Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles,and for the people's right to know.
As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.
Julian's freedom is our freedom.
[More details to follow]
Other URLs from threads we merged:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-25/julian-assange-releas...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/us/politics/assange-plea....
"Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."
that's rich coming from an informant.
You can't because no Afghan informant names were leaked.
Anyway, Wikileaks was urged to hide / censor the names because it put their lives in danger: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-wa.... Some were released, others containing most of the names were witheld by wikileaks and the partnered media outlets: https://www.wired.com/2011/02/wikileaks-book/, https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/701412231. Basically Wikileaks admitted fault and carelessness, and people died as a result: https://www.newsweek.com/taliban-says-it-will-target-names-e...
Who died? Who was even named?
> [...] the detailed logs had exposed the names of Afghan informants, thereby endangering their lives.
If many names were published, what is one name?
The information included FOB locations, contact reports, and secret and classified documents. releasing these documents without properly sanitizing the information put american service men in danger.
Without a doubt, leaking classified information puts thousands of lives at risk. Julian Assage is a criminal. At some point you stop being a whistle blower and you become a terrorist releasing compromising information on troop movements, informants, supply constraints, and readiness assessments. Julian Assage is a terrorist and i'm sure he won't live very long now that he is out. He's pissed off too many dangerous people.
I think the UK and US should abstain from criticising any countries' courts and justice system after that...
Couldn't disagree more. By this logic, no country should criticize any other country's courts and justice systems because they all have problems and massive miscarriages of justice.
Do we want more scrutiny and criticism or less? I think the world is better if the US and UK aggressively criticize and pressure other countries to improve AND ALSO everyone else criticizes abuses by the US and UK and pressures them to improve.
IMO that is a much better world than one where nobody is highlighting abuses or asking anyone else to improve.
What I am highlighting is the hypocrisy.
That strikes me as almost tautologically untrue. It simply doesn't seem possible that every decision about how much to highlight or criticize or ignore a country's abuse of their legal system could be based upon ulterior motives. It implies that there can never be genuine moral outrage, and honestly, for me, that just makes your whole point and outlook feel unfounded or uncommonly sad.
For example, how much of the criticism of Otto Warmbier's detention in North Korea is based upon ulterior motives? Is it all of it? Or is it like, 50% or 10% or less? And if it's a smaller amount, are you actually highlighting a hypocrisy that is meaningful enough for it to be the main thrust of your comment?
It feels like someone cooked you a gourmet meal and you said, "Food only ever tastes good or bad because of the salt."
But it is indeed questionable, why someone should submit to such pressure if there are no consequences in this case either.
‘Think’ is the operative word here. Assange would not have had a jury trial if extradited without the plea deal, and for a jury trial, mere opinion isn’t enough to convict
Err, yep. An effective symbol in all the ways I mentioned. Namely:
> securing legitimacy for their protracted judicial overreach
and
> deterring whistleblowers in the future
all while
> [avoiding] further diplomatic damage with one of its military and economic allies
Mission accomplished for the US "national security interest".
I'll be very honest. You have a bias. You will fit everything to that bias. You don't care about how the legal system works, or that the plea deal was a great deal for him compared to what they could have pursued. Note that when they got that guilty plea on ONE CHARGE which is inconsequential for him, they dropped a lot of other stuff.
You're kidding right? This has had a chilling effect on journalists and whistleblowers worldwide. A large part of Julian's support base are journalists, including many of those that won awards from the published leaks that got him in trouble.
Blow the whistle, and then maybe be in solitary for 5 years? An agent from a three letter agency shows up in the middle of your investigation, and reminds you about your life, family, and friends, and what it might be like to not see them for a very long time. Or maybe just don't blow the whistle.
> You don't care about how [...] the plea deal was a great deal for him compared to what they could have pursued
Not sure where you got that idea. As you imply, it's not anywhere near as bad as, say, Julian had been locked up in supermax until he died, but I think 5 years in solitary has secured enough deterrence. And the conviction is the veneer of justification that the US needs to avoid admonition for blatant and prejudiced torture, while enabling them to cease the ongoing diplomatic hassle (and negative press).
> I'll be very honest. You have a bias.
I'll be very honest. You have a bias. /s
Actually, being honest, I don't even know that you do. But believing it doesn't make it true, and saying it here doesn't really further the discussion.
I'll leave you to have the last word
I'm saying it's my personal opinion that his case is different from the many people I've read about who were railroaded by the criminal justice system, pressured to plead guilty and serve time. Typically those look very different from an espionage act case or compromised government emails, or whistleblower-like scenarios, or questions of press freedom, whatever. Often it looks more like some African American dude you've never heard of being wrongfully accused of a violent crime or drug offense on flimsy evidence.
I suppose? There's maybe some qualitative distinction to be made. But essentially I'd say that Assange was:
> railroaded by the criminal justice system, pressured to plead guilty and serve time.
Though time already served was factored into the sentencing. The pressure to plead guilty was the prospect of dying in solitary confinement.
> If not, we should delete the entire thread
TBF, I don't think 'I think Assange is guilty/not guilty' without any factual backup is really a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.
So sure, given you said "since 22 September", but with a huge embassy-shaped reason why they didn't let him out on bail a second time.
So from 22 September 2019 until his release now he was jailed in very strict conditions without having been convicted of anything, which to me is unacceptable whatever the extradition request situation. Especially now that we see that the instant he pleads guilty he is immediately freed...
What would you have done? "Oh, he ran away again, nothing we could have done, this was totally unforeseeable?"
Was he even wearing a tag on the first bail?
* at least, I assume those crowds were adoring rather than booing…
Revealing information about many murders is very different from doing murder.
Arguing that he hasn't personally killed anyone is not a strong rebuke against such allegations.
The risk inherent to collaborationism is also not one anyone but the informant must account for. Just as mercenaries operate in that same high-risk-reward / low-solidarity space, and accordingly join the cast of characters in war zones along with spies and informants without international sympathy.
The upcoming 2024 elections in the US find both parties trying to court subsets of the population who mistrust the government, so surely freeing Assange was done for realpolitik reasons.
It is not too late for Mike Pompeo to end up serving time. Let's hope that he is brought to justice ASAP.
At the time, the US Government was prohibited by law (Smith-Mundt Act of 1948) from propagandizing the American people. This was repealed by the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 which allows US Citizens to be exposed to propaganda.
Notably, one US Government strategy for propagandizing is to disseminate/test the stories in the British press and wait for them to be picked up by the US press. This strategy is still used even though the Smith-Mundt modernization act makes it less necessary for legal compliance.
Wikileaks revealed that the US Government withheld and classified information solely for propaganda purposes. In other words, a small group of people deceived the public so that a very expensive and consequential war they wanted to have would not be interrupted by common sense insights that the public would have had.
The intention of my comment was a plain statement of fact. You can’t have an unfair trial if you never have a trial.
Here's a slightly biased summary, but in this case I think the extreme outrage and bias is totally justified.
https://prospect.org/justice/julian-assange-espionage-act-19...
There is the deeply philosophical, mathematical (Bayesian estimates), legal and political question whether the fact that he admitted that he was guilty increases or decreases the probability/likelihood that he is actually guilty or not.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: we've had to ask you this multiple times before-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28885166 (Oct 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28319175 (Aug 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613766 (March 2021)
They know they cannot possibly openly share their opinions without the potential for severe penalty. This is exactly why Putin did what he did to Alexei Navalny; it reminds the populace to keep the opinions to themselves or die in the most horrible way possible.
While we’re at it: George W. Bush is a war criminal and should be tried at The Hague.
Obama was the best Republican president we’ve ever had.
See? No.
Using this logic we can say that Trump did what he did to Epstein?
Why, though? I didn't even think that was a thing in Britain, at least if you're not some very high risk criminal convicted of violent crimes, which I don't think he is? Regardless of what one think about what Assange did that just seems extremely unnecessarily cruel unless he was a threat to guards or other prisoners...
He exposed terrible things done by large powers, therefore he was persecuted absolutely.
I'm reading at some sites that this isn't really true and that he wasn't literally held in a 2x3m cell for 23 hours every day. Although it's not very clear what were the actual conditions.
edit: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/11/un-expert-to.... it's very vague and unspecific though..
Well, who is gong to stop them?
There are a lot of countries they have never published anything on. They have a smaller number of large leaks, so that is not necessarily out of the ordinary.
I think it is credible that Wikileaks were provided some documents from Russian state-sanctioned actors, who knew Wikileaks would publish them, and that the state-sanctioned actors did so to serve Russian interests. But the claim that Wikileaks as a whole is biased towards Russia doesn't seem likely.
Besides. The US and Europe and so have fairly free media, so the Wikileaks revelations reached a wide audience. Russia does not have free media, so if there were any leaks like it, it wouldn't reach the Russians as much.
Some people disagree with this, see https://x.com/joni_askola/status/1805628043760685317 and the whole thread
You can’t diminish facts depending on who is telling them - as long as these are facts.
Either he never had been handed any significant leaks on Russia, either he chosed to not publish them.
> Is it not enough that one state committed a crime and he reported it?
It depends on what "it" would be enough for... but if he indeed actively surpressed damaging info leaked to him on par with the stuff he has released, yeah, that makes matters complex.
Another criticism I've seen is that the leaks did not do any redaction whatsoever - even when it clearly pertained to informants in war zones. For that, if the allegations are true, my view is simple: you shouldn't do that. And if you set up an infrastructure for leaking, it is reasonable to assume that you're capable of handling such an important and obviously necessary step.
So "isn't it enough?" - no, it is more complicated than that.
WL continued to redact information and expended significant resources doing so. If this faltered at all, it was only after the organization came under attack from multiple governments and had to undertake its mission with fewer humans available to perform that level of review. While not ideal, WL does not deserve criticism for it as WL was essentially stabbed in the back by the NY Times and other corporate news outlets.
WL wanted to team up with major corporate news outlets to ensure solid redaction and stewardship. They cooperated once before governments told them to instead publish smear stories against Assange. The timing of the diplomatic cables which embarrassed HRC was not ideal, since it led the US center-left (neocons) to get on board more fully in the character assassination campaign against Assange than would have been possible if GWB and the Iraq/Afghan war corruption was the major scandal impacting the USG revealed by WL.
Never? I can easily come up with scenarios where I think you'd also make an exception; If he was a German journalist in 1940 and he discovered what really happened at concentration camps. I'd wager exposing those papers without any redaction would be acceptable.
If you agree, then the rest is just about how you weigh certain crimes by the government, how many and what kind of names you expose, etc.
There are legal minimums for how much time prisoners have to be allowed out of their cells but they're pretty low and not always followed
Because he fucked with the powerful.
> A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/18/julian...
"Willing to hand death lists to psychopaths" is the language of a hit piece so your link seems a little biased.
The article states that there were multiple journalists who could be called as witnesses, and could testify as to what happened, one way or the other.
I'm not saying it's false, I don't know, but the reporting on this has been hotly contested and there are charges of politicization all around.
(I don't buy the argument that it was actually that, but I'm willing to believe that he convinced himself that it was).
Agreed, it will be very interesting to see how this particular thing goes forward from today. Ideally, he would defend himself. I wouldn't hate to be proven wrong, as heroes are few and far between.
However, post-release, becoming a main character in a certain political branch of the podcast-sphere might allow him to ignore any of these annoying factual issues and do just fine.
/cynical
Assange had his own reality distorion field. Like inflating the number of servers wikileaks had, the numbers of active members, etc. etc. I could sense he and Daniel Schmidt aka Domscheid-Berg were making up things on the go, but I and others didn't speak up because we believed we were wrong (How could we doubt wikileaks in 2010ish?).
I personally met David Leigh during the offshore leaks investigation. Dumb & innocent as I was, I asked him right away about the password incident. For those who don't know: At first, the cables were only released in part and redacted, but there was an archive zip encoded with aes encryption and a very long password "ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#" that Leigh used as a headline in his book. Of course someone figured out it matched to that archive and so the cables became unredacted. Well, Leigh was really pissed about the question.
To his defense, Leigh said to me: he was under the impression that the password/archive were digital self destruct. I know, this does not make sense in any way and reality. But given how little Leigh knew about information security, encryption, tech in general - maybe he was told by Assange this as a prank, maybe he assumed it, who knows.
But boy, these people in that time - journos and hackers - back than, most of them were not thinking about any bad outcomes, it mostly about making a splash and spotlight.
And that was, is and will not be enough. I battled "on the hill" to protect a whistleblower and to block a release of information which may have resulted in people being prosecuted in countries with a death penalty. It cost me a lot, but if you're not willing to walk away from prestige and fame for other peoples lives, maybe you should find another job.
Unless you believe it to be so, it seems quite strange to assign any significant share of the blame to Assange for any hypothetical deaths that may occur as a result of him taking actions to reduce the US government's ability to kill people abroad, akin to blaming police who stop a hostage-taker because this might have prompted the hostage-taker to kill the hostage but holding the hostage-taker himself blameless.
Your argument appears to boil down to the idea that two wrongs make a right.
> Another standard way for explaining this is that when judging something, one ought to account for the actual power dynamics between the conflicting parties.
I was ready to get all riled up in response, thinking that Assange had much more power here than the Afgan translators.
> The problem is, prejudice, classism, and bigotry tend to distort what people think and perceive as the actual power dynamics, hence long and controversial news threads like these.
I am settled down now. Yeah, this is not an easy, I appreciate anyone identifying the complexity.
Does the bad entity that is doing bad things have a right to do bad things? No
Does a man exposing the bad entity have a right to do bad things? Also no
Assange seemed virtuous at first but it appears he pivoted into an agenda-driven propagandist after Wikileaks grew more successful and he realized what could be done with it.
Or would it be a classic case of “it’s okay when my guy does it, but people I don’t like aren’t allowed to”
Here's when their key expired in 2007: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks_talk:PGP_Keys
From another below:
vikingerik
A canary goes something like "This website has not received or acted on any government orders to disclose or modify or remove material." When they ever do, then they remove that notice. The government enforcement usually includes a gag order prohibiting the target from saying that they're under orders, so the intent is that you can infer government gag pressure by the canary having been removed. Wikileaks used to have such a notice and no longer does, so we assume government enforcement is why.
These days Snowden is screaming into the void even as concerns HN readers, never mind that he was completely right at great personal cost the first time.
I still trust Moxie, and Carmack/Palmer/etc. seem to be taking a stand, there are others, but it’s getting thin.
The users could then decide to jump ship but realistically they won't.
Ten years ago it was a scandal that big tech interacted with the surveillance state at all: Zuckerberg drove an initiative around cross-DC encryption at ruinous expense because of the mere accusation that the NSA might have a tap.
Today they’re giving us the finger with NSA board members. It’s flagrant, arrogant, and anti-hacker anything: you will do nothing, because you can do nothing.
The vassalization of these companies was imminent, and now, it is complete.
I’m sad because so many of my personal heroes, the hackers I’ve admired, are just on board past any possible argument that it’s in the public welfare.
I learn in the same month that OpenAI is satisfying their voracious appetite for data with an NSA partnership as I do that the old-school FB infra braintrust is taking the money.
I’m embarrassed by all of this. I want to be remembered as part of something else.
Why can't social media platforms implement warrant canaries per user profile?
True patriots.
The insurance file also got changed out at some point as the hash changed.
Never understood why gag orders don't just say "You can't say you received this order. Oh and by the way if we find you removed a canary, we'll just write that up as you having said you received this order".
Because the point of a canary is for it to be known beforehand. So the government surely knows about any canary too.
There must be some backwards definition of "speech" here which doesn't include all conveying of information (such as by removing previously published information), which makes it work, at least in the US (?)
I’m no expert, and I’m sure there are nuances, but the broad strokes behind the design of these canaries are that it’s harder for the government to compel an action than to forbid one.
That's simply not true, Mueller investigated Assange, but declined to prosecute due to lack of evidence that he was complicit or culpable in any crimes. He also didn't totally clear wikileaks or Assange, but noted there were 'factual uncertainties'.
I find it nauseating that Assange is being valorized as some champion of free speech/journalism, but with respect to Mueller, Assange was far from being a 'villian'.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/new-muelle...
That is not at all a conclusion you can safely take from the Mueller report. Which makes me question whether you actually read it or you consumed it entirely via 2nd hand media reports like Buzzfeed and WaPo.
There is no evidence he was colluding with them, he had encrypted conversations with a GRU agent who had concealed his identity as a hacker, contents of the messages which were never revealed.
Even if he eventually did learn the source why should Wikileaks care where a goldmine of documents comes from? As long as they are authentic.
There’s more than enough motivation for Wikileaks to leak docs by a figurehead of the post 9/11 nation security state, regardless of RU or Trump or petty politics.
I’m sure if the NSA sent him documents about some geopolitical matter they’d leak them too.
> and then tried to blame Seth Rich
He never once directly implicated Seth Rich, the worst thing he did was during a TV interview made a reference to Seths murder and then merely declined to talk about it more:
>> 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". Subsequent statements by WikiLeaks emphasized that the organization was not naming Rich as a source.
He also claimed he had physical proof of an inside job, which is entirely possible he was completely taken by the GRU agent who manufactured plausible sounding proof and Assange bought it. These agents are extremely clever and capable, and Assange was in a very poor mental state at the time.
His only true ‘crime’ is not talking about Seth after to appease crazies on the left who see RU conspiracy around every corner nor tamed the right looking to fan the flames on US gov conspiracy theories.
but let’s be honest, that wouldn’t have stopped the hyper partisans on either side. They don’t care either way.
All they want is black/white villains.
I do agree that it's not constructive to say "he's a villain" but it seems the prevailing trend is "he's a hero" and he is most definitely not a hero.
the vox article says one contradicting thing after another. "shamir got all the cable leaks... when shamir asked for the cable leaks he was denied" uh? "never leaked russian documents ... assange first contacted him to leak Russian documents in russia" uh?
I won't even click the second one.
Those aren't quotes from the article and there is no reasonable way to read those contradictions from what's being said.
You seem to be really badly misunderstanding this specific passage:
>"Shamir was also a longtime friend of Julian Assange, who tasked him with helping to disseminate WikiLeaks documents in his native Russia in early 2010.
>“Shamir has a years-long friendship with Assange, and was privy to the contents of tens of thousands of US diplomatic cables months before WikiLeaks made public the full cache,” James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer, wrote at the Guardian the next year. “Shamir aroused the suspicion of several WikiLeaks staffers — myself included — when he asked for access to all cable material concerning ‘the Jews,’ a request which was refused.”
>The first thing Shamir did with the documents was hand some off to Russian Reporter magazine, a Kremlin-friendly newsweekly."
I.e. Shamir, a Wikileaks employee, had access to some leaked US diplomatic cables. He was refused additional access. No contradiction.
This is also the only time that Assange's early relationship with Shamir was ever mentioned (read the article for yourself, find where I'm wrong) and note how it mentions leaking US documents in Russia.
There is no mention anywhere in the article of Shamir "leaking Russian documents in Russia", or what Assange "first contacted" Shamir for. There is also NOWHERE in the article that claims that Assange "never leaked Russian documents".
You're free to disagree with the article, but you're absolutely incorrect and completely misleading about its contents.
a. Piss of both of the most capable countries capable of spying and "mysteriously" bumping people off, or
b. Accept a deal with the devil to not die, and make up any excuse afterwards to justify your actions?
The US unfortunately isn't a very nice or fair country to piss off when they go about bullying (even Assange's treatments have been anything but "fair and above board"), so I'm not sure he ever even had a chance. (Assuming he wanted to live, of course.)
Your language also doesn't allow for the fact that although his actions might have helped Russian intelligence, it may well not be that he sat down at some point and explicitly said "right, how can I help the Russian government?" There's some fantastic literature about how well-meaning people can get dragged in some terrible directions, like Into That Darkness about Franz Stangl, the commandant at Treblinka. I'd encourage you to rethink the way you phrase things like this if you want to have substantive debate. If you just want to shout at people, fill your boots, but I'm not going to engage with it.
And then I just saw this... wow! I am so glad to be wrong, to see my pessimistic side be completely wrong. Julian is free!
Invariably well-informed and well-spoken, even if somewhat self-centered or arrogant at times.
For him and his family, Im glad hes free.
Five years seems a pretty harsh sentence for publishing leaked information about governments behaving badly - isnt that what good journalists are supposed to do ?
People occasionally talk about this tactic as being a bit of a morally grey zone but under cover journalism with an intention of leaking information (if they get their hands on it) do happen from times to times.
I get the feeling if they'd joined the Swedish military and leaked national secrets, things would not have worked out so nicely for them.
That's what Assange was accused of, not being in the military, but actively conspiring with the leaker to steal the documents rather than merely receiving the leaked documents.
...but when handed documents from one another foreign government refuses to publish them
and then it becomes obvious that the leaks were targeting liberal Swedish politicians facing election versus conservative candidates favored by that same one particular other foreign government...
I don't understand why people don't see wikileaks as anything other than a proxy Russian foreign intelligence operation.
Apparently Wikileaks were given documents that had already leaked elsewhere before and refused to publish them because their purpose is novel leaks, not repeating leaks from elsewhere. That has been spun into a narrative that they refused leaks because they are biased, without much evidence.
When there are a lot of disingenuous arguments like this being made to discredit someone that turn out to be unreasonable once you dig a little deeper, like we see with Wikileaks and Assange, it generally is a strong suggestion someone is trying to manipulate people into believing a false narrative.
You know that Russia isn't happy with someone when they end up dead. If the Russian files that Wikileaks published didn't make Russia happy, Assange would be in a box right now, and not headed home.
The result from the political fallout was creation of one of the four constitutional laws that exist in Sweden, the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act of 1949.
One result of that is that if a military personal were to leak information to the press, the journalist would by law be forbidden to ever disclose who that person was. The journalist can be sent to jail if they just happen to disclose it, and must take active steps to prevent it.
The publisher themselves must have the intention to inform the public. If that is true, then the constitution allows the publisher to ignore any other Swedish law like national secret classification for the act of publishing (explicit right given in the constitution).
Legal professors were discussing the situation back during the initial periods when the leaks occurred that Julian Assange now has plead guilty for. The conclusion was that he can not get charged for disclosing national defense information. The constitution do not allow that. He could be charged for conspiring to steal documents (ie, hacking), if the original whistle blower did not have access to the documents in the first place and had material help from the journalist or if they paid the whistle blower to steal the documents (proportional to that action). Conspiracy charges are quite messy however, and since military personal are under different legal laws than civilians, the consensus was unclear if such conspiracy charges is possible, and what if any punishment is available for the courts.
Maybe things are different in Sweden, but violating an employee contract seems like a civil matter, not criminal, which is hugely different.
We argue semantics around incidents like this when it comes down to: people doing bad stuff and trying to hide it.
If anything, these laws are completely broken. People should never be punished for exposing bad actors, period. Imagine if that ever happened. Maybe governments and companies would think twice before acting illegally/immorally.
Governments do not want these incidents to happen because they want to keep doing it in secrecy and they enact laws to make uncovering these schemes illegal. Arguing if that's illegal or not is missing the whole point. It will never be legal in a corrupt society like ours.
He directly participated in stealing a bunch of classified information with Manning.
It only ends the argument of whether or not there is still a legal case against him.
I've always found this claim to be extremely shrill — and doubly so now. This is the same country that just agreed to let him plead guilty in exchange for, essentially, time served (~5 years). It's also the same country whose president commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence down to 7 years.
Your basic claim is not an unreasonable one: people plead guilty because they'd rather take the deal than face the possibility of a worse outcome at trial. But what will it take to stop the rhetoric about the U.S. wanting to lock him up and throw away the key?
> It's also the same country whose president commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence down to 7 years.
The same country who may have a different president come November with a history of calling the Assange case a priority.
Why would anyone feel safe relying on the luck of the draw of the president at any given time to get out of what was an initial utterly extreme sentence?
> But what will it take to stop the rhetoric about the U.S. wanting to lock him up and throw away the key?
When the US stops sentencing people to 35 years like with Chelsea Manning's initial sentence, and there's been a long period without e.g. illegal rendition flights, when Guantanamo Bay has been closed for a few decades and no new camps have taken it's place etc. Maybe when a couple of generations have passed, in other words.
Actually acknowledging and prosecuting the war crimes that were exposed would be a good start.
It’s a difficult area of research, but there are various law schools[0] and charities[1] trying to help people who took pleas because they feared a harsher sentence if they couldn’t adequately defend themselves.
0 - https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/NRE.... 1 - https://innocenceproject.org/
People have breaking points.
and a good thing that was too, exposing our government's wrongdoing and lies
What exactly of value was exposed?
And then you'll enjoy more experiences of aggressively-expansionist governments, Houthi-like groups, and the equivalent of Haitian gangs and Sudanese militias, all over the world, fighting to advance their leaders' own narrow parochial desires wherever they think they can get away with it. They'll be using WhatsApp, Starlink, and cheap drones in their efforts, and enlisting like-minded allies.
You'll find yourself looking back wistfully on the days of the Pax Americana, which for nearly 80 years has maintained a flawed but workable rules-based international order. That's even granting that the U.S. has done some bad things — on occasion, very bad things — in furtherance of its own perceived interests and those of some of its powerful interest groups.
"Freedom" — to be ruled by armed gangs battling for territory (Haiti, Sudan)? To be imprisoned or even killed for disagreeing with the ruling regime (Iran, Russia, China, North Korea)? Or for not wearing the proper head covering as a woman (Iran)? To be poisoned or thrown out a window because you're on the autocrat's shit list? That's certainly "worse," but it's hardly "material conditions."
If you want real "worse material conditions," ask yourself whether North Korean commoners think that their "freedom" makes up for the deprivations that they endure.
The U.S. has been the de facto world policeman for going on 80 years now. Not entirely, but on the whole, the world has been the better for it. Sometimes police make mistakes. Sometimes police are venal or corrupt or vicious. But a world without police would be Haiti, writ large.
Those are all conditions that exist in the current state of the world, so clearly US hegemony doesn't prevent them. The US intervenes only where it serves its interests to do so, and happily cosies up with equally vicious regimes (e.g. Saudi Arabia) when that serves their interests.
I'll take a world where my country has to pay for our own defence, even if it means higher taxes for me, over one where US personnel can kill someone like me and the US will give them a getaway flight with no repercussions.
By that reasoning, murder, robbery, etc., all exist everywhere, so clearly the existence of police forces doesn't prevent them — so sure, let's get rid of the police and other law-enforcement agencies. (Or more succinctly: Half a loaf ....)
> I'll take a world where my country has to pay for our own defence, even if it means higher taxes for me, over one where US personnel can kill someone like me and the US will give them a getaway flight with no repercussions.
If you can make such a world happen, you're of course free to do so. Until then, you might consider acknowledging that the U.S. — for its own mixed reasons, to be sure — provides the key support for an international rules-based order that, on the whole (and with tragic exceptions), has allowed billions of people to live better lives than they would have otherwise.
Right, to justify police forces you have to actually show that they don't cause more crime than they prevent, and by a big enough margin to make it worth the trouble.
> you might consider acknowledging that the U.S. — for its own mixed reasons, to be sure — provides the key support for an international rules-based order that, on the whole (and with tragic exceptions), has allowed billions of people to live better lives than they would have otherwise.
Every gang chief or warlord (including some of the examples you specifically picked out as bad places to live) makes that kind of argument.
1. There is no other country (not even close) that could be trusted with that amount of power (especially considering size)
2. Held up the (illusion of) “neutral” international institutions like the UN. They barely worked in the presence of a “benevolent” power, and will probably completely lose relevance to anarchy and the “right of the stronger” (on local levels), shall the US hegemony subside.
Then on the other hand the US has started undermining their own most important principles:
1. 1971: Removing the gold convertability from the $
2. 9/11: Starting to spy on each and everyone, eastern germany/soviet-style
3. Removing personal freedoms during COVID (not as severe as other countries, though)
If it weren’t for silicon valley, the us would already look like a stagnating state where the economy is mainly driven by government spending. The problem is larping EU socialism will only yield even worse results in the US, since the government seems to be even less efficient.
On the other hand the US is also one of the few countries that have turned around non-violently in the past. Attractiveness for international talent is still immense. So with a few adjustments I’m pretty sure it could be turned around
I would go even further and blame the state of the developing countries on the west too, because their selfish competetivly oriented globalisation left them as vasals since the end of colonization.
This is actually the sadest part, what will remain of this hegemony: a world order made by and for the corrupt. Maybe china makes it better since they resisted IMF, WHO, etc but i have my doubts.
Not that the United States isn't flawed or doesn't do hypocritical or unilateral diplomacy (Israel or anything related to communism, & I guess installing/supporting dictators that support US interests), but is it too much to ask if you can provide me a few examples where the US acted like an exploitative colonial power that hindered developing countries (at least in the past 80 years)?
It looks like china is trying the same thing the west did after WW2: debt trap diplomacy. [0]
The linked article focuses alot on china in a negative way but the origin of debt trap diplomacy began with the bretton wood institutions (IMF, WHO, world bank) in 1944 and resulted in the debt crises of 1980s [1,2] and the globalized developing countries. These institutions where handing out massive loans meant for development but bound to sometimes very harsh economic reforms [3,4]. The effect was not the promised growth but the debt crises and the (imo intentional) economic opening of resource rich but otherwise poor countries to the well developed economies of the west.
Afaik the US did not directly acted as an expoitative power but hindered developing countries as a proxy for multinational corporations. Like for chiquita banana in latin america or for shell in nigeria [5,6].
This story is decades old, explains well the current corrupt-but-useful leaders all over the southern world and i dont even have to go into the petrodollar and its meaning for small oil exporting countries. The US/the west is imo very responsible for the global state of affairs and the gain of power/wealth is the only explaination for the development we took. This is my bridge to exploitation but propably not the smoking gun you where looking for. This topic is so vast to just focus on a single country.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-trap_diplomacy
[1] https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/bitstream/handle/10625...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_debt_crisis
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_adjustment
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20100226180656/http://www.africa...
[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2010/12/10/how-shell-infil...
Not sure where you live, friend. And perhaps America never should have attempted to be world’s policeman. Neither an international awareness nor an appreciation for the subltiew of diplomacy have never been America’s strong suit.
But rest assured it is tired and over such a role, with two plus decades of military veterans having seen up close and personally how ugly the world can be in places.
Perhaps you are merely a troll but I’m guessing you have seen the most recent trendlines on this planet. They don’t look good. And it appears will get exactly what you seek.
Enjoy…
I realize that other countries act similarly in terms of foreign policy when they can. Germany hasn't exactly covered itself in glory either. I'm not just referring to the Nazi era. But I am not at all as pessimistic about the multipolar future that probably lies ahead of us as some others are.
> "There were so many people who were part of this process, and what it showed was people from both sides of politics, for different reasons, arrived at the same place," Mr Joyce said on Tuesday morning.
> "I don't agree with what he did, and I won't, but it wasn't illegal," Mr Joyce said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-25/great-encouragement-j...
> Former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer says "most people" in Australia do not see Assange as a journalist.
> “We can now… say he was guilty of a very serious offence," he tells the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
> “Most people in Australia would agree it’s not appropriate to steal national security information and publish it - governments have to have some degree of privacy in their communications."
> He adds: “I don’t think many Australians have sympathy for him. Just because he’s Australian doesn’t mean he’s a good bloke.”
If you look at the totality of the BBC's coverage, it's clear that the general consensus is that he did a good thing for humanity that hurt some powerful people, and he's been unjustly punished for it, but that there is a small cohort of people (including some very vocal, powerful ones who get headlines) who disagree with that opinion and think that he did something negative and was justly punished for it.
The trouble is that when you summarise that argument, you lose the "general consensus" and "small cohort" bits and you just get the two points, which together make a rather different story.
The Downer family have recent history in misjudging what "most people" in significant chunks of the Australian public think. Chunks, for example, like the electorate they're trying to be members of parliament in.
Sure, a "journalist" is somebody who works for a mega-corporation, preferably owned by a billionaire with political ambitions, and reports whatever the party that controls his outlet considers to be fit to print at the moment.
> he was guilty of a very serious offence
When somebody is caught on camera robbing or stabbing, the "journalists" always insist he is "allegedly" guilty until the court decision is made. These rules, however, do not apply to people who publish dirt on politicians.
> would agree it’s not appropriate to steal national security information and publish it
"Journalists" have done it many times though. And got prestigious awards for it. Of course, the situation is different here - his wasn't approved for anybody powerful and didn't benefit any billionaire with political ambitions, so no awards for him.
I guess it is to be expected from a person whose power is threatened by people like Assange.
At least the PM seems like a more sensible person.
One of the rare moment's I agree with Barnaby Joyce.
(It is probable that if those politicians had been particularly in touch with the views of Australians, they wouldn't have ended up in exile!)
> 79 per cent of people said the Biden administration should drop its pursuit of Assange. Only 13 per cent disagreed. Eight per cent were unsure
Who are those? I can't think of any Australian politicians who are prominent in UK discourse, on Assange or any other topic.
Australia has been a loyal US ally historically and so our politicians avoid criticizing US as not to jeopardize that relationship. It's been a thorny issue in the relationship though as it has made our politicians look weak/cowardly whenever the topic of Assange was approached.
Where I live (way out in the boonies), many people have told me that they have a lot of admiration for him. In some spaces in Melbourne, he seems to almost have a cult following.
I am sure he has his detractors in Australia but, so far, I have either not met any in person or they have kept their opinions to themselves.
I think politicians are more likely to dislike him than the general public does, which makes sense; after all, he targeted politicians and policy decisions.
Does Australia actually exile people? I thought that was done away with long ago. If they are wanted for crimes in Australia then they would be extradited from the UK. Even informal exile only normally happens between countries that do not have extradition treaties. I suspect these politicians are simply expatriates living in the UK for professional or tax reasons.
Sometimes when a public figure fucks up their career in their home country, they'll move to another country where people don't know about the fuck-up.
This isn't a literal exile, it's figurative.
When the people whose specific jobs and lives revolve around the topic have a contrary opinion you should probably take more seriously. Those who don't and elevate their opinions are what we call cranks.
Further, perhaps it is unwise to place much faith in the relevance of formal education to matters of complex political and technical insight deeply mired in populist information warfare and wiser to consider education level to be generally quite independent of formal training in most cases?
It's not a superior or single view per se, but it's probably a set of closely aligned views tempered by a greater breadth of thinking in terms of not being totally stuck in an isolate ghetto spacetime wallow / populist moshpit.
If that graffiti were written in Australia, I think it would be far more likely written as 'Aussie hero'.
I think that's because "Oz" comes from "Aussie", which Americans mispronounce (they say something like "ossy" rather than "ozzy").
It's uncommon for Australians to say "Oz" in my experience, but it's still definitely a thing (albeit mostly in ads/marketing rather than daily speech). And even the ones who never say it still know what it means.
I don't know what people say in the UK because I have never been there.
Btw, I agree with you that US Americans often mispronounce 'Aussie', but I can understand why, if they encountered the word in print before hearing it spoken.
I definitely don't think that is always a positive thing but I struggle to think of anything which Assange leaked which I really disagree with. Probably some parts of cablegate should not have come out as they were very "inside baseball" talk between diplomats and were too easily construed negatively in the media, though, I think for the most part our allies realized that they said the same things about us in their private communications and there was really no major fallout from it.
Now, all that said, Assange did break the law and I don't think there should be no consequences for that but the way the US went about this (across 3 different presidencies) is just terrible. Nudging and cajoling and perhaps berating our Swedish allies to jin up a "rape" case against him so he could be extradited from the UK to Sweden and then obviously to the US, and, denying that we were doing that was just dirty on our part. I'm sure if there is a cablegate 2.0 we'd find we did some fairly terrible stuff to persuade our Swedish allies to prosecute this.
Ultimately the simple reason I think there is near positive reaction to this news is that everyone understands that even given what he did, it does not merit almost 15 years of prison in some really terrible conditions. Should he have walked away free? Maybe, maybe not but he should have had a fair trial with fair charges and faced a fair jury and he never got any of that, he was effectively extrajudicially jailed.
Could he have had that if he turned him self when he was originally charged?
He was accused of espionage, which is in itself incredibly alarming, given that he's a journalist. The law he's being charged under comes from WWI, which was a low point in the history of freedom of speech in the US, and that law is most likely unconstitutional. The law would not allow Assange to argue any sort of public interest defense. Probability of conviction would be near 100%. The US government conspired to assassinate Assange when he was in the Ecuadorian embassy, and many American officials, from the president on down, have denounced Assange, called him a terrorist, called for his execution, etc.
The United States is claiming the right to prosecute any journalist of any nationality anywhere in the world if they publish information that is classified in the US.
Dunno if there was any "nudging and cajoling and berating", but from all I saw, those Swedish women (yes, plural) seemed to legitimately have a case. As I understood it, the case was dropped only because there seemed no chance to get him to Sweden to stand trial.
So whether he should have had no punishment at all, or sixteen consecutive lifetimes of hard labour, for spying, he's sure no saint -- and quite possibly deserved jail time -- in other ways.
Again, consensually, he did this without wearing a condom.
However, under Swedish law, that is rape and the charge is against the customer (not the provider).
So, yes, the women agreed on the facts of the case (Assange showed up and we had sex without a condom) but it was entirely consensual though illegal.
While I do have some understanding of why Sweden has a law like this (to encourage condom use) I don't think it fits anyones conventional definition of rape and under normal circumstances this would not be an offense that the Swedish government would be extraditing someone for (it's a nominal fine in most cases).
Please if I misunderstood something let me know, because, it has been years since I significantly researched this and it's one of the most politicized cases in memory.
Prostitutes have nothing to do with it; of the two women who reported him at least one was a political activist who was, AFAICR, originally supposed to guide him around at the organisation(s?) where he was to be a guest speaker, but ended up hosting him in her home. (I got the impression she was, at least originally, pretty much a groupie of the romanticized image of him.) The other one may have been a friend or acquantiance of the first, or otherwise a "similar type". Far from prostitutes.
> However, under Swedish law, that is rape and the charge is against the customer (not the provider).
> So, yes, the women agreed on the facts of the case (Assange showed up and we had sex without a condom) but it was entirely consensual though illegal.
Been a while since I lived in Sweden, but I go back there every year and nobody I know has ever mentioned any such bizarre law. It would also most likely have been mentioned in news media in neighbouring countries, so I'd probably know about it even without going there, if it existed.
> While I do have some understanding of why Sweden has a law like this (to encourage condom use)
It doesn't. You have been utterly duped.
> Please if I misunderstood something let me know, because, it has been years since I significantly researched this and it's one of the most politicized cases in memory.
Getting stuff so utterly wrong, it's really rather hard to believe you ever "significantly researched" anything about this, because the picture you're painting has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth. (Well OK, sure, for all I know he may have also gone to prostitutes, but that has nothing to do with the rape allegations.)
Your "research" sounds as if it must have come directly from some kind of cross between an Assange fan site and Incel HQ. Just try the other Wiki in stead -- -Pedia, not -Leaks. They're usually at least somewhere close to the truth.
To me it's a very bad smell when you pretend to fight for press freedom and democratic values, but never say anything bad about regimes where presidents-for-life are extinguishing the free press and poisoning opposition leaders.
It's like these all the crazy conspiracy theories that flourished online during the last decade, that are somehow never hurting Russian interests...
But I must be paranoid, right?
Imagine you're a Russian and you have information about the government that you want to leak. Would you give it to a primarily English speaking organization, with no Russian speakers on staff, that nobody in your community has ever heard of and has been alleged to have ties to Russian intelligence for years?
Or would you give it to a Russian speaking organization that has connections in Russia that could potentially help you if things get bad?
The US, the pariah state? In terms of geopolitics? In terms of economy? There's just no argument that could be made that that really is the case. What global players does Russia have any significant influence over? Who do they have substantial leverage over? A best some other pariah states. Now answer the same for the US. Not even in the same league.
China, N. Korea, probably Vietnam, India'll listen to them, possibly more in s.e. Asia, and they're expanding their influence in Africa (by supplying mercenary armies).
They play the game differently than the US (at the very least: with other countries), but that does not make them a 2nd rate power.
Russia is at the mercy of China. China can operate independently of them, same as India. They are trading partners, but it's a very asymmetrical relationship.
> N.Korea, probably Vietnam, [...] possibly more in s.e. Asia, and they're expanding their influence in Africa (by supplying mercenary armies).
As with all the countries they do have like some (though debatably not substantial) leverage over, they're in the global south, and most certainly not 1st rate powers.
Now, yes. Back when this happened, it was still closer to the other way around. (Well OK, China wasn't exactly "at the mercy" of Russia, but Russia was still generally regarded as the senior of the two. Perhaps mostly out of old habit.)
In my view: Putin is a patient, reasonable strategist who is trying to defend his country against significant aggression by US Neocons. US Neocons do not respect the maturity and sacrifice that led to the de-escalation of the cold war, and they want to incite conflict with Russia both out of ignorance of history and payments from Ukrainian oligarchs -- don't forget much of the wealth of the USSR was captured by a small number of oligarchs -- arguably including Putin -- and they don't all want Putin having all the power.
To be clear, the payments are not always direct, but across the US political spectrum there are many people who have set up shop as gatekeepers. Rudy Giulliani, Hunter Biden, and many many more are able to easily make millions a year doing the bidding of various eastern bloc billionaires. We are seeing the policy impact of their work at play in Ukraine now.
I'm skeptical of this argument, as a hot war or claiming of Russian territory is off the cards. Not just because of the nuclear deterrent, but because it's not really in the interests of any other country to engage in hot wars. Proxy wars between US and Russia have been a thing for a long time though. In reality, what is transpiring between Russia and the developed world is a battle for political influence, and they have, at least under their current right wing default, no interest in amenable relations with the west. And this is not because there isn't anything to be gained (particularly economically), but out of spite and injured national pride. A radical change of leadership would be great for the Russian people, its economic development, and also the border security of its neighbors.
Japan thrived post WWII because they accepted their position and made the best of the situation. And in spite of it's economic reputation, Japan is an excellent place to live, in terms of amenities. You pretty much have to be homeless on purpose. Though I think they are overworked (but much could be said of many Asian countries). Russia lost the cold war, through and through, but it still wants to live in the past, and drag everyone else down with it. The Russian leadership could just not start wars, and go back to economic development, and just in general have a less combative relationship with the rest of the world... but I'm not holding my breath.
The US will fight Russia this way till the last Ukrainian. It's a cynical policy and I feel badly for all of the people whose hearts are moved by the heroism of those in Ukraine fighting for their country. Alas the war was started by the US and the US does not care at all about Ukrainian suffering or Ukrainian lives. The whole project is just supposed to be a way for the US to harm Russia in a cost effective and politically feasible way.
Given that Ukraine was already quite openly invaded by Russia in 2014 -- these were, by definition, defensive moves.
Still doesn't make an actual invasion more plausible in any real way. This is something that happens all the time. Jets from both sides fly near China and North Korea all the time. Again, their sovereignty remains and...
> was part of the strategy of trying to push the line further East
... their borders remain unchanged. As Russia (and the US) well knows, you can't change borders without sending the tanks in. And as the US has learnt the hard way, even then, it's probably not worth it.
Yeah, I remember the big headlines about how Hunter Biden was going to build a huge luxury hotel in Moscow... Sheesh.
But hey, thanks for demonstrating how people who exhort others to listen to that asshole Mearshimer generally tend to come off as Putler trolls.
- Michael Flynn founded the Flynn Intel group in 2014 and was hired by Turkish interests, Russia Today, and is alleged to have worked on behalf of other Russian lobbyists.
- Rudy Giuliani founded Giuliani Partners and had clients in Ukraine, Qatar and Venezuela.
- The Clinton Foundation accepted numerous "donations" for alleged philanthropic work. Yet the donations dried up and the foundation dramatically shrunk after HRC lost in 2016.
- John Podesta founded the Podesta group which did lobbying work for Ukraine and Saudi Arabia
- Newt Gingrich has consulted for a variety of foreign entities.
- Bob Dole consulted for Taiwan
- John Bolton had a consulting firm that was hired by interests desiring Ukraine to join NATO
- Corey Lewandowski's firm sought foreign clients
- Paul Manafort did extensive consulting for Ukraine's pro-Russian political party
- Tony Podesta (John's brother) did extensive consulting for foreign governments
- Richard Gephardt has consulted for Turkish interests, among others.
- Jared Kushner had numerous foreign deals in play when he was a US official
FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act) was intended to promote transparency in these kinds of dealings. Of the people listed above, only Flynn, Manafort, the Podesta brothers and Dole registered under FARA.
The rest tread on the very large gray area of influence peddling. The thing to keep in mind is that all of the people involved in these kinds of schemes are easily bought for very little money when dealing with state-actor level budgets.
As you can see, the graft spreads across both parties and is generally concentrated a few degrees away from the ones holding current office. The Clinton Foundation was particularly ingenious and had the 2016 election gone differently would likely today be among the nation's most influential and financially successful NGOs.
Oh, so _you_ have an open mind, I see. You must be a free thinker, free from propaganda and bias.
proceeds to parrot Putin talking points
Give us a break.
I'm not a fan of Putin but he is a superb strategist and a clear communicator who has sadly outwitted US leaders over the past decades, resulting in the US wasting a lot of money and keeping its eye off the ball strategically in other areas of the world.
In the same way that lobbyists are why soft drinks in the US contain harmful ingredients like corn syrup, lobbyists have led the US to spend a lot of money on pointless, strategically stupid wars that have weakened the US tremendously relative to its adversaries.
So let's see, how was Russia threatened? Who on earth was going to invade Russia? They have enough nukes to destroy the planet. They were supposed to be the 2nd military power after the US. There already are 3 NATO countries right on the border with Russia, so if the invasion was about preventing NATO getting too close, it was a failure before it even started.
It's crazy the amount of mental gymnastic Putin apologists have to come up with.
So, if it's not about Russia being invaded, what else was so unacceptable with Ukraine not being barred from joining NATO?
Well, maybe, I know it's crazy, but bear with me, maybe, Putin had great plans for Ukraine and Russia, which would have fallen appart if Ukraine suddenly could not be invaded.
But that's too simple, right? It must be about US agression, CIA biolabs, nazi organ-trafficking pedophile satanists, combat pigeons, and Russia survival.
Seriously, what would have happened if Putin didn't invade Ukraine? Nothing. Russia would be fine. But Ukraine refused Putin's ultimatum to sign a treaty disallowing it to ever join NATO. Of course they refused. How could a sovereign country accept it? I mean, if you had a neighbor, already grabbing some of your garden, which insisted you agree to never get a bodyguard, would you accept it? Russia: WE DEMAND YOU STAY WEAK AND VULNERABLE TO AN INVASION. What a joke.
So of course Ukraine refused, even though it wasn't even in the process of joining NATO at the time. That provided Putin with an half-assed pretext to invade, so he did, and he made sure to lie about it, while the world was witnessing the amassing of 150K troops on Ukraine border. He lies. All the time, every time. That's who he is, that's what he does. He lies, we know he lies, he knows we know he lies, we know he knows we know he lies. But it doesn't matter, it's just the Russian mob way.
Anyway, you're also saying Putin is a 'superb' strategist? yeah, sure, but is he as superb as Hitler? If you admire Putin's strategy, you must be in awe when it comes to Hitler strategy, right? It's just too bad the guy is the worst war criminal of all times. Or maybe it's all Western lies too?
Now, the US is deep troubles internally. But it's not due to their wars. It's not about money. The Trump cult is just out of control. They are so close to become a full blown failed kleptocratic state it's mind blowing. If Trump gets back in the white house, it's basically over, he and his friends will literally loot the US, selling state secrets, selling the sabotage of the country. You must be deeply impressed by Trump as well, right? How can someone make the 1st world power self destruct like this, in just a decade?
Ending the cold war took a lot of discipline and sacrifice. It is hawkish neocons in the United States (the same people who architected the Iraq war, etc.) who have nudged the US toward aggression and have tried (successfully) to shift public opinion in Ukraine toward nationalism and favoring an anti-Russia non-neutral perspective.
Putin has been responding to the antagonism with bold and efficient use of force to advance Russia's national interest in the face of such aggression.
Putin has many, many problems (authoritarian, etc.) but he's not an idiot and the whole problem was caused by US neoconservatives who incidentally don't care if many Ukrainians die in the process of trying to weaken Russia.
As usual, the US propaganda machine paints Putin as irrational and insane, just as it painted Saddam and OBL. If anything, by now we ought to realize that when we hear US neocons saying that about someone that it's probably completely false.
It's very, very sad that the people of Ukraine have been victimized first by US propaganda and second by the US using them as human shields to avoid needing to spend dollars and lives sending US troops to fight more openly with Russia.
The extent to which the US has been weakened by following neoconservative warmongering impulses is staggering. First trillions of dollars flushed in the Iraq war. We emerge from the Iraq war with the defense industry tremendously enriched and with 100x the lobbying power it had beforehand. And now we find ourselves pushing Russia and China (and many other countries who will join) into an anti-US alliance that was completely preventable.
According to? It was supposed to be sovereign. It gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for guaranties of never being attacked... Russia can't be trusted.
>there has been a faction that has wanted to push NATO boundaries east
Well, NATO membership works like this: Countries ask for membership. It's not "NATO" deciding "hmmm, let's expand east". You must be confusing with Russia expansion, forcibly annexing land, with all the war crime and deportation. Ex-soviet countries know what it's like to be occupied by Russia, so they want to be part of NATO. I'm sure you can see the difference.
> Putin has been responding to the antagonism with bold and efficient use of force to advance Russia's national interest in the face of such aggression.
Bold and efficient use of force??? Like, bold torture? Efficient killing and starving POWs? Smart kidnapping and re-education of Ukrainian children to draft them to fight against their own people? Yeah, what a genius. You're nauseating. You're talking just like a nazi would.
I think I'll stop there, I don't think it's worth discussing with people who casually admire war criminals.
The US was the first to violate the agreement, unfortunately.
> It's not "NATO" deciding "hmmm, let's expand east".
Lobbying groups from inside and outside those countries advocate for membership, etc. There are hawks in the US that don't care about Ukraine being neutral because they want to squeeze Russia.
> Bold and efficient use of force???
Putin has effectively used a much weaker military to thwart the US at every turn. He is a much, much smarter strategist (again, unfortunately). I am no admirer of Putin. Most recent US presidents most certainly qualify as war criminals, for what it's worth (unfortunately).
The sad part is that the US is encouraging Ukraininans to fight and die for a cause that the US has no intention of supporting in a significant way and has no intention of truly following through with. The US has been duplicitous with Ukraine and in spite of many US hawks wanting to go all in for Ukraine, it won't happen and they know it. The best they will do is donate weapons and let Ukraine harm Russia as much as possible while there are Ukrainians left to fight and while the conflict doesn't escalate to the point of endangering the US mainland.
Incidentally, it is quite likely that Putin will be nudged into attacking the US mainland at some point, either via cyber attacks that cost lives or actual munitions.
How, specifically? Facts only, please.
There are hawks in the US that don't care about Ukraine being neutral because they want to squeeze Russia.
That doesn't mean they are a dominant contingent or that this is a key driver of current policy.
And then, I'm curious, what makes you think that Putin is a patient and reasonable strategist? What is patient and reasonable, exactly? Not only invading, but _annexing_ other nation's land? Throwing in jail for 7 years anyone who criticize the war? killing/poisoning your political opponents? Airing fake demonstrations of people demanding "we nuke Europe NOW"! Turning your country into a fascist military dictatorship, proudly putting assault rifles in the hand of children in kindergarten? Letting state-sponsored TV hosts say the most ridiculously fascist things like “Life is highly overrated”, "Ukrainians are not humans", "Ukrainian children should be drowned in the Tysyna", "We will kill 1 million, or 5 million; we can exterminate all of you". Pretend Ukraine is filled with nazi organ-trafficking satanist pedophiles? While you torture and starve POWs? Rewriting history? Pretending they fought the nazi since the beginning, while they invaded Poland hand-in-hand with the nazis, and were best friends until Hitler betrayed them. Only then they fought, for their survival, it was never a choice. Pretending they defeated the nazis alone, while the US helped them a lot with their logistics.
It's a sea of lies. You just have come up with big lies, repeat them again and again, and somehow it'll work. Textbook fascism, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie. And now, with open western social networks, it's super easy, super cheap. So, yeah, Putin is certainly not reasonable, he is just a "strategist", but he's just applying old fascist propaganda techniques, and let the useful idiots, bigots and opportunists do the rest.
Not really, though I am frustrated as it does feel like he's only popular because he's an underdog sticking it to The Man.
Even in isolation and ignoring the preceding case — for which he fled to the embassy in order to not risk the very outcome he's now facing (c.f. going to the USA, "Assange would appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S.-controlled territory north of Guam", even though that wasn't even on the cards at the time he fled) — many other journalists manage to publish damning evidence that seriously upsets their governments without having to solicit for it (AFAICT, no journalists have gotten into trouble for publishing Snowden's leaks, just Snowden himself), while some other journalists who broke the law to get their scoops also faced court for breaking the law to get their scoops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_arrested_in_the...
There's limits of course, but whistleblowers should be afforded a lot of leeway, particularly because quite often doing things the "right way" is engineered to accomplish nothing.
Assange is to Manning as Glenn Greenwald is to Snowden. (Except for all the differences which make the legal issues in this case a thing in the first place).
Countless journalists solicit classified information all the time. They don't just sit there hoping a story falls into their lap. They make connections in government and actively seek out information, including classified information. This has been completely standard in American journalism for decades.
Julian Assange was an irresponsible arsehole. Doesn't mean his treatment was anything resembling just. While he probably put a lot of people at risk, I've not heard of anyone actually getting hurt as a result of his actions. Given that, and given his treatment in prison, he's more than served his time.
Regardless, Assange has been punished enough, particularly given the distasteful manner in which he was found guilty and imprisoned.
Yes, war crimes committed by USA and its allies are best kept secret and those committed by others are best exposed, right?
He’s not American and America are not “the good guys”. For any given secret, consider if you feel that USA should honor a request by Russia to keep it secret for the best of Russian interacts, if you don’t feel the same then its best exposed.
It’s redicules that so many Americans feel that war crimes committed by it and its allies should be kept secret because “we’re the good guys” then turn around and argue that the reason “we’re the good guys” is because we don’t commit war crimes, or when we do we at least have the decency to try to keep it secret because we know it’s bad, unlike the evil enemy who commit war crimes and try to cover it up!
Instead of making people guess what you mean by nuanced, you simply should go ahead and provide that nuanced perspective and see if anyone wants to engage it.
There were many documents that WikiLeaks released that seemed to have been released under the auspice of "full transparency" but really served no public good and inflicted a lot of harm. Releasing the names of afgan informants, cablegate, that airstrike video where journalists were killed (can't remember the name specifically), etc. I just don't know if I agree that the public should know everything.
Think about the case of the NSA--yes they were spying on Americans in egregious ways and overextending the scope of their mission and authority. But at the same time, we do want a lot of their methods to remain secret. They have thwarted many potential terrorist attacks since 9/11; and if we, and our adversaries, knew exactly how and who they were spying on--I'm sure Americans would be less safe.
Is there a source for this claim that isn't just the NSA saying "trust us"?
Charging journalists with espionage for publishing classified information is completely new in the US. Trump and Biden's prosecution of Assange is the first time it has ever happened. It's also almost certainly unconstitutional.
a) This applies to nuclear launch codes, not to the kind of things that Assange leaked even if leaking this is inconvenient or embarrassing for the nation.
b) Many of us aren't Americans and don't really care that much about US "national interests".
Assange’s imprisonment was widely considered to be caused not by democratically formed laws, but by the whims of politics.
Should USA really pass a law to protect Russian state secret? No? Why should Australia or England pass laws to protect US state secrets?
This soft-handed approach towards anti-American behavior is the culmination of multiple movements in the post-Soviet era where the remnants of Soviet-sponsored communists and other home-grown agitators align themselves with anti-western groups around the world (Russia, Iran, China, various terrorist groups, etc). These groups have a lot of influence in the left in general, and in the current US administration, so it's not surprising that now is the time that Assange gets a friendly deal. Between this and Manning's sentence being commuted, I think a lot of damage has been done to our security apparatuses. What's the dissuade the next kid with delusions of toppling the corrupt American empire from exposing state secrets in a noble act on behalf of our comrades in the benign and honorable states of Russia, China, and Iran?
You seem to have the impression that leakers are getting sweetheart deals. In actuality you have people like Reality Winner who got five years for leaking information that was pretty much already public. Natalie Edwards getting six months for the FinCEN Files is probably a little low. I am incredibly skeptical that given the number of news organizations with access to the documents that they remained private and that no one was tipped off. But she was actually doing it in an effort to put pressure on Russia!
You lost me there. Assange got a deal because the prosecution needed a deal to resolve the case. They didn't do it out of the kindness of their heart, nor because there was any pressure from the administration to do Assange a favor.
JULIAN!! The guy that embarrassed evil powers all over the world!
What evil powers? Well, the US, the US, and... the US.
I got down-voted by just mentioning he didn't release anything significant on Russia for some reason.
I wouldn't be surprise if some of the massive support we're seeing here in this thread is not completely legit.
How dare you Julian? No Russia or China is on the list? No! US can't be evil, only Russia/China can.
US certainly can be, but, why stop there? Why not mention other evil powers while you’re at it?
Why focus on the US while Russia is going for textbook land grab à la Hitler?
Invading a country is very concerning, annexing it should considered unacceptable. Russia is doing the later.
Yes, you didn't, but the vibe of your message looks like whataboutism defense.
> Why focus on the US while Russia is going for textbook land grab à la Hitler?
Why focus on Russia while Israel is going for textbook land grab à la Hitler?
> Invading a country is very concerning, annexing it should considered unacceptable. Russia is doing the later.
Annexing a territory is very concerning, silently stealing the houses and land using settlers while killing civilians should considered unacceptable. Israel is doing the later.
No, it didn't. What you're apparently not getting is that Wikipedia's message -- and, by extension, your comment -- look like a defense-by-contrast of Russia and China.
Eh, yeah... WikiLeaks, duh.
But then, you should stay on topic. Did Assange publish any leaks on Israel?
Yes? That’s fair. No? Then we’re allowed to wonder why. But clearly you don’t care, it was just to throw whataboutism at me to show how biased I am.
Assange gave the public invaluable information that would not have been know otherwise, but he ended up playing right into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit Clinton.
Politics is complicated.
And no, letting USA or any other nation for that matter commit war crimes quietly does not support democracy.
So let’s just check your bias. Assuming an American journalist living in England exposes video of Russia gunning down civilians and shows they are covering it up. Would you say the right cause of action would be for that American to be procedures in Russia because “ States have secrets it’s just the nature of the world.” and apparently hiding war crimes and prosecuting journalists who expose them is also just states rights?
But russia is a democracy...
> States have secrets its just the nature of the world.
That's an anti-democratic worldview...
The whataboutism surrounding this feels completely disingenuous to me considering much of what was leaked by Wikileaks was war crimes, media collusion with Clinton's campaign and embarrassing mistakes the government tried to cover up, that they had no business trying to cover up.
States have secrets, but that is a privilege granted to them by the people to protect national security, their abuse of this privilege has been completely unacceptable even if the reveal made your preferred candidate look bad for actions they were personally responsible for.
If Wikileaks accomplished anything, it was revealing the hypocrites and those who lack even an inch of integrity.
However as I said there is real utility to publishing information which shouldn't be kept from the public. Which is why I think Assange is a hard case.
It revealed some hypocrites who lack integrity. The main effect, if any, of their exposure was to pave the way for other hypocrites who lack integrity to take over the positions of power and influence of the former.
Someone with integrity supports whistleblowers no matter who they blow the whistle on, I'm sure this revelation must be a surprise for you.
What does that have to do with anything? Assange never was a whistleblower.
There are also a lot of people in the Republican Party who go the exact opposite way: They support Israel's actions and Russia's actions, and they were also in favor of the US's invasion of Iraq (though they shut up about that now). They have a very hawkish political philosophy.
Then there is a third group of people I've identified, who confuse me: they oppose Russia's actions in Ukraine, but they support Israel's actions in Palestine. (I do not know what their opinions were in Iraq because this is a group of people I have only encountered online, not in person.) I do not understand their political philosophy at all because it is seemingly self-contradictory; most of my attempts to understand it suggest that it is not really a philosophy so much, but more about nationalism or racism — they like Ukraine more than they like Russia, and they like Israel more than they like Palestine, and that's all the thought they put into it.
They're not, of course.
But labeling them as such is one of the myriad ways by which criticism of Israel gets automatically branded as you-know-what.
I have no idea what your essential attributes are. Nor do you have any idea as to mine. And I'm not telling you what to think about anything.
This thread is getting far from the original topic. Recommend we both close shop here, and move on.
Again, there are many, many, many such Jewish voices that have emphatically dismissed the format of your attempted victimisation play here.
There’s nothing simple when it comes to international politics. But foreign meddling by an adversary is a pretty bright line.
The United States is responsible for sowing the good, not Russia for not hiding the bad.
"Being better at targeted propaganda" isn't really how I'd like our leaders to be chosen. Obviously that's where we are, but I wish we could do better.
How does any of that constitute a 'war crime'?
Please, name the war crimes that Chelsea Manning exposed.
This isn't small potatoes. Here in Sweden it wasn't just the extradition from Bromma in 2001, but the US flew multiple illegal flights with prisoners through Sweden, possibly to the US torture camps in Poland and eastern Europe.
I also think these cables revealed information about the Thailand black site, where the US was torturing some people.
Yet they remain steadfastly silent on the crimes committed by Russia and China.
Should the US withdraw from geopolitics and allow those other two to fill the vacuum?
Like Julian Assange himself - I suspect many Russia supporters are hiding in plain sight.
Withdraw from what?
>Yet they remain steadfastly silent on the crimes committed by Russia and China.
How have we been silent on those crimes. We have been quite concerned, they are almost next to us.
I don't myself want to be part of NATO, but evidently the government is to afraid not to be, so now we are.
>Should the US withdraw from geopolitics and allow those other two to fill the vacuum?
The US has not gained anything of geopolitical value by storing people in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp or by flying suspect terrorist to torture camps in Europe, or by inhuman treatment of prisoners, as happened at Bromma. It hasn't gained anything geopolitically by going after people who revealed war crimes.
The US actions that I oppose are for the large part neither of benefit to the US itself, nor to me. On the whole these actions are just stupid.
To the degree that I want to avoid US troops in Sweden, this stupidity, these useless and harmful decisions that get implemented are one of the problems. Because if the US can this stupid on matters like Assange, or can desperately want to torture some random nobody, and are in such a hurry to do so, that they fly him through Bromma just because can refuel there, then they can do any kind of idiocy, and it can end up being me, or something Swedish that matters that pays the price.
The US can defend its interests in a more co-operative way and with greater respect for international law and for its partners.
>Like Julian Assange himself - I suspect many Russia supporters are hiding in plain sight.
If you're implying that I would like Putin, who I consider basically a Chechen-cuddler. I've had less problems with him historically, and I don't think I fully understood how vengeful he was until he did as he did against the Karabach-Armenians. I'm probably more pro-Russia than Zelensky is-- I don't hate the Russians and I like many aspects of Russian culture, including their mathematics tradition and some of their music.
I don't see the Ukraine war as per se very different from the Iraq war. This means that I view Russia and the US as closer on the level of morality than most people, who I feel have a bit of short term view of the world. These things 20 years ago are like yesterday to me. Details matter though, and scale, and many other things.
Rather, when it comes to support of Ukraine my view is not based on morality as such, although I do believe that the Ukrainians have a right to rule their country, but rather on Swedish defence needs. We Swedes need to support them and ensure that Russia does not expand and get a border against Poland or some other unnecessarily forward position. There is no reason why we should allow such a situation, which will only cause us problems.
Oh yeah, that's the big problem with him. Sheesh...
> I don't see the Ukraine war as per se very different from the Iraq war.
Yeah, I distinctly remember how Shrub denied that the Iraqi people exist, claimed they were all Americans anyway, and set out to annex Iraq to the USA. And who can forget the moving ceremony when he bestowed Statehood upon those four Iraqi provinces? Sheesh... Try as I might, I can't come up with any reason for why you would want to pretend to be this stupid, so...
> This means that I view Russia and the US as closer on the level of morality than most people, who I feel have a bit of short term view of the world.
Yeah no, that means it's you who are... If not morally blind, at least severely short-sighted.
Your statement doesn't add any nuance to said concerns.
Not “adding any nuance” is suggesting that publishing the truth about warcrimes is worse than committing war crimes.
I'll repeat my point so maybe you can focus on that than the straw man.
It's not hard to find scandals, that's the whole point of having institutions meant to watchdog corporations and governments.
But of course governments/corporation will try and cover it up or deregulate said institutions, but this doesn't make an obvious adversary (Russia) a helping hand in holding the corporations /governments accountable because it's not meant to, it's meant to create cynicism and a feeling of hopelessness.
So no publishing truth is never bad, the issue is how you do it.
If I publish an internal report that has good undercover agents doing good things but also has bad undercover agents that are acting against the country's interest, it would be absurdly dumb and reckless of me to publish the internal report as is without redacting names that has nothing to do with said bad actors.
There are correct guidelines specifically about doing whistle blowing and failing to do so can and will cause lives to be lost.
>You reference “correct guidelines.” Please cite them, and what is definitely good and bad outside a local construct within a modern Westphalian political nation state.
I just told you with my example, but here's ICC's guidelines about whistleblowing:
https://iccwbo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/02/icc-gu...
Pretty much any whistleblowing guideline will have similar statements about whistleblowing.
>Should nationally critical information controls survive mere legal disobedience? If they don’t how much security theater fulfills your appetite?
Why do we have to present this as a black and white issue? The best is a compromise to ensure that the power abuse gets pointed out and the adversaries that are responsible be highlighted as the alleged perpetrators (as this is still something that a court has to decide on) without putting national security/innocent lives at risk/at harms way.
You throw examples that are not whistleblowing nor does these cases have anything to do with whistleblowing guidelines but laws regarding whenever or not sources should be disclosed.
Especially the herridge case which is part of a broader case of the federal government employees allegedly leading government documents of an innocent person's information (specifically information about them from the investigation)
Even more it's not even a shut case and what a surprise the judge is also following concrete guidelines.
That however does not mean you are the good guy for playing into the hands of an adversary that wanted to rig a democratic election.
But then if we care about truthful facts then why didn't Assange release rnc documents?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...
Besides showing that email is not really that secure in the first place (and evidenced by Ms. Clinton's own maintenance of a personal email server), it doesn't show any evidence that Cozy Bear was behind the DNC leak.
Assange himself seemed to implicate Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was shot twice in the back in a mysterious murder in July of 2016: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/will-jul...
Thanks, that's a good point, I was motivated to read a bit more about it; the article I linked is indeed a bit vague.
The source for it is a de Volkskrant article, I found it in an archive: https://archive.is/S5KeI
This has more detail and contains the claim that the Dutch did observe Cozy Bear breaking into the DNC network.
However, elsewhere we can read that the emails were leaked to WikiLeaks not via Cozy Bear but via Fancy Bear, which is part of GRU; see the Mueller report Volume I, Ill. RUSSIAN HACKING AND DUMPING OPERATIONS, A. and B. page 44-56 in the PDF.
Both the SVR and the GRU infiltrated the DNC network:
"Cozy Bear" had access to DNC systems since the summer of 2015; and "Fancy Bear", since April 2016. There was no evidence of collaboration or knowledge of the other's presence within the system. Rather, the "two Russian espionage groups compromised the same systems and engaged separately in the theft of identical credentials".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_National_Committee_...
From what I've read that's a common way of authoritarian state organization: to prevent any security service from becoming too powerful and thereby becoming a threat to the dictator, there are multiple services with overlapping responsibilities and they compete with each other.
> Assange himself seemed to implicate Seth Rich...
Apparently Aaron Rich's defamation lawsuit got some results:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/seth-ric...
It's worth noting that leaked messages (the irony) show Assange was knowingly misleading the public about Seth Rich:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevincollier/assange-se...
And then I have to ask yet again, why did not Wikileaks release the RNC leaks?
I've already covered it in a different thread. It's most likely that the DNC leaks were from an internal source.
Assange implied Seth Rich. The emails that were leaked were largely about the DNC railroading Bernie to favor Hillary during the primary. That's not some state-level propaganda. That's how party politics work. A disgruntled Trump supporter would have little reason to leak RNC emails, since it was publicly known how much they hated him and since Trump won in spite of the RNC's antagonism.
Honestly though it doesn't matter who leaked it. It was standard faire political controversy. It was a much bigger deal that Clinton herself maintained a private server to conduct state department affairs. Hard for her to spin that one on the Russians though.
And according to the intelligence report it was Russia who indirectly hacked the DNC (via guccifer) so I don't know where this "internal source" comes from, would love to see a report that shows otherwise.
The irony is that Wikileaks allegedly did have RNC leaks, but Assange choose not to publish it.
1: https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl
2: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
3: https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/10/report-russi...
4: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
But in [1] and [2], could you hint where in there that information is to be found? Those are quite long documents and wikileaks is not the main subject there.
Also interesting that they didn't Wikileak these messages, some mainstream journalist had to do it for them. Probably they just hadn't gotten around to it
2. Doesn't seem to have made much difference beyond spreading cynicism as it was never appropriately published.
3. This would have been despite Wikileaks.
That's not journalism, that's dishonesty and activism.
ITYM he repeatedly implied that Seth Rich was his DNC source, so readers should infer it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/hillary-clin...
Then, Assange probably thought that Hilary Clinton really tried to drone him, despite denials:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/4/hillary-clin...
It isn't the first time that she made unwise statements:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/clinton-on-qaddafi-we-came-we-s...
I'm pretty sure that the charismatic Obama, even if he had had a similar email affair, would have won the elections. Personalities really matter.
It's easy to blame one entity or another for these sorts of upset events, but national elections are media circuses largely run by private spending on the terms of private parties and blaming any one party seems like missing the forest for the trees.
Again, election "interference" is not unfamiliar ground for democracies or republics, liberal or classic, so it confuses me why people blame the electorate rather than the flaws in our implementation of democratic ideals (eg the citizens united ruling) that allowed private capital to run rampant over our election mechanics.
To illustrate how inevitable this is, the roman republic had statute stipulating the width of the halls leading up to the ballots to physically restrict voters from being harassed or intimidated. Otherwise the richer candidate would simply pay a mob to physically bully you into voting a certain way regardless of your original intentions—or perhaps they might outright buy your vote out if they knew which way your ballot cast. It was completely understood by all involved that voting (& armies) could be bought with sufficient money and ingenuity by even single people.
Why we are discussing anything other than restricting the ability of money to interfere with our modern processes when it comes to "democratic health" is beyond me.
That's the point though, not that many people care about the implementation of a democracy, which itself is a form of democratic will (or the lack thereof). The problem with simply "more democracy" is we might end up with these contradictions.
People don't care much about the fine details of the implementation of their governance. In an ideal world, they would have voted in people who'd tear up these "money is speech" laws, but we live in a world where the average Joe only cares and are receptive to catchphrases.
The man and those in his orbit have a hard-on for Putin/Xi/Kim-style autocracy.
Naah, he was only the March on the Capitol figure; so much better.
(FWIW, they had/have a Capitol in Rome too. That's what the American one is named for.)
0. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansar...
1. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/10/politics/biden-assange-au...
It's pretty similar to the US claiming jurisdiction over Ukrainians running torrent websites from Ukraine. Or over random Afghanis who share their first name (something extremely unique like Omar or Abdul or Mohamed) with a supposed terrorist, enough to kidnap to torture them.
The people who committed treason are the ones who dragged us into multiple illegal wars based on fabricated evidence.
Those war criminal fucks cost us trillions and trillions of dollars, and are responsible for milllions of deaths. Assange tried to prevent that, and has paid a terrible price for doing so.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
You have a strange idea of what proof means.
"Hillary has so much slime on her shirt it is now hard to make dirt stick.” Lol.
Btw the author of your link, Micah Lee, has been lying to smear Assange for years [0, 1].
0 - https://contraspin.co.nz/beingjulianassange/
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/7o96ot/micah_lee...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/assange-offered-pardon-if...
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-ass...
And there's even the internal wikileaks chat logs to prove they were working at the behest of the russian government, purposefully targeting Clinton, etc: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
More than happy to locked them up unless it creates an image problem.
Unfortunately in this country, a whistle blower is a fast track to being punished.
Despite Mr. Albanese (the prime minister)'s election promise to bring Assange home, he's officially refused[0] to talk to Biden about it and has never answered questions on what they're doing about it.
It is great he's finally coming home, but forcing a journalist to plead guilty of espionage falsely, the decade of harassment and false imprisonment, the fake rape case... This should not be treated as "job done".
0. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-29/pm-says-biden-wont-in...
He refused it. Two years later, the Educadorian embassy kicked him out because they were tired of him smearing his shit all over the walls and assaulting female staff.
It's been extensively proven he was acting in collaboration with and in the interests of the russian government: https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-ass...
"fake rape case"? Take a look at Assange's history of misogynistic comments both in public and in internal wikileaks chats: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
...and him assaulting female Ecuadorian staff
...and tell me again how it's more plausible that both Swedish prosecutors and the Swedish criminal court system up to and including their supreme court conspired with the US to fake an entire case around Assange sexually assaulting two women. And then the UK government joined in that conspiracy. And then Ecuador joined in that conspiracy?
Or...and bear with me here for a second...he's a misogynistic asshole who has so little respect for women he treats them as sexual objects?
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternative...
To me that plea creates a bad precedent.
Not exactly damning evidence.
Only for the Clinton's there's a book:
https://www.amazon.com/New-Clinton-Body-Count-Suspicious/dp/...
And for Putin there's a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_Vladimir_Putin_i...
(look for the "†" marks and read to see if you think it was natural causes or accidents)
No prizes for guessing where your politcal allegences lie.
"there" as in I do not live in the US.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-lo...
Today was a good day.
This would have been embarrassing for the US. One country doing something decent and calling another out on the whole indecency of the whole case. Not a good look after a decade plus of legal limbo with no end in sight. And of course the man actually being extradited (as unlikely as that would have been at this point) would just refocus the attention on all the embarrassing things that Wikileaks actually leaked that have caused this whole vindictive attitude towards Assange. All that stuff being rehashed in court rooms and the media for months on end was not going to end well. So, the US grudgingly finally doing the right thing via a plea deal seems like a good face saving compromise that just ends this now.
(massive sidetrack, but I can't let this sentence go unpunished)
The current labour leader is the lamest duck in a group of wet blankets. His policies revolve around not being as corrupt as the Tories whilst doing virtually nothing else to better his constituents. His backbone has a restitution coefficient somewhere in the Oort cloud.
Wet blanked doesn't begin to cover it. I honestly think he's an entryist trying to tank the Labour party on the behalf of some British spy-lord. He's failing, but that's more the Tories' fault.
I'm far from following current UK politics, but I've heard the same thing about Liz Truss...
My attempts to find them by searching the internet have failed.
I am not commenting on the backbone, but he is definitely there for his constituents.
Not saying he's got a backbone, but he's just going for the easier option that keeps his party united.
Maybe you are referring to them not stating that they will change taxes significantly? Well, yeah no shit. a) they can't, taxes are at their highest level since WW2, and b) they don't want to destabilise things like Truss did.
I think his biggest issue is that his voice sounds a bit wet and that makes people think he is wet.
- Scrapping private schools charitable status
- Ending the two-child benefit limit
- Ending tuition fees
- Increasing income tax for the top five per cent of earners
- Nationalising public services
- Reforming the House of Lords
The other side of the coin is, of course, the Iraq War. We needn't debate that, because we'll surely violently agree, but let's not pretend the Blair/Brown partnership didn't lead to many positive things for the UK. It did.
Like the other commenter, I think that his interventions in the NHS were potentially short-sighted and ultimately more damaging than they were worth. It feels to me that rigorous performance metrics and PFIs contributed - along with subsequent under-funding by Tory governments - to running it into the ground.
I will concede however that the minimum wage and Good Friday Agreement are big wins!
Having worked in both environments, it's not particularly important to me whether work gets done by a private or a public entity, the most important thing is that money is spent efficiently. If the public sector is spending public money then efficiency usually means ensuring that pointless work is stopped, and that staff who have become ineffective are shed. If the private sector is spending public money then efficiency usually means hawk-like contract negotiations are required to prevent a good chunk of the cash from being siphoned off by middlemen.
[1] https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-c...
This is very much a minority opinion.
Unfortunately the UK public doesn't seem to buy into that sort of thing. Sure, a large, vocal minority does, but enough to win an election against the hoards of basically-tory-supporting middle-englanders?
Not as far as I can see. Labour has to claim the middle ground to win, at least if it wants to win more than once. The next session is probably in the bag either way.
You are describing the recipe for a one-term government IMO - Elections are won from the center, and moving Left will open a center gap for someone else to claim.
The last time a 'full left' Labour government ruled was probably just after the war (i.e. Clement Attlee).
Secondly, I see this, but at the same time Corbyn was the most vilified politician in the UK in a generation and he still got close to a win with that program. Suppose Corbyn could do that at a point where the Tories were not historically unpopular. In that case, it's clear Starmer could have stuck to his pledges to be "pragmatic continuity Corbyn" and walked this election - most of the actual policies in the 2017 manifesto were highly popular when polled, including with conservative voters.
I mean - from my point of view there are two glaring issues in this election that are just being coughed aside in a deeply disingenuous way, by all parties (with maybe the exception of the LibDems, a bit):
1) Brexit. For this not to be on the agenda when it has been the most ruinous decision made in the last 10 years of our political history is just ...well, weird at best, totally surreal at worst. Widely recognised [even by many? most?] of those who voted for it as now being a mistake, it just seems insane to leave any discussion off the table.
2) Tax rises. Everyone knows that for our UK standard of living to continue (or even - lol - rise), the money has got to come from somewhere. And that place can only really be taxes. All of the parties seem to be pulling out a magic hat full of magic money - an honest conversation would have all the parties in a room agreeing that someone, somewhere has got to pay for all this stuff.
Anyway, wow, gone well off topic. Sorry Dang!
2) The UK's in a bit of a hole that it can't really tax and spend out of. What we need is more like sane government and economic growth. Just not having something like Boris's "fuck business" and tearing up our trade agreements for a while would help.
I think you're probably correct, as only the Green Party seem to be committing to moving back in (one reason I'm considering voting non-Labour for the first time in my life). I wonder though, do you think this will last forever, especially in the face of consistent polling suggesting that twice as many people think it was a bad idea as think it was a good one? [0]
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/987347/brexit-opinion-po...
The EU today is significantly different to the original idea, but I can see the UK entering into the single market and military partnerships etc (contrary to popular opinion, there are lots of free trade agreements worldwide that don’t have full regulatory alignment!).
However, what I'm really wondering is whether (and when) there will be a gradual political shift in the UK towards rejoining.
There's very little public appetite to focus on it again for now. I disagree with Starmer on a lot but he's right to totally shut down discussion on this until after an election
I don’t actually agree that our taxes/spending have to increase in order to get a better standard of living - what we need is services which function better for the same costs.
- Built the NHS
- Decolonised India, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Jordan
- Nationalised the coal industry, electricity utilities, railways and long-distance haulage
- Established a national childcare service
- Paved the way for the creation of National Parks and introduced public rights of way
There is a lot of progress that can be made with a genuine left-wing government with a majority, even in a time of economic upheaval. With Reform splitting the right-wing vote this is the best opportunity the left has had in my lifetime. But Starmer is in the lead, banning MPs from attending strike pickets and talking about how he's had to give up his pledges on the NHS in order to "grow the economy".
Campaign on a platform of comprimise and sensible polices to attract moderate voters... And then just completely ignore everything you said you would do...
This is the exact opposite of what we should encourage from politics.
He's telling you who he is, so please believe him - the idea that this man will become PM and then suddenly turn into Jeremy Corbyn is, frankly, delusional. I can understand why someone would want to believe that, but in all likelihood we're just getting more of the same.
Don't know why the labour party would want to replicate that shit-show.
Corbyn was never going to be "allowed" to be Prime Minister. Also, listen to his recent interview where he says he was asked by a committee if he would guarantee to be 100% behind any military action instigated by Israel.
> An investigation based on the largest leak of documents in British political history. The Labour Files examines thousands of internal documents, emails and social media messages to reveal how senior officials in one of the two parties of government in the UK ran a coup by stealth against the elected leader of the party.
Leader of the party can't unite their own party so there is a plan to oust them? That's politics.
Jeremy couldn't particularly unite the party, didn't take the center ground, and while I don't think he was a true antisemite there were enough mis-steps there that it meant that the claim could stick (along with the IRA sympathizer claims).
That even Corbyn - the most vilified British politician of a generation - got that close to a win is a strong demonstration of that. Since then the Tory party support has collapsed to historic lows. A win on a program close in ambition to the 2017 manifesto - which was not in any way radical - should be a walk in the park for someone like Starmer in current conditions if he actually had dared try.
We have a political environment where the Greens are smeared as "crazies", people remember the Lib Dems for their deception, and mass media has many believing Reform will win if they don't vote for Labour. A Labour win is all but guaranteed, so Starmer doesn't need to be the other cheek of the Monoparty arse - he chooses to be.
If Starmer is a "genocide supporter" for being tepidly pro-Israel, then Corbyn is a genocide supporter for his pathetic Russian apologism on Syria and Ukraine.
If that's where your line is, then there's no chance Corbyn hasn't crossed it either.
I'd ask you to consider that the situations in Syria and Ukraine are not nearly as straightforward as the US would have us believe; indeed, the US and Israel are, as usual, the main instigators.
Regardless, Corbyn hasn't "crossed any lines" - he certainly hasn't publicly stated that it's OK to cut a civilian population's water supply as collective punishment, for example. Corbyn takes a more considered, nuanced, sensible view on world politics, which unfortunately doesn't play well with our right-wing press's simplistic "good guy, bad guy" gov-sponsored narrative. This is why Corbyn was smeared - he stands up for what's right, even if it means going against the US and Israel.
OK, you've sounded mostly reasonable in this thread so far, but that came to an abrupt halt here.
neither has Starmer... also this never happened...
That isn't the own you think it is. It's the position of every single successful modern state.
>genocide supporter
Sigh...
>suddenly turn into Jeremy Corbyn is, frankly, delusional.
Brillant, people voted for him for exactly this reason.
It is, however, a condition of membership under the rules of the UK Labour Party that you are a democratic socialist, and in favour of goals that include democratic socialism. Whether or not you think that is right, it is what Starmer signed up to when he joined.
> Brillant, people voted for him for exactly this reason.
His pledges when he was elected leader was to largely be "continuity Corbyn". A lot of the Labour membership voted for him for that reason. The extent to which he has been willing to lie and deceive his own party membership to get his position is quite scary given he'll likely be PM soon.
To be fair, he was refusing to face trial. And he is expected to plead guilty, so he isn't innocent.
That said, there may be legitimate questions about whether the United States should be entitled to exercise jurisdiction over foreign nationals who are not physically present in the jurisdiction for national security offences.
And so I think even with a guilty please, there ought to be a requirement for the prosecution to prove the case. Maybe lower the bar a little bit, but not much. And that is indeed how pleas work most places.
Few jurisdictions have US-style plea bargains where the prosecutor can negotiate large "discounts" to the potential maximum sentencing and get judges to agree.
To me, a country that allows that and where they are frequently taken does not have a functioning justice system.
There's also a significant difference with respect to the coercion when sentences are long, and when the possible variation in sentence length is huge, and the US stands out as particularly bad with respect to both of those factors as well.
The question who is guilty by a US court does not determine the guilt of an individual in any relevant or moral way under these extreme circumstances. It just indicates if you are part of the system or if you rather are uncomfortable and need to be silenced.
Yes the killed journalists were in a country that was being attacked by a foreign nation. This does not make it their fault that they were murdered.
While this might be a common occurrence in war, it does not excuse anything: if wars are fought in a way that these kill innocent people then they should not be fought in the first place. Something is not morally excusable only because it is expected when done.
Thirdly, sure the crew was investigated (here i admittedly only know what wiki has to offer) but there is no known outcome of said internal investigation.
You are speaking of the "human rights lawyer" who at best acquiesced in Starmer being locked up in Belmarsh.
You are speaking of the man who became Labour leader on the strength of six promises, all of which he repudiated as soon as he was leader.
He doesn't have a principled bone in his body.
I do think it's right to accept a guilty plea and time served, but it's hardly a story of exoneration for Assange.
If you knew anything about British politics you'd know that this is horseshit.
> Julian Assange has embarked on flight VJ199 to Saipan. If all goes well it will bring him to freedom in Australia. But his travel to freedom comes at a massive cost: he will owe USD 520,000 which he is obligated to pay back to the Australian government for the charter flight. He was not permitted to fly commercial airlines or routes to Saipan and onward to Australia.
Links:
Not permitted by who, and on what basis?
What planet do you live on or what U.S.Intel agency do you work for?
It is not grift though, it does cost in that ball park for international private long distance flights in the 10,000+ mile range . Planes that can do this like say gulfstream V would seat 15-20 people , so like 25k per seat , it is not that much more expensive than a first class ticket cost wise if you think about it
Wikileaks has $250mil in bitcoin, they could chip in a bit surely?
Hopefully his Second Act brings good fruits without the thorns and rot of the previous ages. Good luck to him!
That's how aviation stays safe: the planes broadcast where they are, to anyone and everyone who tunes in to that public signal.
Few journalists would do that today because most now toe the main line -or they think it’ll give the “other guy” cover. No one bucks the incumbents these days. See anyone criticizing any western government actions these days? It’s not like there isn’t any fodder.
The most recent: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jun...
> The only thing you can do is
I’ll stop you there - reductionist arguments can be dismissed with the same casualness they’re made with.
>to fly under the radar and not participate, or participate as little as possible
So you’ve invented communes and the barter system. Tax time must be interesting.
>build your communities and relationships outside of it.
Pardon? Do you have a spaceship or space station? Wholly independent ship-city in international waters? If not you’re apart the system wholly and completely.
Did he make the right choices? Who knows. There is always a lot of counterfactual reasoning involved.
Yes, there was a point in getting the information out as fast as possible, but I think it's fair to blame Assange for not putting in the redaction work.
To sum this up, they were putting the redaction work, but someone else failed to, and at that point it was too late.
Those media outlets that are in fact guilty of what Assange/Wikileaks was accused of jumped at the first opportunity to throw Assange under the bus.
With how mad we are about him fcking over our people, surely we haven't fcked them over ourselves at a higher rate.
I think precisely in that situation is when you need that kind of ability. But I wouldn't say we should whip him! Again speaking for yourself I suppose hahahahahaha! :)
You miss a key emotional boundary: to cannot know. You dismiss just undermines by revealing lack of empathy
Frankly, I wouldn’t care if this info was dropped by the Kardashians on a very special episode. It was crucial public information and it needed to get out one way or another. If vanity is an incentivizing factor toward someone taking that risk, so be it.
What is it about someone being incentivized to be a whistleblower, in your mind, changes the validation of the act?
> A city slicker shoots a duck out in the country. As he's retrieving it, a farmer walks up and stops him, claiming that since the duck is on his farm, it technically belongs to him. After minutes of arguing, the farmer proposes they settle the matter "country style."
> "What's country style?" asks the city boy.
> "Out here in the country," the farmer says: "when two fellers have a dispute, one feller kicks the other one in the balls as hard as he can. Then that feller, why, he kicks the first one as hard as he can. And so forth. Last man standin' wins the dispute."
> Warily the city boy agrees and prepares himself. The farmer hauls off and kicks him in the groin with all his might. The city boy falls to the ground in the most intense pain he's ever felt, crying like a baby and rolling around on the ground. Finally he staggers to his feet and says: "All right, n-now it's–it's m-my turn."
> The farmer grins: "Forget it, you win. Keep the duck."
Or, in this case, after prosecutors hold someone in prison for a decade or two they offer a plea deal.
Here's another: https://www.newagebd.net/article/226187/julian-assanges-gran...
Ultimately the responsibility falls to the President since the DOJ isn’t responsible for international relations. Biden must have thought the case was important otherwise there’s no reason to harm relations with an ally over something like that.
The direct spat lead to Assange helping Trump and the Russians publish Hillary’s email server spool.
I don’t like that Assange ended up helping Trump and Russia, but you can’t blame him for helping the one person who can kick the person out of office who wants to Tomahawk you
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/julian-assange-drone-strik...
2. In any case, Clinton has been very openly critical of Assange, saying the charges were not punishing journalism and that "he has to answer for what he's done." [1]
In understanding how the world around us works, credibility matters quite a bit, and "I'm not interested in pretending True Pundit says true things" is a pretty reasonable shortcut.
Rather than just thought-terminate with "logical fallacy," the burden is now on the one bringing the evidence to bring it via a channel other than True Pundit.
It implies that she's being characteristically tonedeaf and screwing up the communication of some pretty serious concerns about Assange, but I think that's no mystery by now. You can always get Clinton to make it all about her and spin it in a way that can let you get away with damn near anything, but that's just exploiting personal failings on her part, where if you dig into what she knows it's unsettling how sharp she is.
You can't go by whether Clinton's screwed up the optics.
I don't recall calling for or making detailed plans to assassinate the leaders of the G7 at their recent summit.
I also don't recall claiming that you were a pedophile, a murderer and a cross-dresser.
So does that mean you believe I have actually said/done the above, as I haven't denied them?
Your examples also fail to continue with "but if I did it was a joke" -- a remark itself almost as damning as the act. We're not talking about mere defamation in the case of Assange: talking about the secretary of state-- who unambiguously has the power to murder foreign persons with a suggestion-- suggesting that she's would joke about murdering people. Not a great look.
So, no, your remarks are unambiguously not denials, but no denial was required in your case.
> At best unproven and denied.
As far as I know there is zero evidence that wikileaks did not publish everything newsworthy that they were given regardless of who it helped or hindered.
Anyone have anything credible showing they suppressed anything ever?
Riseup currently has a canary[1], they state that it would not trigger for "gag orders, FISA court orders, National Security Letters" which seems like it makes it pretty useless.
Instead, all I see is some debate about PGP.
I can believe that only one submission ever used it. PGP is not friendly to people who barely undersrand how computers work (99.999% of the population), and some panicking whistleblower isn't interested in taking a layman's course in crypto to send some docs.
So why would wikileaks renew their useless(from their perspective) PGP key?
Last update in the Leaks section is from 2018.
Last update in the News section is from 2021.
I'm interested to see if Assange brings it back to life.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Leave the moderating to dang, it's his job and he gets paid for it. If you have nothing to say, don't reply at all.
Have you got a link for what it is?
My prior is that any evidence of substance that contributed to a belief in wikileaks being untrustworthy would be /very/ easy to find in many locations. Maybe it's not but I can't think why. Perhaps you know?
I'm not sure what the cryptographic part has to do with anything. I'd guess it was signed in a way that you can verify the government itself didn't tamper with the notice.
I'd assume that once the canary died whichever actors compromised them scrubbed it.
It's been over a decade now, but I do have a machine somewhere with evidence.
Some nerd bigger than me here certainly has evidence available in a dropbox or somewhere accessible. I don't.
Source?
The documents were later published elsewhere and nobody cared because they were uninteresting.
WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.
The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks’s side of the conversation.
“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.
“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.
Edit: at the time I think this was considered to be a pretty comprehensive description of what happened. Not sure if new information has come to light since then.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mg7xjb/how-hackers-broke-int...
Hillary ran her own email server that trafficked classified information and that was maintained by a couple of Pakistani dudes.
Julian Assange lied about Seth Rich, and never excused himseéf to his bereaved parents. He is no better than Alex Jones.
Identified by the same people that have lied about pretty much everything else?
Although I'm willing to bet that the true actors here weren't necessarily presidents (even though they would ultimately be accountable like you say). Would be interesting to see who demanded what and when.
There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level. When the information was released the public never clamored for it to be investigated and for people to be hunted down and jailed for releasing it. It was entirely a captured administrative state claiming for itself rights it demonstrably never had, such as claiming a foreign national committed treason, or that he could be viewed as an "enemy combatant."
To have gone along with this willingly deserves the same scrutiny we gave German officers at the end of WWII.
I would argue there should, no exception. Not even WWII. While keeping in mind that the responsibility was so gigantic to begin with, that even diffusing it might end up putting most participants in jail, some of them for a long time.
"I'we seen bad thigs, this is all i got, lets look at it together."
1) The US was doing a lot of things wrong. Going off the 2011 cables [0] they were spying on various people they weren't meant to be, there were one or two things that look war crimes to me but who knows technically and a few gems like "Der Spiegel reported that one of the cables showed that the US had placed pressure on Germany not to pursue the 13 suspected CIA agents involved in the 2003 abduction of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen".
2) It wasn't obvious in that leak that the US was doing anything counter the interests of the US. But Assange isn't a US citizen and wasn't in the US at the time, so that isn't a reasonable standard to hold him to.
3) Even internally to the US though there is a reasonable argument that he was helpful. If US citizens don't have easy access to this sort of information, how are they supposed to effectively exercise democratic control on the government? People are going out and doing terrible things in their name which, arguably, are counterproductive and they would probably not want done. Accountability requires sunlight and they can't debate whether there is enough sunlight without people like Assange.
4) It turns out that the US does have a huge probably-illegal certainly-ill-advised spying program that was being sniffed out by leakers. The response to Assange seems likely to be part of a campaign to keep material information on such topics like that out of the public sphere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...
You know who didn't go to jail? Glenn Greenwald.
It might help you to follow the perspective if you consider it is plausible that the US's current diplomatic strategy is ineffective and needs pressure to reform. Especially after discounting the heft of their domestic economy. From what I've seen of the game theory, generally speaking best policy is to be scrupulously open and honest with very short bursts of sudden backstabbing when it makes overwhelming sense. The is, happily, a strategy that is highly compatible with radically transparent democracy.
There isn't a way to run this sort of institution without transparency. The incentives don't tend to work out.
How much is that Taliban source worth vs. greater transparency that could have ended the war earlier? The biggest problem was publicising which interest groups in the US government were responsible for prolonging the inevitable. Just keeping all meeting minutes on a website unredacted would have been a lot more valuable than having a source.
The tricky one is the Saudis. How much is a Saudi source worth vs. full transparency of voters into the US-Saudi relationship? The issue here is ... we can't debate that, the necessary knowledge is secret. But since large organisations are generally dysfunctional, and there is no reason to believe that the Saudi source is more valuable than more transparency into what is actually going on in the Middle East.
The issue to me is that secrecy makes democratic institutions ungovernable - they can't be assessed without full information and therefore voters can't even attempt to make rational decisions. Full transparency is probably more valuable than the net influence of secret sources [0]. The value of long-term secret sources is highly questionable. If there is a source or confidant in some foreign organisation you want to protect, give them a passport and set them up in Texas. Problem solved.
There is no genuine concern here over some deep vulnerability our society has to russians or anyone because of wikileaks. Assange (nor snowden) caused any material harm remotely proportional to the blowback they've received since. This is about punishment for circumventing state-level controls and embarrassing the state. To think that Trump would somehow be more lenient on either is unthinkable—he's part of the same class of people that Clinton is that is most sensitive to the health of systems Assange threatens.
Enter Russian oligarchs, just like they bought up London, and then control the oligarchs by force when you can't simply direct them by shared ideology, and you've got pretty much the most powerful propaganda outlet you could possibly have, until you exploit it so heavily that you burn its former reputation to the ground. Which you do, because you yourself care nothing for its well-being: it's a tool for your political aims in fighting NATO and furthering your empire.
Sure, it applies to western media as a whole, from the bottom to the top.
If WWIII had stayed entirely in the infosphere, and Russia had not invaded Ukraine and tried to make good on their preparations, nobody would ever have known WWIII had been waged in the infosphere. That's how well it had been going. It ran aground when physical countries had to be annexed.
That Wikileaks systematically favors the russian government, and never does anything contrary to the interests of the russian government, strongly suggests they are an asset of russia.
You could claim Wikileaks is a Thai or South African asset too on those preconditions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julia...
> He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012[10] on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States.[11]
It seems to me like the Trump administration simply mainted the status quo of what came before them. One theory could be the timing of the charges was more aligned with Ecuador changing PM/kicking Assange out of the embassy. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/14/lenin-moreno-julian-assan...
As I recall, Wikileaks made the choice to take sides in politics, so the blame lies with them.
I mean, even if Biden has something to do with this plea deal, his staffers won’t promote it because they think Assange is a kremlin puppet who conspired to help Trump get elected.
They were too virtuous to run an election but they seem to make pretty decent policy decisions
Voters backed Biden in the primary because he was a throwback to an earlier version of the party. But the Elizabeth Warren bots ended up running the administration anyway.
But, I mean, sure, maybe Biden directed DOJ about an open case, and AG Garland just rolled with it, because he sure seems like the type.
Supporting transparency and good journalism isn't a partisan issue, and there are going to be good people in any administration. Plus Assange wasn't annoying presidents, he was going after people in the deep state.
They're forcing Assange to 'confess' to a crime in the US, where he has never been and which creates enormous problems. It should be remembered how severe what the US was doing at the time. They got some people handed over to them here in Sweden, who they agreed to not torture, and then started already at the airport. They had torture facilities in Poland, where people almost certainly died, etcetera.
What Assange did was legal and what the many activities the US was engaging in to obtain people abroad etc., illegal. He has no duty to the US, because he is not a US citizen or permanent resident.
Consequently even this is not a friendly act from Biden. It ends Assange's imprisonment, but it is a use of threats in order to obtain something from him, namely his 'confession'.
What you say we need badly as it keeps every government employee accountable for what they did.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
But I might missunderstand you.
Out of genuine curiosity: what "actions" do you want taken and what accountability are you interested in? I mean, to be blunt: you think this is a crime, right? You want someone charged and prosecuted in a court, with due process, in front of a jury of peers, yada yada.
So... what if your imaginary prosecutor jumps ship to somewhere else where they get arrested and detained, and then refuse to come back to the US to face trial. Are they not then a political prisoner? Why not?
The point being: Assange wasn't thrown in jail without trial, he was thrown in jail because he refused trial. And there's an important difference.
Imagine you're a journalist and someone hands you a shoebox full of SD cards with classified materials including video evidence of war crimes. Most of us would agree it is the ethical thing to do to publish that and you're definitely a journalist.
Now imagine you had a contact in the military with acccess to classified data. What if instead of simply receiving that information, you tell that person what you're interested in. Are you still a journalist?
What if you procure tools for that person to bypass security procedures? What if you instruct them on methods they can smuggle out that information from a secure facility? Are you still a journalist?
What if you run someone off the road so they have a car accident and they miss their shift and that person is in charge of facility security, making it easier for your contact to smuggle out classified materials? Are you still a journalist?
This can go on and at some point you're no longer a journalist.
My point is that Assange was allegedly more of an active participant in acquiring these materials so there's an argument to be made that he wasn't a journalist, legally speaking.
But here's where I think Assange really hurt himself: by playing politics in selectively releasing the Podesta and DNC emails to try and sway the 2016 election. This demonstrated that Wikileaks is not, as it portrays itself, a vessel for unfiltered publication. This mattered in the court of public opinion because that's what would ultimately have to come to Assange's aid.
Now make no mistake: the US government did what it set out to do, which was to create a chilling effect on journalism that exposed US government secrets. Assange has essentially spent 12 yaers in confinement between the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh awaiting extradition.
And it's not that they're committed to always releasing everything, they painstakingly withheld information about Russia's financial backing of Syria during one of their releases.
Snowden and Manning had a duty to the US. They were US citizens, they even worked for the military or spying apparatus.
For them to release information, no matter how justified, is obviously a crime, but Assange isn't American, not US permanent resident, and he has no duty to be loyal to the US.
This is why I feel that the prosecution is so insane. Assange getting extradited to the US is like Russia getting somebody extradited to Russia. Now of course, you can't expect better from the UK, which participated in the same war he is most famous for publishing stuff from, and him going to the UK was incredibly stupid.
But acquiring material actively is something you should obviously do. If you're a citizen of a third country and have a chance to obtain material of public interest, of course you should, and it shouldn't concern you whether the country whose material you obtain regards that as a crime.
Snowden and Manning broke the oaths they took.
Assange is guilty of espionage.
> but Assange isn't American, not US permanent resident, and he has no duty to be loyal to the US.
That's besides the point, for example if a CIA agent is in China gathering intelligence on classified things, he is clearly guilty of espionage. You don't have to be a citizen or a permanent resident or have a duty to be loyal to a country to be spy.
edit: typo
Consequently, if arrested in, let's say, Thailand and handed over to China he will presumably not confess to espionage, just as Assange should not. He will instead presumably regard the procedure as irrelevant and say nothing.
By entering into a guilty plea he is participating in a legal procedure which is bullshit, and by legitimising it he causes harm to others who would seek to obtain information about war crimes from foreign countries.
Consequently, entering a plea, and particularly a guilty plea, should not be done.
Political borders should not be relevant to evaluate the ethics of what each person did.
Manning & Snowden ultimately to me acted ethically (And subjectively history has not been kind to the things that Snowden has had to do or chose to do since he got asylum in Russia)
Assange ultimately acted UN-ethically by being selective in some cases (leaking DNC data but not RNC), and "non partisan" in others (Leaking data that contained info on US war crimes; while also risking the lives of unrelated US intelligence agents and informants NOT complicit in war crimes)
I believe illegal acquisition of proof shall be punished only if the underlying case is denied.
If I as a US citizen didn't sign a contract agreeing not to publish something and if that something isn't libelous, I should be free to publish it.
Why do governments are given special treatment when some of their secrets are crimes that are disclosed too late to get anyone involved in a trial, and happened too long ago to do anything about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
At the time, I was initially a person who thought that what Wikileaks was doing was a net good for the rule of law, but changed my mind when I learned about the selective nature of what they publish. The fact that they were playing politics, pushing conspiracy theories, and actively coordinating with the Trump campaign completely discredits any moral high-ground they had. You can say that what happened to him is unfair and that may even be true but Assange is no hero.
What your asking implies is was he more an agitator or conspirator. Well he is about to admit to as much out of necessity, more to the point, will the next round of international journalists feel so much grey area hunting is necessary to bring us the truth about governments acting in the red area? I suspect many a journalist would go back in time and spill coffee on Hitler if it helped unearth those state secrets.
David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.
I'm ambivalent about his jailing. If you are going to get heroic people killed then you can't cry too much if you get jailed a bit.
The Taliban are awful, but they're the awful legitimate government of Afghanistan. And they've already ended two of these problems. If you inform against a paramilitary that has no concerns with rule of law, you're already inserting yourself into their war and accepting the risk of being outed.
Many you really couldn't possibly sanitize the situation any more. He said an absolutely heinous thing out loud that reflects values I definitely don't want from someone running a "neutral" dissemination platform for secrets
However, Assange has always displayed a great respect for human life, and so, this doesn't sound like him at all.
I can't find any clip of this, nor anyone discussing this, and have never heard of it before your claim. Care to bring receipts?
Edit: Looking more into it, I found the source - people said that Declan Walsh said that he heard Assange say this at a dinner party. You really ought to be a little more discriminating when using a single quote to try and completely dismiss someone.
I hope the rest of his life is equally miserable now that he is a free person.
It was reported in several major publications as well at the time.
> Wikileaks response:
> A representative of Wikileaks responded, ‘We have no further reports on this “rumour/issue”. Another Wikileaks representative told Index “obviously it is not approved”.
Following back the Guardian story linked in the above, there's this:
> Assange subsequently maintained he had only a "brief interaction" with Shamir: "WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region."
As far as I can tell, it looks like Wikileaks paid Shamir ~$2,000 for reviewing a batch of documents, but he maybe broke his NDA and tried to sell the docs (even the evidence for this, as far as I can see, is purely circumstantial).
It's all a far, far cry from "Assange gave cables to KGB". Small wonder this isn't even in the top 3 attempts to smear Assange as 'linked' to Russian agents (all of which have never had a shred of direct evidence btw).
Of course wikileaks/assange aren’t going to admit to doing something terrible. Whether or not it’s true, they’re going to give the same answer!
I haven’t looked into that Belarusian thing, so I don’t know what evidence there is but it doesn’t make sense to take Wikileaks at face value - it’s obvious confirmation bias. Even if one doesn’t want to accept that it’s confirmation bias, one should be aware that it comes off as it to everyone else.
The whole wikileaks thing was so annoying because it was 95% of the time of two different choirs preaching opposite sermons based only on faith not objective facts.
Notice also how I never said "Assange gave cables to KGB" but that his buddy did. Are you going to bicker over whom Shamir got the cables from?
The last line of Chapter 31 Tao Te Ching sayings it right.
"Fine weapons are instruments of misfortune; all creatures fear them. In peace we favor creation; at war we favor destruction. Weapons are tools of misfortune, not the tools of the wise. The sage uses them only as the very last, with calm restraint. Victory is no cause for rejoicing; victory comes from killing. If you enjoy killing, you can never be fulfilled. When victorious, celebrate as if at a funeral."
None of the US leaders whose crimes were exposed by Assange have faced any consequences whatsoever, and many of them remain influential, lauded figures in American society.
Our societies are already convinced those are dictatorships.
But it took Snowden and Assange to show us how deeply messed up our societies are.
It's very possible they are both Russian assets, but what they reported have been verified, and we needed to know it.
The way you are reacting is close to a religious interpretation of the world. It's not us VS them. It's not a football match.
We have a society to build, and it's been taken from us, one piece at a time. If we don't want to end up like Russia, we need all info we can get.
And given the huge price they paid for it, yes, I consider them heroes. And I think history will remember them as such.
- we're better off because there is less human suffering "per capita" for lack of a better word.
- we're worse off because technology has allowed us all to instantly see and learn about every human (and animal) atrocity anywhere in the world.
I'm sure if I keyed up a gore site right now I could find the latest mexican cartel atrocity, or a necklacing in Africa, or someone somewhere else being cruelly hurt. But in the 1950s you had to pay for a paper which was excessively rate-limited and narrow in scope.
Also, "everything is relative" is an idiot's way of saying something something meaningless while trying to make it seem incisive. Yes, many things are relative to others, but there are also objective measurements and visible differences between material aspects of the world, past and present especially. Feel free to live with the violence and material resources of a 16th century peasant, with no access to modern amenities for a few months and see how you rethink "better off" when considering most of mdoern life (even for a majority of poor people)
The peasant who used to get one square meal in 3 days now gets one square meal a day. So objectively we are better off. ( And the HN idiot will gloss over the stats to point out how fortunate we are to have software jobs)
In fact I can answer my question in another way. We do not exist as a hive collective and nor ought we individuals compare our lives to an alternate life living in the past. A historical societal fact that is technically does not apply to the problems of individual people living today. It was wrong of Pinker to inconsiderately apply those historical facts on the level of societies by further making his implied political points about the individual needs of the marginalized and the oppressed today, but in public that is what he has constantly done.
The list goes on, they are not the BBC or Al-Jazeera. The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.
Just such a bizarre take completely divorced of reality.
Not to mention the usually cited helicopter video is highly edited and anything but impartial, with an American Bradley fighting vehicle under ambush a block away as can be heard in the audio. And I can’t fathom why a journalist, accompanied by men with AK’s themselves, would be pointing what obviously looks like an RPG from a distance at troops in a firefight- not to mention bringing women and in children with him in the minivan.
If this highly edited footage was the worst that could be found in such a large dump of documents- I’m highly underwhelmed.
Evidence of war crimes? Hardly. A chance to see how ugly these conflicts are and another reason why Americsn troops perhaps should never have been there in the first place? Yep, absolutely.
But my hunch is that the entire event is a Rohrschack test where most people will take away from it the same perceptions that they walked in with.
It showed a cover up of the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan which had been caused by American Troops.
It showed significant horrific human rights violations against innocent and untried inmates at Guantanamo Bay. (As if just the existance of that wasn't enough.)
It showed illegal spying by the NSA on governments around the world.
Plenty of good done by wikileaks.
"Torture At Abu Ghraib" was published in 2004, Collatoral Murder not until 2010. Were there still fence-sitters at that point? I honestly can't recall the prevailing attitude of the time, besides Assange being an enemy of democracy who deserved to be brought in and shot. I think the reaction was most telling, the continued bloodlust for traitors who are doing little more than advertising the US's incompetence and aimlessness in that war. If collateral damage didn't make me any less patriotic, seeing our politicians harass an australian for treason (???) certainly did
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu...
Saying the above, the reason to release wasn't to sway patriotism, it was to get the truth out. For that reason it was the right decision even if it ended up with a portion of society disliking Assange for his so called 'treason' (which of course it wasn't as he isn't an American).
Anyone that has blind patriotism without any doubts, to the US military, after Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib can't be helped.
I don't remember the bystanders to the camera man being armed?
Also, the camera might look like a RPG barrel on the ground, not from the helicopter.
in my experience people who condemn wikileaks for this almost universally praise wikileaks for other releases (just so longs as the other releases happened to paint their political opponents in a bad light).
In what locale and at which time did humans have control of their leadership?
No they are not in dispute, they are simply not facts.
From [1]:
The head of the IRTF, Brigadier General Robert Carr, testified under questioning at Chelsea Manning's sentencing hearing that the task force had found no examples of anyone who had lost their life due to WikiLeaks' publication of the documents.
Edit: fixed link.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#:~:text=The%20h....
Nobody is perfect and he's no different, all that they're expressing is that making the hard moral choice to expose bad behavior should be applauded instead of punished.
I know the vast majority of us (including me) would not have the courage to risk personal retaliation to expose bad behavior. We all love to think we would, but we all witness corruption everywhere and never say a word for a plethora of reasons.
If they were claiming "purity" as you imply, I'd agree. But that's not what was written, and it seems a lot of people have the same flawed interpretation. Yes, he's flawed, but that doesn't make what he has done any less brave.
I'm glad the darker side of the US operations came to light, but it would have been better if the leaks went straight to an actual news organization that had enough ethical standards to ensure names of informants and activists at risk were properly redacted.
Snowden's leaks were far better handled.
And didn't lead to any change.
The US testified in court that his disclosures didn't get anyone killed, this is misinformation stemming from early propaganda against him by the political establishment that was humiliated by WikiLeaks' publications
The US’s testimony makes it barely better given the quote (I’ll take your word for the testimony) and leaves me equally puzzled regarding his admiration.
> Fourteen years ago, at a human rights conference in Oslo, I met Julian Assange. From the moment I encountered the wraithlike WikiLeaks founder, I sensed that he might be a morally dubious character. My suspicions were confirmed upon witnessing his speech at the conference, in which he listed Israel alongside Iran and China as part of a “rogue’s gallery of states” and compared the Guantánamo Bay detention facility to a Nazi concentration camp
I think it's pretty obvious from that opening that it's a hit piece on Assange. Anyway, that piece links to an earlier Guardian piece [2] for the source of the quote. That Guardian column is another, and even more obvious, hit piece on Assange. Here's its first paragraph :
> You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
Vomit. But finally in the Guardian piece we find the source of the purported quote. It's from David Leigh and Luke Harding's "history" of WikiLeaks. I think most people who have closely followed the Wikleaks story will understand how unreliable and compromised both David Leigh and Luke Harding are to serve as 'witnesses' or sources for any reporting on Wikileaks and Assange. But they've served their masters very well as yellow journalists engaged in a state backed smear campaign against Assange.
Did he say that? It's a secondary witness from someone who hate him. You need to double check sources.
In sincere good-faith: is there even a US law about publishing the names of undercover informants? Isn't that what Dick Chaney and the New York Times did?
Can this be used to indict other journalists who receive and publish classified information? As if so, this feels like a huge loss, though I can hardly blame Assange for not continuing the fight.
Julian Assange actively solicited leaks of information. That's where the espionage claim comes from.
There's not much precedent on this though and making a plea deal avoids establishing one. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Generally, precedent is established when someone appeals their conviction, and a higher court determines that the conviction is lawful. Higher court decisions bind lower courts, so e.g. if a circuit appeals court says the law is "X", every district court within it has to agree.
Since generally, you wouldn't appeal a plea deal, there probably won't be legal precedent from this.
That being said, I wonder if the USA will informally say "we got Assange; we can get you" the next time a similar situation comes up.
This phrasing makes it sound like Assange asked "Do you have this?" when the accusations have always been closer to "Can you get me this? Here is how you could go about doing that." That takes it out of the realm of journalism in at least the legal sense.
Did he actively encourage people to do things they didn't want to do, or did people actively seek the necessary advice from him?
Would Assange's problems been solved a single cut out? "I can't answer that but I can put you in touch with people who can."
Any bit of classified information can be reasonably considered in the interest of someone in the public.
Public interest can only mitigate the illegality of what you're doing, it doesn't just magically make the act illegal.
> Did he actively encourage people to do things they didn't want to do, or did people actively seek the necessary advice from him?
False dichotomy.
If you want to rob a bank, and you come and ask me to be the getaway driver, we're both going to hang. It doesn't matter who had the idea for the crime, what matters is that he materially assisted in carrying it out.
Now, if you robbed a bank, and just dropped a million dollars on my porch, that would be a different story. That's the defense journalists use when they receive illegally obtained information.
Flawed analogy.
He didn't help them rob the bank. They asked "what is a good way to get away from a bank robbery." He answered "here are some ideas that have worked in past bank robberies."
And it's not a false dichotomy. The law considers mens rea to be a very important factor. The law isn't a black and white application of imputed standards to our social order. You can tell this because we allow juries to decide what happens in them.
Judges interpret law, and give juries specific instructions for which facts to make a determination on.
In the case of computer crime, the law treats 'getting away with it' as more or less the same act as doing it. Exfiltrating data and covering your tracks is all under the umbrella of unauthorized use of a computer system. Knowingly consulting for a particular instance of it makes you part of the conspiracy.
And so, in your world, if I rob a bank and give all the money to really good charities that measurably make peoples' live better, it's not illegal?
Or if I kill a known pedophile/child rapist to keep them from hurting more children, is that not illegal?
Is that what you believe? If so, why bother having laws at all? We just need to ask our modern-day Solomon -- akira2501, that is -- if something can be justified, and as such, is legal. Or am I missing something?
I can't imagine we haven't been saying that since the day Assange set foot inside the Ecuadorian embassy.
Even if you think Assange did more than this, this plea deal is very clearly over passively receiving classified information.
The precedent information is good to hear, thank you.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/new-york-times-co-v-...
As the last paragraph points out, not a clear victory for the free press, but the Assange prosecutors know this case very well and you are absolutely right that they want to avoid another one.
Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
Practically, yes.
I've been in situations where there was no precedent, and in asking what would happen if this went to court, decisions were made based on how lower courts ruled. Legal analyses, law review articles, customary practice, etc. all /influence/ courts.
Correct. As a general rule:
- When the "black-letter law" dictates a result (that is, a statute or binding precedent), a judge will generally follow it — unless the judge really wants to achieve a particular result and is willing to do mental-gymnastics rationalizing or to try to get the law changed.
In other situations, judges are typically very busy but they still want to get it "right," in accordance with whatever their personal mental model of life suggests, and they don't like being reversed on appeal. So they (judges) look for support — and try to anticipate possible counterarguments — from a variety of sources, as suggested by the adversaries' counsel battling each other's arguments — each of whom is motivated to help the judge do what counsel want by finding the sorts of things mentioned above.
>Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
Those charges were (presumably) dropped as part of the plea, and his plea did not mention them. The plea is only about receiving and publishing.
By way of comparison, the former US president who is also in current poll results more likely than not to be elected as the next US president is presently alleged to have conducted 40 of these 18 U.S. Code § 793 offences.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_...
The "overt acts" part you mention is over Title 18 793(g) which basically says if two people work together in one part of a conspiracy they're both guilty of any actions their partner made.
By way of example: the murder-for-hire accusations against Ross Ulbricht were listed "overt acts" in his conspiracy charge.
>By way of example: the murder-for-hire accusations against Ross Ulbricht were listed "overt acts" in his conspiracy charge.
Yes, the supposed murder for hire was something he wasn't charged with and wasn't mentioned in his sentencing. It was not a part of his trial.
"Title 18" is almost the entire federal criminal code. Saying "a specific clause in title 18" is like saying "somewhere, in the entire US federal criminal code, it says...".
As I just said: the murder-for-hire scheme --- which I believe was in fact part of Ulbricht's sentencing --- was an "overt act" in Ulbricht's conspiracy charge.
I had referenced the specific clause, 793(g), in my previous post to you. It is also referenced in the plea. I didn't think I needed to do so again. I can quote the section
>If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.
Here: a Ken White article that is almost entirely about how "overt acts" work in conspiracy charges, along with their historical purpose:
https://popehat.substack.com/p/overt-acts-and-predicate-acts...
I still don't see how the plea is about anything else. That if this charge went to trial they may have brought up his supposed violations of the CFAA as some kind of evidence of his conspiracy doesn't really change things.
In both threads, the answer comes down to: the plea agreement says otherwise. Assange has stipulated to his culpability in the conspiracy --- the 793(g) charge you brought up. The plea agreement doesn't list the overt acts that substantiate the charge, and would make clearer the reasoning behind Assange's active participation. But that's because the plea agreement is a stipulation, for which the only evidence needed is that of agreement between prosecution and defense.
The superseding indictment is much more explicit. Had the case ever gone to trial, you'd have seen at its conclusion jury instructions that would have made clear the evidentiary threshold --- the overt acts, what acts qualify, etc --- to convict on the conspiracy.
The case isn’t about Assange simply receiving classified material from Manning.
Why are you quoting that part rather than any of the actual offenses? He undoubtedly conspired with Manning to receive classified documents for the purpose of publishing them, which is what the plea details.
Part (a) even says he "received or obtained" classified documents from a person knowing that they were illegally obtained. It doesn't say he helped with the illegal obtaining.
This differs from for example The Pentagon Papers where the material was delivered to reporters after already having been taken. They had no foreknowledge that they would be taken.
What you should do here is compare the plea stipulation to the superseding indictment, and note that the "overt acts" of the conspiracy charge refer back to the "general allegations" section. Or: you could go track down any other conspiracy indictment (Ulbricht's is a fun one) and see examples of "overt acts" listed explicitly.
Also Australia is beholden to US and has deep ties with it.
Sweden may differ of course. I don't think either of the 3 primaries care what Sweden thinks.
"Swedish papers illuminate CIA renditions" https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7915747
"Sweden Violated Torture Ban in CIA Rendition" https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-...
Edit: Your down votes do not change reality. More important countries than Sweden have been satellites, such as East and West Germany.
The US promised to not torture three guys who were handed over to them, and then started torturing them, illegally at Bromma airport, but this was restricted to things that they did not regard as torture, such as drugging people, putting things into their colons, use of 'restraints', etc.
There were no black sites in Sweden. There was torture here, but only for one afternoon, on an airplane that soon left our territory.
What the fuck? Amazing I never heard about this, even doing my best to follow the 'extraordinary rendition' atrocities.
- Mainstream media of all political alignments have reported on CIA black sites.
- The Red Cross has investigated CIA black sites and delivered reports to the White House on them.
- The Council of Europe has investigated CIA black sites:
"A June 2006 report from the Council of Europe estimated 100 people had been kidnapped by the CIA on EU territory (with the cooperation of Council of Europe members), and rendered to other countries, often after having transited through secret detention centres ("black sites") used by the CIA, some located in Europe."
- The European Parliament officially criticized (after a vote) the European nations (including Seden) who:
"...have been relinquishing control over their airspace and airports by turning a blind eye or admitting flights operated by the CIA which, on some occasions, were being used for illegal transportation of detainees"
This is not some "conspiracy nut" stuff. This stuff has been widely known for decades and reported everywhere. If you didn't know about it, you haven't read the news. You can look into it on Wikipedia if you want, of all places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/apr/10/biden-assange-...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/14/austr...
Worth mentioning that this wasn't David's intentions. He leaked the documents as he thought special forces soldiers were being "unfairly" restricted via tighter rules of engagement & defense oversight in order to protect civilians. He wanted the ABC to tell everyone that special forces were being kept on too tight of a leash, not report on war crimes.
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/a...
"He told another media outlet at the time that it was a “different story to the one I wanted. They (ABC) published something about SAS soldiers shooting people by accident, which I found disappointing.”"
I don’t agree with either sentence, but they do not appear at odds with one another.
I disagree on the lack of connection.
But the fact he is pleading guilty to a serious crime will have further implications for his life e.g. preventing travel, not allowed to apply for certain jobs etc.
I think he'll be fine.
I'm glad he's going home to his family, but this is a least-worst outcome to an awful miscarriage of justice that destroyed many lives.
Had he done what he did to China or Russia, he probably would not be a alive.
He is not a character worth celebrating.
His liberty is a triumph of western values. We don’t off our dissidents.
What does that say about those people? Are they easily led by emotion? They certainly don't care about the rule of law, if breaking the law by others can so easily be ignored. They aren't particularly patriotic, if they think that subverting the checks and balances in their preferred kind of government is fine.
I'm glad this partiular episode will be finished soon.
This is true in both directions and Assange is the perfect example of that. Someone being a whistleblower is not a get out of jail free card and there are still laws regarding how whistleblowing should be handled and what qualifies. Assange leaked a lot of important stuff that qualifies, but that wasn't all he leaked or did. A shockingly few number of people seem willing to engage this issue with the nuance that is requires and either label Assange a hero or a villain when he clearly is somewhere in between.
In the beginning Assange tried to vet the leaks he published. He contacted the US over the Manning leaks to go over them so he could publish without risk, the US refused.
So Assange set up a huge team of journalists to comb through the documents to see what was safe to publish. One of those journalists working for The Guardian proceeded to publish the key to the entire database, ensuring everything was leaked
Shortly after, he ends up in embassy and was unable or unwilling to do similar things.
Interested in any links you could provide, too.
If you want a deeper dive, I'm sure something exists but I don't remember where it would be.
Are you suggesting with this "unable or unwilling to do similar things" part that he should be excused because he tried to do it initially? Should we forgive a lapse in journalistic ethics from that point forward because he started out on the right path and just couldn't stick to it?
Maybe the plea deal should be an opportunity to reevaluate these hyperbolic claims regarding the potential punishment that awaited Assange.
>Our government has been the bad guy every step of the way in this whole affair.
And that was the exact lack of nuance I was criticizing. One side being a bad guy does not make the other side a good guy. There is no excuse for the way Assange eventually abandoned any form of journalistic ethics.
It might have been somewhat leaked before, maybe because of misscomunication/individual action. But it was not known widely before - still, Wikipedia made the decision to publish all unredacted on their own:
"WikiLeaks said that on 2 September it would publish the entire, unredacted archive in searchable form on its website"
Wikileaks said their decision to publish was to prevent third parties from tampering with the leaks creating false stories, but it was likely primarily that Assange and Wikileaks wanted the credit for the leak. Not a noble reason, but it still wasn't their fault they were in that shitty situation.
Not so sure about that. I recall some of the journalists working with him on the release said, they were shocked to here, that Assange said he does not care at all about the life of the informants, as they were working for the US. (source, some article from "Spiegel", would be quite some work to dig that up)
So I do not trust, that he seriously was concerned about their lifes, making serious security considerations.
Every possible decision after the keys were leaked was shitty. Maybe Wikileaks could have picked a less shitty one, but they were still in a terrible situation because of somebody else's actions.
"In February 2011 David Leigh of The Guardian published the encryption passphrase in a book;[6] he had received it from Assange so he could access a copy of the Cablegate file, and believed the passphrase was a temporary one, unique to that file"
Assuming David Leigh was not lying, Assange should have been more clear with the security implications. (then again, I see no reason to publish the temporary key in the first place). Still at that time it was not not known, except for maybe some intelligence organisations. So if really concerned, one could have done many different things to protect informants, delay the time, instead of publishing it officially for the whole world to see.
The key was public and the database was public. If you're an informant, would you rather be completely unaware of that while the local intelligence organization is already digging through it or have the whole world know including people that could help/warn you? I don't think "sit on it" is obviously the best choice.
This is much bigger than Assange.
I assume you mean the famous "collateral murder" videos?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...
That is my biggest issue with the whole wikileaks thing. Because it might borderline a warcrime by being careless - but it was no murder. Yet it was framed as the US army just killing journalists for fun. But it was not at all like this.
There was active fighting, the journalists that were killed were embedded with active fighters - and their camera misstaken for an RPG. Those things can happen, especially if the journalists do not mark themself as journalists.
"The cameras could easily be mistaken for slung AK-47 or AKM rifles, especially since neither cameraman is wearing anything that identifies him as media or press"
The second attack while civilians evacuated and the children killed in the van - that was the bad thing. But it was still in the context of US troops receiving fire. So not at all allright, dirty war in a urban area - but not intentional murder. It was collateral damage in a wrong war.
And my general judgement of the war was quite clear I think.
So if you come to a different conclusion about the facts, then I am interested in your arguments.
I'm familiar with the video. Unfortunately, I don't see that WikiLeaks ever did publish that one.
All the other stuff in the video is either legal or something which could be an honest mistake.
I tend to agree, the problem is, this was not a conventional war, for which the concept of war crime was made for.
The combatants were not wearing uniforms. The van was not marked as an ambulance. All civilians and some had weapons - and on the other hand US soldiers thinking only in terms of conventional combat, where there might have been an rpg still around for an enemy to retrieve and fire at them.
"Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle"
But they happened to live there. They did not visited a battlefield for fun. So yes, the video showed quite well to the world the reality of urban fighting against an uprising. Dirty as hell.
But partisans and resistance movements are normal part of war and something you have to accept when you invade and occupy a foreign country. It is permissible to use all means available to one when resisting foreign occupation.
The Van wasn't an ambulance. It was, I suppose you say, people helping wounded people, and those people are protected, whether they are marked or not.
But otherwise there are some rules for engagement in partisan warfare. For example they must be marked as combatants by uniform or some other clear sign.
Exactly for this reason, to be able to divide between combatants and civilians. The more the partisans ignore that, the more civilians will die. Which is why it is also frequently used as a dirty tactic to raise more civilian uproar and more joining the partisans.
It is at least permissible to order the use of enemy uniforms for sabotage operations, provided that they be taken off before direct attacks.
One does have to put on a uniform or sign while performing direct attacks, but it's not required during sabotage operations. Then it's even permissible to use enemy uniforms.
No it is not. At least not under common international law. (And a sabotage mission is a direct attack)
"Not all uses of enemy uniforms are prohibited therefore; only “improper” uses. For example, wearing enemy uniforms in order to flee the fighting or escape capture does not run afoul of the law. On the other side of the spectrum, engaging in attacks while wearing the uniform of the enemy is flatly prohibited"
https://lieber.westpoint.edu/combatant-privileges-and-protec...
At least part of that lesson is that if you engage in partisan politics with your 'journalism' then you instantly become a great deal less sympathetic with about half the population. That includes a bunch of people in positions with enough power to make your life complicated.
I find it troubling that people dont have the nuance to identify that hes a bit of a smelly housemate and problematic manager but ultimately a clear net benefit to mankind.
I hesitate to even bring it up because it tends to poison any online discussion, but the DNC leaks were a pretty obvious one. Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt that the leaks were truly whistleblowing despite not actually revealing any illegal behavior, the way he continued to insinuate that Seth Rich was his source despite Assange still being in contact with the source after Rich's death should make it clear that Assange was not acting ethically.
>but ultimately a clear net benefit to mankind.
And this was exactly my original point. This isn't how the law works. We don't throw the good and bad on the scales of justice to see which side is heaviest. He did plenty of good things. He committed some crimes. The good things don't excuse the crimes.
Shoot, there goes the argument I was planning to deploy against Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.
Assange is a journalist. The DNC leaks were public interest. The fact that they occurred during an election heightened that public interest. They were 100% justified in the US in moral and legal terms under 1A. Unless you are still tilting at forgotten politicians its really really weird to keep harping on about.
>This isn't how the law works.
What has law got to do with morality, other than often standing in the way of morality?
He has consistently maintained that the crime they charged him with "Soliciting covert information" should be protected under 1a. Or at least otherwise protected as journalism. He isnt even a US citizen mind, but US law doesnt give a shit.
Law should follow morality. Any normal right thinking human bean should understand that its literally the job of journalists to solicit and expose public interest information. If the government is committing crimes, if the government is acting in a way counter to their domestic narrative (which you base your vote on), if the government is treating its foreign partners especially shittily, the public has a right to know.
That the US had made doing so a crime, is a matter for the US electorate to deal with. They should remove the dumb as dogdoodoo law, or remove the government that opposes removing that law, physically if necessary. That he failed to abide by a set of stupid rules in doesn't suddenly make his actions amoral.
Its not that on balance he did some good and some crimes. Its that his crimes were in the public interest, so the law that made his actions criminal, is at fault not he.
I actually don't understand why this has to be brought up. I don't understand why people cling to law as a substitute for morality. Governments are very often wrong.
And on the other hands there are Nazis who just followed legal orders.
Isn't "it's difficult to prove that people literally died because of his actions" a pretty low bar to set?
"Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."
I personally don't see much moral need to, for example, somehow obtain proof that the Taliban actually killed people based specifically off of his actions. He obviously doesn't actually care if they did.
This means that whistleblower immunity should be extremely strong and anything the government wants to do to prosecute whistleblower should have to pass many hurdles.
This doesn't conflict with the concept of checks and balances, rather it has to be an integral part of the checks and balances.
In fact, this rationale is so simple and self-evident to anyone who asks themselves how the rule of law can be upheld in the face of the potential for unlawful conduct by government actors that one should ask themselves if coming to the opposite conclusion does not require a strong dose of motivated reasoning.
My impression that partisanship in reporting is incredibly strong.
When no, he was and is as partisan as anyone else.
He's more akin to an activist.
> WikiLeaks wins top Australian journalism prize... The Walkley Award is one of a number of journalism prizes won by WikiLeaks in recent years, including Amnesty International’s UK Media Award and the acclaimed Martha Gellhorn Prize. The latter award is given to journalists who reveal “an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda.” These prizes undermine the Obama administration’s claims that Assange is not a journalist and that the publication of thousands of secret US diplomatic and military cables is illegal.
> a person who writes news stories or articles for a newspaper or magazine or broadcasts them on radio or television
Simply dumping files on a website doesn't make you a journalist and US courts agree.
Cambridge.org needs to wake up.
The various yt auditors around - especially in the US - all class themselves as journalists.
Saying it doesnt make it true.
The year is 2024 and we've had the internet for a good while now.
I think it's safe to say that "tradition definitions" are long, long dead and we need to get on with what the reality actually is.
Who cares what "journalists" were defined as in 1980.
This agreement itself is a plea deal, but involves the agreement in principle that Assange has committed a crime by publishing this information. That in itself is an enormous problem for people seeking out government wrongdoing.
Essentially uncovering hypocrisy in the way our Governments and corporations works.
People can both care about the act of whistleblowing and the illegal actions incurred as a result.
But it's all nuanced, there's whistleblowing and then there's whistleblowing in a way that puts other innocent people at risk.
From: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstrike
3 attacks. Two 30mm cannons and one hellfire.
There is tons of video out there and sometimes leaked of the drone strike recordings. The hostage video section of high side is creepily advertised also for inspiration or idk.
"Deemed illegal", sounds rubber-stamped.
The fact that you put "collateral damage" in quotes, has the same value as me putting "Murdered by COD players, just for carrying a camera" in quotes.
I stand to be corrected regarding the video in question.
They hate you because of your "freedom" anyway.
Regardless, the exposures are exactly what journalists and publishers should be doing - government agencies went out of control under the umbrella of the Patriot Act, and the results, from fabricated claims of WMDs in Iraq to who knows what, have been disastrous.
Also, Wikileaks did pretty responsible journalism for example on the explosive Vault 7 leaks:
https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/
> "Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks."
where are the dumps from north korea. where is kim jong un's private communications with Xi Jinping. Where is Putin's communications with Lukashenko. Where are internal memos from the people's liberation army. Where are the leaks from the Ayatollahs.
Also yes the targets were western governments. What about western corporations? Where are leaks from Boeing about their issues? Where are leaks from Facebook about PTSD of their moderators? Where are the leaks about Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or whatever?
The targets WL chose were basically the "evil west", you know, the only reason Ukraine has not been reduced to a prison complex.
i really hope this man will be free. there's still a really bad precedent set that they will imprison you first, make you serve your term, then get your day in court to go free.. its a bit crooked and i really dont like this
part of me thinks this is happening now because the presiding dominant western political establishment is losing power everywhere and they don't want the growing adversarial camp to hold freeing him as a victory while being able to set the precedent of his guilt to someday have in their back pocket the ability to do this again without the perceived unfairness
Well thats fascinating. Were his kids somehow all born after he was imprisoned?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Assange#Personal_life_a...
Uh, what's this thread about, again...? He "was never convicted" because he evaded trial by hiding out for seven years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-t...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2223847/fullcredits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tomorrow
(Or if you actually have a real source for "RT funded it" then you should update Wikipedia and IMDB)
Never ceases to amaze me the hoops that Assange cult members will jump through to deny inconvenient facts about their hero.
Can only imagine what you come up with to justify Assange's pathetic insinuations about Seth Rich and his blatant anti-Semitism.
I edited the first event press mention of WikiLeaks at Wired.
I covered the early Guantanamo leaks and the Iraqi Apache attack.
I've interviewed Assange, likely before you ever heard of him.
I broke the story that wikileaks' submission system broke and its SSL failed, the first external sign of the internal dissent where its tech lead literally made off with the server because he didn't trust Assange.
I pointed you to an extremely reputable source showing what everyone knew at the time, which is that a Putin controlled media outlet paid for and claimed credit for funding his "talk show."
His Russian connections after that were perfectly clear, including routing Snowden through Russia and later being the handmaiden of GRU in the DNC leaks.
Keep putting your head in the sand with dumbass arguments like it's not in IMDb.
It's a fine line between being a fanboy and being complicit and it's pretty clear which side of that line you're on now.
Ahem... hrm...
Edit: Haha is that you editing the Wikipedia page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_Tomorrow&di...
Enjoy your cult of personality.
public intellectual*
Whether or not his work had any worth to it, it's hard not to conclude that he was a de-facto Russian agent, IMO. The most pungent data point is probably that Rohrabacher [2] was mediating a pardon deal between him and Trump. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...
[2] https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/kevin-mc...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/19/donald-trump-o...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-r...
REJOICE!!!!!!!!!!!
Woooo!!! This is incredible news to wake up to.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/04/08/activist-ola-bini-sen...
Then the US requested the countries he happened to be in to extradite him to the US.
If this is correct, if he were in Australia (his country) when the US issued their request, he would have been free, right? (without the possibility to travel I guess as other countries may follow the US request).
And who was punished for killing journalists in [0]? The whistleblower.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...
Julian Assange leaves UK after striking deal with US justice department
https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/jun/25/julian...
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nmid.64...
Bangkok – Saipan: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/9h-vtd#35d863e6
This is a little disingenuous, and made me chuckle. It's faster and cheaper to get to Australia from the US mainland than it is from Saipan. Yes, it's physically closer as stated, but does not confer the claimed benefits.
So, they get to rubber stamp this and get it over with without too much scrutiny in the media before the man starts giving non-stop interviews in Sydney or wherever he is going in Australia.
Where were they in the dark days of the semi-secret travesty of a trial in London?
Thankfully people like Craig Murray stepped up to the crucial fourth estate role they abdicated, to witness it for us.
Wrong and right are not absolutes.
But I think, charitably, what people mean when they say things like this is that more information should be free. And I think agree with that. But I'm not entirely convinced it applies to everything Assange is responsible for releasing.
Keeping war crimes classified until everyone responsible is dead is not the same as keeping plans secret during a war.
Hard to mix those two up to the point I'd say it was done in bad faith.
It's also worthy of outrage when keeping secrets leads to monsters escaping accountability.
But don't pretend it isn't the same thing! It would be very nice if all military secrets that get leaked were only of the "exposing war crimes" sort, but all that information is all mixed together with the "jeopardizing people and plans" information.
It's just not this clear cut "leaking is always good because information should be free" thing that a lot of people want it to be. It also isn't the clear cut "people who leak information are bad" that a lot of other people want it to be. It's a mix of good and bad and the details matter.
A pardon can cover previous crimes with or without conviction.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/05/25/steve-b...
Seems like the perfect place to kidnap him
Do you believe that Russia benefits equally from the election of either candidate this time around?
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_assassinations
The distinction between Biden and Trump is that Trump is opposed to the machine that's been responsible for decades of disastrous foreign policy, while Biden is the face of that very same machine.
Putin is far from the only foreign leader who would prefer Trump. It's silly to attempt this framing.
But what if the decision is between a stability candidate and a pro-chaos candidate? I think then that Russia would take a side. And I doubt many would debate that one candidate is clearly more pro-chaos than the other.
It went far beyond a couple of artificial protests.
Russia did support Trump in 2016 (and beyond), Trump was quite happy about it.
If you were Russia in 2016, would you have preferred that the next US President be someone competent with significant foreign policy experience, or a Putin-idolizing fool with zero foreign policy experience?
If the Cold War was truly over when the wall fell, we'd have welcomed Russia into NATO. That would have been a huge mistake, as Russia has proven to be antithetical to democracy and an aggressor against the interests of the West, despite dressing up in its skirt.
Instead we've engaged in proxy war after proxy war with very little changing in the best part of 40 years or so. That's no accident.
Suggesting otherwise IMO is to take talking points from the mouth of the Kremlin. I get tired of the "Russia is being bullied by the mean ol' United States" narrative, they're malignant and hostile. I think you're right to raise this point.
This was offered by NATO: Partnership for Peace, NATO-Russia Founding Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93NATO_relations It's Russia that wasn't interested.
And they have repeatedly been caught meddling directly in Western countries (see i.e. multiple assassinations in the West).
Henry Kissinger (Former U.S. Secretary of State) - Expressed concerns about NATO expansion increasing tensions with Russia over several years, particularly noted in discussions and forums during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
William Perry (Former U.S. Secretary of Defense) - Voiced apprehensions about the strategy and pace of NATO expansion, particularly in the late 1990s during his tenure and in reflections thereafter.
Sam Nunn (Former U.S. Senator, Co-Chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative) - Warned of strategic miscalculations and heightened conflict risks due to expansion, prominently during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Jack Matlock (Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union) - Criticized NATO expansion for potentially setting the stage for conflict with Russia, in articles and public lectures, particularly during the 1990s.
Yes, that's how propaganda works. But in the face of new information, that propaganda has to be tweaked or abandoned. To keep hammering the same message produces quickly diminishing returns.
If all source material that you can find is hyperbolic nonsense, then you have made up your mind before looking.
He didn't serve 12 years. He locked himself in his room for 7, then he actually served 5.
It absolutely does not quality. Being on the lam is obviously not the same as serving time in custody.
You can only sum up to 12 by making false equivalencies and ignoring important differences. It reeks of having a self-serving preordained conclusion (or being downstream from one) then distorting everything until it fits.
Assange was never going to be extradited to the USA, because of the US Govt's behaviour in the Harry Dunn case (finally closed this month):
Harry Dunn was a UK teenager who, while riding his motorcycle was struck and killed by a car driving on the wrong side of the road close to a US Airforce base. The driver, Anne Sacoolas, was reported to be the wife of a US Intelligence Officer. Under the UK- US Govt agreement, Intelligence Officers could be prosecuted locally, but their husbands / wives had diplomatic immunity. The US Govt asserted diplomatic immunity (probably aided and abetted by the UK Govt), and Sacoolas was swiftly hustled out of the UK on a private flight by the NSA or CIS). Anyhow, after a long campaign for justice by Dunn's family, it turns out that Anne Sacoolas is herself a senior US Intelligence officer, so should not have had diplomatic immunity. Charges were brought in the UK, but the US Govt refused to extradite, despite a direct request from the UK Prime Minister (Johnson) to the US President (Trump). There has been huge and sustained public sympathy in the UK for the Dunn family in their quest for justice, and the UK legal system and civil service was seriously angered by the attitude of the US Govt. Anne Sacoolas finally pleaded guilty over video link to charges of causing death by dangerous driving earlier this year. The inquest on the death of Harry Dunn (which was delayed until the conclusion of the criminal case) concluded earlier this month.
The UK was not going to extradite Assange as the US Govt refused to extradite Sacoolas. There was enough noise around the conditions that Assange could be held in, or the possibility of him facing the death penalty, for UK judges (who have a lot of independence) to raise questions on Assange's possible treatment in the US, and refuse an extradition request - it had already been going round in circles on this question for years.
Everyone wanted a face saving resolution - and with the possibility of a Trump presidency next year, the UK Govt did not want to have a point of contention with Trump, and his severely transactional approach. So, this is a face-saving compromise for the UK and US Govts. Assange pleads guilty (so the US says they have brought him to justice), Assange goes home (not to the US), and the UK Govt gets a nasty diplomatic problem resolved.
An excuse that was always made zero sense.
It later emerged that at the time of the Swedish investigation, there was no indictment from the US.
The UK routinely extradites people to the US (and facilitated extraordinary renditions from UK soil). The claim he could not leave the UK for fear of being extradited to the US was always a nonsensical lie.
(there was no claim that the UK does not extradict to the US in general, but in this specific case they might not)
He is on his way to US soil right now and will appear in US territory before a US judge, he has been extradited.
He was already in prison. Usually you do not let people go out to let them extradict themself.
It is a weird comprimise to put an end to this farce.
In reality he is not "free" till the judge slaps their hammer down.
"National Defence Information" ... is that what we're calling "War Crimes" these days?
That's the conspiracy charge they indicted Assange for. If you don't believe me then read https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-julian-assa... . If you say that's too long to read then just read the last 4 paragraphs.
They've bent over backwards to charge him here over something that literally did not happen and was only discussed as an option in passing. If they had anything else to charge him with they would. But they don't and rely on people like you propagating falsehoods.
Assange is not and has never been a US citizen or permanent resident. What he did is perfectly permissible.
He made a huge mistake in traveling to the UK though.
Here on HN, people tend to think highly of "journalists", especially those involved with foreign policy-related stories, as being some sort of guardians of democracy. Yet Julian Assange has shown that many journalists are in fact working closely together with governments to generate consent for war. To this day, journalists are still actively misleading the public with fearmongering for the Next Big Enemy(r) with whom who we should go into war with next. And a large part of the public — including the HN crowd — are still falling for this.
I get that the US has (had?) an interest to make him pay and that the only thing that really counts in geo-politics is power — but I don't see why my country should be allied with a nation that punishes the people uncovering their war crimes instead of (at least: also?) punishing those who carried them out.
That being said I can't shake the feeling that it would also be to some degree in the self interest of US citizens that their government respects the rule of law. Hard to claim to be the good guy while you are the driving force behind such things or propaganda campaigns against vaccines¹ or all² the³ other¹¹ things¹² the¹³ has¹¹¹ done¹¹²
¹: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
²: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67582813
³: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
¹¹: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MKUltra
¹²: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1953_Iran_coup
¹³: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9...
¹¹¹: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27%C3%...
¹¹²: You get the point, also not all superscript numbers seem to be supported on HN
I don’t believe that Starmer would have actually have dropped extradition proceedings against Assange as he’s extremely stingy with his political capital, but I guess things look different on the other side of the Atlantic. Easy to see a “left wing” government incoming and think “oh shit we’d better agree a plea deal”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110901064746/https://wikileaks...
Less persecution of those that benefit society, more persecution of those that seek to undermine it, please.
Is that too cynical of a view? I mean this is an administration that is supplying the most destructive weapons to Israel so they can kill and dismember Palestinian women and children — what’s the freedom of one innocent man to such people?
Do you think this helps Biden? Assange is a right winger, helping him out isn't likely to convince moderates to go for Biden.
Or do you think traditional liberals ripping Biden non-stop when most liberals are demoralized by everything happening is going to help Biden somehow?
The only people who think this hurts Biden are people that think Clinton was a better liberal candidate than Bernie.
He was an Australia citizen left out to dry.
Disgraceful.
I cringe every time I rewatch.
(Then again thanks to Wikileaks we now know US were “assessing” whether Gillard would be a good replacement to Rudd a year before it all happened… so I guess that made her a fan!
Aus sent troops to the invasion of Vietnam too. You dont do that unless you badly want to suck up to the US. Even the UK who will do virtually anything else for the US didnt do that.
Part the Random Caps I use iOS voice dictation
During WW2 we were bombed by the Japanese.
Keep your name and any trace back to you out of it.
No idea how but I have yet to see a story of a whistleblower not getting fucked over.
Probably the answer is to not bother and try and destroy the system from within.
#FREEDASSANGE
What a waste of a life over a pointless and vindictive prosecution. Here’s hoping all prosecutors involved go the way of Stevens’
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedeta...
However, I won't cheer for Assange, the person. He's using the guise of impartial journalism to be anything but impartial.
His selective disclosure of leaks, with a heavy bias towards NOT disclosing Russian caches, is pretty damning. Assange was shouting from the rooftops that WikiLeaks "doesn't have targets", but at the same time chose to focus on the DNC campaign leaks and decline to publish 2016 caches showing Russian involvement in Ukraine, and Wikileaks declined to publish documents revealing a 2 billion euro transaction between Syrian regime and a Russian bank. WikiLeaks also handed information on Belarusian dissidents to the Lukashenko regime.
Not to mention the infamous leaks of Taliban informants details, to which Assange was quoted saying: "Well, they're informants, so if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it.", as well as the 2015 Saudi leaks which revealed the virginity status of multiple Saudi women, several Saudis suffering from HIV as well as being arrested for being gay.
The level of care and privileges he's had while being imprisoned weren't afforded to the many Afghan informants, Belarusian dissidents and the LGBTQ members in Saudi that he's exposed.
(TL;DR - if Assange was on modern Twitter, I bet he'd be a Assad-loving, anime-pfp-displaying, Putin-bootlicking tankie)
Both Snowden and Assange went far beyond "blowing the whistle" in what they leaked and/or solicited.
Where is the punishment for the people commiting the crimes and treason that Snowden and Assange exposed?
Other funny things have been exposed too and nothing ever happens.
Like for example $12 billion, in hundred dollars bills, being send by a military cargo plane to Iraq, after the Iraq war. Of these $12 billion, $9bn are totally unaccounted for: it's not even clear if they ever made it to the plane. That is well documented.
Just imagine the number of crooked politicians and military officials involved in such a highway robbery: robbing the people, to enrich themselves.
"Which fraud are we going to commit today, we didn't steal enough money: we need to choke on more money, what's our plan?" "I know, I know, let's make $10 bn in hundred dollar bills disappear!"
It is also very likely, but probably too soon to be exposed/revealed, that such similar shenanigans happened with SBF/FTX and the funding of the war in Ukraine, where monkey business happened with US donations that probably never made it to Ukraine.
To me it's no coincidence that all the charges against SBF concerning the bribing of politicians have been dropped: that's quite the can of worms for it's certainly related to money which disappeared while supposedly going to Ukraine.
Another really funny one too is the government refusing the audit of the (missing) gold in Fort Knox (yeah, no, if out of $12 bn we know that $9bn vanished, I guarantee you there's no way all the gold supposed to be in Fort Knox is there). "It's too complicated to do an audit". I read: "a sizeable amount of that gold indeed vanished, like those $10 bn in $100 bills".
That's my main reason for wanting to pay as little taxes as possible: it makes me puke to know I encourage crime.
Now although these traitors and petty thieves shall never ever be send to jail, at the end of the day there are more important things, like having a clear conscience and being able to look your kid in the eyes.
So let these traitors choke on their ill-acquired wealth, they deserve to be the miserable cockroaches they are.
It's not enough to move the needle on the dollar value, it's barely more than a buck per person om earth.
He acted in the interests of everyone who doesn't like the US, you could justifiably say the same thing about him acting in China's best interest, or Iran.
Absolute codswallop that you can't hold a government to account else you are criticised for aiding their enemies. Does that mean we should just sit down and take it because it makes us look bad?
I'm the first in line to criticise my government (UK) but that doesn't mean I'm intentionally working in the interests of it's enemies.
Sod off with these bad faith attacks espousing an opinion that no reasonable person could possibly hold.
Reasonable minds can differ here, I don't think it's bad faith to suggest he might have been acting specifically towards Russian interests - if not originally, then later on.
It has never been proven he had some killer stuff on trump and failed to leak it.
Its not his job to selectively withhold information during an election to make demo voters happy.
And trump is basically immune to bad press anyway. What more could you say about him that hasnt been said.
This claim never held water and still fails to.
Wait, Assange or Trump?
Still, I hope he finds happiness and peace.
I mean I don’t blame him for not wanting to be murdered by Russia but he isn’t a freedom fighter when he only leaks things for countries that don’t directly threaten his life.
This argument is completely nonsensical, this idea that who revealed the crime matters more than the actual crime.
What does it matter who "influenced" him, if the information was legit? And is it your opinion that none of this information should be released unless it covers all countries equally? Do you honestly think he should have thought, I can't reveal this crime until I find an equal Russian crime, for equality. What a wonderful, open world that would be! Utterly ridiculous.
This is the same stupidity as "Hunter's laptop". It allows the Idiocracy to dismiss anything because "the Russians!".
Because they may have influenced the timing and content of the leaks to further their own ends. Revealing sensitive information is not a neutral act. It has consequences far beyond the exposure of bad actors.
The underlying principle is the rule of law and the Constitution codifies the powers of the government with legislation codifying more details. That’s why the government is accountable to you, not because of your tax dollars. If you are a citizen who doesn’t need to pay any taxes, the government should be as equally accountable to you as to the very wealthy because of the rule of law and everyone being equal to it.
...yes. That's what a job is. There are also off-duty codes of conduct employees must adhere to.
That’s why the government is accountable to you, not because of your tax dollars.
I didn't say my taxes are why they're accountable. I said my taxes are why I want any and all evil actions taken by them exposed.
Again, we’re aligned on that. But the “ma taxes” argument is facile because for nearly 100 years there wasn’t even income tax so it was secondary taxes through purchases or tariffs. As for off duty codes, there usually aren’t any meaningful ones and they generally are very constrained by the legal system (eg they can’t punish you for political activity). It’s the same reason someone standing up to a politician and screaming “my taxes fund your salary” is blatantly incorrect. The economy is a circular dependent system. For example, government tax dollars pay corporations which then pay your salary which you then get taxed on. You’re over privileging your personal role in the economic system when you make this argument and then the next follow up argument is “well I pay more taxes than you so I should get more of a say than you in how government is run”. It’s a flawed premise that leads to all sorts of directly harmful lines of reasoning. Just argue that we’re a country based on the rule of law and no one is above that. That’s literally the founding principle of the country.
For consistency, you should then feel guilty that criminals use the roads we’ve built. After all that was government dollars used to create jobs infrastructure that murderers use to travel to kill their victim and to escape justice. And what about guns in the first place. Government tax dollars go to sustaining those gun manufacturers in the first place, otherwise we wouldn’t have guns for our military. Those guns are then used for murder and all sorts of bad things. And heck, the internet was created through government funding and many big tech companies make a lot of money from the government and that’s got a lot of crime and victimization that happens. So you should feel guilty about that too.
Grow up.
When presented with evidence of her infidelity, her first and only reaction, "Who sent you those screenshots?! It was Sarah, wasn't it? You know she hates me. Why are you talking to her?!"
IDGAF if Russia and China do the same things. I ASSUME they do them.
The west enjoys the "free world" moniker and the distinction it implies. It should be held to an accordingly higher standard.
However, for me, personal feelings about him should not matter in this case. It's a question of how our society treats people that expose bad actors. He's a flawed human being like every other one, but what he did was not wrong even if deemed illegal (by the justice system from the exposed party, who would've guessed).
Not saying Russia doesn't engage in propaganda attempts, but they are more or less irrelevant for any domestic discussion then and now.
Agree with it, I want to read news about different countries, but it looks like the people\bots are obsessed with Russia on reddit.
Also it's interesting to see how people react to the same news about civilian deaths. People are happy when Russian civilians die. I with these forums had a feature to hide/swap country names in a news/posts so people can realize how evil they are.
You know what's even more exhausting? Russia being so bad.
Also, whining about 'relentless "Russia bad!" parroting'.
The way to end the "parroting" is for Russia to stop being bad.
No, he is not. Nobody can go through what he has been forced to suffer in all those years without lasting consequences that can't be undone: years of his life have been taken away, his health has been damaged, his family has been hit as well. He may be free to roam around, but he's not the same person anymore. I don't see any happy ending here, especially if there are no consequences for the psychopaths dressed as patriots who forced him into that ordeal.
You might want to trademark it.
He's actually agreed to confess to something which the US should have no legal authority over.
We must remember that the US are torturers who tortured people here in Sweden, right at Bromma airport, even after specifically agreeing not to torture them. It is not a country which should have any influence whatsoever outside its borders; and this is someone who exposed very severe crimes and who had no duty whatsoever to keep any US defence information secret.
I wholly agree, as an American citizen
The United Kingdom went from a country with enormously outsized global influence to just another European nation. The downward spiral has been stark. The economy stagnates, more and more people live in poverty, and voters decided to inflict further self-harm by cutting themselves off from economic treaties with neighbors based on an illusion of self-importance.
If America ends up in the same place, its collapse will be harder and more dangerous.
You should read the book Treasure Islands by Nick Shaxson.
The UK may not be the global military/political power it once was (and that's probably a good thing), but it is still very much in the middle of the global economy (and not in a good way).
This isn't to refute any of your points, but it was an eye-opening read.
If the only way to sustain that was to starve people in india… perhaps it is good to learn how to survive on one's own means instead?
Seems to be not only inevitable, but currently in progress.
In my experience, UK is a country that has managed to combine the worst of America with the worst of Europe with very few redeeming benefits except for the richest 0.1%, who are indeed very well taken care of in England.
Are you assuming nobody here has lived or visited the EU or UK?
There are tons of homeless in London, Berlin, and Paris. It is equivalent to the worst American cities.
London is definitely a better city for the super rich though. It is essentially a butler economy - most residents are involved in the industries that cater to super rich foreigners.
Spending two minutes to look on Wikipedia shows that, for example, comparing UK to USA: the UK is technically worse in "homeless per capita" (where homeless includes people forced to sleep in the houses of friends or family) - at 56.1 per 100k for UK, and 19.5 per 100k for USA. However when it comes to "unsheltered", i.e. what people generally think of "homeless" as meaning, and what's visible on streets, the US is far worse at 12 per 100k compared to UK's 0.9 per 100k. (France at 4.5 per 100k, Germany doesn't have a comparable number listed and I'm too lazy to look for one.)
I have lived in two of the European cities you mentioned, visited many others as well as a number of major US cities, and I agree that in all of them it is possible to see extremely depressing scenes with far too many people forces to live on the streets. But it's ridiculous to think you could compare any two city's homeless/unsheltered problems based on visiting or even living in those cities without actually studying the situation / looking at statistics.
Perhaps you read parent comment as implying there are literally zero homeless people in Europe, which obviously isn't true, and technically US and European unsheltered numbers are indeed "comparable" as I've just proven by comparing them - but I feel if the difference is the US having 12x as many people in that position it's misleading, to the point of being effectively wrong, to call that a comparable situation.
What are we calling 'unsheltered' versus 'homeless'?
America is full of oddballs who live #vanlife or couch surf or bounce between motels. Is that what we are calling 'unsheltered'?
> Every time I've seen statistics comparing, they disagree with your anecdote.
We both know the Churchill saying. Hard to parse the statistics you provided but what I am talking about is bona-fide homeless on the street that you walk past in the city. Not some Barista who is technically not on a lease but lives at her boyfriends house.
The stats in it differentiate between those two types of homelessness, and says that US is actually better than UK when counting "some Barista who is technically not on a lease but lives at her boyfriends house", however drastically worse for "bona-fide homeless on the street" (the official term for which is "unsheltered").
I don't want to infinitely limit US influence, and want something more like no one country being able to dictate anything to others, an increased capacity for all countries to be free from both overt and covert influence of all sorts, etc., perhaps with the exception of some particularly horrible countries.
I'm not going to defend US autrocities, but why exactly is Sweeden and the EU allowing this stuff to happen on their soil?
Yet the calls from Swedes for the US to provide more Ukraine aid are deafening at this point. Swedes want the US to intervene when it benefits them, regardless of their chest-beating.
Where is the criticism from Swedes when Russia murders its own journalists or China restricts freedom of speech?
Please, if you are so anti-american, impress upon your countrymen to stay away from NATO. You people are clearly not interested in allying with the US.
Well well well… the request to join NATO was done just a few months BEFORE the election, after several changes of government since the previous elections.
People in power specifically didn't want the people's opinion about that one.
But just to be on the safe side, they also did a lot of mediatic fear mongering about russia invading sweden very soon™, which is ludicrous if you look at a map and see that there's a sea in between.
Anyway in sweden the ruling class had wanted to join NATO for at least 10 years, if not more. But the people would have not liked severe welfare cuts to buy expensive bombs. However the invasion of ukraine provided the perfect excuse.
Perhaps you need a better map. Gotland is a prime target for Russians. Establishing air defense batteries on Gotland, along with capturing the Suwalki gap between Poland and Lithuania, are two key steps of invading the Baltics. Suwalki cuts the land supply route and Gotland the air and sea routes.
To prevent liberation of Gotland and keep Swedish armed forces busy, they would then terrorize the remaining parts of Sweden with drones and missile attacks on cities the same way they do in Ukraine. Even Sweden isn't rich enough to buy enough air defense systems for that, hence the need for NATO to get access to pooled resources.
It's a simple calculus.
It's wrong. But it's certainly very simple :)
You forgot about how an invasion force is supposed to swim across the baltic.
After all, Russia can't move a huge fleet in there, because access is between sweden and denmark. So they'd have to use whatever they already have in there.
And sea invasions are more complicated than land invasions.
The only wrong thing here is the idea that the invasion of Gotland would have to look like Normandy landings.
We even warned the Soviet Union of Operation Barbarossa, using information we obtained from cracked Nazi codes. When one of my grandparents fled Norway due to the Nazis they were given asylum. During WWII Sweden was led by a political coalition consisting of the peasant's party and the social democrats, and in Germany, social democrat leadership got put into concentration camps as they were seen as communist-adjacent.
>Yet the calls from Swedes for the US to provide more Ukraine aid are deafening at this point
The Russians have probably threatened us behind the scenes and have probably been saying things that are quite extreme. Otherwise the social democrats wouldn't have flipped and had us join NATO. Furthermore, it's not like the US didn't want Ukraine to join the western block, so why shouldn't they help, now its attempt to do so is being met with an invasion?
I don't hate America. There's much good about it, but the US should rule the US, the Swedes Sweden, and the Ukrainians Ukraine. Just as we help Ukraine, it is reasonable that the Americans do too, since it's near us, and since we're kind of in this together.
>Where is the criticism from Swedes when Russia murders its own journalists or China restricts freedom of speech?
Literally all the time? When has Swedish media stopped caring about people Politovskaya, etc
>Please, if you are so anti-american, impress upon your countrymen to stay away from NATO. You people are clearly not interested in allying with the US.
I am kind of personally opposed to our membership, but I don't hate America, nor am I necessarily anti-American as such. But I don't want US power in Europe, we should rule our lands, and the Americans theirs.
If the Americans have influence here, then that is influence we ourselves do not have. Consequently, it can't be permitted. But this doesn't mean that we can't be friends. It means that the US can't have the keys to our house, or put cameras in it, or hang around the windows with binoculars, or decide what we buy, etcetera.
I understand the US wanting to get at the maniacs after 9/11. 9/11 was much worse than is immediately apparent and there are details that anger me even now, that make me want to reach across the world and dash a whole bunch of people against walls and furniture, so I understand the desire to do something, even the extraordinary rendition stuff, to some degree, but you can't do this kind of thing. You weren't willing to actually go after the Saudis, which you probably should have, instead of the aggression against less relevant countries.
Justice for individuals is important and soverignty is as well and even justified lashing out, when it is at odds with justice for an individual or soverignty of some foreign country, then it's not easy to go along with the lashing out of a country that is justified.
He means like letting their troops cross sweden, sell iron to them, ask them to specially mark the documents of jews. Perhaps he's seen the photos that nazi and swedish soldiers were taking together at the time, on the border with occupied norway.
> Otherwise the social democrats wouldn't have flipped and had us join NATO
Or… hear me out… they're corrupt and got something from the owners of weapons factories?
They had been waiting for a literal casus belli for several years.
Sweden was officially neutral, so the Germans were permitted to buy iron in return mostly for coal, which we needed not to die during winter.
Once Germany had occupied Norway they argued that it was permitted to transit troops. Some transits were indeed permitted, but at the same time Sweden accepted many Norwegians in and many of them were trained militarily to later retake Norway.
With regard to the marked passports, that is not in any way support for the Nazis. We wanted to be able to control our immigration and to know who was attempting to enter. Policy w.r.t. to Jewish immigration was also reversed as the attacks on Jews in Germany crossed the line.
>Or… hear me out… they're corrupt and got something from the owners of weapons factories?
We won't get more weapons factories because of NATO. Much of our weapons industry is successful because we've been one of the few highly industrialised third world countries.
We'll spend more in weapons. I never said it must be a swedish factory owner to be doing the corrupting.
First you responded to a friendly comment with a swipe and then you added more downthread to make sure you turned it into a slur. I feel ashamed of HN when I see people treating others this way.
If that's not what you intended, please make more effort to disambiguate your intent in the future. That's every commenter's responsibility here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I think much of the problem is Islam + Central Asia/Mongols/steppe conquests, and I think either is bad enough on its own.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Protip: none of them
I’ll refrain from judging your viewpoint, but I don’t think it’s controversial to interpret this as trying to judge cultures objectively, no? That inherently includes a lot of trust in one’s viewpoint and knowledge to judge off of. Just the snippet you posted here does not inspire a lot of confidence.
Being unable to discern between the product of a society and the situation after an exogenous power funded and armed the outer most fringe of deplorable religious extremism, under the delusion they would be fighting the commies and noone else, is not the good look you think it is.
But hey, I’m sure you regard your own opinion as something valuable and positive, it’s your own after all ;)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_...
How much time should pass before it's no longer seen as America's fault ? Assuming you're referring to the arming of the mujaheddin.
Instead of talking about what ifs, why don’t you have a look at what has been. Pre-Soviet Afghanistan is truely worlds apart from anything you’d now connect with living in Afghanistan. If you so desperately want the afghans to be at fault for their demise, how did that happen?
Close relatives of mine try to reform and expand Kandahar university clinic and med school, they all have built a comfortable living abroad, they owe that to no one. Of course, there are more than enough elements in Afghanistan that have contributed to their collective fate, profited and now hinder progress. I’m not here to defend them, i despise them. But that’s nothing different to any other country, they just have wayyy more destruction and suffering to foster and grow. Germany just needed a few decades of, in comparison laughable, economic mismanagement, for new politicians talking about gas chambers[0] to emerge. Let’s not act like that’s a uniquely afghan reaction to misery of any sort. Still horrible from all perspectives, no denying that.
[0] https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article206589067/AfD...
I'm being sarcastic. It terrifies me, but now I need to hear it.
Though to be honest, I expect it will be run-of-the-mill cultural chauvinism and I'll be disappointed.
And if you'd please not post in the flamewar style generally, we'd appreciate it.
He had sex in Sweden with a woman who consented to having sex, but not without a condom, and at some point he took off the condom.
As I remember, that led to England seeking his arrest to be extradited to Sweden for this sex crime. Since he was stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Britain stationed officers outside it for years in case he stepped out. Ostensibly, for justice in this sex crime.
Everyone knew the real reasons were to extradite him to the US, but the US was totally silent on him, until minutes before the statue of limitations would have run out.
The US' charge was that Assange offered to run John the Ripper on a hash Bradley Manning gave him. Which, I mean, who among us have never run a hash in john the ripper?
It's been astounding to see such incongruity between the heft with which the US can use its muscle against a target, and the thin veil of weak crimes the legal systems would admit to investigating.
If Sweden, the UK, and the US would have been transparent that they were colluding to imprison him for publishing, I wouldn't have become so cynical.
Here it is: He was sent a Windows NT password hash, he ran hashcat over it, couldn't successfully reverse it, and gave up.
That's it.
Prosecuting him for this "heinous crime against the state" has cost US and UK taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
At the time of this "crime" occurring he was not physically in the USA, not a citizen of the USA, and hence not subject to its laws.
Unless you think the USA is the world government and can police anyone, anywhere, for anything?
A link to the "tools of the crime": https://github.com/hashcat/hashcat
Yeah..? He played an active role with his conspirator lol. He doesn't pretend to be some fool who accidentally got involved so there is no reason for you to do so on his behalf by trying to deny his crimes.
>At the time of this "crime" occurring he was not physically in the USA, not a citizen of the USA, and hence not subject to its laws.
An abused claim. Plenty of Russian hackers aren't US citizens or in the US when they commit credit card fraud or launch ransomware attacks but obviously they are still able to be charged under US law (or the law of any country they attack). And no one can seriously argue otherwise. Sitting in a different jurisdiction doesn't mean you can't be charged with a crime. For example, the South American drug lord isn't free to traffic drugs into Europe just because he isn't in Europe or a European citizen. That would be stupid and isn't how the world works.
>Unless you think the USA is the world government and can police anyone, anywhere, for anything?
US law can apply to the whole world if the US wants to enforce it (and so do most countries for plenty of crimes like cybercrime, terrorism, money laundering).
>Prosecuting him for this "heinous crime against the state" has cost US and UK taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
I mean sure; trying any person for a crime cost money. Not really relevant.
Have you ever said anything disparaging about the CCP or its leadership in an online forum? If so: congratulations! You've committed a crime directly equivalent to what Assange did.
You've just argued yourself into saying that it is proper, good, and right for China to extradite you. If not you personally, then people you know who did say negative things about the CCP. Or took Muhammad's name in vain. Or, or, or...
We can't be subject to every country's laws, irrespective of citizenship or location.
> So you're saying Chinese law applies to you when you're a US citizen in the US?
Sometimes
> We can't be subject to every country's laws, irrespective of citizenship or location.
No, that's why countries have extradition and other treaties that detail what foreign crimes they will recognize and provide reciprocity for with enforcement. Usually the answer is "Things that are also crimes in our country". Hacking is a crime in both countries, so Australian laws could be enforced on a US citizen through the mechanisms established by those treaties. Disparaging the CCP is explicitly protected in the US, so it wouldn't - so long as the US citizen never visits China.
Before you answer, consider that his crime is the rough equivalent of you walking past a "secure government facility" with one of those number-pad locks on the door, trying a few combinations, and then giving up.
Also, before talking about "attempted crimes are still crimes" or whatever, please do a rough Fermi estimate of how many teenage children do that much or worse on a daily basis, attempting to hack US systems from either abroad or on US soil.
Should the government of the United States spend tens of millions of dollars prosecuting every such incident? Extradite every script kiddie and drag them in front a grand jury? Are you saying that there's "rules" here that are being meticulously followed by all parties?
To most normal people, this looks like abuse of power. Assange made powerful people look bad and they retaliated with all of the tools at their disposal.
That anyone here can justify this kind of behaviour is a sign that you want an emperor, not a president. A king, not an elected official. You want monarchy, with those in power able to execute a peasant for any infraction against their betters.
If I launched a ransomware attack against a Chinese company, smuggled drugs into China via the Post, etc then I wouldn't be surprised when China charged me for my crimes. That is how the world works! There are plenty of laws where you don't need to be physically inside a country to be at risk of indictment (or equivalent).
>We can't be subject to every country's laws, irrespective of citizenship or location.
It would be silly for a country to try and enforce every law they have on others abroad. That doesn't mean countries can't enforce certain laws on people who are abroad. I gave you 4 examples of laws that countries commonly enforce on people abroad and for good reason.
>You've just argued yourself into saying that it is proper, good, and right for China to extradite you. If not you personally, then people you know who did say negative things about the CCP. Or took Muhammad's name in vain. Or, or, or..
No I didn't. China trying to extradite someone for criticizing them isn't the same as the US trying to extradite a Russian hacker who is behind a ransomware attack or a South American drug kingpin. Assange was a direct co-conspirator in accessing and stealing classified documents. Trying to pretend like that is on the same level as criticizing the CCP or some warlord is absurd. It is so absurd it is hard to tell if you are even being serious or just trolling.
Why?
To them it's the same severity of "crime".
You don't get to define who takes what crimes seriously. If you open the door the US prosecution of overseas non-citizens for non-crimes they didn't commit on US soil, then you open the door for everyone else to apply the same logic to you.
Assange basically did nothing. He didn't break into any systems, he didn't access any IT systems, etc...
> trying to pretend like that is on the same level as criticizing the CCP or some warlord is absurd.
Tell that to these people, executed for criticizing a dead person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo
To you this might be an absurd reason to go execute someone, but to other people it was a "serious crime" requiring capital punishment.
What exactly was this guy doing? Was he accessing secrets to sell them to north korea or was he exposing crimes against humanity, conspiracies against the public interest, and violations of international law?
I wonder something. Let’s say the mafia spent on Hollywood and mainstream news enough to develop mainstream culture to the point where the mafia is legitimized in the eyes of enough of the public. You would defend mob punishment of someone who steals documents from them wouldn’t you?
I wonder what is it that makes you ready to side with authority and blame the (potential) victim? Do you always side with authority because it’s more comfortable to pretend they are noble than to admit to yourself that you ignore the tyranny of an evil, abusive authority? Do you blame the Gazans for Israel dropping bombs on their apartment buildings or burning their children alive in the refugee tent camps (that Israel declared as safe) because nearly two decades ago Hamas won the election in Gaza? Do you blame the millions Vietnamese for getting agent orange dropped on them because they dared to tolerate deviations from what the Americans desired in terms of Vietnamese economic/civic management?
It’s an interesting thing to see people jump to defend an authority when they lash out from a position which is so clearly not the moral high ground. Why is that? The American Government destroyed this mans life because he exposed their crimes. You can’t ignore the Governments crimes — which stretch far back —- while being fixated on his violations of some social contract that has been long trampled upon by the government itself.
Remember the people who didn't stand by him: The entire left. Most European Governments, who were collaborating in a decade of torture; that he had to be protected by Ecuador is an utter shame. Of course WaPo, NYT, et al. Now every time I hear a high pitched social justice squeal from these folks, I realize that it's selective and merely self-serving.
Sorry, political rant because this is a political topic.
He could have engaged with the various legal processes being held against him, but he chose extra-legal protests instead. None of us know if that approach is better or worse than what he did, but this wasn’t torment without agency. It was a direct outcome of his own choices.
One man (and a bunch of supporters) against several governments with limitless resources. If something didn't stick, there would be another. Let's not judge his legal tactics looking back.
That half of his “years of torment” were a legal tactic on his part.
Oh come on. No matter your opinion on the whole situation you can't say sitting in an Ecuadorian embassy is torture lol. Dude had his girlfriend, internet, and pets. Calling the self imposed stay torture is beyond absurd. BFFR
His mental health deteriorated a while back.
>His mental health deteriorated a while back.
Okay and so what..? Does that somehow mean he shouldn't be held to account for his crimes? Plenty of prisons have bad mental health but that doesn't mean they should be let free. Had he not spent 14 years trying to avoid a trail he would have already been out years ago.
I agree that whistleblowing shouldn't be punished like we usually do, and the attempts to imprison him were a farce, but I still think he's a piece of shit who ruined any journalistic credibility he had when he got in bed with Putin.
Here it is different, it is an activist sponsored/supported by an enemy state actively seeking to create chaos in a foreign government.
I wonder what is the end result.
It could be that these leaks actually improved the practices and government entities act nicer, due to the fear of getting caught.
Or, just worse:
It could have actually improved the information-protection practices, and serious crimes that would have "naturally" leaked to the press, are now even better guarded than before Wikileaks.
I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. He is appearing in US territory before a US judge who is actually under any obligation to honor the plea deal. The judge could reject the plea deal and remand him to custody or sentence him to US prison.
He's not out of the woods yet by any means, but if they reached a deal his lawyers are confident in, I wouldn't be worried about the judge. They are supposed to deffer to international law if US is a party to the treaties involved (which in the case of extradition, it is).
There's every chance here that this deal represents a way out for the US as well, and that it will be kept for that reason, but if the US government still wants him to stand trial, a plea deal and the risk of a minor diplomatic scuffle at a point in time where the UK parliamentary election will overshadow the case in UK media isn't going to stop them.
Keep in mind he doesn't have any support from the UK government - they'd rather be rid of him -, and the current UK government is almost certain to be out of government shortly. It's unlikely there'd be more of a diplomatic incident than a slightly stern letter.
I think he has reasonable odds - this case is likely at this point mostly just a nuisance for everyone involved except Assange himself. There's nothing to be gained, other than perhaps for some overzealous prosecutor. But I also would not be one bit surprised if something was to happen.
An Indy article that sums Sir Keir's atlanticist stance in a few short paragraphs: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-...
He would then spend potentially several more years in jail preparing for trial, obtaining discovery, going through discovery, filing pretrial motions, subpoenaing witnesses, etc etc.
Australian Politicians: collective silence
We let dodgy Uncle Sam do whatever he wants to us.
1900 days in isolation (human rights violation), falsly accused of rape with the goal to extradite to the US, jailed outside of the US on behalf of the US (but not officially), and just the simple fact that a journalist gets jail time for exposing war crimes.
Yeah, this has nothing to do with law or justice. This is about a handful of people above the law trying to save their *sses. Anything could happen at this point.
Reminds me of when a foreign diplomatic aircraft (Equador) was forced to land in a foreign country (France), because the US thought Snowden might be on board. Remind me of the relevant law that allows for this please? lol
Example: Gerhard Schröder was also very obviously bought by Russians. He never went to jail nor was he hunted down.
Assange also did publish actual literal war crimes committed by the US. Not sure how you can just casually ignore that fact?
There's more to this.
Let an old spy go off and retire, he can't work anymore anyhow.
Where’s the evidence that he was falsely accused?
I'd say that you could have found all this out yourself with Google, but you didn't even need to. All this info has already been linked in these comments.
Most of the links in these comments aren't authoritative in anyway
... Which weakens the oral evidence.
The only evidence they had; because there was no DNA found on the condom submitted as evidence.
https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian...
> There were never any formal criminal charges, and the Swedish Prosecution Authority’s investigation into Assange was dropped in November 2019 due to a lack of evidence.
https://rsf.org/en/rsf-dispels-common-misconceptions-case-ag...
Call it what it is, torture.
Why would it be a diplomatic incident? When you are a fugitive from justice taking a plea deal is always a gamble because you have to show up in court. Should the judge reject your deal, you are handed over to US Marshals pending a new court date.
Edit: downvote all you want, it doesn't change facts. There is a separation of powers between the prosecutor who is negotiating the extradition/plea and the judge who independently evaluates the agreement.
They probably just realized they shouldn't dig the embarrassment hole any deeper, and think that an extorted confession is the most face-saving they're going to get.
He committed a crime against the United States, they empaneled a grand jury, and handed down 18 federal charges of espionage and computer intrusion. The US sought extradition just like they would in any other similar case.
While he fighting extradition, he was actively attempting to recruit hackers to break into US government systems and steal information for him.
Assange was the one who was constantly trying to make it political and turned it into a clown show by trying to paint himself as a journalist.
That is the definition of a political crime. Governments are allowed to charge people of crimes which only have the government as victim, but most countries (including the UK) have laws against extradition for such crimes.
And when the person you charge is not a citizen of your country, and the act harming government is simply journalism, you have to be pretty blind to deny that it's political.
> they empaneled a grand jury
which can famously indict a ham sandwich. The grand jury was empaneled in a district in which half the adults work for the spy agencies as I recall.
There's a clown show. We are not obliged to respect this kind of process as something proper and legitimate.
> trying to paint himself as a journalist
He has won a ton of journalistic awards. When journalists call you a journalists, you are a journalist, even if security services and their online yes-men say otherwise.
So offering a deal only to have the UK agree to release Assange and lure him to US territory would definitely be a diplomatic issue, possibly jeopardizing future extraditions from the UK, for instance.
I wouldn't expect the judge not to go along with this though - he is pleading guilty and did serve what is now being called a sentence and presumably the US government can say that there are other benefits to his freedom that should not be overriden by the judiciary.
source: over a decade of experience in pretrial operations
Does the judge have to honor the prosecution agreement or is the judge free to impose a different sentence than what was agreed to by the prosecution?
Here's how it works generally: when you plead guilty the judge warns you that they do not have to accept the plea deal and can sentence you however the hell they wish. You plead guilty and then the judge tells you if they accept the prosecution's deal. I've seen several defendants surprised by the judge not taking the sweet probation deal and turning around and giving the defendant years in prison which they are unable to appeal.
So, in theory, the judge could potentially give Assange some time.
So why are you writing all this and then doubling down?
> A letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie to U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona of the Northern Mariana Islands District said that Assange would appear in court at 9 a.m. local time Wednesday (7 p.m. ET Tuesday) to plead guilty and that the Justice Department expects Assange will return to Australia, his country of citizenship, after the proceedings.
Northern Mariana Islands District is US jurisdiction.
Now please excuse me while I find my tanto.
Oh, sweet summer child. In such political cases there is almost zero "separation of powers". Much higher powers than the judge and the prosecutor are involved directly.
One of the key things blocking extradition from the UK to the US is that UK law doesn't let them extradite if the person will be tortured, executed, or won't receive a fair trial in the destination country. This isn't something that politicians can bypass, except by changing the law; judges are not political appointees in the UK.
This means the extradition process from the UK to the US relies on the UK receiving assurances, and the courts accepting them, because the US has always followed its agreements in the past. To me it seems unlikely the US would want to jeopardise this.
And what would the benefit be? They've already shown they have the power to ruin people's lives at will, effectively imprisoning them in an embassy for a decade. That seems like a deterrent that will scare off most journalists.
So MAGA would probably take up his cause, but with the Biden admin freeing him (fingers crossed), that's one less thing they can use against Biden in the elections.
a) think
b) (mis)use the English language
For clarity: do you believe that your cognition on this matter is logically, ontologically, and epistemically flawless?
I hope your seeming high level of confidence is resilient enough to answer this simple question directly, without engaging in rhetoric, meme magic, evasion, misdirection, silence, etc which in my experience is the standard behavior of the normative conditioned Western human mind when it is put into such a situation.
No, I believe my cognition on this matter can be flawed. That's why the qualifiers "would probably be", "apparently", and "parts of".
But I agree with kome's response.
Did you properly qualify each statement in your broader text?
Are you familiar with the terms "rhetoric", "interpretation", "reductionism", "perception", "misinformation", "Meme Magic", "emergence"? Do you think they may have some causal relevance to the (possible/alleged) "technical correctness" of your statements?
Do you think it is possible that speaking out in this manner/style may have non-trivial (which could range from "bad" to "extremely bad") negative effects on the overall system (which I think is at least part of your concern with the behavior of MAGA people)?
> But I agree with kome's response.
If that's the case, would you be willing to answer the questions I asked of kome?
I have a question: do you believe I am actually a chatbot, or are you only speaking as if you believe that I am a chatbot (full disclosure: my theory being that you might be[1] leveraging humor to galvanize support against an outsider in the community, taking a different attack angle than others have tried, etc)?
Regarding HN guidelines: I would say they are highly optimal as they are: ambiguity + (layers of) culture is a very powerful combination, it allows moderators great leeway in using heuristic/cultural pattern matching to "prove" violations by exploiting well known bugs in consciousness (which have been discussed with very little controversy right here on HN many times in the past).
Human conversation and belief (aka: truth) formation is extremely complex, and often counterintuitive.
Thoughts or counterpoints? I think it is an interesting and important topic that does not get nearly enough attention.
[1] though not necessarily with explicit conscious intent, perhaps simply just as an intuitive, culturally conditioned behavior
Regardless: as a fan of novelty and effort, you get my upvote. Also: the bots angle is actually a rather interesting idea, if a person was to put a bit of thought into it.
Perhaps (it is a subjective matter, in more ways than one, and some more importantly than others). What of it?
Or another way of looking at it: which is more important in the big (geopolitical or otherwise) scheme of things...politeness (deceit, ignorance, rhetoric, etc) or truth/accuracy? Don't forget, lives are literally on the line. (Something else I find funny: sometimes lives being on the line is important, other times it is not. It is amazing how inconsistent humans are, even on the very most important matters.)
> their comment is ok
Is this to say that it suffers in no way regarding the specific phenomena that I am asking about?
And if not:
- what does "is ok" mean, precisely?
- do you believe that it does not suffer in any of these ways?
> and i fully understood their logic.
If you did not, would you necessarily be able to know? (Can you realize the architectural problem you are in?)
> I cannot say the same about yours.
What specific "logic" of mine are you referring to here?
Not being a complete and utter asshole, like you are being here. HTH!
What does HTH stand for by the way?
The Secretary of State not responding to the Libyan consulate’s security concerns prior to the attack is a serious matter and the source of the documents is not the issue.
Ah, an appropriate example of bending logic and serious ignoring of many facts to end up with this conclusion...
One step less than 'hoax' but it's Snopes and they lean left.
If the US didn't want to fuel russian propaganda with crimes against humanity, they shouldn't have fucking committed crimes against humanity.
If this is about the emails story, blame the lapses in security on the people responsible for them, and the incompetent candidate that got tanked with that.
Raising awareness about government surveillance is a laudable goal but it does not seem to be that of Wikileaks. How does publishing Clinton's or Macron's campaign e-mails reveal anything about government surveillance? Unlike most human right groups, for example, that cover human rights abuses no matter who the abuser is, Wikileaks consistently acts in ways that further the cause of Russia and maximize the damage done to adversaries of Russia.
Getting allies Trump and Le Pen to power in the USA and in France is a goal of Putin, this is not a secret. https://x.com/TheoLaubry/status/1512009330991763457/photo/1
It is very strange. I wonder if it possible could have something to do with foreign affairs, which a state prosecutor is by law very much forbidden to take instructions from. That would be in defiance of the rule of law, but then, they were already in defiance of the rule of law.
6 March 2018, a U.S. grand jury charges Assange, but it is secret.
11 April 2019, Ecuador expels him from the embassy, the UK arrests him for skipping bail.
11 April 2019, the U.S. unseals the charges and asks for him to be extradited.
13 May 2019, Sweden re-opens the rape investigation because he is now potentially available to be extradicted again.
19 November 2019, Sweden closes the investigation because the evidence is too old.
Reframing that as being not merely about being extradited but being disappeared helps shift emphasis away from the other 90% of the conversation surrounding extradition fears, that proved in the end to be true.
Edit: The fears about harsh treatment were legitimate as well. Look at what happened to Chelsea Manning, charged with similar crimes. Chelsea Manning was subjected to 23 hours a day of solitary confinement, put on suicide watch, checked on every 5 minutes, forced to be "visible" at all times while sleeping, and ultimately their treatment was investigated U.N. and condemned as inhumane.
I don't understand what's so unreasonable about suspecting Assange would be subjected to harsh treatment when that's exactly what happened in the closest comparable case.
How many suicides have there been there?
At the risk of sounding a tad conspiratorial, it's possible the U.S. agreed to this deal specifically to avoid the upcoming trial. As I understand it, there remains an open question of whether (or to what extent) the US constitution applies to non-citizens and it's conceivably in the government's interests if that thread isn't pulled by foreign courts and in such a public fashion.
To clarify: I don't believe the US was ever going to "disappear" him or whatever he and others hypothesized. Even outside that context, there's an interesting question of why the US suddenly decided to wrap this up after a decade of seemingly-relentless pursuit.
That might have been the trigger on the timing?
Later
Moreso: assume Assange spends another year or two in UK prison, and then is extradited; the trial is complicated (for the same reason the Florida documents trial is complicated: because it involves evidence that has to be cleared for and during trial) and could easily run over a year, longer if Assange wanted to --- you're now running up to the maximum possible guideline sentence even if the prosecution could establish that he led the conspiracy, rather than just participating.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/albanese-expresses-f...
But whatever, I'm glad he's free and is not being extradited to whatever hellhole the US had planned for him. I hope he's able to get a beer and a swim and put his life back together.
When you compare the relationship that Australia has to the US compared to non-EU, non-NATO US allies in Europe and Asia, it's plain to see that Australia is far, far more deferential to the US than it has to be, as nations much more vulnerable and much less valuable tolerate far less.
Except, you know, the giant obvious one. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/ch...
I think you have serious misunderstanding of what a concrete military threat is. China is 6000km away from Australia by sea, and to get there it has to get rather close to US bases. There is no way that China can do anything beyond standoff strikes to Australia without a crippling cost in the next 20-30+ years. There is absolutely no military threat to the Australian mainland. Conversely, there is very little US submarine bases in Australia do against standoff strikes, so clearly that's not what Australia or the US are worried about (nor should they). In any case any naval power or sustained air power would have to defeat the US first, ally or not, to get to Australia. And if the US can indeed be defeated, then what?
Australia is not meaningfully more threatened by China than, say Brazil. That's just how the geography works out. However, Australia is lot more useful if your goal is to block shipping to and from China, as it is not so far from the straits of Malacca and a good base to contest the island chains (and is, as we've said before, itself very secure).
Unless you think Canada is somehow under a severe Chinese threat, neither is Australia. Australia is far more useful offensively against Chinese shipping, hence why the US will never ever drop it as a basing location unless it really has to.
The only thing that China would want to invade Australia for is our resources, and they can just buy those. There is at least one mining operation in WA that is Chinese-owned, Chinese-run, entirely staffed by Chinese folks flown in direct from China, and exports the mined resources only to China. They just pay some taxes and royalties to Australia. That is vastly cheaper than any military solution for obtaining the same resources.
I think there's a section of Aussie society that would like China to be a credible threat so that it justifies more military and more fear. But it's just not.
Public opinion, maybe. And not comparing the two in size, etc., but Australia holds a bit of a privileged place in terms of some of the US resources: Pine Gap and a lot of the classified NRO/NSA equipment, deep space and classified military satellite comms, and then one of the major relays / radio systems for US submarine communications.
Ah, Western Democracy and the rule of law and humane treatment of prisoners, how we love thee. That sounds like I'm pro-Russia or China, but no, I don't like them either.
The kind of imprisonment that Assange was subjected to is unambiguously torture, and was unambiguously administered for the purpose of revenge.
There is no natural "need" for the conditions he was subjected to (e.g. the cost of a larger cell is negligible), and no natural purpose other than to punish.
I am deliberately ignoring the question of guilt here, because I don't believe that we should torture _anyone_, regardless of the crime. The fact that we do this is a giant ugly stain on civilisation.
Snowden showed that leakers didn't need Wikileaks for Chelsea Manning-like releases and the Russians have just switched to directly releasing on Twitter.
Or more frequently just making shit up. Enough people will believe it anyway if they're politically inclined to do so, plausible details are not a required element.
Someone gets arrested? The conspirators had it out for them. They later get freed? The conspirators simply changed their mind!
It's not that you're wrong, it's just that your argument is entirely unfalsifiable.
I'm not even sure it's a conspiracy anymore as each legal procedure by nation states played out in public.
The conspiracy in principle is always a layer deeper than public view.
Unless you submitted Russian documents to be leaked. Those get sent to /dev/null.
The reason he was charged by the US is because rather than just being a recipient of leaked documents he took an active part in helping an insider obtain them by breaking internal security controls. That's crossing a line and is something journalists are careful to never do.
When he provided tools and direct guidance to Chelsea Manning to access classified information and when he and others breached the Congressional Research Service to leak documents from there he went far beyond what any professional journalist would do and lost the associated protections.
> went far beyond what any professional journalist would do
A useless statement without contextualization, but you can spare the contextualization because it's a moot point; Assange, running his own outfit, is free to decide for himself what kind of journalist he wishes to be. He doesn't have to follow CNN's playbook because he doesn't work for CNN.
I'm not defending the lack of censorship which may have put lives at immediate risk, but that's also not the basis on which the US government has sought his extradition. The basis of their argument had to do with the act of allegedly providing Manning the means of acquiring the data.
> lost the associated protections
You're downplaying the significance of the Cablegate leaks. The US went to great lengths to prosecute and get revenge on everyone involved, including Manning.
I'm not sure what point you're even trying to make here, as you're shifting goalposts.
1) You're coming off as pretty darn patronizing yourself, too, so stones and glass houses.
2) Dunno about "the" definition of whistleblower; in your GP you said you got it off Google. They're (so far) not King of the English Language, AFAIK. No that I am, either, but the connotations I've picked up wherever I've heard or read the term usually include that "a whistleblower" is someone on the inside dishing the dirt on their own organisation. Which isn't what Assange did.
(So by the general consensus usage, the only WikiLeaks whistleblower would be that German guy who wrote the book that showed what a general asshole Assange is.)
Just because you call yourself a journalist it doesn’t mean you’re free to do whatever you want and still claim journalism protections.
It doesn’t matter where you are, journalism does not include hacking into or otherwise intentionally and actively stealing information. Doing that rightfully opens you up to criminal charges.
> It doesn’t matter where you are, journalism does not include hacking into or otherwise intentionally and actively stealing information
We see things very differently, the difference is that you are gatekeeping journalism and hacktivism, while I'm not.
I don't feel like devolving into a meta-argument, so I'll leave you to think on it.
Funny how you seem to think that your view on everything, even on a difference in views, is automatically the authoritative one.
I don't feel like interacting any more with you either, so why don't you think to yourself about it why what you think is "so obviously correct."
So when the other person brought that up, as well as when you are arguing about it, what you are doing is being both wrong on the point and pendant in a way that is irrelevant to the central thesis.
Instead of trying to claim that someone was wrong about 1 single word, the good faith way of approaching the argument would be to talk about the thesis, which was that it wasn't really a "conspiracy" when the US government absolutely had strong motivation to go after him.
The word "whistleblower" which has multiple meaning is basically irrelevant.
And his original justification, of using a Google search definition, is absolutely valid.
Or, it is at least valid enough that I don't think you are justified in being upset about a perfectly normal way of using a word.
Especially when the use of the word, that is supported by Google, is irrelevant to the thesis statement.
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-lo...
- "This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally."
- "The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment."
I'm not saying this would have been Assange's fate, I would expect things to play out more like the Manning case. Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.
Usually the problem with conspiracy theories and why they're so mad is they presume thousands of actors act in concert with no clear motive to do so and all can keep a secret. This is a conspiracy which didn't really need to be kept all that secret, with a pretty blatant unifying motive - taking down Assange meant stemming leaks both directly and by making an example of him.
No, that isn't "obvious" at all.
> Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.
Not that this has anything to do with anything, since Assange has never been neither a whistleblower nor a journalist.
I don't know what this link is supposed to represent, beyond the fact that I've never been a supporter of Assange's, since long before the 2016 election shenanigans that cost him so much of his support among American nerds. I'm sure at some point I've said I didn't buy that he was a major prosecution target --- that was before I read the indictment that spelled out his conspiracy liability for computer intrusions, which, as it turns out, does make sense: you can't safely instruct people to hack into DoD computers any more than you can safely instruct henchmen to murder people in America. I'm not a lawyer, I read some stuff, I updated my take.
Your lack of integrity indicates that you should be ignored on all topics for all time.
I don’t know what your issue is, but you are extraordinarily dishonest.
>The emails and documents showed that the Democratic Party's national committee favored Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.[6] These releases caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign, and have been cited as a potential contributing factor to her loss in the general election against Donald Trump.[7]
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/donna-brazile-hillary...
https://apnews.com/article/mcbride-whistleblower-court-priso...
Exposing war crimes was an unintended self own for McBride.
He was British Army (Northern Ireland) through and through, came out to Australia, failed to make the SASR and worked instead as an army lawyer.
He leaked documents with the intent to "expose* how "increasingly restrictive Rules of engagement and the nature of investigations into members of the special forces" were making things worse for the poor squaddies doing their job.
What happened was journalists looked into all his leaked documents and focused instead on the poor squadies kicking "bad guys" off cliffs, blooding new soldiers with execution kills, etc.
His stated goal for leaking was to impede | stop investigations into war crimes:
Justice David Mossop stated "the way you’ve explained it is that the higher-ups might have been acting illegally by investigating these people too much, and that that was the source of the illegality that was being exposed."
"WikiLeaks wallets now contain only 3.265 BTC ($168,000) compared to 4,079 BTC total inflows. Overall, it appears Bitcoin users have donated $1.62 million in BTC to WikiLeaks since it opened donations 13 years ago. If held until today, that BTC would be worth $210 million.
As for what WikiLeaks does with its crypto donations, the group previously said the funds would pay for “WikiLeaks projects, staff, servers and protective infrastructure.” Last week, WikiLeaks made its first transaction in two years when it shifted 10.459 ETH ($31,200) to another address."
https://blockworks.co/news/julian-assange-extradition-wikile...
Especially considering that a substantial part of the value of BTC is the fact that a lot of it has been accidentally destroyed.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/2007-iraq-apache-att...
We can't be a "beacon of democracy" so long as we're shooting children from helicopters, covering it up as "national security", and prosecuting journalists who disclose these things to the US public. Democracy is premised on its people understanding the things its government is doing in their name.
What does it mean to convict a country? Do all of its citizens serve jail time, proportioned out by how much taxes they paid?
I understand the desire for justice, but I honestly don't even know what "justice" means when the actor involved is a state. This is, I think, one of the fundamental challenges of the modern world. We've gotten so good at building huge organizations of people (states, corporations, etc.) that can harness the efforts of thousands or millions of people.
But the result incredibly powerful entity has a diffusion of responsibility that confounds our notions of morality, right, wrong, and justice, which were all developed under the assumption that the primary actor is a person.
Yes, that's definitely part of the problem. How do you evaluate the overall goodness of an organization that does thousands of things, some helpful, some harmful?
No doubt non-Swedish legal experts with no clue about Swedish laws or the Swedish justice system, meaning their opinions which are based on how the legal system in their own country works, are completely null and void.
It also shows that Sweden is a country were you cannot always rely on the law to deliver justice.
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Against-Sweden-Submarine/d...
and probably
There is even a documentary where the Navy's Chief Scienctist John P. Craven (the same guy who was part of Project Azorian and the N1 sub) said they could change the assumed position of Russian submarines, which again (possible but the big smile on his face say's all) led to the stranding of submarine S-363.
A documentary about N1, the part where they could change the position of Russian subs is maybe in this one:
https://youtu.be/2XoPPXQYGXU?t=80
EDIT: And of course now i found it (Blind mans bluff genius book btw):
"The womens statements about being stealthed were changed to sound even more serious"
"There was no rape"
Pick one. Stealthing is rape. Completely disgusting to pretend otherwise. It'd be okay if your opinion was you didn't like how authorities handled this, but that's not what you're saying.
Would you say the same for this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
There is a good chance the guy would have end up suicided. There is still a good chance he meets some questionable end. Fabricating charges of what is probably the worst crime with plausible deniability you can do is more than a possibility.
FTFY
That's the way it goes sometimes. Not all cases are strong enough to allow justice to be done.
That doesn't mean we can then say that he definitely did what people were accusing him.
I believe he basically hid in the Ecuadorian embassy until the statute of limitations ran out.
> Swedish prosecutors have brought cases to court in absentia before
Yes, usually against heads of state for things like war crimes. I don't think there are similar cases I want you to take a moment to imagine your own outrage if Assange was tried in absentia in Sweden and found guilty. Whether or not it is technically possible, doing so would not be a legitimate option.
He entered the embassy in 2012. He was interviewed in 2016. His asylum was withdrawn in 2019. Mentioning "first half" of his stay while avoiding to mention that means he's been there for several years at that point comes across as attempting to downplay how long they waited.
Can you explain why they didn't try in 2012? Or why she didn't try while he was in UK custody prior to his bail?
The prosecutor was criticised by at least one Swedish legal expert at that time for failing to attempt to interview, and called out because she flat out lied and claimed it wasn't possible (and she herself proved that to be a lie when she several years later arranged to interview him).
By the time he was interviewed, he'd already spent far more time in a combination of English jail and stuck in the embassy than he would've spent in a Swedish prison if convicted.
By the time the rape case was dropped, the Swedish Prosecution Authority gave as a reason that "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question", but the bulk of that delay was down to the prosecutor choosing to hold off on interviewing Assange for 6 years claiming she could not do what she eventually did anyway.
The less serious parts of the case were dropped due to the statute of limitations in 2015 before the prosecutor interviewed Assange, because the prosecutor chose not to do her job.
You see why people question her motivations?
As I've said many times, I think her own political/ideological motivations are more likely to be the reason she acted this way than US involvement, but to me it appears to be a clear failure of justice intentionally caused by the prosecutor - whether to Assange or the woman in question depends on what actually happened, and we will probably never find out because this prosecutor failed to do her duty.
> I want you to take a moment to imagine your own outrage if Assange was tried in absentia in Sweden and found guilty
If the trial was conducted fairly, I would take no issue with it. Whether they'd be able to carry a case to conclusion in a fair manner without his presence is a separate matter. The issue is that they failed to try.
I think the prosecutors own justification, which she stated quite plainly is both valid and convincing:
There was very little reason to put effort and resources in conducting an interview with Assange, since he would need to return to Sweden for a fair trial to be conducted.
She was, of course, proven correct when after the interview, Assange continued to refuse to return to Sweden for a number of additional years. Had they conducted an interview after 2 weeks, the outcome would have been the same.
> You see why people question her motivations?
Given Assange's behavior, no, not really. She seems to have made a plainly correct judgement of his actions and resources, and attempted to treat Assange like any other defendant, at least until he turned the situation into an international political incident to try and avoid trial.
> If the trial was conducted fairly, I would take no issue with it.
Note how in the very next sentence you leave the door open to object to any trial on the grounds that it wasn't sufficiently fair. This is my point, Assange's defenders cannot really be placated. There's always some thing to be concerned about, some reason to believe Assange is being treated uniquely unfairly. It's reminiscent of how Trump and his supporters cry out about how unfairly he's treated by the legal system, when in fact both are treated quite normally, Assange just made things worse for himself by turning himself into an international fugitive out of conspiratorial fear.
The first excuse she gave was that it wasn't possible. She lied. You're making excuses for a liar who was called out on her lies before she tried to use that other excuse.
As to the second excuse, if that true, they wouldn't have eventually bothered, but they did, nor cited the passage of time before they could secure evidence as a reason for closing the rape investigation once they had finally conducted the interviews, but they did.
They failed to do their job, and they lied about it.
> Note how in the very next sentence you leave the door open to object to any trial on the grounds that it wasn't sufficiently fair.
That would apply to any trial, in any situation, with any accused. But somehow it seems to get people who try to defend the way the Assange case was handled very worked up.
> Assange's defenders cannot really be placated.
Only being prepared to accept a fair trial is not a high standard, and not one I'm willing to dispense with whomever the accused is. That this is even an issue is very telling about the attitudes involved.
> There's always some thing to be concerned about, some reason to believe Assange is being treated uniquely unfairly.
There "always is" because he's been subjected to gross human rights abuses. The attempt at using his character to justify that is nasty. The moment human rights are made conditional, they are not rights. Nobody should be treated this way.
To me, this case is very revealing. Assange isn't likeable to me. He may well have done awful things, whether or not they can be proven. I'm not arguing this because I like or support him. I'm arguing this because he has human rights like anyone else, whether or not he was guilty of rape, and whatever else he might have done or not.
This entire discussions disgusts me.
This may be the case, but I can find no evidence of such a statement having been made.
> As to the second excuse, if that true, they wouldn't have eventually bothered, but they did,
The justification was to do the interview so that they could continue to maintain the charges, which seems reasonable. Assange (nor anyone else) should not be rewarded for making themselves a fugitive to avoid a trial.
> But somehow it seems to get people who try to defend the way the Assange case was handled very worked up.
Well yes, mostly because (at least until he was actually put in jail in the UK) he wasn't actually subject to any human rights abuses or injustice. He, in fact, was treated with extreme deference and privilege compared to most people accused of crimes, and yet because of his platform people demand his kid gloves be treated with kid gloves.
You cannot claim that someone's self-imposed exile is a human rights abuse. At that time, he was not imprisoned. He could have walked outside and faced justice and, he'd likely have been free sooner and with less detriment to himself.
It is primarily because he had (as we can now see: unjustified) conspiratorial fears about getting disappeared that he suffered so much. And the majority of that was at his own hand, or as a result of him committing additional crimes to avoid facing justice for the alleged ones.
If you actually care about human rights abuses, Assange is a terrible person to platform, both because he is eminently unlikeable and because his suffered "abuses" aren't really. Someone in Riker's likely has it worse, and less ability to improve their situation.
Key points include the revelation that one of the women did not accuse Assange of rape but had her statement altered by the police. This alteration occurred under instructions from higher authorities, as evidenced by an email directing the change. The case against Assange was further complicated by the involvement of a second woman, whose testimony was also questionable and possibly influenced by external influences, including a friend in the police force.
AFAICR, they showed up and said "What he did feels wrong, surely that must be some sort of crime?". She wasn't jumped and gang-raped in an alley, so she didn't know it legally counted as rape; the police helped her put the correct name to it. Doesn't seem at all as suspect as you're trying to make it.
> This alteration occurred under instructions from higher authorities, as evidenced by an email directing the change.
Oh my, someone asking their boss what to do and the boss telling them? Wow, that must be a conspiracy!
> The case against Assange was further complicated by the involvement of a second woman, whose testimony was also questionable and possibly influenced by external influences, including a friend in the police force.
Idunno, sounds like you're trying to give the impression that having two cases in stead of one should make the allegations less plausible...? Is that how you usually think about things like that; "Oh, this guy is said to have commited several burglaries, that clearly makes him less suspect than this other guy who is supposed to have committed only one"?
Anyway, I see you've drunk the koolaid and are in full defense mode, so I'll leave you to it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Not long before the Assange case ended, Swedish police kidnapped two asylum seekers (and yes, kidnapped is the right term - it was not an arrest, and has since been found to violate Swedish law) and handed them over to the CIA who handed them over to the regime they fled, which subsequently tortured them. The kidnapping and rendition was both a violation of Swedish law, and a violation of international treaties, and yet nothing happened to the people responsible to my knowledge.
You might see why someone who believed - rightfully, as it turned out years later - the US wanted to file charges and get their hands on him, might worry that the Swedish government would turn a blind eye to him being handed over to the US.
Whether or not he was right to fear that, it seems reasonable to believe his fear was genuine, not least because he chose to put himself in a situation that has kept him imprisoned in inhumane conditions far longer than he would've ever served if he was convicted of what he was accused of in Sweden.
But in any case, the issue isn't whether he was right, but whether he believed he'd be safer in the UK than Sweden, and I think the Swedish prosecutor did a whole lot to make him worry that something fishy was going on. I've written more than once over the years I think she was acting out of political/ideological reasons (specifically, she had a long history of fighting for much stricter treatment of rape cases) rather than due to US pressure, but the net effect was a whole string of incidents around the case that'd easily look mighty suspicious for someone worrying about the US trying to get them.
I don't know whether or not he was right to fear it, but I'm surprised he was.
Note that "I will come to your soil if and only if you make such and such promise" is not deciding how their justice system should work. It just means that if they don't get the promise, they will not come to their soil. Likewise, we could point out that Sweden has no right to force someone out of their jurisdiction to turn themselves in.
> What I don't remember was any reasoning on why he thought it more likely that he'd be extradited from Sweden to the US rather than from the UK, who are particularly close?
Sweden has a history of extradition, the treaties aren't the same… and though at the time Assange wasn't formally charged by the US, if I recall correctly he did have (founded) suspicions that a grand jury was put on his case. At the time, his chances of being extradited from Sweden rather than the UK were higher.
> you've drunk the koolaid and are in full defense mode
Someone has gone full attack, and I suspect this is not just about "striking a balance".
If you were wanting to come off as less of a kook than the person you were talking to...
TLDR; Sweden turned over two Egyptians asylum seekers to the CIA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_an...
Do you just not care at all that’s it’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Swedish authorities changed and made up evidence against him? There’s official documents that say this. Meanwhile your bullshit hasn’t been proven at all.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If "legitimate" means fradulent charges drummed up for political reasons, from testimonies later withdrawn, then yes.
The sentencing guideline for rape in Sweden is 3-6 years in prison, or at most 4 years (I can't find a minimum) for "negligent rape", and even if convicted for everything he was alleged to have done, Swedish practice in rape cases would mean there's no chance he'd have gotten anywhere close to maximum sentences, and might well have had part of the sentence suspended. In practice, it'd have been surprising if he got more than a year of actual prison.
So without going into whether or not that case was legitimate, or whether or not the handling of it was legitimate, he's suffered more, in far worse conditions, than a Swedish court would have imposed.
Well not "extradition" in the traditional sense, since Snowden is now a Russian citizen and they don't have an extradition treaty, but hey in a lawless place, anything is possible, they can just ship him to a US-friendly country who will then deliver him the rest of the way.
I wonder if he's got a hiding strategy figured out, with wife and kid(s). Russia's a big place after all.
Or worse. Not say anything other than "get in the car now". It is not like dictators need to explain themselves.
It's the same with an average dim Russian's opinion on Navalny as it is with an average dim American's opinion on Snowden and Assange.
The second link is: <<Full List of Russians to Fall Out of Windows Since Putin ...>>
Ref: https://www.newsweek.com/full-list-russians-fall-windows-put...
http://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&que...
Does this variation of the phenomenon bother you as well, and to the same degree?
[1] I mean this in the technical sense, not merely as shit talk.
Do you think they mostly & consistently have the ability (cold/natively, or even if explicitly prompted)?
It might be wise to consider that knowing your own government is not that strict about the rule of law when it comes to horrible crimes is also in your interest if you live inside of the US. The US is an absolute behemoth of power and utterly unable to police itself. If it was, Assange wouldn't have had to do anything at all.
Now ideally the media of my own state would be doing a good job on all things own government fucks up. But it turns out, sometimes journalists from elsewhere whose news organizations don't have to care so much about getting exclusive access do a better job on that front — especially if they have an incentive to find things. Even if that means I have to now try to figure out what is complete fiction and which grain of truth (of any) can be found.
So yeah, sue me if I differenciate between the Russian state, a news source financed by the Russian state and a whistleblower financed by a news source financed by the Russian state after the news outlet in Western nations with which he first had contact somehow felt they can't report on their own governments involvment in a human rights violation anymore.
I am not a fan of Assange and I don't think he is a sympatic person, but I think we all owe it to the world to differenciate and see the chain of events instead of lumping together everything ins simplistic answers.
Sorry, if you are prosecuted and no other network gives you a show, what will you do? I'm sure he would have taken a CNN show as well.
This was also in 2012, before the whole Euromaidan thing. Many European politicians lined up to be friends with Russia.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/feb/13/russia.poli...
Here is a site that claims that the deals went on well after the Crimea annexation:
https://www.declassifieduk.org/under-putin-mi6-linked-bp-ext...
I do not know the second site, so search and check for yourself. Britain also took gas via the Nordstream network that had a pipeline through Northern Germany to England.
I would direct such criticisms towards Blair and not towards someone who was under tremendous pressure and frankly fearing for his life.
I'm against double standards. It was wrong from both Assange, Blair and other Western leaders and activists who claimed to care about democracy and human rights to deal with Putin's Russia the way they did.
It's no secret he was given a ton of leaked material material on the Kremlin but decided not to publish it.
They're someone elses enemy, not mine.
Hope it helps, because it doesn't to millions of people living in their regimes. Authoritarianism apologia is wild.
Not to mention you sidestepped the entire conversation. It sucks for their own people. Their own govt is their enemy - we should be standing next to them, not going "oh yeah you're oppressors of your own people but in my book you're cool because I dislike my own country/Israel/West" or whatever the new excuse is.
If "we" is taken to include the core HN user base (the USofA) then that horse has bolted given the the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the U.S.- and British-instigated, Iranian army-led overthrow of the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh that more or less kick started the arc toward where Iran-West relations are today.
Did that work well? Should the west keep following a similar course of action?
I am also keenly aware that British Empire involvement started with conquering Palestine & The Balfour Declaration, and ended in the Sergeant's Affair. We have spilled more than enough blood for Zionism and (when we were no longer useful) had our blood spilled by Zionism.
Therefore I reiterate - do not make Iran your enemy on behalf of people who have historically used us as tools to get what they want.
Personally I'm more or less ambivalent whether he walks free or not today, what matters is deterrence is established.
And if he did, it would make perfect sense to charge him with that.
Sure, they implied it might possibly maybe have happened and some suckers believed it. Why wouldn't they? They hated his guts because he exposed a war crime so naturally they'll sling any kind of mud they can - whether there is evidence or not.
In this case not.
For a person in his position - he must’ve been very naive to have a show on ruzzia today.
If you're a dissident rival foreign powers will give you a platform which you won't get domestically.
Plenty of Russians think Navalny was a traitor because he made western documentaries. It's good to know you agree with them that releasing dissident material with a hostile foreign power means he is automatically a traitor I guess.
I wouldn't say that that is a position I agreed with though. I would say the principled stance is that dissidents should use the options available to them to avoid being silenced - hostile power or no.
We can't all be principled though, can we?
Assange was told he would be falling out a window if he published it. Then he buried it.
He is only about publishing leaks about western countries that don’t directly tell him they will murder him.
That isn’t a free society.
I think Assange deserves what he got.
The differences in what they did and how make the distinction.
Snowden saw something the public needed to know and filtered it through a journalist who did everything reasonable to filter and publish what the public needed to know. And the public really did need to know it.
Assange tried to find anything and everything to publish in bulk and did so with no regards to the content or the need for anybody to know. He actually put things in danger and the things he leaked were of limited value and often hyped up to be much more than they were.
If you're an edgy teenager with a "fuck the system" mentality sure you'll appreciate Assange, but I'm not. That's not dystopia.
If, however, I am suspected of committing a crime, the police expects the whole untempered truth and anything else can be considered as obstruction of justice. If I can be held to this standard, so does our public servants in the government.
The government, however, has the power to hide stuff from the public. Leakers and whistleblowers are the only thing that can hold them accountable.
So - you are saying that governments should not be accountable and transparent in their operations? Transparency within the limits of safety (intelligence gathering/criminal investigation (while it is underway - once it hits the courts and convictions are made, should be transparent) - yet - what happens when those who have the power are abusing it and committing criminal acts?
Yeah - give me the leakers, give me the dissidents - because you end-up with an out-of-control fascist police-state otherwise.
I never saw anything on Wikileaks I thought needed to be leaked.
>Because they (or myself - or yourself) are not empowered to systematically commit crimes by their/our citizens - who pay for the privilege of that through taxation.
You have power over, say, your children, spouse, parents, maybe you manage folks? Do they have a right to dump all your information to each other?
>Yeah - give me the leakers, give me the dissidents - because you end-up with an out-of-control fascist police-state otherwise.
This is exactly the kind of teenage rebel logic I'm talking about. Snowden exposed an actual significant abuse of power issue. Assange didn't, as far as I know with the things I've seen and remember. People who want to blindly rebel but have nothing but vague charges and cannot point to real issues supporting anything anti-government.
Adults need to focus on understanding the real problems of government and providing real feedback on logically sound arguments. Not ambiguous "down with the man" rhetoric. You live in a world that needs government to function and governments need to keep secrets.
This is essentially a pro war crime position.
How is that "fuck the system" ?
How is trying to uncover warcrimes a bad thing?
Perhaps journalists are not the best choice, though, don't you think? In a democracy I'd say the most trustworthy people we have to be tasked with filtering our information are our freely elected politicians!
Your comment actually violates the laws of my micronation. Please come here and face summary execution.
The United States does not have an extradition treaty with China, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, Vietnam, the GCC states, most African states, and most former Soviet states, among others. Some countries with US extradition treaties have refused to extradite includes: Ecuador, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Iceland, Pakistan, Egypt, Switzerland, Venezuela, Zimbabwe etc.
There's also a map if you prefer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...
I can think of a lot of places I'd prefer to live besides Russia, while still offering a decent level of social/technological development.
Like getting leaked data from the DNC and RNC and coordinating with the Trump campaign to time DNC leaks for maximum effect (I have no love for the DNC) while not releasing RNC content sent to you?
I think you've confused wikileaks with the new york times there. The times definitely pick and choose. I have seen no evidence that wikileaks suppressed anything ever. Link if you have it as that would make them more like the times.
> Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate.
> The messages show WikiLeaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.’s cooperation.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...
> Candidate Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump Organization received an email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents, according to an email provided to congressional investigators.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/08/politics/email-effort-give-tr...
> In the messages, WikiLeaks urged Trump Jr. to promote its trove of hacked Democratic emails and suggested that President Trump challenge the election results if he did not win, among other ideas.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-jr-comm...
So no.
I think you wanted Wikileaks to suppress the information there and they didn’t. They published. But hell maybe Assange really did decide he preferred syphilis to gonorrhoea. Just like the times do, and the post, wsj, and Fox, cnn and mother jones. It’s a very establishment media thing to do. Clapper disagrees, sure.
The content of the emails was the problem not Wikileaks for publishing truth.
Wikileaks gave access to third parties for documents they were publishing many times. So dues everyone when the story is big and impact is desired. So what?
And yet they did have leaks about the RNC that weren't released. Why?
I mean, dirt on Trump isn't hard to come by - are you claiming that not once has anyone sent Wikileaks negative information on him or his campaign, and that's the only reason we haven't seen any?
> I think you wanted Wikileaks to suppress the information there and they didn’t.
To be unequivocally clear - The DNC is corrupt to its very soul. Whatever you or I think of Bernie Sanders, the way they handled the whole Sanders/Clinton situation is despicable and vile and an insult to the members of the party they purport to lead. And the fact that Debbie Wasserman-Schulz was running the Clinton campaign, effectively, less than 24 hours after being finally forced out of DNC leadership, to me just demonstrates that those theories were accurate.
> The content of the emails was the problem not Wikileaks for publishing truth.
Yes.
The other problem is Wikileaks sitting on OTHER email contents and choosing NOT to publish them AND communicating with political candidates on what they'd like to see leaked and not, and when.
>are you claiming that not once has anyone sent Wikileaks negative information on him or his campaign, and that's the only reason we haven't seen any?
There is nothing that wikileaks is even credibly accused of suppressing. Trump leaks are found on the front page of the new york times. Lead story of CNN, NBC, CBS, wapo, wsj and fox. Eg his tax return. There is no need for whistleblowers to send things to wikileaks. If wkileaks didn't publish, you'd see it and also likely claims from the source that it happened.
"There must be massive trump dirt so if we haven't seen it that's wikileaks supressing it." Difficult to believe.
Again if there is /any/ credible accusation that wikileaks suppressed /anything/ at all in support of republican presidents, like we know the ny times did, let's see it. Let them answer for it specifically. These constant smear accusations that are totally evidence free look really bad.
You can tell it’s election year for the USA. Probably hoping for a little extra PR from it all for being the Good Guys (tm)
Assange was just a soundbite for him to dogwhistle.
A little too heavy handed. Yeah it seems like from the outside he was potentially overly punished, pending further details that may never materialize, but “his freedom is our freedom” is pretty extreme given what he did. He’s not relatable.
Outside of the tech community, he’s not really known except for being that guy who leaked things.
And objectively the internet is a safer place thanks to the Snowden NSA leaks which were directly inspired, not just ideologically but technically in how it was done, by Assange. You can look at the mass adoption of encrypted messaging and HTTPS adoption statistics (which grew exponentially directly after the leaks to become near standard), and plenty of other metrics to see that.
Wikileaks was the spawn of many good things, even despite it’s flaws.
I don't think increased TLS adoption was caused by Snowden or Wikileaks. It was because of the HTTP/2 protocol and Lets Encrypt taking off.
You can read about that history here: https://opensource.com/business/16/8/lets-encrypt
According to Aas, they decided to start LetsEncrypt in 2012. Before Snowden leaked anything.
Similarly, one could argue that encrypted messaging became popular because of the work done on projects like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaCl_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp (which added "encryption" in August 2012).
[Takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.
The U.S. as a national entity certainly isn't above lying, as leaks regarding them have shown.
Most notably, the UK-US extradition treaty, which has exemptions for political offenses (e.g. espionage), has been found not to apply.
This article is decent https://theconversation.com/julian-assange-how-british-extra..., but from the middle of the trial. Craig Murray's blog is also a good source of info.
Considering the lengths Assange has gone to to avoid entering US custody, I think he's weighed up the ability to trust the US on this one with probably more information than we have.
