The US Is Preparing to Prosecute Julian Assange

And it is how propaganda works. There is no coordination between the 5 or 6 or however many media outlets but it seems as if there is turn almost based on how quickly he went from a martir to Russian puppet in just a year or less.

Same thing kind of happened to Greenwald though to a lesser degree.

The DNC/Podesta leaks were timed specifically to cause maximum negative effect to Clinton and the Democrats.

Then there's the lack of curation in some of the leaks. A lot of personal data that shouldn't be public by any means (e.g. medical information, sexual identity) has been leaked by Wikileaks. There is a limit to what information should be open and available to the public.

I also can't help but feel like they've stopped being transparency campaigners and whistleblowers, and now do it for the social media spectacle and publicity. Just look at how they released Vault 7, with their viral cryptic posts before the release. Wikileaks feels more like a media agency than a group of transparency crusaders these days.

If the best a state level actor can do to "bring down" a person, they'd most likely manage something more untoward than "had consensual sex with someone, but questionable consent over the use of a condom".

I think that more points to a narcissistic type, than a conspiracy on a state bent on character assassination.=

Currently, the alt-right does not see him as a Russian agent, because Russia doesn't meddle in elections and stuff. That's just crazy talk propaganda. They are dangerous with some nuclear stuff so we have to build more nukes. But they are good in Syria and we need to either step away completely from that shit-show or give them a hand and fight on their side. It's complicated.

The left-leaning have Assange see him as a tool of right-wing US politics which are 100% bought by Russian oligarchs, or maybe the US politics bought the Russian oligarchs. It's unclear.

Questions?

Whatever you do, do not cross the streams. Gotta keep both (can never have more than 2 sides in a debate! that's we call it bi-partisan! have you heard of tri-partisan?! Is that some kind of cheese?! lol) sides hot and angry. Don't mind the man behind the curtain.

Really I have the feeling that they have gotten played like a goddamn fiddle by the intelligence agencies - after they faced the right turning against them for believing what their lying eyes were telling them about Trump's blatant Putin connections. So they are trying to save their behind after they were the brunt of rightful left-wing grudges over things like the Iraq intelligence, spying on activists, and spying on everyone pissing off the general public that doesn't drink the red white and blue "we need to destroy our freedoms to save them" koolaid.

I'm personally of a liberal of a 'free market but intervene when it works better and highly value civil rights' view who believes that the sheer dark history of the intelligence agencies makes the moderate option be to purge every last organization and make sure they never work in anything peripherally related again.

Strip away all labels and contexts and you would probably agree that an agency of torturers who trains dictators, overthrows democracies for short term petty economic interests at great suffering, invented depravities like 'rape dogs', and 'rectal feeding', practices torture despite knowing it doesn't work and more means that they deserve far worse.

Are you saying it’s ok to let people off the hook for war-crimes, but reporting them should put you in prison?

What kind of society would that be? Certainly not one I would want to live in.

(This would not happen unless the UK would be OK with it, of course. The UK, unless they have some exceptional reason, does exactly what the US says. If the law has wiggle room, they'll look the other way. I am sure also something could be arranged so Sweden and the UK could save face for each other in their relationship. Even if the US black bagged someone, as long as they didn't do it on UK soil, why should the brits just not shrug and say "ah, those naughty Americans, can't keep up with them all the time eh?" wink, wink, nudge nudge)

Edit: Regarding the charges themselves against Assange - I have no doubt Assange is a bit of a douche. I would not be surprised at all if he violated Swedish law. It's still quite suspicious that even though most similar investigations are closed, even with better evidence, this case was opened anew, by Marianne Ny. Of course the handling of this case was political.

It's up to us who believe something else to convince more people and achieve critical mass, which will make the difference.

In Russia, more likely "being held in custody up to court's decision" because of the rules in criminal case processing code.

Of course, it isn't completely black and white. If it's alleged you killed someone in one country, and then flee across the border, should you be extradited? Given enough evidence, yes, that sounds just.

So how about if somebody mails a bomb to an address in another country, is it just to extradite them? It's hopefully illegal in most countries, so why not try them in the country in which they were when they committed the crime, in this case building the bomb?

Cyber-crime also seems clear cut, but there's equally grey scenarios, like hacking utilities to cause harm. But for copyright infringement it's hard to see how it's just, even it it was on a commercial level.

Assange is Australian.

Whereas Assange might have (depending on the facts) happily taken help from the Russian state in the name of sowing chaos. Assange has no particular ties to the US, and might have found a way to square it with whatever his morals are. Or he found an encrypted archive in his email and he just published it, provenance unknown.

https://amp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1266777/exclusiv...

There are definitely levels of threats to American democracy. If DWS refers to Wasserman-Schultz then it pales in comparison to an enemy foreign state's military intelligence corrupting the American government.

Do you accept that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian agent? If not, then it's going to be a long post.

If you do, then Guccifer 2.0 himself claimed he gave the leaks to Wikileaks[1]. Wikileaks tweeted the same information[2].

Which part is in question here exactly?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer_2.0#cite_note-:5-7

[2] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/743377025742798848

Even if one accepts the premise (that there was active collusion inside the DNC that cost Sanders the election, binding popular primary elections have only been a thing since 1972. It’s quite a stretch to call the supposed failure of that system a threat to democracy.

I'm not sure I understand. How is it for the better? Shouldn't wrongdoing be brought to light, no matter the perpetrator?

Where is the line? When is transmitting factual information to the public journalism and when is it not?

Many people wish to discredit Wikileaks.

So far no one has provided evidence that Wikileaks has ever doctored, edited or manufactured anything in their releases.

I think that indicates something, but it's certainly not conclusive.

But they can decline to release certain groups of documents that go contrary to whichever narrative they are trying to build.

It's also to be expected that WL's every move is scrutinized. But anti-WL action went much, much further, including a complete financial boycott from above. That was years before any allegations of Russian meddling ever entered the picture. The US has openly targeted them for years, but if they hold any grudge about this in return in the form of not pulling punches and maximizing publication impact, it is supposed to reflect badly on them? That seems more than a little unbalanced.

The skepticism only goes one way. WL has a perfect track record in accuracy. Their own story however is regularly misrepresented and misstated. Plus, never forget that it was a Guardian journalist who was dumb enough to leak the crucial password to the full diplomatic archive, in the same book where they admitted to being too dumb to Google how to open a 7zip file. Such their missteps from the traditional press are casually excused in a game of closing ranks that reminds one more of cops than renegades. So much for the enlightened and free press: they needed a bunch of crypto nerds to show them how it is done, after the tech industry stole their collective lunches, and they handed over control of their platforms and income to hordes of shady surveillance capitalists.

The traditional press' warmongering and American mythologizing is also a naked fact. So much that they even held off on the Trump bashing for a while, when he was banging that drum, calling it "presidential".

So who is really using power over whom? Who is using truth for whuch cause, and who is publishing self serving fluff pieces instead? Why should we worry about WL, when the American fish is clearly rotting from the head down, and those who are supposed to stop that are incapable of doing so?

The cablegate dump had many interesting revelations https://theweek.com/articles/488953/wikileaks-cablegate-dump...

Some may believe it is in the public interest to hide US aggression to protect ourselves from repercussions. I think it is necessary to expose US aggression to public light to minimize its use altogether. If you can't justify an action to the public, perhaps you should not be spending taxpayer dollars to do it clandestinely.

If they found that I was involved in a scandal, and gave that information to the New York Times, and they fact checked and published it, would be ridiculous for me to try go after NYT.

That seems like a fine reason to call someone partisan, but doesn't sound like anything Assange has been shown to have done.

Besides, the press is often partisan. That doesn't mean we should abandon a free press.

Well, yes. The ever-increasing, horrible drone campaigns conducted from the Obama years onward as a tool of destabilization are one thing, but that doesn't make it reasonable to expect that they'd use them to assassinate high profile political agitators in first world countries or that they actually have the ability to do such a thing. The contexts are totally different, however the narrative IS in keeping with the typical far right behavior of cultivating the image of a victim terrorized by an all-powerful shadow cabal

You really think she would have drone bombed an embassy in the heart of fucking London? Come on. That's clearly delusional.

Source?

Yes. There's a difference between drone programs 'crossing the line' say, in a hunt for known terrorists, they blow up a building that has civilians next door our just outside ... and arbitrary targeting of 'annoyances of the state'.

There are actually quite scant false flag operations in US history, and many of them weren't even false flag so much as 'purposefully misrepresented'.

And besides - there would be no 'false flag' with any kind of attempt to kill Assange.

The notion that Clinton (or any agency) would go after Assange with drones and hellfire missiles is well into crazyland territory. Not even the crazy among them are thinking it, it doesn't make sense really on any level I think.

I'm sorry about that, but losing someone in an attack doesn't make your point any more valid.

The Taliban refused to extradite bin Laden and the UN Security Council responded with sanctions (e.g. Security Council resolution 1267).

1. That's not a drone strike.

2. That's not an assassination mission. OBL was more valuable alive than dead.

3. Islamibad isn't London and the UK isn't Pakistan. Hard power solutions are for countries that can't control their own airspace and can't/won't be able to capture the person of interest with their own legal/security apparatus. Name one drone strike outside the middle East.

4. You are comparing the most notorious terrorist in world history to a journalistic nuisance. The US would have to be retarded to pursue Assange to the same severity as they pursued OBL.

Citation?

I live in Belgium, but never heard about this, when did this happen, do you have any references?

> The leaker was not protected. She was caught and prosecuted.

You're talking as if Assange or WikiLeaks disclosed the source.

Are you suggesting that a journalist has a responsibility to protect a source unto the ends of the earth, even when that source openly and flatly confides in an (in retrospect, untrustworthy) friend that she has leaked what she knows to be classified material?

How exactly was Wikileaks supposed to respond? By somehow tracking down Adrian Lamo and ensuring that he didn't report her? I'm just astonished at this part of your indictment.

> The data was not protected. WikiLeaks was hacked and leaked all the raw data.

"Hacked?"

WikiLeaks published the entire cache of documents - and I celebrate them for it. I have personally read over 600 pages (probably a thousand at this point) and I have yet to encounter one of them that I, as a United States citizen, believe was rightly withheld from my view by my government.

WikiLeaks took care to redact some proper nouns from these documents, but provided unredacted versions to some journalists, along with painstaking, easy-to-follow instructions about preserving them. Nevertheless, a (much more ostensible respectable) journalist at The Guardian posted the passphrase and the files were leaked.

In what universe is this a failing of WikiLeaks OpsSec? "Hacked"? What can you possibly be talking about?

The only security compromise about which I'm aware on the part of WikiLeaks was a problem with their web frontend which briefly allowed a group to change it to a juvenile message. No documents were involved.

> The content was not shared in an objective way. Assange editorialized the content with his own opinions (ie Collateral Murder).

...so? What's wrong with that?

Let's keep things in perspective here: a person flying in a helicopter intentionally fired an explosive missile at a person standing on the ground. I know we're all pretty numb to this happening at this point, but I think it's still pretty shocking when you think about it.

Maybe he did think that he was firing on someone carrying an RPG. So? It's still a crazy act, carried out during an illegal war. Calling it "Collateral Murder" doesn't turn me off in the slightest.

> There's a reason why Ed Snowden didn't give his leaks to Assange.

I appreciate the way that Ed Snowden conducted himself. He took a different approach and one that is welcome.

I also think that Ed Snowden's criticisms of WikiLeaks are substantially more honest than yours. Can you explain why you've characterized these things in such a strange way?

Why do they get to decide what's "pertinent"?

If true, that's the point at which Assange and Wikileaks departed from the path of legitimate journalism.

Reality check - partisan newspapers, news channels, and news organizations publish partisan nonsense with the intent of influencing elections. All the time.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, freedom of speech does not mean 'Freedom of unbiased speech.' If it did, then you could shut down the entire media establishment tomorrow.

Wikileaks quality has surely dropped. They are still the press, and any prosecution by the US will be over things like the Manning links, a direct attack on the freedom of the press.

Or said another way, they act as a news organization.

Modern day news organizations unfortunately have zero integrity and are unwilling to take on the people with power.

That indictment does not actually mention Wikileaks at all, let alone suggest that Wikileaks knew the source was the Russian government.

Not sure what part of "claim" you don't understand. It doesn't matter who makes the claim. Claims by the Secretary of State or the CIA are no more credible than claims by you or I if they don't come with evidence we can independently scrutinize. Older people should have learned this lesson in 2003 with the WMD debacle. Those of us who are even older should have learned it at the Gulf of Tonkin.

>trying to claim that "we" are as bad as the Russians is the same shit Putin does to dispel any criticism against his fucked up regime's actions.

Demanding evidence I can scrutinize is not "dispelling criticism". If you trust the evidence- free claims of the government (or anyone else) - on any matter - you are incredibly naive. Unfortunately you aren't alone.