Julian Assange's stay in London embassy untenable, says Ecuador
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I think it's impressive that the media made you think he was the one responsible for that narrative, instead of them.
He had information that was seriously damaging to very powerful people, and an audience that was ready for proof of their suspicions of political/corporate/media corruption.
This makes him a massive target.
I hold a similar opinion to the op, and don't really see how there's any narrative being formed. WikiLeaks own tweets and actions are concerning enough on their own.
> #PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717458064324964352
> The US OCCRP can do good work, but for the US govt to directly fund the #PanamaPapers attack on Putin seriously undermines its integrity.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717459700367790080
I read a fair bit about the Panama Papers at the time and never came away feeling like the focus was on Putin - the main thread was wealthy tax evaders across the globe. The casual mention of Soros instantly sends up alarm bells for me, as he's been a favorite punching bag of the right since the Glenn Beck days.
Later, there was the whole process of releasing the DNC emails in batches week by week close to election time - this felt like deliberate social engineering to me.
And finally, more recently there have been the private messages on twitter between Don Jr. and the WikiLeaks that came out - the way WikiLeaks asked for Trump's tax returns so they could look less partisan, the way they were giving suggestions, that they were communicating to begin with.
There's other bits and pieces that I put less stock in - Assange's show on RT, word that they were offered Russian gov docs and turned them down, etc. But the overall tone and feel has changed a lot since 2010. Hell, you can look through their feed about a week back and they're talking about Clinton's emails and the "deep state".
Because this is a topic worth discussing.
> But the overall tone and feel has changed a lot since 2010.
Many people think this is because Wikileaks no longer controls their Twitter/Website.
And not a single media mention, the entire change in perception was either through Wikileaks’ actions and words, entirely through reading mostly their own Twitter.
Edit, found it:
Some of the reasons why I don't like WikiLeaks:
1. Their cooperation with Roger Stone: "Well, it could be any number of things. I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be."
2. "Most of Wikileaks' critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre. Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers?"
3. Fueling the whole utterly bizarre 'spirit cooking' thing. The world's most pre-eminent performance artist invites the brother of the campaign manager of a presidential candidate for dinner? I'm sure that the degrees of separation to fucking Trump are shorter than that, but no, Hillary is literally the devil. And the whole 'election is rigged' thing with "Trump won't be allowed to win the election"
4. Calling out the Clinton Foundation for receiving money from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is one of the world's wealthiest countries, and the Clinton Foundation is one of the world's more pre-eminent charities. They have many other donors and Saudi money goes many other places. And the Saudi royal family numbers in the tens of thousands. Sure, some of them will be involved with ISIS. But seriously.
5. "WikiLeaks offers award for #LabourLeaks. Wikileaks offers £20,000 reward for #LabourLeaks with information on how the Labour Party’s top officials have attempted to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming and staying on as leader." Any chance of a reward for information pertaining to Trump or Russia? I didn't think so.
6. The RT/WikiLeaks connection
7. Leaking Clinton library records. The chilling effect here is insane.
8. Hitchens, back in 2010: "The WikiLeaks founder is an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda."
Almost entirely WikiLeaks themselves, posted before the election of Trump even, no colouring in of my opinion by the lamestream media.
(or better: do you have a link?)
I'm confused, isn't the (((3 brackets))) a white supremacist thing for identifying Jewish people?
Given that half of the establishment is hell bent on finding evidence of a Trump/Russia conspiracy theory, whether it exists or not, Wikileaks isn't really a necessary part of the process. If there is something, somebody will share it.
But yet they need to offer a 20k GBP reward for inside info on British Labour? I thought “if there is something, somebody will share it”?
Which one of them would you share your secrets with?
Contrast that with the Washington Post, which would wet its collective pants if you found anything on Trump, no matter how minor, and would probably offer a large reward. The NYTimes clearly hates him too. You're spoiled for choice.
Unless you're insinuating that it wasn't him that has given interviews/presented shows on RT (some kind of imposter?), that he isn't in control of the Twitter account, and isn't actually putting out the publicity materials that WikiLeaks does...
... I don't know how you can spin that he's been targeted. It's is own words and deeds that paint him for being at best a stooge.
because he was. Is the media responsible for the wikileaks twitter account now?
Or are we just talking about the clearly timed leaks of Clinton emails every time Trumps campaign seemed in jeopardy? I can probably be convinced that Assange isn't just a Russian operative, but to just act like he believes in 'radical transparency' or doesn't have shady connections is laughable at this point.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12864328/wikileaks-threat-... [1]http://bigthink.com/think-tank/julian-assange-to-host-talk-s... [2]https://www.thedailybeast.com/pussy-riots-nadya-tolokno-juli... [3]https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/1026/WikiLeaks-r... [4]http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-le...
I'm getting tired of that one.
I don't have a dog in this race, and have little opinion on Assange's actions, but media opportunities are media opportunities.
I have absolutely no trouble considering RT and their opinion to be spun, but I don't automatically associate Neil deGrasse Tyson with the opinions of Fox News or Bill Maher for simply being a guest and using the media opportunity to speak to an audience.
RT spins things. BBC spins things. NYT spins things. Fox spins things. MSNBC spins things, it should be no surprise that media outlets, most especially ones funded by a nation state, have a hard bias.
Serious question : if Assange was seeking a media soapbox to sit on top of, what other network choices did he have, being implicated in a feud with western agencies?
Besides the fact that I see quite a difference between RT and the other outlets you’ve mentioned (I don’t remember multiple journalists quitting from those other organizations because they were ‘being used to spread propaganda’), my answer was to show the multitudes of questionable connections and even more questionable judgements can’t just be reduced down to something that is conveniently dismissed.
The prosecutors have physical evidence of unprotected sex recovered from the rape kit.
They have testimony from a long term ex-boyfriend that they never had unprotected sex, and that he can't imagine her ever consenting to it.
They have testimony from another woman Assange slept with earlier that week who claims that, while she wasn't raped, Assange really pressed (forcefully) the issue of not using a condom.
Given the circumstances, it seems like a reasonably strong case. Deserving of a trial, at a minimum.
From Wikipedia:
> On 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities dropped their investigation against Assange, claiming they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020. "We are not making any pronouncement about guilt", she said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Swedish_sexual_...
I don't know much about it, but I thought he was worried that the UK would extradite him to the US for whatever reason they can manufacture.
Also, I'm not so sure about some of those facts you listed about the case. I saw a TV show about it, and the Swedish rape laws sound very odd, if I remember correctly a woman can consent at the time, then subsequently (the next day) can revoke consent, and that's rape under their law.
He doesn't need to be a russian stooge to have credibility drop to the level of fox news.
Did you just insinuate the government of Sweden is a front for Russia?
Well Snowden is probably safer in Russia out of all the other places. US is probably not going to render him out of there without a major incident. Is Snowden a Russian agent? Ok besides Hillary who isn't a Russian agent...
Not sure why he didn't criticize Trump. Trump is probably getting enough scrutiny as is? I remember hearing about how many scoops of ice-cream he ate or how long he shook Macron's hand. I am guessing if someone handed him a pile of Trump's emails he would publish it.
Back when Wikileaks had a better reputation, it also helped affray Correa's attacks on free speech at home. Now that Assange's reputation is in the gutter, he's only a liability to Ecuador.
It really amazes me how many people claim there are no conspiracies against Assange though - the number of things that went from 'conspiracy theory' to 'uncomfortable fact' because of Wikileaks is obviously no evidence of anything.
I remember what it was like watching discussion of the 5 Eyes before Wikileaks; people were written off as cranks for opinions that turned out to be very well rooted in fact. If Wikileaks' leadership gets shut down, we are going to lose a very comforting level of insight into how decisions are actually being made by people in power; and what the moral realities of government actually are.
Nothing has changed.
I expect that Trump doesn't particularly want Assange (despite WikiLeaks complaining of a Trump Admin war on WikiLeaks), and I expect that he especially doesn't want Assange anywhere within reach of the Mueller investigation.
Wikipedia mentions a previous time this may have happened.
"In 1964, a Moroccan-born Israeli double agent named Mordechai Ben Masoud Louk (also known as Josef Dahan) was drugged, bound, and placed in a diplomatic mailing crate at the Egyptian Embassy in Rome, but was rescued by Italian authorities.[4] The box that he had been sealed into "had almost certainly been used before for human cargo,"[5] including possibly for an Egyptian military official who had defected to Italy several years before but then disappeared without a trace before reappearing under Egyptian custody and facing trial."
To my (perhaps naive) eyes, it looked like that was the "final settlement" to defuse the situation -- the Swedish charges have been dropped but he has to face charges for the comparatively lesser offence he plainly and publicly committed (breaching UK bail conditions)?
I'm not sure there is much the UK can mediate on -- they plainly can't do or say anything about whether a third country (the US) has prepared charges they are waiting to file as it's not under their control, and in any case that wouldn't have any bearing on the UK bail-skipping charges (as a suddenly-filed extradition request if anything would be more likely to succeed if he wasn't facing charges in the UK)
The details are largely irrelevant. We’ll kill him the second we get the chance. If US INTEL doesn’t get him mossad will.
He knows he’s not long for this world, and it’s frankly very sad that this is happening at all.
(That's the part I never understood... why would there be a need to spirit Assange from a Five Eyes country and very close ally of the US to one that is not before springing a surprise extradition?)
1. The UK will not assent to to Assange's extradition to the US, so extraditing him to Sweden will protect him from extradition.
2. The UK will assent to Assange's extradition, but for mysterious reasons, they didn't just hand him over, when he was in their custody. Despite their status as a close ally of the US, and their long standing history of handing over anyone the US asks for, no questions asked (Gary McKinnon, Richard O'Dwyer, the NatWest Three, and many more).
Plus, neither the UK nor Sweden can legally extradite him to the US without a binding assurance that the death penalty will not be sought, so...yeah. The more you think about it, the less sense extradition makes as an explanation for the Swedish problems.
If extradition was going to happen, it would have happened when Assange was in British custody (and it didn't) or it would happen after Assange left the EU and was in a more pliant jurisdiction (ie, not Sweden).
That's a very good point that I hadn't seen made before.
> neither the UK nor Sweden can legally extradite him to the US without a binding assurance that the death penalty will not be sought
I'm not sure that "life in jail" (particularly an american jail) is much preferable... The US has been known to give those assurances.
My understanding is that Assange and allies allege that there is probably a sealed one, and that there is a (leaked in Stratfor emails) sealed US indictment against him.
Entirely biased source: https://www.justice4assange.com/US-Extradition.html
You're asking the parent to prove a negative, which is impossible. No public extradition request has ever been filed-- indeed, the United States has never so much as commented on it-- and so the burden of proof is on you to show that there is such a request. And no, links on "justice4assange.com" aren't convincing
It's reasonable that the UK Government may not agree if the appearance is bad and would cause political backlash. It's also possible that they're harder to lean on than as smaller, weaker, lower GDP government.
I mean, it could be as simple as "they won't agree, but other guys might". Maybe someone in US Gov has a better relationship with the person/people in Sweden that would need to approve things. Maybe someone owes someone else a favor.
All of these are reasonable possibilities. Governments aren't 1 dimensional.
Under EU law, if Assange was extradited from the UK to Sweden, then both the UK and Sweden would have to approve of him being re-extradited to the UK. So either the UK will approve of Assange being extradited (and extraditing to Sweden isn't needed) or they won't (and extraditing to Sweden won't help).
To speculate, perhaps the US's original plan was to waiting for Assange to make his own way to a more pliant jurisdiction, and the whole Sweden case caught the US by surprise as well.
As soon as Assange ended up in the Ecuadorian embassy, the US would have had no incentive to file for extradition.
I'm no big fan of that man but there are so many questions around this investigation that I have serious problems believing most of the official story.
This kind of snark is obnoxious and never adds anything.
I'm generally a huge fan of European police and think they often don’t get enough credit for the work they do.
That said, in this particular case there is a number of red flags for me, e.g.:
- generally Scandinavian police won't go to these lengths for cases like this. Why this time?
- why wouldn't they even meet him in the embassy until their deadlines started approaching? If I was trying to sort a case big enough to require extradition requests then flying to London to interview would be a no-brainer.
See: Martha Stewart. Trotsky. Etc...
I characterized your snark as obnoxious not obvious.