Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It seem political when people criticize Assange political refuge to a embassy. There need to be some insight to show why it is not political. It also need to explain from a historical (ie scientifically) why the actions are not rational.

I personally have collected enough reason to be very skeptical against such criticism. The first Swedish prosecutor dropped the case. When it was restarted by a second prosecutor, several uninvolved lawyers looked into the case on behalf on news agencies and conclude that the case had zero chance of going anywhere. When compared to rape cases in Sweden that get dropped, get not-guilty in court, and the small number that get a guilty verdict, you either need to have physical evidence of violence/drugs where a medical expert use their experience to claim rape, a video recording, witnesses that strongly (and seems more common than not to fail here) to show that the victim was incapacitated when going to sleep, or a confession. In contrast to most cases all the details for Assange case has been leaked and it has shown none of those critical components for a successful case. In addition we get some more warning clocks ringing when the European arrest warrant made a record for the lowest number of potential year in prison. A second record was achieved by the the amount of money spent in regard to the number of potential year in prison.

It could be a unicorn, a one of the kind where all the stars align to a guilty verdict, but the case smells political. The rational behavior when the legal system turn political is to run and hide.

It became a much bigger deal once he fled first Sweden, and then British jurisdiction. That set up it as a test of the powers of the legal systems of those countries.

If you allow someone to escape prosecution simply by raising the costs/creating inconvenience, you all but guarantee others to try to do the same, and/or to lose faith in the equality of justice.

Regarding the common conspiracy theories: always remember that he was arrested, then freed on bail, in both countries. If they had wanted to extradite him to Guantanamo, they would've done it long ago.

> always remember that he was arrested, then freed on bail, in both countries

That's not how I remember it, but given that it has been a long time (2010), I accept that my memory could fail me here, so I tried to google it.

Assange was questioned by the police during the preliminary investigation. He left Sweden about a month after the start of the investigations. The sources are a bit fuzzy then, Wikipedia writes: He left Sweden on 27 September 2010. According to one source his departure was with the permission of the Swedish authorities. Another source claims that the Swedish authorities notified Assange's lawyer of his imminent arrest on that same day.

So he was neither arrested in Sweden nor freed on bail in Sweden.

> If they had wanted to extradite him to Guantanamo, they would've done it long ago.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

If this case has no chance of going anywhere, then why run? A prosecutor acting based on political motives isn't uncommon, though unfortunate. But to actually convict Assange with so little evidence would require subverting the criminal justice system, tampering with witnesses, judges and the jury, which is far more egregious and unlikely. I don't have much faith in the ethics of prosecutors, but the judicial system I consider far less susceptible to political interference.

> If this case has no chance of going anywhere, then why run?

I think it's common knowledge that he cited concerns about extradition to the US as the reason for leaving Sweden.

For context, this was just a few years after The Pirate Bay bust. TPB operated for a while claiming that they are breaking no Swedish law and seemed resistant to takedown attempts until suddenly the police raided them and they were arrested and sentenced. It wasn't uncommon to see claims that Swedish government sold out to Uncle Sam at the time.

Except he was in the UK for almost 2 years fighting the extradition to Sweden. The whole time he was saying the Swedish extradition was "actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US" as if the UK is any less likely to cooperate with the US. If the US wanted him they could have asked for extradition from the UK during those 2 years.

IIRC: as a citizen it was somehow harder to extradite him from UK than from Sweden.

As far as I know he’s not a UK citizen, but an Australian citizen. But maybe being from the commonwealth counts as special?

I am totally willing to believe that it was a setup by the CIA or some allied intelligence service.

That said, once he was stuck in the embassy, he left himself vulnerable to being manipulated by the Russians and now it seems he is acting as a Russian agent.

I think the us badly botched its handling of Wikileaks, Snowden and manning and allowed Putin to use them to his advantage.

The Russian deal has a fairly good explanation. Clinton made some very direct threats and attacks towards Assange in media after the diplomatic leaks, resulting in a personal vendetta between the two. All that talk about treating him as an enemy combatant, drone attacks, assassinations and so on has made it personal. In that context, if Russia gave him political ammunition then I am not very surprised that he used it.

He is no more a neutral party when talking about Clinton than Clinton would be talking about Assange. Any data brought by one party against the other need to be read in that context.

> He is no more a neutral party when talking about Clinton than Clinton would be talking about Assange.

This may or may not be true, but it does not matter since the approach WL takes is to release materials in full without editorial discretion/bias.

> This may or may not be true, but it does not matter since the approach WL takes is to release materials in full without editorial discretion/bias.

Where's your proof of this? The DNC leaks certainly had a lot of missing emails that may have served to provide context for conversations that were used as "evidence" of misdoings.

> The DNC leaks certainly had a lot of missing emails that may have served to provide context for conversations that were used as "evidence" of misdoings.

Where is your proof of this? I'm not being flippant. You take an unsubstantiated claim and argue against it with an unsubstantiated claim.

Note however, that the unsubstantiated claim that Wikileaks releases all materials without editing or redaction is extremely well-vetted, and the belief that they do redact is, so far as I know, only held by you.

I'm not aware of a single missing email.

If someone had come forward with an email and offered it as evidence that WL had withheld even a single one, I would view WL much differently.

Instead, WL took the trouble to DKIM verify as many as possible. Afaik none of the embarrassing or politically potent emails failed DKIM verification and nobody offered any evidence that emails in a chain were removed from the archive. Even claims of tampering were dropped after the DKIM verification was installed.

> once he was stuck in the embassy, he left himself vulnerable to being manipulated by the Russians

Err, how? Does Ecuador have good relations with Russia or something?

> That said, once he was stuck in the embassy, he left himself vulnerable to being manipulated by the Russians and now it seems he is acting as a Russian agent.

I wrote something along those lines a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13513523

I have little reason to doubt that Assange and Wikileaks as Russian agents. However, I'm willing to defer to Gruqg and his chain of deduction: Wikileaks was always destined to be become the unwitting propaganda horn of a foreign power.

>it seems he is acting as a Russian agent.

That's certainly what the CIA want us to believe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com