how Donald Trump avoids blame for his sexual crimes through the lens of politics. Very smart tool to ensure you can never be guilty of anything and your supporters will deny any wrongdoing as politically motivated. It's no surprise that Assanage and Trumps people communicated and coordinated, as these devious tactics sure look familiar.
Reminds me of Assange's "Seth Rich" gamble, how he supercharged a heinous conspiracy theory on behalf of fake news purely to earn political approval and gain loyalty from folks who, like you, will not do their homework to validate the claims they make.
>It'd be one thing if he was hiding from the charge "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up, and I think either evidence of ignorance (you thought the US was extraditing him for his sexual crimes in Sweden ...?) or malfeasance (you know it was espionage, but you brought this up to muddy the waters intentionally).
>I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
It's always cute when people try to repeat your lines back to you as a weak "gotcha" but completely fail. You're not going to make that accusation because I'm obviously not.
I will accuse you of being a victim of fake news and implicit supporter of sexual violence though.
> Julian Assange getting away with his sexual assault of a woman due to his politics
This is far from an accurate representation of the events. You seem consistently misinformed on key points. Perhaps you should do some more research before spreading that misinformation further.
> Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up,
You are the one who brought it up. Assange faces up to 5 years for the "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash" and up to 170 years for the crimes he is being charged with under the espionage act.
>Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related [...] I think either evidence of ignorance (you thought the US was extraditing him for his sexual crimes in Sweden ...?) or malfeasance (you know it was espionage, but you brought this up to muddy the waters intentionally).
No, that's not true. It's easily shown that Assange's first charges were laid in Sweden in November 2010 [0]. He was granted political asylum in Ecuador's British embassy precisely because it was so clear that the charges weren't about sexual assault but rather about his involvement in leaking things. The Yanks were still investigating him at this time [1][2], and didn't lay charges until years afterwards [3], in 2018.
Since you've accused me of being a victim of fake news, I assume you've got the Real Truth hidden away. You've got actual reasons to claim the things you've claimed, which AFAICT are just lies, right? You're not just muddying the waters intentionally?
> "completely eliding a bunch of politically-motivated now-dismissed sexual assault charges that were the actual impetus for him to hide in a foreign embassy for years"
Isn't this the total opposite of what Assange and his supporters were saying? He was claiming that we wasn't avoiding the sexual offence EAW, but hiding in the embassy because of the US indictment, to which the Swedish allegations were (he claimed) somehow connected.
The evidence revealed during the US case has basically shown that the Obama DOJ in fact had decided against prosecuting him, so at the time this UK->Sweden->USA scheme could never have happened because there wasn't, at that point, a US indictment (ignoring that fact it made no sense when he could have always simply gone UK->USA).
Yep. The Assange story that he was totally willing to answer to the rape charges but had to flee to a country that wouldn't extradite him to the US for something else isn't really helped by him being extradited by the "safe" country for charges filed years later after a change of government. I'm not convinced of the merits of the DOJ case against Assange either technically or politically, but its notable how many other people publicly known to have been involved in the dissemination of the Collateral Murder video have continued to do investigative journalism without having charges of any sort filed against them, never mind two separate Wikileaks supporters accusing them of sex offences ...
> I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor,
Then don't bring it up, it doesn't add to the discussion.
> he is charged with a relatively minor criminal offense stemming from his assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers
That was only the first charge he was indicted on.
> Imagine hiding from a 5 year max sentence for 10 years.
Assange currently faces up to 170 years in prison.
He was hiding from a one of the worlds largest perpetrators of targeted assassination, one which we know has debated assassinating him at its highest levels.
> As for Reality, she really could not have transitioned in Russia and China regardless of prison, that was the point you missed.
You seem to be confused. Reality Winner did not change genders and was not working for the military when she leaked documents to the Intercept.
> I do think that the idea of classification and state secrets have merit
Just because there is merit to the idea doesn't mean that everything that gets classified deserves that classification, nor does it mean that the government doesn't use that classification infrastructure to hide things that the American public needs to know about. The prosecution of Assange absolutely represents an unacceptable expansion of the USA'a ability to suppress such information.
Reality Winner and Manning are American citizens. Assange is not.
What "games" would YOU play to get out of being extradited to a foreign country for crimes of publishing factual information? Your consolation is that it's only a decade or so of his life in a cage unjustly, no big deal?
You think it is the definition of intelligence to submit to that?
>"What "games" would YOU play to get out of being extradited to a foreign country for crimes of publishing factual information?"
The crime he is charged with has nothing to do with publication of anything, it's a charge stemming from his help attempting to crack a password hash of military computer accounts to help gain unauthorized access to military systems.
Are foreigners allowed to hack military networks in your country?
> You think it is the definition of intelligence to submit to that?
Considering that you're giving me an emotional tale of "CRIME OF PUBLISHING" which is completely contrary to the facts, I would say that the definition of intelligence at the very least includes setting your emotions aside and learning the basic information of a situation before coming to a conclusion
> Are foreigners allowed to hack military networks in your country?
Yes, it happens all day every day. Assange didn't even "hack" anything, he allegedly helped educate Manning, no different than a text file or a 2600 article. Manning committed the crime, she was the one bound by US laws, not Assange. We could hand over every journo who has aided classified foreign information being published in US media, it's the same thing.
The crime of publishing is the truth, not an emotional tale, regardless of the official charges, unless your definition of intelligence is believing the charging documents of the American government as truth.
Truthfully that question is hard to answer, you must be specific - do you mean reporters helping people jaywalk? Source the law that this Australian citizen ran afoul of. Greenwald provided protection and services to Snowden where the case for espionage is much stronger, we do not consider him a criminal however.
This was inevitable to anyone who read the original ruling.
What I said 11 months ago:
" actually don't think this is such great news for him.
Extradition was specifically blocked on the grounds of a particular regime he might be subjected to (to be fair, probably the only legal grounds on which he had any chance of succeeding). That leaves the US with a way out if they want to proceed with the extradition - guarantee a different set of circumstances.
If the judge had found on more substantive grounds, those would have been much more resistant to that. For instance, all the claims based on language in the extradition treaty and other international agreements failed and they failed for pretty fundamental legal reasons. English courts only have regard for domestic law and it is for parliament to pass laws consistent with the treaties that have been signed, therefore claims based on treaty language won't work.
That means that none of the claims on the political nature of his activities were upheld and those would have provided a much more robust and durable bar to extradition."
Are you denying that he washed and selectively released Russian propaganda, and also worked with the Trump campaign? So do you believe Seth Rich was murdered then?
Edit: roenxi: Spreading the propaganda that Seth Rich was murdered is not "aggressively telling the truth", it's aggressively and mendaciously lying. It's a bit awkward for you to suggest that it's true.
>Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, fueled the speculation in an interview with Nieuwsuur published on August 9, 2016, which touched on the topic of risks faced by WikiLeaks' sources.[76] Unbidden, Assange brought up the case of Seth Rich. When asked directly whether Rich was a source, Assange said "we don't comment on who our sources are".[77] Subsequent statements by WikiLeaks emphasized that the organization was not naming Rich as a source, as they do with other leaks.[32] It subsequently came to light that WikiLeaks communicated with the Trump campaign over other issues.[78]
>According to the Mueller Report, WikiLeaks had received an email containing an encrypted file named "wk dnc link I .txt.gpg" from the Guccifer 2.0 GRU persona on July 14, which was four days after Seth Rich died.[79][80][81] In April 2018, Twitter direct messages revealed that even as Assange was suggesting publicly that WikiLeaks had obtained emails from Seth Rich, Assange was trying to obtain more emails from Guccifer 2.0, who was at the time already suspected of being linked to Russian intelligence.[82] BuzzFeed described the messages as "the starkest proof yet that Assange knew a likely Russian government hacker had the Democrat leaks he wanted. And they reveal the deliberate bad faith with which Assange fed the groundless claims that Rich was his source, even as he knew the documents' origin."[82] Mike Gottlieb, a lawyer for Rich's brother, noted that WikiLeaks received the file of stolen documents from the Russian hackers on July 14, four days after Rich was shot. Gottlieb described the chronology as "damning".[83]
It is impressive that the Russians manage to maintain such a stranglehold on the US consciousness given the number of special interest groups they have to keep in front of.
It would appear that this "Russian propaganda" involves aggressively telling the truth. It is a bit awkward to suggest that is an effective tactic against the US.
seth rich probably had nothing to do with wikileaks, but there's no doubt that he was murdered.
and honestly i can't hold it against assange for being on the lookout or even paranoid about things like that, given his circumstances. being wrong about that simply puts him in the company of a huge section of the political establishment that was promoting the case.
i also don't really care if the source of the leak was a Russian hacker. the damning part is the data was real.
Just to be more forceful on one point - Seth Rich had absolutely nothing to do with Wikileaks and it's extraordinarily shameful that Assange winked and nodded like he did.
Rich was a low level staffer working for the DNC to help voters find polling stations - he wouldn't have had any access to their email systems (and of course wouldn't have had access to Podesta's emails since Podesta didn't even work for the DNC and it was his private Gmail that was compromised).
Yes, 100%. I think the documents he released were all authentic, but that’s a great distance from either being “the truth” or being in service of “the truth”. The majority of propaganda is factual while attempting to subvert "the truth".
Propaganda isn't trying to subvert the truth, whether quoted or unquoted. Propaganda is trying to promote a particular position. Nobody has as a goal to subvert the truth, that's just a caricature of one's enemies.
What we do is public relations, what they do is propaganda.
It's just a rationalization to disregard the standards that one would normally use to judge information i.e. its accuracy.
Seriously? This is priority #1 of anyone with alignment with authoritarian goals. Does the phrase "alternative facts" ring a bell? Ever heard of Joseph Goebbels?
Are you saying that just because they released truthful information that was supplied to them (and it happens to be against your preferred side of the political spectrum) they are guilty of propaganda, or is there any proof that wikileaks rejected authentic documents concerning "the other side"?
Sure, but without any proof, in the form of other leak organizations that released something that WikiLeaks withhold, or any other type of proof that they did, you are sharing with us your pet conspiracy theory, not facts.
I don't know how other countries deal with treaties, but the USA tends to ignore all the treaties it has signed unless it has also created a statute in federal or state law to enforce it.
The US is actually quite far in the "monist" side of the spectrum when it comes to ratified treaties but it has such a divided and dysfunctional political culture coupled with an executive which has wide latitude in foreign affairs that many agreements are signed up to by the executive without being ratified by the senate. Monism basically means that properly entered into, international treaties have force as domestic law as well.
The UK is one of the world's most dualist countries. No treaty has any domestic legal standing whatsoever. Until 2010, the government of the day could ratify treaties without recourse to parliament although there has been an observed rule since the early 20th century called the Ponsonby rule that parliament have time to debate and vote on important treaties. The government cannot make domestic statute law without a parliamentary vote therefore dualism emerged.
This means that the UK has to pass a "back to back" law to give legal effect to any treaty it signs where that is required. The US only has to do so when there are elements of the treaty that are plainly not "self executing" i.e. if the US signs a treaty creating a personal right for its own citizens then no further legislation is required but if it signs a treaty agreeing to do something that requires new appropriations, a new agency, or whatever then additional legislation is required.
Quite a long-winded way of saying that Assange never had recourse to certain claims his legal team attempted to make about conflicts between his treatment and the extradition treaty - the extradition treaty does not directly drive UK domestic law on extradition.
Only in the sense of a Solzhenitsyn nightmare. There are breathing, ideologically-bent individuals pushing this. Who are they, and how do we hound them like they have hounded him.
While I'm not particularly sold on the shadowy organisation argument, what the majority of Americans want should be fairly irrelevant to a matter of British law.
One would presume that Americans want possible crimes against them to be tried in their courts, but the purpose of an extradition hearing is to determine whether what the other country wants is acceptable.
It;s an international community that controls finance and media, they're bound together by race and religion much like the National Socialists were. Name them, unite against them, and drive them from our institutions.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. You can't do "race and religion" (to use your euphemism) flamewar on this site.
Wait, if you don’t know who they are then how do you know they are “breathing, ideologically bent individuals” right before asking who they are?
What if instead they are ego fragile and angry at Assange for daring to challenge the unchallengeable order?
Or what if this is a case of banal evil?
I’m not suggesting any of qualities exist in the persons who are implicated in the question of “who.”
I do want to use this opportunity to point out that if you expect to find some quality in someone else you will find it, if it is truly there or even if it really isn’t. This is motivated reasoning and if not handled appropriately then it can backfire in very serious ways.
I hope this doesn’t come off as insulting. @the_optimist I’m not a saint, I’m not perfect. My only hope, selfishly, is to surface desirable qualities (open to truth vs motivated reasoning) and hope my friends and family will echo the desirable qualities back when I inevitably stray.
This is what the HN thread looked like last time. People were claiming the judge was corrupt, colluding with the Americans, and/or was herself deciding issues in a pre-determined way when she didn’t accept the “political crimes” argument from his defence after her very thorough analysis of the treaty. It was pretty awful, and that was a judgment that denied his extradition! The truth is the issues in this case are simply out of the realm of understanding of most people. There’s not much you can do.
The legal aspects may be hard to understand, and we may not precisely understand the underlying motivations of either Assange or the government, but the general dynamic is not hard to figure out. Assange spat in the face of the giant, and the law is now only an obstacle for the punishment they want to dole out. My country is throwing its weight around like a petulant bully.
I'm starting to accept that lies grease the gears of society somewhat, that we can't always live up to the ideals we propagandize about. Sometimes tricking people is the best way to get them to behave.
But I also think that the leaks themselves and the response to them show how far out of bounds our government is with its lies and liberties. The undermining of our diplomatic position began with our diplomacy, our military action. You can argue Assange released "too much", but that doesn't forgive the reaction.
I expect a government with some integrity would admit mistakes and do some house cleaning to regain the lost trust. Maybe I'm not following well enough, and there was some of that? But it seems to me like they went straight to trying to punish Assange with dirty tricks; no real admissions of guilt or plans to improve. That speaks to a pervasive lack of integrity, and so has undermined confidence in the fairness of these legal proceedings.
I don’t think you will see any real discussion on those points until it goes to trial. The case here barely touched on those things at all, and if that’s the entire frame you have, then you are missing that extradition is a matter of international relations over anything else. You’re talking about the US as “the government” but Assange and US are before the UK courts.
> they went straight to trying to punish Assange with dirty tricks… no plans to improve
I take “they” to mean the US, right?
> That speaks to a pervasive lack of integrity, and so has undermined confidence in the fairness of these legal proceedings.
The US’ “dirty tricks” somehow implicate the UK court system and the integrity of their judges? This is the exact illogical step I was referring to from the last thread. If you do not understand that the Americans are in a UK court, asking another sovereign power to let them have him, you should not be commenting on it at all. Even if you made the argument that the UK’s government employed dirty tricks too, you would be ignoring the fact that their democracy has an incredibly rigid separation between executive and judicial power. Your understanding has lumped together the American executive government with the UK judiciary, which would be a stunning display of ignorance were we not on the Orange Website, where it is just the usual amount of ignorance.
I'm ignorant of a lot of detail here (though not that the US is arguing to the UK for extradition) but let me explain: I'm lumping the US and UK together only to the extent that I think their intelligence services work together on things (they do) and their power/influence is kind of super-legal; it crosses borders and ignores laws. Dirty tricks would include having apparently fake rape charges made against him, also in a country that wasn't the US. When I said "these legal proceedings" I did mean everything, across jurisdictions, up to the point where the US gets their way and prosecutes him. I'm not saying the UK judge is complicit, but the outcome may still not be beyond influence.
The entire US military and intelligence apparatus? If you want to know names, just look at the most senior people in the intelligence world. Good luck.
Start with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations. FOAF 3 or 4 levels deep, and you will find the people who are murdering millions of innocent human beings in your name, Americans.
The framing of Assange as an innocent “journalist” being persecuted for just doing his job is, in my opinion, disingenuous.
I do not necessarily agree with all the actions the US Government has taken with him, or their handling of some of the information that was leaked.
However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage, let alone encourage/incite it. In case my point is unclear, I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.
Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
Assange is an activist, not a journalist. He should not be treated as such and much of the consequences he suffers now (e.g., confinement during appeal) is directly related to his own actions (e.g., fleeing to an Embassy).
If you think that is the information that he is being punished for is that video, you clearly did not look at what he leaked closely enough.
Likewise, if you think leaking the pentagon papers is the same as leaking all diplomatic cables and operational communications from a period of time is the same thing, not sure I can say much to change your opinion.
He shouldn't be in prison and we should have a public holiday in his honor for informing the American public about the war crimes our government commits in our name and with our tax dollars.
The overarching question is at what point does a private citizen/activist become culpable. Developing technologies and social networks (old school kind, not facebook) which are explicitly designed to enable the stealing/leaking of state secrets would seem to be skirting pretty close to the line of "I'm just a private citizen/journalist." This is doubly true if said leaks end up putting military personnel and government assets in harms way.
This is doubly true if said leaks end up putting military personnel and government assets in harms way.
We don't need to consider that possibility. It has been over a decade since this information was released. If anyone about whom USA government cares had ever suffered any harm (even if they actually deserved it) as a result, the USA war media would have crowed about it until we had all memorized all details. Not even a rumor exists of anything like that, so we know it didn't happen.
Very interesting. The actual war crimes are brushed aside but the person who revealed those war crimes are punished. I wonder how this would have played out if China or Russia did it.
> Likewise, if you think leaking the pentagon papers is the same as leaking all diplomatic cables and operational communications from a period of time is the same thing, not sure I can say much to change your opinion.
It would be very difficult, because you believe that journalists enabling the distribution of secret government documents means they're not journalists, they're activists. That equally condemns the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. You agree with their opinion, which is why you can't say much to change it.
edit:
Daniel Ellsberg: “Whatever Julian Assange is guilty of, I’m guilty of.”
Many corporations publish "leaked" documents because they want to make a profit and they realize that it appears to a certain demographic. They aren't doing any activism. They are just trying to make a buck.
Editors/publishers exercise judgement and take responsibility for what they put out into the world. AFAICT, Assange's best argument for his innocence is that he bears no responsibility because... he neither took nor accepts any responsibility.
Everyone is responsible for everything that is unacceptable, but it doesn't really help to try to enforce that.
Scoping to a reasonable level, publishers' primary job is to review and filter information for quality, safety, and fitness for mass consumption. Assange and WikiLeaks explicitly do not do that. At best, they are a distributor.
I've never heard of any law that requires a publisher to review / filter information for public consumption. The only responsibility that a publisher at a capitalist media outlet has is to make sure their publications bring in a profit. That is their only "obligation".
> I've never heard of any law that requires a publisher to review / filter information for public consumption
The law generally views the publisher as responsible for unlawful (defamatory, copyright infringing, etc.) content without evidence of specific knowledge, whereas distributors are generally liable only when they have specific knowledge of the facts that make the content unlawful. This, in effect, makes publishers responsible for reviewing/filtering content, because if they fail to do so, they will be held responsible.
That's the whole source of significanxe of, e.g., the section 230 protection against hosts or other users of online services meeting certain descriptions being treated as the publisher of other-user submitted content.
Wikileaks, which Assange leads, is more than just an editor and/or publisher.
WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.
As a reminder, the post you show isn't when the aggression against Wikileaks escalated. You reminder is not true.
This can definitely be one reason but I find your cherry picking very disingenuous.
His disclosures have shown a consistent bias to damage the Democrats, support the Republicans, Trump, and the Putin regime. He also endangered the lives of multiple assets by revealing their names and locations.
This is completely untrue. He used to be loved by the Democrats when he was exposing Bush's war crimes. The claim that he was working with Russia to help Trump came from the Hillary campaign.
It might have been partially activist, that still doesn't justify the extradition. The US had no standing, as I believe it's called. They can declare whatever they want "top secret", but that doesn't make a crime for a citizen of another country to publish it. The hacking and conspiracy claims have been added to make it appear as if they have standing, but these are empty. It's another triumph for big budget lawyer corporations, and an actual loss for the freedom of the press.
I do not think it is a loss for freedom of the press, I think it is an opportunity for the courts to define what a journalist actually is, vs. not. Perhaps the courts will side with Assange and we will find that this is First Amendment protected activity. I personally do not believe it is, but I do think that this situation is a bit unique to modern times and is likely to set precedent one way or the other.
Sure, that could happen and be the result out of all this. I think that is jumping to the worst possible conclusion though and the result will be a bit more nuanced than that.
If a Russian citizen exposed evidence that the Beslan massacre of schoolchildren was staged by the government and Putin tossed them in prison under an espionage law that explicitly criminalizes leaks, would you consider that situation "nuanced"?
"Russia also does this. Inconvenient journalists are designated "foreign agents", for instance."
Inconvenient journalists financed from abroad. And "foreign agents" are not imprisoned, they just obligated by the law to remind their readers about this fact.
I think it shows that you can put a lid on foreign journalism by drawing your chequebook. Just add a few indictments from the extradition agreement. The UK courts clearly haven't sided with Assange.
Zeems awfully convenient to label anything that embarrases the government as 'secret national security matter'. The government can literally get away with murder
I respect your perspective but wholly disagree with your conclusion. There is not a viable concept such as whether a journalist “enables espionage.” Journalism is necessarily adversarial, not pliant.
Thank you for the tactful disagreement and I appreciate your perspective. I also believe journalism is necessarily adversarial and should be allowed to exist with little encumbrance. However, I do think there is a line that needs to be drawn at some point as to what is journalism, versus what is propaganda for a specific agenda masquerading as journalism.
> However, I do think there is a line that needs to be drawn at some point as to what is journalism, versus what is propaganda for a specific agenda masquerading as journalism.
Why does the intent/purpose of the publisher matter here in any way from a legal prospective? I fear that your opinion of his purpose is forming your opinion of its legality.
You do not draw a distinction in intent between informing the public and furthering the goals of a foreign adversary? Not saying he was, just an example, of how intent absolutely does matter from a legal perspective.
What if accomplishing the first thing necessarily accomplishes the second thing? For example, informing on any nation's heretofore unknown war crimes hurts them on the world stage.
That's a good question and I am not 100% sure where I would personally/morally draw the line. I think the conversation would be much different if all that were released was the evidence of what people consider to be a war crime. However, there was a lot more than that released than just that. Whether A (benefit to society) is greater than B (risk/damage) is always a hard distinction to make and up for significant discussion/analysis.
> That's a good question and I am not 100% sure where I would personally/morally draw the line.
What benefits or harms a country is orthogonal to what is factual. Any law that claims a moral high ground in protecting facts from being publicized, is used as a club to suppress speech. That is the moral issue, not some misguided idea that you are beholden to where and when you were born over reality to make statements. When you chase people after the fact (information is already published), you're doubling the moral insult. This isn't he ruin of the US, so it's transparently a petty vendetta.
There are practical problems (like state secrets in larger war games, ie Game Theory), which countries have historically forgone any nuance for the club, in the interest of expediency and simplicity. This isn't so complicated. Everyone understands. This is not a justification for totalitarian behavior, regardless of how dressed up the process is.
The Abu Ghraib whistleblower(s?) revelations certainly diminished the USA's reputation internationally, so weren't they, too, "furthering your adversaries'interests"?
1. If the interests of the public and US adversaries coincide, then there may not be a distinction. For example, if the US government had gone rogue and was spying on literally everyone (as, indeed, appears to have happened) then it is useful to both the public at large and the US's adversaries to know about it. It is good journalism to report on it. Ditto war crimes and all sorts of other shenanigans that Wikileaks has uncovered.
2. I don't think Assange is accused specifically of furthering the goals of a foreign adversary. If there was evidence of that then he would presumably have been charged with it somewhere.
> Why does the intent/purpose of the publisher matter here in any way from a legal prospective?
Motive is incredibly important from a legal perspective. It's the difference between self-defense and murder. I believe you have the burden of proof suggesting why motive shouldn't be considered from a legal perspective, and I believe you'll have an uphill battle doing so.
How do you draw a clear line between what Assange disband what other journalists do? Most journalists have agendas, if we allow our government to prosecute journalists with agendas they don't like, then we don't have a free press.
There's no way to draw this line. The vast majority of commercial journalism is propaganda, unsubstantiated by tangible facts and portrayed in directions strictly favorable to power and pleasing to the audience. Far from jesters speaking truth to power, commercial media are largely courtesans.
>However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage, let alone encourage/incite it. In case my point is unclear, I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.
Your point is pretty clear. You designated exposing war crimes a criminal conspiracy no different from any other.
This view isn't compatible with a belief in human rights and democracy.
No, that is not what I said, nor is that what my point is/was.
To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
You cannot look at just one small part of what was leaked and ignore the rest. If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.
>No, that is not what I said, nor is that what my point is/was.
I see no substantial difference.
>To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
I really don't understand what you being in Afghanistan is supposed to prove. If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
Is that not the case?
>If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.
Oh, we absolutely would. The case was built specifically around the leak of collateral murder.
American espionage law criminalizes leaking evidence of war crimes. Snowden has offered to come home if its scope was tightened to only include actual espionage. Congress demurred.
This is what you were fighting for in Afghanistan like it or not - for a group of elites who would toss you in prison for exposing their war crimes without a second's thought.
The comment about being in Afghanistan was intended to convey that assuming information was released putting people in harms way, that I and people I cared about would have been directly impacted.
> If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
No, my comment does nothing of the sort and neither you, or him, know anything about me. Believe it or not, the world is not black and white and people do the best they can given a variety of factors in front of them.
However, I am glad you are able to with criticize and judge a person with 20/20 hindsight, while simultaneously offering nothing of value to the conversation.
Thank you for taking the time to offer your opinion and I wish you nothing but the best.
Yet your comment history on this subject ("activist" vs "journalist") indicates that's how you see the world. My contribution is to expose the cognitive dissonance surrounding your comments.
I've yet to see anything that makes your time in Afghanistan relevant to this conversation. In fact another person already posted a source debunking the claims that anyone's life was in danger due to the Wikileaks releases.
Glad they were in Afghanistan and had any kind of level of understanding beyond superficial to make that evaluation.
Aside from that, I did not ask about, nor do I care, what you think of my time in Afghanistan. I am more than capable of evaluating my own life choices through a critical and charitable lens.
Thank you for taking the time to contribute to the discussion and wish you the best.
I'm not sure how you get to a less superficial understanding than
> Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet.
During the Manning trial and sentencing, the prosecution and their witnesses finally admitted that there was no evidence that anyone was harmed from the releases.
My only take away after reading everything you've posted in this thread is that you are committed to the idea that exposing war crimes is a bigger crime than war crimes themselves.
What was indiscriminate about it? Wikileaks reached out to other journalists to sort through and publish the information. The full release of the diplomatic cables happened only after some of those journalists (David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian) failed to keep that content secure.
I feel that an Australian citizen should not expect to be extradited to the USA for publishing information the USA would rather not be published. Still true even if he is an activist, would still be true even for someone genuinely trying to systematically destroy America and American values, if it’s just publication. Free speech etc.
For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the non-legalese summary of the accusation? I don’t know how I feel. The internet (telecoms in general) breaks borders and jurisdiction in ways that are not yet settled even in my own head.
Fleeing to an embassy definitely looked dumb to me at the time, and still does now. If someone is told to eat oranges, refuses because they are afraid oranges might be poisoned, volunteers to eat apples instead, runs away when someone tries to force them to eat an orange, then gets given a poisoned apple… I still don’t understand why people say this vindicates the original no-oranges stance.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and I especially liked the way you put the dilemma related to how the internet breaks borders. Similar to you, it's challenging to wrap my head around and is a pretty big paradigm shift in terms of the sovereignty of countries, let alone the legal implications of that shift.
> Were Gandhi/MLK/Rosa Parks wrong when they made a point of breaking unjust laws and encouraging others to follow along?
Your question of right/"wrong" is a matter of morality, not legality. Stealing bread to feed a starving person might be morally good, but legally wrong, and nobody should expect to avoid legal consequences because of it.
In the case of civil disobedience, those involved do NOT attempt to flee from justice. Being arrested and facing the legal system is an integral part.
Assange may just get his chance to emulate Ghandi by spending years in prison...
>In the case of civil disobedience, those involved do NOT attempt to flee from justice. Being arrested and facing the legal system is an integral part.
You think Oskar Schindler was wrong not to hand himself in?
Judging if any given law is or isn’t just is too far outside my skills to have strong feeling about what Assange did one way or the other.
I do know that rule of law doesn’t function if everyone gets to decide for themselves what is and isn’t an unjust law, even though I can say with the benefit of hindsight that Rosa Parks deserved her Congressional Gold Medal, and that I hope I would’ve recognised the law as unjust at the time.
The reference that comes to mind is the four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and cartridge, which should be used in this order. Breaking unjust laws counts as #3, normal journalism is #1, Assange didn’t have the option of #2 with regard to the USA.
>I hope I would’ve recognised the law as unjust at the time.
I'd have hoped so too, but from what you've written it sounds like you would have slotted in with the liberal whites who declared support-for-ending-segregation-in-theory but would also say that "this isn't the right way" or "this isn't the right time".
They made rather similar arguments to yours about the primacy of the rule of law as a principle.
I hope I am the sort of person would have supported Rosa Parks — if I’d been on a jury, I want to be the sort of person who would have voted “not guilty” by way of jury annulment.
Four boxes is a reason to take things slow, not a reason to say “no not like that” when the first steps have failed. And when the law bites someone for breaking it, if you think the law is wrong you should support the victim of the law; but that’s not the same as saying the law should not bite at all. A court case is by itself a powerful bite for most people, even without conviction.
I can also see that someone who is constantly being ground down and dehumanised by the law isn’t going to care about an end to the rule of law. I can’t expect someone in that situation to care if rule of law is damaged, because it never protected them in the first place. I suspect the feeling the law is a bludgeon rather than a shield is the cause of the current “ACAB” and “defund the police” slogans.
But is Assange even in that category? I don’t think so, so I do not feel confident predicting how I would vote if I was hypothetically on a jury. I do think the Guardian newspaper in the UK was in the “law is wrong” category, and that it was wrong for the UK government to destroy their copy of what Snowden gave them.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to. MLK had a specific, rather famous riposte to this attitude because of how common it was:
"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
I think you’ve misunderstood me: I’m agreeing with MLK — It’s not my call to make to say when someone moves from one to the next, and I will only go so far as to place those four boxes in that sequence.
But let me turn this around to demonstrate why such an ordering is desirable: lynchings in the USA disproportionately targeted African Americans. Those mobs were full of people who often claimed to be enforcing justice, but they were reaching straight for the 4th box.
And again, this is only even a consideration for people who care about rule of law. I can easily believe that many rights activists — women’s equality, race equality, Stonewall, independence movements in then-European colonies — had no possible reason to care about rule of law, because the law was never on their side. Anyone in that situation, I’d expect to reach for #4 first because it’s the only tool even available.
"However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage"
"Espionage" like publishing warcrimes.
"I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy"
Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to enforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes.
"being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did"
Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?
"Assange is an activist, not a journalist. He should not be treated as such"
Activists, journalists, and regular citizens should all be treated the same.
"is directly related to his own actions (e.g., fleeing to an Embassy)."
Yet given how the events turned out it seems that he was right. He was hiding in the embassy in fear that they would try to send him to the US.
"Yet given how the events turned out it seems that he was right. He was hiding in the embassy in fear that they would try to send him to the US."
If only we could all flee when faced with consequences for breaking laws that we disagree with.
"Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to 3nforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes."
There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and the breadth of information crossed a line between what was necessary for informing the public, versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world.
"Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?"
Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion.
"If only we could all flee when faced with consequences for breaking laws that we disagree with."
These who can flee the overreach of foregin countries trying to enforce their unjust laws on them, do so.
"versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world."
Yeah, if a country commits horrible warcrimes then most of the world will not want to deal with them. It was not assange who was responsible for this but the US itself. One would not accuse a rape victim of ruining the reputation of their abuser.
"Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion."
Pray tell. If it is zero then you can just say so, and if you did try to expose warcrimes I will take it back.
> There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and
Sorry, I have to: that's just, like, your opinion man. Have you ever thought that you might be wrong on this? How about the state stops doing the things they need to keep secret? You may call it naive, but some will call it being just, you know?
Fortunately you and I do not individually make that decision. Society does and it has deemed, through democratically elected leaders and participation in a social contract that there is a case to be made to state secrets.
The fact that something can be done doesn't mean it should.
At one point, society deemed it acceptable to amputate various parts of a body as a form of punishment. Imagine you have a time machine and get to go watch a public torture and execution ca. 1200AD. Would you consider literally frying someone slowly into charcoal something you can "make a case" for? Why not? The social contract of there and then says it's fine?
There are places today where the social contract is still pretty much the same it was throughout human history: "we'll murder our way to any resources we need, and if you try to stop us you're dead (and if not, we might even share a bit)". Would you say this contract is good and just? Would you support it? And if not, why should we support yours, if it's precisely how your own "social contract" looks like to anyone that is not you?
Which part of the Afghan society voted you and your friends in? Why is your social contract important and just, yet theirs doesn't mean anything to you? Moreover, you went there specifically to break their contract: there's no way a full-scale invasion doesn't break at least the guarantee of single jurisdiction. So, your social contract - good; their - bad. Because terrorists?
On a related note: "society does and it has deemed" sounds to me like "and God said it was good". It's not an argument, it's an observation at best, but most often utterly empty. If you want to tell us that killing civilians with an attack helicopter should be kept under wraps, you should really give us the reasons why you personally think so. You really cannot speak for the "society", now can you? Or are you Borg?
I am a non-native english speaker typing on a phone without a spellchecher. I also have dislexia. If you have some specific complaints then please do point them out, I would love to improve.
I am not sure why you think that this is the case given that the person that I am replying to literally worked for an organisation made for killing people and with a known record of torture and warcrimes. Would you welcome a proud ISIS fighter? I would not.
If they killed nobody then they just can say so. I just do not wish to talk to people who murdered people in illegal invasions.
Lots of words. What crime do you think Assange has committed, specifically?
> Assange is an activist, not a journalist.
Assange has broken two of the biggest stories of our era and literally hundreds of stories each of which would be a reputation-maker for a lesser individual.
Just because you don't like the truths that Assange reveals, doesn't mean he isn't a journalist.
> any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
Wikileaks tried to get cooperation from the US government to redact the sensitive parts. They refused to cooperate.
Your way would have meant nothing at all.
Can you explain what harm you believe these leaks caused, compared to their value in knowing that the US engages in war crimes and covers them up?
Both the CIA and the FBI concluded that no one in the Taliban had any idea of 9/11 before it happened, which is very logical, because you aren't successful at conspiracies by telling everyone.
And yet Bush invaded Afghanistan, because he needed to invade somewhere and couldn't invade the actual culprits, Saudi Arabia - Al Qaeda being founded, funded, manned and managed by Saudis.
---
Participating in a great war crime that killed hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people and completely failed militarily, economically, diplomatically, and strategically should not be a matter of pride.
A journalist is /any/ citizen engaging in journalism. ANY. As soon as you have to "qualify" to be a "journalist" and can't be an "activist" What you have is state controlled media.
Indiscriminate publishing. So you think the vetting done in partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times was not journalism and the employees of the NYT and WaPo who are now not journalists should be prosecuted along side him?
That's pretty radical.
Do you think that the comments that are furiously ignoring this and pretending that there is some sort of official journalist title are genuinely ignorant or trying to sow confusion?
I think it is mostly driven by emotion and it would be very easy go that way if you didn't follow the story closely and from multiple media sources. It's easy to believe in another context eg pick one of "Maddow/Hannity/Limbaugh/Moore" is not a real journalist by which you mean good source of factual information. This is wildly different from "should/should not have the legal rights of a journalist."
Many of the larger newspapers lean toward the former kind of "he's not one of us" and clearly hate him on a personal level, for many reasons one of which is that he de-values their prestige currency of the scoop by having achieved many orders of magnitude more important scoops than they reasonably ever dreamed of without having to have the crap beaten out of him as a young person joining a newsroom like they did. "My editor would never allow me to publish that even though it's completely true and backed with documents proving it." He doesn't have that problem.
There's no doubt that the litany of CIA, NSA & FBI openly employed as analysts are pushing a false narrative about it which is repeated often. We saw evidence of that kind of ting pretty clearly with the evidence free suppression of Hunter Biden's laptop contents as "Russian disinformation." Now we know it's real. The contents are minor league attempted sleaze but true. The suppression of it and the constant refrain of "Russians" is vastly more significant and pretty worrying.
People have be led to think of Wikileaks and Assange as "Anti-American." Pretty obvious that the Military would want to frame it that way. And it's reasonable not to like anti-american stuff. It's not so very far to go from there to thinking CIA lies are actually anti-american and reporting the truth about massive corruption and illegality in government is what has made the American experiment with democracy work and so is pro-american.
I don't know the extent to which the CIA and NSA etc actually use social media comments to push a narrative, I'd really, really hope it was none. Was there anything about that in Edward Snowden's revalations?
If publishing leaked information is punishable by the state, than what kind of press would you have? Its precisely the most contentious things that the state wants to hide, is what often the public needs to know about.
The modern corporate press is bad enough as it is. But do you really want to live in a country where legit journalists are jailed for publishing things the government does not want you to know about.
Just this week, state prosecutor blanked out almost all the names on Epstein flight logs. Fairly obvious its in the public interest to know which powerful people went there. But powerful people will try to protect other powerful people.
Being an activist doesn't make you not a journalist, any more than being employed by companies that share portfolio space with the companies that get all of their revenue from supplying war material doesn't mean you're not a journalist.
> However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage
Then you don't really believe that 99% of journalists are journalists, because they would disagree with you. I'm thankful that I don't live in the completely bowdlerized history that would have been the result if more journalists agreed with you.
What does it matter if he's an "activist" or "journalist"? He exposed war crimes. He IS being persecuted and that fact is being waved in our face out in the open. The punishment doesn't fit the crime, that's the problem.
> I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.
He exposed crimes committed by war criminals. "Criminal conspiracy" is disingenuous. Furthermore the "classified" label is defined by the organization that committed those crimes. Do you think murdering innocent civilians indiscriminately should be classified?
You seem to be arguing semantics more than establishing any sort of moral or ethical argument against what he did.
>that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
Shouldn't you be pushing for the prosecution of the Guardian journalist that published the encryption keys then? Not Assange who actively worked to get both press and government help to ensure safe disclosure.
> Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
It's funny to me that you were marauding around Afghanistan a couple of years ago and would use the word indiscriminate to describe Assange.
By your definition, 99.9% of “journalists” aren’t journalists because they are all activists. Assange is the purest form of journalist, especially considering things he published were mass reported by other journalists who got awards for their reporting.
If Assange is transferred to US custody, there is a strong chance he will be killed (and possibly in a way that makes it look “accidental”). The CIA was actively planning for such scenarios in 2017: https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london...
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 645 ms ] threadhttps://www.state.gov/subjects/press-freedom/
Like Epstein?
Let this be a point, there is no press freedom in the United States.
Prison is worse.
Exactly. You can't prevent prison suicides.
In 2012, when she was home secretary, Theresa May stopped Gary McKinnon's extradition to the USA, on the grounds that he was a high suicide risk, and therefore the extradition violated his human rights. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon). If only I had similar expectations of our current home secretary.
I wonder how much pressure the Lib Dems put on her.
I'm not sure the judges were naive enough to believe the US government, but they probably had no choice.
If the institution gets a hint that you are suicidal you will be placed in some sort of anti-suicide cell, which generally means that you are in solitary, you wear a paper or foam suit with no other clothing, you have no bed linen or any paper materials in your cell, and all your food comes on foam trays without any cutlery and has to be eaten with your fingers.
I also failed to mention the light in the cell will be set to bright and will be on 24x7 and your cell will almost certainly have a completely glass door and you will be under camera and guard surveillance 24x7 to make sure you don't do anything stupid. If you are very lucky, some of these cells have a small wall in front of the toilet so you can at least get a tiny amount of privacy - they'll only be able to see you from the waist up.
The evidence pretty much all point to something other than suicide...
This is global jurisdiction and enforcement, that's what the extradition is about.
Seems like the "assurances" given by the U.S should not be taken seriously. Previous actions speak (or should I say shout) much louder than words.
P.S : Adding "FREE JULIAN ASSANGE" to my personal website, I encourage everyone to do the same
Great idea. I would suggest to link to this page https://defend.wikileaks.org/
This man is not a USA citizen, and was not in USA when he did the journalism that so offends the USA deep state. He will be extradited for purely political "crimes". Let's not pretend anymore that any of us live in societies governed by laws.
He won't get a bond either because of all the stuff that happened with the Bolivian Embassy.
Personally, I don't think we should extradite him simply because it's arguably a political 'crime'. The US/UK extradition treaty is so one-sided, though, and British extradition law so Executive-friendly, that that is essentially an impossible case to win if the Secretary of State wants to extradite.
He is charged and being extradited under criminal code. As a non-combatant, I don't think he could be charged by an Article I court.
Quick search for numbers show:
"53% of Americans say Julian Assange should be extradited to America"
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
I wish I could still have your faith in my fellow countrymen. Sadly I believe yours won't survive this trial.
Rehashing US war crimes, which would certainly come up, won't be great for the prosecution either.
Assuming the judge doesn't block that line of argument.
It's not that Voting for Trump is in any way related to being against Assange (It's my understanding that Wikileaks is well liked within that community), but I've learned to to speculate on what Americans might do.
I've taken to just expecting the worst possible outcome from any decision.
‘F*ck Him!’ Trump Reportedly Furious With Netanyahu Congratulating Biden, Hasn’t Spoken to Him Since
https://www.mediaite.com/trump/fck-him-trump-reportedly-furi...
>Former President Donald Trump is reportedly livid with Benjamin Netanyahu. At issue? Congratulations that former Israeli Prime Minister expressed to President Joe Biden following the 2020 general election.
>This is according to a new book from Axios writer Barak Ravid who reports:
>>Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu were the closest of political allies during the four years they overlapped in office, at least in public. Not anymore. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” Trump said of the former Israeli prime minister. “F*k him.”
>>What he’s saying: Trump repeatedly criticized Netanyahu during two interviews for my book, “Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.” The final straw for Trump was when Netanyahu congratulated President-elect Biden for his election victory while Trump was still disputing the result.
>“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. … Bibi could have stayed quiet,” Trump is quoted by Ravid as saying. “He has made a terrible mistake.”
It's not that Voting for Biden is in any way related to being against Assange (It's my understanding that Wikileaks is well liked within that community), but I've learned to to speculate on what Americans might do.
I've taken to just expecting the worst possible outcome from any decision.
The judge will set firm boundaries for what the jury can and cannot consider in their deliberations and while the jury is actually free to use any criteria they want, it will be very heavily implied that they cannot. The court will do everything in their power to make the jury believe they must convict based on the evidence presented and the rule of law.
Similarly the court will put significant limitations on what can and cannot be presented as evidence. US's commission of war crimes is (arguably) irrelevant as regards the crime in question, so I won't be surprised to see that bringing it up will not be permitted.
This is all fairly standard US court stuff.
Yes, that means juries are usually composed of uninformed idiots. Lawyers mostly like it that way.
Neither. This is the Espionage Act, so he's going to the spy court. Those doors will be closed and the jury will consist of people who work for the government. The court case will be over way way faster than you might expect.
No, he isn’t going to a FISA court, those don’t try criminal cases…
Never said he was. He's going to the spy court in virginia. It's obviously not something you list on wikipedia.
FISA is too monitored. The court he'll be going to always sides with the government.
Assange is going to the same place Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, Paul Manafort, various terrorists.
I wonder if Assange will ever see if he is guilty or not. Epstein treatment incoming. Though I do believe he will be treated properly, no enhanced torture or anything.
Manafort and Hale weren't tried in any sort of special court, and it's definitely on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f.... Manafort proceedings were public; reporters live-tweeted it. Hale pled guilty pre-trial.
Assange in 2010 revealed and gave clear proof of American war crimes in Iraq https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Collateral_Murder,_5_Apr_2010 - now the US wants him dead.
That's how imperialism works. Today is a sad day for all freedom and peace lovers.
Edit: just to be clear, the perpetrators of those barbarous war crimes, and their superiors, never had to face justice.
Despite all of Assange's many flaws, it boils down to this: he reported on war crimes, those crimes go unpunished and uninvestigated, but the US wants to punish Assange, severely, despite the fact that he is not American and never even set foot there.
Honest question: are these crimes under U.S. law?
Understood. But there are international laws and conventions with no binding effect, and there are those ratified and incorporated into the domestic bodies of law of its members. I’m curious if Assange’s allegations are in respect of the former or the latter.
> (a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
> (b) Circumstances.— The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act).
> (c) Definition.—As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct— (1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party; (2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907; (3) which constitutes a grave breach of common Article 3 (as defined in subsection (d)) when committed in the context of and in association with an armed conflict not of an international character; or (4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians.
(...)
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-military-jury-acquits-s...
There are not easy questions to answer when you consider the difficulties of operating in war. Many times, people in those situations are moving on incomplete or even incorrect information and lives of their fellow soldiers hang in the balance. It’s easy to look back at hindsight and judge it harshly but in the moment, put yourselves in their shoes, what would you have done?
This is the big one. I can totally see how Assange handled some of the data irresponsibly, and I can understand if he deserves a firm slap on the wrist for that. But they're asking for 175 years for this, while the war crimes he reported on go unpunished, and that is the real injustice here.
The US clearly doesn't care about war crimes anymore, but it does not tolerate criticism of crimes committed in service of the government.
“I spread misinformation to others without doing due diligence,” phone8675309 said.
Also unproven
And on this "who has lied more" chart, we can see Hillary is up there in the hundred of verified lies area, while Assange and Wikileaks are on 0 verified lies.
That loathsome comment wasn't even [flagged]! Good grief.
(I shouldn't have to point out that was sarcasm, but I fear I need to, these days.)
I know it's a pretty common troll tactic on Reddit and Twitter, it's a shame to see it here.
But when it is used as at least partial propaganda (and it often does) in line of "look at good us and bad them" or comes from the government / affiliates then they better look in the mirror first. One thief has no standing criticizing the other. The fact that one had stolen $1000 and the other went for $2000 does not make much difference.
I'm disgusted by what is happening to Assange. But what China is doing to the Uyghurs is Medieval. Even if you ignore the Uyghur situation, China has tens of thousands of political prisoners for every one Assange the USA has.
Of course a correct judgement should apply the mindset of when the facts happened.
I dunno, I just like dislike this kind of, whats the word, reductionist approach to a human being. Million things made Julius the man that he was. If he ever had avocados, would we consider him proto-vegan?
edit: I am only jesting.
That doesn't sound right either, we 'as in the himan race' done some fucked up shit because at the time it was cobsidered the right thing to do
What exactly does this mean for Julian Assange? I mean, in terms of this repetitive circle of going to court and then coming back empty handed.
How often can Assange's defense team appeal these decisions and at what point can we expect the "final" decision to be made? E.g. Julian is either released or he is extradited.
Aside from that, it will go to the Court of Appeal and/or to the UK Supreme Court.
So potentially 2 or 3 further appeals.
And it stays alive as "wannabe big" again dream long after. This is why britains elite aligns so flawlessly with the atrocities of the usa imperial bloom. The institutions recognize themselves from 100 years ago, when the trampled and maimed people like ghandi.
Assange has exposed them time and again and they want payback.
The USA is in 4 ongoing wars crossing 3 different administrations.
The USA likes killing international people.
Khashoggi didn’t get a public court hearing nor a jury of civilians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
You think America secures all the resources you rely on by being nice?
“My way of life is built on military imperialism. Why is my government awful?”
Shit n hellfire. The adults are just turning off Sesame Street
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-r...
And the right thing to do is to denounce evil as it comes. Journalism is a requirement for democracy.
Reality Winner will be released from prison soon. Chelsea Manning, who leaked the info to him, the actual whistleblower who broke the laws, is a free woman. (Could you imagine if Chelsea tried to transition to a woman in Russia or China or other nations that are coming up in this thread in comparison? Just goes to show how fundamentally different these societies are, that she could transition to a woman while incarcerated!)
If Assange hadn't played his games avoiding the court for the better part of a decade, the dude would probably already have done his time and be free.
Although it's entertaining to read the astronomically terrible takes in this thread, I did hope to see a little more intelligence in this community.
Also, Chelsea could transition to a woman without prison too. The fact that they ended/will end in prison while people who actually committed crimes that these two (and Snowden) exposed speaks volumes about how fundamentally different USA is.
As per his crimes, he is charged with a relatively minor criminal offense stemming from his assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers -- a crime that would also be charged in any other western nation. Imagine hiding from a 5 year max sentence for 10 years. Oof.
As for Reality, she really could not have transitioned in Russia and China regardless of prison, that was the point you missed. But as to her crime, yes I do think that the idea of classification and state secrets have merit and that members of the military who violate that can be punished.
It'd be one thing if he was hiding from a "5 year max" charge of "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
Reminds me of Assange's "Seth Rich" gamble, how he supercharged a heinous conspiracy theory on behalf of fake news purely to earn political approval and gain loyalty from folks who, like you, will not do their homework to validate the claims they make.
>It'd be one thing if he was hiding from the charge "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up, and I think either evidence of ignorance (you thought the US was extraditing him for his sexual crimes in Sweden ...?) or malfeasance (you know it was espionage, but you brought this up to muddy the waters intentionally).
>I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
It's always cute when people try to repeat your lines back to you as a weak "gotcha" but completely fail. You're not going to make that accusation because I'm obviously not.
I will accuse you of being a victim of fake news and implicit supporter of sexual violence though.
This is far from an accurate representation of the events. You seem consistently misinformed on key points. Perhaps you should do some more research before spreading that misinformation further.
> Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up,
You are the one who brought it up. Assange faces up to 5 years for the "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash" and up to 170 years for the crimes he is being charged with under the espionage act.
No, that's not true. It's easily shown that Assange's first charges were laid in Sweden in November 2010 [0]. He was granted political asylum in Ecuador's British embassy precisely because it was so clear that the charges weren't about sexual assault but rather about his involvement in leaking things. The Yanks were still investigating him at this time [1][2], and didn't lay charges until years afterwards [3], in 2018.
Since you've accused me of being a victim of fake news, I assume you've got the Real Truth hidden away. You've got actual reasons to claim the things you've claimed, which AFAICT are just lies, right? You're not just muddying the waters intentionally?
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11803703
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#cite_ref-Holder...
[2] http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/20...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julia...
Isn't this the total opposite of what Assange and his supporters were saying? He was claiming that we wasn't avoiding the sexual offence EAW, but hiding in the embassy because of the US indictment, to which the Swedish allegations were (he claimed) somehow connected.
The evidence revealed during the US case has basically shown that the Obama DOJ in fact had decided against prosecuting him, so at the time this UK->Sweden->USA scheme could never have happened because there wasn't, at that point, a US indictment (ignoring that fact it made no sense when he could have always simply gone UK->USA).
Then don't bring it up, it doesn't add to the discussion.
> he is charged with a relatively minor criminal offense stemming from his assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers
That was only the first charge he was indicted on.
> Imagine hiding from a 5 year max sentence for 10 years.
Assange currently faces up to 170 years in prison.
He was hiding from a one of the worlds largest perpetrators of targeted assassination, one which we know has debated assassinating him at its highest levels.
> As for Reality, she really could not have transitioned in Russia and China regardless of prison, that was the point you missed.
You seem to be confused. Reality Winner did not change genders and was not working for the military when she leaked documents to the Intercept.
> I do think that the idea of classification and state secrets have merit
Just because there is merit to the idea doesn't mean that everything that gets classified deserves that classification, nor does it mean that the government doesn't use that classification infrastructure to hide things that the American public needs to know about. The prosecution of Assange absolutely represents an unacceptable expansion of the USA'a ability to suppress such information.
What "games" would YOU play to get out of being extradited to a foreign country for crimes of publishing factual information? Your consolation is that it's only a decade or so of his life in a cage unjustly, no big deal?
You think it is the definition of intelligence to submit to that?
The crime he is charged with has nothing to do with publication of anything, it's a charge stemming from his help attempting to crack a password hash of military computer accounts to help gain unauthorized access to military systems.
Are foreigners allowed to hack military networks in your country?
> You think it is the definition of intelligence to submit to that?
Considering that you're giving me an emotional tale of "CRIME OF PUBLISHING" which is completely contrary to the facts, I would say that the definition of intelligence at the very least includes setting your emotions aside and learning the basic information of a situation before coming to a conclusion
Since the answer to both of these questions is no, what does it have to do with Assange's situation?
I do hope the US files charges against Israeli hackers who have targeted American organizations though. No country should get a free pass.
Yes, it happens all day every day. Assange didn't even "hack" anything, he allegedly helped educate Manning, no different than a text file or a 2600 article. Manning committed the crime, she was the one bound by US laws, not Assange. We could hand over every journo who has aided classified foreign information being published in US media, it's the same thing.
The crime of publishing is the truth, not an emotional tale, regardless of the official charges, unless your definition of intelligence is believing the charging documents of the American government as truth.
He later asks for the status on the hash.
Do reporters usually help people break the law?
Truthfully that question is hard to answer, you must be specific - do you mean reporters helping people jaywalk? Source the law that this Australian citizen ran afoul of. Greenwald provided protection and services to Snowden where the case for espionage is much stronger, we do not consider him a criminal however.
https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london...
What I said 11 months ago:
" actually don't think this is such great news for him. Extradition was specifically blocked on the grounds of a particular regime he might be subjected to (to be fair, probably the only legal grounds on which he had any chance of succeeding). That leaves the US with a way out if they want to proceed with the extradition - guarantee a different set of circumstances.
If the judge had found on more substantive grounds, those would have been much more resistant to that. For instance, all the claims based on language in the extradition treaty and other international agreements failed and they failed for pretty fundamental legal reasons. English courts only have regard for domestic law and it is for parliament to pass laws consistent with the treaties that have been signed, therefore claims based on treaty language won't work.
That means that none of the claims on the political nature of his activities were upheld and those would have provided a much more robust and durable bar to extradition."
Edit: roenxi: Spreading the propaganda that Seth Rich was murdered is not "aggressively telling the truth", it's aggressively and mendaciously lying. It's a bit awkward for you to suggest that it's true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...
>WikiLeaks statements
>Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, fueled the speculation in an interview with Nieuwsuur published on August 9, 2016, which touched on the topic of risks faced by WikiLeaks' sources.[76] Unbidden, Assange brought up the case of Seth Rich. When asked directly whether Rich was a source, Assange said "we don't comment on who our sources are".[77] Subsequent statements by WikiLeaks emphasized that the organization was not naming Rich as a source, as they do with other leaks.[32] It subsequently came to light that WikiLeaks communicated with the Trump campaign over other issues.[78]
>According to the Mueller Report, WikiLeaks had received an email containing an encrypted file named "wk dnc link I .txt.gpg" from the Guccifer 2.0 GRU persona on July 14, which was four days after Seth Rich died.[79][80][81] In April 2018, Twitter direct messages revealed that even as Assange was suggesting publicly that WikiLeaks had obtained emails from Seth Rich, Assange was trying to obtain more emails from Guccifer 2.0, who was at the time already suspected of being linked to Russian intelligence.[82] BuzzFeed described the messages as "the starkest proof yet that Assange knew a likely Russian government hacker had the Democrat leaks he wanted. And they reveal the deliberate bad faith with which Assange fed the groundless claims that Rich was his source, even as he knew the documents' origin."[82] Mike Gottlieb, a lawyer for Rich's brother, noted that WikiLeaks received the file of stolen documents from the Russian hackers on July 14, four days after Rich was shot. Gottlieb described the chronology as "damning".[83]
It would appear that this "Russian propaganda" involves aggressively telling the truth. It is a bit awkward to suggest that is an effective tactic against the US.
and honestly i can't hold it against assange for being on the lookout or even paranoid about things like that, given his circumstances. being wrong about that simply puts him in the company of a huge section of the political establishment that was promoting the case.
i also don't really care if the source of the leak was a Russian hacker. the damning part is the data was real.
Rich was a low level staffer working for the DNC to help voters find polling stations - he wouldn't have had any access to their email systems (and of course wouldn't have had access to Podesta's emails since Podesta didn't even work for the DNC and it was his private Gmail that was compromised).
Both Podesta's and the DNC's leaked emails came from targeted Spearfishing campaigns, some of the source emails for these were leaked alongside the rest of the contents. (e.g. Podesta's: https://cbsnews3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/10/28/b4836dda-...)
Yes, 100%. I think the documents he released were all authentic, but that’s a great distance from either being “the truth” or being in service of “the truth”. The majority of propaganda is factual while attempting to subvert "the truth".
What we do is public relations, what they do is propaganda.
It's just a rationalization to disregard the standards that one would normally use to judge information i.e. its accuracy.
Seriously? This is priority #1 of anyone with alignment with authoritarian goals. Does the phrase "alternative facts" ring a bell? Ever heard of Joseph Goebbels?
if you pick and choose which ones to release, you absolutely are propagandizing, trying to use selective information to misinform.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause
The UK is one of the world's most dualist countries. No treaty has any domestic legal standing whatsoever. Until 2010, the government of the day could ratify treaties without recourse to parliament although there has been an observed rule since the early 20th century called the Ponsonby rule that parliament have time to debate and vote on important treaties. The government cannot make domestic statute law without a parliamentary vote therefore dualism emerged.
This means that the UK has to pass a "back to back" law to give legal effect to any treaty it signs where that is required. The US only has to do so when there are elements of the treaty that are plainly not "self executing" i.e. if the US signs a treaty creating a personal right for its own citizens then no further legislation is required but if it signs a treaty agreeing to do something that requires new appropriations, a new agency, or whatever then additional legislation is required.
Quite a long-winded way of saying that Assange never had recourse to certain claims his legal team attempted to make about conflicts between his treatment and the extradition treaty - the extradition treaty does not directly drive UK domestic law on extradition.
When someone lives inside one of several walled properties, hiding is unnecessary.
Offtopic: doxxing is evil. Don't do it.
Devil's advocate: Doxxing isn't any more or less evil than investigative journalism or hiring a PI.
For starters, there are the majority of Americans who believe he should be extradited. (In second place, those who don’t care.)
One would presume that Americans want possible crimes against them to be tried in their courts, but the purpose of an extradition hearing is to determine whether what the other country wants is acceptable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What if instead they are ego fragile and angry at Assange for daring to challenge the unchallengeable order?
Or what if this is a case of banal evil?
I’m not suggesting any of qualities exist in the persons who are implicated in the question of “who.”
I do want to use this opportunity to point out that if you expect to find some quality in someone else you will find it, if it is truly there or even if it really isn’t. This is motivated reasoning and if not handled appropriately then it can backfire in very serious ways.
I hope this doesn’t come off as insulting. @the_optimist I’m not a saint, I’m not perfect. My only hope, selfishly, is to surface desirable qualities (open to truth vs motivated reasoning) and hope my friends and family will echo the desirable qualities back when I inevitably stray.
I'm starting to accept that lies grease the gears of society somewhat, that we can't always live up to the ideals we propagandize about. Sometimes tricking people is the best way to get them to behave.
But I also think that the leaks themselves and the response to them show how far out of bounds our government is with its lies and liberties. The undermining of our diplomatic position began with our diplomacy, our military action. You can argue Assange released "too much", but that doesn't forgive the reaction.
I expect a government with some integrity would admit mistakes and do some house cleaning to regain the lost trust. Maybe I'm not following well enough, and there was some of that? But it seems to me like they went straight to trying to punish Assange with dirty tricks; no real admissions of guilt or plans to improve. That speaks to a pervasive lack of integrity, and so has undermined confidence in the fairness of these legal proceedings.
> they went straight to trying to punish Assange with dirty tricks… no plans to improve
I take “they” to mean the US, right?
> That speaks to a pervasive lack of integrity, and so has undermined confidence in the fairness of these legal proceedings.
The US’ “dirty tricks” somehow implicate the UK court system and the integrity of their judges? This is the exact illogical step I was referring to from the last thread. If you do not understand that the Americans are in a UK court, asking another sovereign power to let them have him, you should not be commenting on it at all. Even if you made the argument that the UK’s government employed dirty tricks too, you would be ignoring the fact that their democracy has an incredibly rigid separation between executive and judicial power. Your understanding has lumped together the American executive government with the UK judiciary, which would be a stunning display of ignorance were we not on the Orange Website, where it is just the usual amount of ignorance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29509343.
I do not necessarily agree with all the actions the US Government has taken with him, or their handling of some of the information that was leaked.
However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage, let alone encourage/incite it. In case my point is unclear, I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.
Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
Assange is an activist, not a journalist. He should not be treated as such and much of the consequences he suffers now (e.g., confinement during appeal) is directly related to his own actions (e.g., fleeing to an Embassy).
As a reminder, this is why the US wants to punish Assange:
> Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-a...
Likewise, if you think leaking the pentagon papers is the same as leaking all diplomatic cables and operational communications from a period of time is the same thing, not sure I can say much to change your opinion.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/indictment...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wikileaks-releases-classifie...
The overarching question is at what point does a private citizen/activist become culpable. Developing technologies and social networks (old school kind, not facebook) which are explicitly designed to enable the stealing/leaking of state secrets would seem to be skirting pretty close to the line of "I'm just a private citizen/journalist." This is doubly true if said leaks end up putting military personnel and government assets in harms way.
We don't need to consider that possibility. It has been over a decade since this information was released. If anyone about whom USA government cares had ever suffered any harm (even if they actually deserved it) as a result, the USA war media would have crowed about it until we had all memorized all details. Not even a rumor exists of anything like that, so we know it didn't happen.
If you think it wasn't about that you clearly didn't follow the lawsuit.
What something is ostensibly about -- like for instance, what's spelled out in a lawsuit -- is not necessarily what it's actually about.
It would be very difficult, because you believe that journalists enabling the distribution of secret government documents means they're not journalists, they're activists. That equally condemns the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. You agree with their opinion, which is why you can't say much to change it.
edit:
Daniel Ellsberg: “Whatever Julian Assange is guilty of, I’m guilty of.”
https://www.exberliner.com/features/julian-assange-trial-202...
Scoping to a reasonable level, publishers' primary job is to review and filter information for quality, safety, and fitness for mass consumption. Assange and WikiLeaks explicitly do not do that. At best, they are a distributor.
The law generally views the publisher as responsible for unlawful (defamatory, copyright infringing, etc.) content without evidence of specific knowledge, whereas distributors are generally liable only when they have specific knowledge of the facts that make the content unlawful. This, in effect, makes publishers responsible for reviewing/filtering content, because if they fail to do so, they will be held responsible.
That's the whole source of significanxe of, e.g., the section 230 protection against hosts or other users of online services meeting certain descriptions being treated as the publisher of other-user submitted content.
WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.
As a reminder, the post you show isn't when the aggression against Wikileaks escalated. You reminder is not true.
His disclosures have shown a consistent bias to damage the Democrats, support the Republicans, Trump, and the Putin regime. He also endangered the lives of multiple assets by revealing their names and locations.
It's a lot more nuanced than you portray it.
Redefining journalist can let you imprison any and every journalist.
Inconvenient journalists financed from abroad. And "foreign agents" are not imprisoned, they just obligated by the law to remind their readers about this fact.
Why does the intent/purpose of the publisher matter here in any way from a legal prospective? I fear that your opinion of his purpose is forming your opinion of its legality.
What benefits or harms a country is orthogonal to what is factual. Any law that claims a moral high ground in protecting facts from being publicized, is used as a club to suppress speech. That is the moral issue, not some misguided idea that you are beholden to where and when you were born over reality to make statements. When you chase people after the fact (information is already published), you're doubling the moral insult. This isn't he ruin of the US, so it's transparently a petty vendetta.
There are practical problems (like state secrets in larger war games, ie Game Theory), which countries have historically forgone any nuance for the club, in the interest of expediency and simplicity. This isn't so complicated. Everyone understands. This is not a justification for totalitarian behavior, regardless of how dressed up the process is.
2. I don't think Assange is accused specifically of furthering the goals of a foreign adversary. If there was evidence of that then he would presumably have been charged with it somewhere.
Motive is incredibly important from a legal perspective. It's the difference between self-defense and murder. I believe you have the burden of proof suggesting why motive shouldn't be considered from a legal perspective, and I believe you'll have an uphill battle doing so.
As far as I'm aware his activities regarding the whole guccifer, Seth rich, etc. affair make me think a mere journalist he is not.
Your point is pretty clear. You designated exposing war crimes a criminal conspiracy no different from any other.
This view isn't compatible with a belief in human rights and democracy.
To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
You cannot look at just one small part of what was leaked and ignore the rest. If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.
I see no substantial difference.
>To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
I really don't understand what you being in Afghanistan is supposed to prove. If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
Is that not the case?
>If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.
Oh, we absolutely would. The case was built specifically around the leak of collateral murder.
American espionage law criminalizes leaking evidence of war crimes. Snowden has offered to come home if its scope was tightened to only include actual espionage. Congress demurred.
This is what you were fighting for in Afghanistan like it or not - for a group of elites who would toss you in prison for exposing their war crimes without a second's thought.
> If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
You realize you were the invader right?
However, I am glad you are able to with criticize and judge a person with 20/20 hindsight, while simultaneously offering nothing of value to the conversation.
Thank you for taking the time to offer your opinion and I wish you nothing but the best.
Yet your comment history on this subject ("activist" vs "journalist") indicates that's how you see the world. My contribution is to expose the cognitive dissonance surrounding your comments.
I've yet to see anything that makes your time in Afghanistan relevant to this conversation. In fact another person already posted a source debunking the claims that anyone's life was in danger due to the Wikileaks releases.
Aside from that, I did not ask about, nor do I care, what you think of my time in Afghanistan. I am more than capable of evaluating my own life choices through a critical and charitable lens.
Thank you for taking the time to contribute to the discussion and wish you the best.
> Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet.
That is, unless there were somebody they could point to who was dead as a result. Then they would describe what happened.
Or stay silent - if there were no examples.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-mannin...
Hopefully that's not what you mean to convey.
Some clarification would go a long way.
What was indiscriminate about it? Wikileaks reached out to other journalists to sort through and publish the information. The full release of the diplomatic cables happened only after some of those journalists (David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian) failed to keep that content secure.
I feel that an Australian citizen should not expect to be extradited to the USA for publishing information the USA would rather not be published. Still true even if he is an activist, would still be true even for someone genuinely trying to systematically destroy America and American values, if it’s just publication. Free speech etc.
For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the non-legalese summary of the accusation? I don’t know how I feel. The internet (telecoms in general) breaks borders and jurisdiction in ways that are not yet settled even in my own head.
Fleeing to an embassy definitely looked dumb to me at the time, and still does now. If someone is told to eat oranges, refuses because they are afraid oranges might be poisoned, volunteers to eat apples instead, runs away when someone tries to force them to eat an orange, then gets given a poisoned apple… I still don’t understand why people say this vindicates the original no-oranges stance.
Were Gandhi/MLK/Rosa Parks wrong when they made a point of breaking unjust laws and encouraging others to follow along?
Many liberals at the time thought yes - "the law being the law" and all that. It does sound like you're making the same argument they were?
Remind me about how Rosa Parks ran and hid?
Your question of right/"wrong" is a matter of morality, not legality. Stealing bread to feed a starving person might be morally good, but legally wrong, and nobody should expect to avoid legal consequences because of it.
In the case of civil disobedience, those involved do NOT attempt to flee from justice. Being arrested and facing the legal system is an integral part.
Assange may just get his chance to emulate Ghandi by spending years in prison...
You think Oskar Schindler was wrong not to hand himself in?
I do know that rule of law doesn’t function if everyone gets to decide for themselves what is and isn’t an unjust law, even though I can say with the benefit of hindsight that Rosa Parks deserved her Congressional Gold Medal, and that I hope I would’ve recognised the law as unjust at the time.
The reference that comes to mind is the four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and cartridge, which should be used in this order. Breaking unjust laws counts as #3, normal journalism is #1, Assange didn’t have the option of #2 with regard to the USA.
I'd have hoped so too, but from what you've written it sounds like you would have slotted in with the liberal whites who declared support-for-ending-segregation-in-theory but would also say that "this isn't the right way" or "this isn't the right time".
They made rather similar arguments to yours about the primacy of the rule of law as a principle.
Four boxes is a reason to take things slow, not a reason to say “no not like that” when the first steps have failed. And when the law bites someone for breaking it, if you think the law is wrong you should support the victim of the law; but that’s not the same as saying the law should not bite at all. A court case is by itself a powerful bite for most people, even without conviction.
I can also see that someone who is constantly being ground down and dehumanised by the law isn’t going to care about an end to the rule of law. I can’t expect someone in that situation to care if rule of law is damaged, because it never protected them in the first place. I suspect the feeling the law is a bludgeon rather than a shield is the cause of the current “ACAB” and “defund the police” slogans.
But is Assange even in that category? I don’t think so, so I do not feel confident predicting how I would vote if I was hypothetically on a jury. I do think the Guardian newspaper in the UK was in the “law is wrong” category, and that it was wrong for the UK government to destroy their copy of what Snowden gave them.
Like I said, complicated.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to. MLK had a specific, rather famous riposte to this attitude because of how common it was:
"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Emphasis mine.
But let me turn this around to demonstrate why such an ordering is desirable: lynchings in the USA disproportionately targeted African Americans. Those mobs were full of people who often claimed to be enforcing justice, but they were reaching straight for the 4th box.
And again, this is only even a consideration for people who care about rule of law. I can easily believe that many rights activists — women’s equality, race equality, Stonewall, independence movements in then-European colonies — had no possible reason to care about rule of law, because the law was never on their side. Anyone in that situation, I’d expect to reach for #4 first because it’s the only tool even available.
The difference between their civil disobedience and Assange's actions is that they took their punishment.
"Espionage" like publishing warcrimes.
"I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy"
Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to enforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes.
"being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did"
Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?
"Assange is an activist, not a journalist. He should not be treated as such"
Activists, journalists, and regular citizens should all be treated the same.
"is directly related to his own actions (e.g., fleeing to an Embassy)."
Yet given how the events turned out it seems that he was right. He was hiding in the embassy in fear that they would try to send him to the US.
If only we could all flee when faced with consequences for breaking laws that we disagree with.
"Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to 3nforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes."
There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and the breadth of information crossed a line between what was necessary for informing the public, versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world.
"Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?"
Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion.
These who can flee the overreach of foregin countries trying to enforce their unjust laws on them, do so.
"versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world."
Yeah, if a country commits horrible warcrimes then most of the world will not want to deal with them. It was not assange who was responsible for this but the US itself. One would not accuse a rape victim of ruining the reputation of their abuser.
"Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion."
Pray tell. If it is zero then you can just say so, and if you did try to expose warcrimes I will take it back.
Tell that to Snowden.
> There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and
Sorry, I have to: that's just, like, your opinion man. Have you ever thought that you might be wrong on this? How about the state stops doing the things they need to keep secret? You may call it naive, but some will call it being just, you know?
At one point, society deemed it acceptable to amputate various parts of a body as a form of punishment. Imagine you have a time machine and get to go watch a public torture and execution ca. 1200AD. Would you consider literally frying someone slowly into charcoal something you can "make a case" for? Why not? The social contract of there and then says it's fine?
There are places today where the social contract is still pretty much the same it was throughout human history: "we'll murder our way to any resources we need, and if you try to stop us you're dead (and if not, we might even share a bit)". Would you say this contract is good and just? Would you support it? And if not, why should we support yours, if it's precisely how your own "social contract" looks like to anyone that is not you?
Which part of the Afghan society voted you and your friends in? Why is your social contract important and just, yet theirs doesn't mean anything to you? Moreover, you went there specifically to break their contract: there's no way a full-scale invasion doesn't break at least the guarantee of single jurisdiction. So, your social contract - good; their - bad. Because terrorists?
On a related note: "society does and it has deemed" sounds to me like "and God said it was good". It's not an argument, it's an observation at best, but most often utterly empty. If you want to tell us that killing civilians with an attack helicopter should be kept under wraps, you should really give us the reasons why you personally think so. You really cannot speak for the "society", now can you? Or are you Borg?
How many members of Western society do you think would agree that war crimes should be routinely covered up? I'd guess very, very few.
Your question is abhorrently tasteless and irrelevant, which is about all I can say without violating the forum guidelines myself.
I am not sure why you think that this is the case given that the person that I am replying to literally worked for an organisation made for killing people and with a known record of torture and warcrimes. Would you welcome a proud ISIS fighter? I would not.
If they killed nobody then they just can say so. I just do not wish to talk to people who murdered people in illegal invasions.
> Assange is an activist, not a journalist.
Assange has broken two of the biggest stories of our era and literally hundreds of stories each of which would be a reputation-maker for a lesser individual.
Just because you don't like the truths that Assange reveals, doesn't mean he isn't a journalist.
> any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
Wikileaks tried to get cooperation from the US government to redact the sensitive parts. They refused to cooperate.
Your way would have meant nothing at all.
Can you explain what harm you believe these leaks caused, compared to their value in knowing that the US engages in war crimes and covers them up?
The US invasion of Afghanistan was a complete failure and one that allowed the actual guilty party, Osama Bin Laden, to escape.
The Taliban offered twice to give up Bin Laden but Bush refused even to discuss it with them. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
Both the CIA and the FBI concluded that no one in the Taliban had any idea of 9/11 before it happened, which is very logical, because you aren't successful at conspiracies by telling everyone.
And yet Bush invaded Afghanistan, because he needed to invade somewhere and couldn't invade the actual culprits, Saudi Arabia - Al Qaeda being founded, funded, manned and managed by Saudis.
---
Participating in a great war crime that killed hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people and completely failed militarily, economically, diplomatically, and strategically should not be a matter of pride.
Indiscriminate publishing. So you think the vetting done in partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times was not journalism and the employees of the NYT and WaPo who are now not journalists should be prosecuted along side him? That's pretty radical.
Many of the larger newspapers lean toward the former kind of "he's not one of us" and clearly hate him on a personal level, for many reasons one of which is that he de-values their prestige currency of the scoop by having achieved many orders of magnitude more important scoops than they reasonably ever dreamed of without having to have the crap beaten out of him as a young person joining a newsroom like they did. "My editor would never allow me to publish that even though it's completely true and backed with documents proving it." He doesn't have that problem.
There's no doubt that the litany of CIA, NSA & FBI openly employed as analysts are pushing a false narrative about it which is repeated often. We saw evidence of that kind of ting pretty clearly with the evidence free suppression of Hunter Biden's laptop contents as "Russian disinformation." Now we know it's real. The contents are minor league attempted sleaze but true. The suppression of it and the constant refrain of "Russians" is vastly more significant and pretty worrying.
People have be led to think of Wikileaks and Assange as "Anti-American." Pretty obvious that the Military would want to frame it that way. And it's reasonable not to like anti-american stuff. It's not so very far to go from there to thinking CIA lies are actually anti-american and reporting the truth about massive corruption and illegality in government is what has made the American experiment with democracy work and so is pro-american.
I don't know the extent to which the CIA and NSA etc actually use social media comments to push a narrative, I'd really, really hope it was none. Was there anything about that in Edward Snowden's revalations?
The modern corporate press is bad enough as it is. But do you really want to live in a country where legit journalists are jailed for publishing things the government does not want you to know about.
Just this week, state prosecutor blanked out almost all the names on Epstein flight logs. Fairly obvious its in the public interest to know which powerful people went there. But powerful people will try to protect other powerful people.
> However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage
Then you don't really believe that 99% of journalists are journalists, because they would disagree with you. I'm thankful that I don't live in the completely bowdlerized history that would have been the result if more journalists agreed with you.
> I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.
He exposed crimes committed by war criminals. "Criminal conspiracy" is disingenuous. Furthermore the "classified" label is defined by the organization that committed those crimes. Do you think murdering innocent civilians indiscriminately should be classified?
You seem to be arguing semantics more than establishing any sort of moral or ethical argument against what he did.
Shouldn't you be pushing for the prosecution of the Guardian journalist that published the encryption keys then? Not Assange who actively worked to get both press and government help to ensure safe disclosure.
It's funny to me that you were marauding around Afghanistan a couple of years ago and would use the word indiscriminate to describe Assange.
- Donate to WikiLeaks Official Defence Fund: https://defend.wikileaks.org/donate
- Sign petitions: https://bit.do/free-assange, https://bit.do/free-assange-uk (UK specifically)
- Contact politicians, unions, charities to inform and urge to act
- Inform yourself and others
- Social media: #ProtectJulian, #FreeAssange