Abuses show Assange case was never about law
jonathan-cook.net
jonathan-cook.net
Apparently at first he assumed Assange was just a good actor, but after visiting him it had become clear to him and the medical experts with him that this is a case of treatment amounting to psychological torture, the likes of which (psychological, not physical) he has not seen in 20 years.
He's been giving numerous interviews about the matter and says that extradition to the US should be ruled out at all costs and that he has very real fears for Assange's health and for the probable violation of his human rights.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/julian-assange-showing-sy...
I don't deny his symptoms, but I strongly deny that "his treatment" by others led to those symptoms.
His own decisions and actions, namely, to live in a cramped room for years, and not going to see a doctor, led to those.
Now, you may argue that he was right to do so. But it was by his own volition. Sweden would have given him first-class medical treatment and much better living conditions, even if he would have been put in a prison cell (which isn't too likely).
Less. As in "not at all binding".
The choice appears to be stay in the embassy and hope his lawyers could have closed the warrant or spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement as Chelsea Manning was. To say any of this was his choice is an incredibly cruel take.
So, I think staying the embassy was the only option for him, given that the US clearly wanted to have Assange and had already tortured Chelsea Manning for simply being the source of a leak. Not to mention that "Collateral Murder" was literally a video about the US military murdering journalists and then killing first responders. If they were willing to cover up their killing of US journalists, god knows what they'd be willing to do in Assange's case.
The granting of political asylum does not prove the crimes alleged are solely political. That this point is granted zero further attention weakens every subsequent claim.
The granting of political asylum is itself a political act. Particularly when extended by an executive. When Assange’s asylum was granted, Assange was popular and well known. The Ecuadorean leader drew power from an anti-American base. Years later, most Americans don’t know who Assange is [1]. The leadership in Ecuador changed, and with it the political incentives that made Assange valuable [2].
I don’t think Assange fled the Swedish charges per se. But there is insufficient evidence to show he didn’t commit any bona fide crimes under U.S. law. Yes, he exposed war crimes. But he also published sensitive information of zero public benefit yet detrimental to those exposed, e.g. agents in terrorist organisations or the medical records of gay men in Saudi Arabia [3].
I am unfamiliar as to how those balance under American law. But to dismiss the latter solely because of the former is to say a good deed single-handedly excuses bad deeds, which isn’t justice.
[1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ecuadors-president-turns-on-his...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/aug/23/wikileaks-post...
[4] https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=6024868-Assa...
For example, you say that WikiLeaks has released a huge amount of material of zero public interest, and give the example of them supposedly outing a gay man in Saudi Arabia. WikiLeaks actually published a huge cache of Saudi diplomatic cables, which are obviously of immense public interest. Those cables detail the Saudi government's backroom dealings with foreign countries and internal repression. One cable mentions the arrest by the Saudi government of a gay man. That is the cable that people use to accuse WikiLeaks of outing someone in Saudi Arabia.
Assange is an Australian, currently in the U.K., and was accused of rape in Sweden. We shouldn't let the apparently global reach of U.S. law go unexamined.
Although the attempt is certainly not the same, as I don't think you can get extradited for GDPR violations.
That would make me really sad if its true.
Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did fine [1].
I’m not convinced that, had Wikileaks filtered their material like the ICIJ did with the Panama Papers [2], they would have been charged. Ignoring the collateral damage caused by Assange’s decision not to curate, like every journalist is trained to do, doesn’t make it immaterial.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_%28Watergate%29
But honestly, saying earlier leakers did fine also seems pretty selective. Deep Throat did fine because he kept his identity secret for 30 years. Woodward did well because his publications forced Nixon to resign, producing an administration that wasn't being directly harmed by the leaks.
Before Nixon's resignation, those associated with leaks suffered quite a bit more. Daniel Ellsberg had his medical records stolen from his psychiatrist's office. When Nixon thought the Brookings Institute had Vietnam files, he ordered their office robbed and later planned a firebombing to enable an FBI raid; this was apparently preempted only because the Pentagon Papers were published. Other reporters and editors were regularly targeted with tax audits for criticizing Nixon. Martha Mitchell was kidnapped and sedated to prevent her from discussing her husband's role in Watergate. Many of the people targeted most heavily, for instance for FBI harassment and break-ins, were activists instead of reporters, but Assange's place on that continuum is hardly clear.
It does seem excessive to claim that this was an inevitable outcome. But I don't think the recent or Nixon-era experiences of leakers justify any belief whatsoever that responsible leakers face less retribution.
Of the 4 examples you provided, only Wilson didn't violate any laws. Drake and Kiriakou were government intelligence officers and violated federal laws regarding the disclosure of classified information. For Kirakou, the problem was not that he blew the whistle--the problem was how. He could have blown the whistle in a manner that protected classified information, such as by reporting to the Congressional oversight committee, which is what Drake tried to do. Drake was shielded from prosecution because he attempted to follow proper procedure all the way to the extremes and only breached disclosure rules when he was rebuffed. Kirakou didn't even try, which is why he ended up serving time. Brown may have committed a number of hacking-related crimes while a member of Anonymous; his criminal charges related to that and not to his reporting. (Being a journalist only shields you for journalism-related activities. It's not a magic shield to protect you from any crime you commit.) Wilson was never charged with a violation of the Espionage Act, so I'm not sure why he's on your list....
Sweeden considers espionage a political crime and does not extradite people for political crimes. Sweeden seems like a great place to be if you're wanted for political crimes. Not a great situation in life, but a good place to be for that.
The usual theory in response to that is that the US was going to kidnap him from Sweeden or something (it seems to be the standard response I get). I find the idea that a kidnapping would be less likely in the UK or Ecuador fairly absurd. If the US (or any nation) really wanted him that bad, it seems like a first world country that doesn't extradite political crimes would be a RELATIVELY great place to be... and if things are as folks say about governments wanting to kidnap him, I think they could have done it long before the embassy events too.
I think Assange at some point (maybe the start, who knows) really has struggled with the "truth" in favor of grooming his own narrative. This is hardly unique to him, politicians do it all the time too, but it also makes his stated motives and explanations hard to belive. On their old Facebook page (not sure if they still had one) in the early days if you followed up and asked "hey want happened to what you said you were going to release today" they'd delete your post in short order, and any post about their past plans to release whatever it is they had promised ... IMO their willingness to control the information for their own purposes seemed to betray whatever people wanted Wikileaks to be. Not that they should just dump it without consideration but their actions did not seem to follow the ideals.
This article talks about "never about the law", and yet in the end he's charged with helping someone try to break into a computer. IMO that is a step beyond what a journalist should do. That's the law, it's a legitimate law IMO, and we'll see how the trial goes as for proving it and what if any punishment there is.
A country like Switzerland can afford to act a little bit more neutral because they are located in the middle of Europe, with no close enemy in sight, but when you share the same sea with the Russians things are different. Come to think of it even the Swiss had to renounce part of their famous banking secrecy when the American IRS came asking for questions.
Or in other words, this fear of being extradited to the US was completely justified, and everyone who thought otherwise was wrong, including you.
You are wrong. He is being sent to the US. That proves you wrong, and makes everything you have to say about Sweden incorrect, because he is being sent to the US.
That is exactly what the "conspiracy theorist" predicted, and exactly what happened.
If you thought otherwise, then you were wrong. Full stop.
That the US would try to extradite him was never really in doubt. The conspiracy theory was that the Swedish charges were trumped up because it would be easier to extradite him from Sweden.
There doesn't seem to be any real critical thinking about Assange's actual actions here, or taking any accusations directed at him seriously.
To some extent this blog post takes the law as seriously as it claims the government(s) take it.
Our system empowers psychopaths because those people are attracted by power more than any other kind of person. I think the best solution is to abolish democracy and to replace it by a random number generator which elects government officials by random (kind of like jury duty). Randomn selection is the best way to prevent a system from being gamed.
He doesn’t say “wake up sheeple” but this is unlikely to result in a good discussion and he has no new information or analysis to contribute.
The author isn't attempting to add anything new, he's merely trying to reincorporate the facts back into a narrative that has strayed from the appropriate journalistic path.
The facts presented plainly is the contribution.
I feel like that phrase gets bounded about all the time when people don't see their own narrative parroted back to them. Same with the following part of the sentence.
Again, I'm not saying anything about the actual merits of the case or the conduct of any of the parties involved, only that I don't think a good discussion will come out of an inflamatory blog post by someone who lacks particular legal expertise, knowledge about the case, and seems to be using it as grist for preexisting grievances about “corporate media”.
Accordingly, I'm not going to reply further.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...
There is no guarding of the truth in the abstract sense plus there is definite lying by omission. The paper is a left-wing gatekeeper, giving out enough of the truth to keep people doing things like going to anti-Trump rallies but not thinking that actual change is possible.
In this context of gatekeeping you can expect the paper to be 'clickbaiting' the readers with lots of Assange stuff. Supporting Assange and wanting him to get fairly treated is popular with the readers, none of whom would dare advance a controversial truth themselves.
When push comes to shove the Guardian are on the warmonger side, which is unfortunate if you have been a life long reader of the paper. They get orders from on high about what they can and cannot say, if there is a D-notice they will oblige rather than go front page.
It is not that hard to research examples of this, for a while 'off-guardian' did a good job of doing so. But even then they did not get into the D-notice stuff, where, incredible as it seems for a democracy, you can have facts and stories vanish into thin air on the government's say so. This is also the case in the U.S. where Special Administrative Measures can be used to make a story completely disappear. By the time this happens to a story you really do have a 'revolutionary truth' out of place with the times and deeply taboo. For this reason no examples can be cited, but this is something to bear in mind next time there is something weird like the Scripal incident.
My point being that although this is not a helpful article, The Guardian are not whiter than white, they fulfil a very important role in public diplomacy.
I think it’s fair to say that the quoted wording in the Guardian is clearly factually incorrect on those points at least.
An important side note: this is the why the state always attacks the personality and popularity of activists, and why it's important to defend personalities and people.
For example, let me say that, having met Cody Wilson several times and spending several hours with him on a couple of occasions (and moderating a panel on which he sat), I found him to be an absolute standup guy. He seems like a genuine patriot to me and a person of big heart and bravery.
It's absolutely routine for basically anyone accused of sexual assault to find a whole bunch of men reporting that they seemed to be a standup guy. That doesn't mean they remain a standup guy when left alone around women.
Agreed, of course. I'm just speaking of my own experience.
Innocent people don't run. Especially not before they've even seen what the evidence against them is.
“He had not been charged when he went to Taiwan, so he is not considered to have fled the country“ [1].
Based on the original story, there should be plenty of evidence forthcoming. No need to jump to conclusions.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/business/cody-wilson-arre...
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/09/21/3d-printed-gun-desig...
I don't think this is a fair or universal generalization.
Snowden ran. Leary ran. Rushdie ran. The Dalai Lama ran. Sometimes innocent people run.
Snowden ran after charges were filed against him. He admits to his actions. If he had stayed, he could have beaten the charges in court, because it is a defense to prosecution for a lesser crime to be committed (improper process of whistleblowing) to prevent a worse crime (various). But while Snowden is not innocent of the crime, he's simply got a valid defense to negate a guilty finding.
Rushdie fled a fatwa issued by a religious cleric, not the government, following the publication of The Satanic Verses. He was not charged with a crime by the government, but numerous individuals attempted to assassinate him for what they viewed as blasphemy of their religion.
The Dalai Lama, the then-legitimate ruler of Nepal, fled the Chinese occupiers of his country and set up a government-in-exile. He has never been charged with a crime by China.
Timothy Leary actually did commit a number of drug-related crimes including distribution, and ran because he was quite guilty. He also got caught a number of times and saw the inside of a number of jails and prisons...
Tibet
Anyway, he might be accused of sexual assault but he actually did nothing immoral. He just visited a legal site and had consensual sex with someone who claimed to be an adult at the time, and is in fact an adult now.
The moment he was removed from the embassy protection (again, as result of extreme pressure by USA onto Ecuador), the indictment for a death-sentence charge becomes public, and his personal belongings are illegally given by Ecuador to USA.
In my opinion, Assange was proven right.
He dug his own grave.
How specifically did he do this? Publishing 'Collateral Murder' embarrassed a lot of people in Washington and probably affected elections afterwards, yet I never heard anyone make these accusations back then. And this hysteria about Russia over 40k worth of Facebook ads and some twitter bots is outrageous, Facebook/Twitters policy of censoring conservatives likely has a much more significant effect on elections than those ads and bots ever could.
>openly stating his preference as to the result destroyed any possible credibility as a "journalist" and made him look very much like a Russian puppet.
The entirety of the corporate media openly stated their preference during the election as well, to put it lightly.
Releasing after the fact would have been dishonest and less helpful to either party. It also would have been dishonest to people who donated.
Yes, the DNC chairman resigned and was immediately given the golden parachute of being hired by the Clinton campaign, but the DNC could have made things right instead of that joke resignation. It's not Wikileak's fault the DNC is corrupt and stayed corrupt instead of doing the right thing, and they did the right thing by giving them a chance.
Your statement only makes sense if Wikileaks had similar information regarding the Trump (edit: or other conservative) campaign and refused to release it.
So your statement only makes sense if you assume that all journalists are trying to influence politics to the benefit of their preferred candidate in their reporting.
Which is exactly what Wikileaks did, openly, at Assange's direction...despite the misgivings of the rest of the staff that the releases were timed for political effect on the US campaign on not out of some desire for the truth.
And personally, assuming the emails are legit, I would rather they release that info before the election when it actually matters instead of afterwards. If a candidate is engaging in collusion/corruption to rig the primary against a competitor (Sanders) and receiving debate questions prior to a debate that's something I'd want voters to know about.
>The Clinton campaign warned about the files pilfered from Podesta and published on Wikileaks, though it never offered any proof.
While the Podesta emails are believed by US intelligence to have been hacked by Fancy Bear as well, the wikipedia page on the Podesta hack says this:
>Cybersecurity experts interviewed by PolitiFact believe the majority of emails are probably unaltered, while stating it is possible that the hackers inserted at least some doctored or fabricated emails. The article then attests that the Clinton campaign, however, has yet to produce any evidence that any specific emails in the latest leak were fraudulent.[4] A subsequent investigation by U.S. intelligence agencies also reported that the files obtained by WikiLeaks during the U.S. election contained no "evident forgeries".[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_emails
In regards to the DNC server leaks, there is no convincing evidence the Russians were involved and I do not trust the conclusions of an analysis done by a third-party cyber security company contracted by the DNC (Crowdstrike)
The few emails that I checked had a valid dkim signature.
Otherwise it's a very weak proof.
I did notice a big uptick in what I thought was right wing, pro-Trump statements on their twitter feed, and especially on Assange's twitter feed, shortly after Trump was elected. However, I assumed that was part of some strategy to win favour with Trump (perhaps hoping that Wikileaks would become popular with the new administration since Trump had been so pro-Wikileaks during his campaign speeches).
which was just a couple months after Assange stopped signing anything with his PGP key.
In his interview with Nasrallah, he presses Nasrallah about Hezbollah's support for the Syrian government. It's clear that Assange is critical of Hezbollah's involvement in Syria, which undermines the idea that Assange is a Russian puppet. He also asks Nasrallah about whether God is a tyrant, which elicits an interesting response.
Since he won, the holes in narrative were not covered up well, and it has fallen/is falling apart.
Why did Assange defend Putin after the Panama Papers? I thought he loved transparency. When did Assange start his RT show, funded by the Russian state?
I think the answer to that question is yes. Assange should stand trial and, more importantly, the verdict rendered should be fair and just.
The verdict will have implications for journalism and the First Amendment, and insofar as Assange has acted under the auspices of free speech and journalistic integrity, I believe he should be found not guilty.
Insofar as he has acted as an enemy of the United States and outside the jurisdictional domain of journalism, such a verdict may be more difficult to justify.
Moreover, while it would not violate both international law, various treaties, and the US Constitution protections on due process to charge Assange with crimes that could theoretically carry the death penalty after his extradition, any attempt to actually impose such a penalty were he found guilty of any such crime would violate all of the above, ensuring that he could not be executed for his crimes in America. At worst, he could face life in a maximum security facility.
Whilst I am sure you are correct that the specific charges against him in the superceding indictment do not carry the death penalty, other charges could.
I'm ignorant enough to not see why you believe it would be a violation of international law, treaties and the US Consitution to execute him. The US executes people and subjects them to solitary confinement and even punitive measures that lead to death of inmates all the time (take the recent example of someone who the jailers denied water for seven days until he died).
You don't have to look further than the treatment of then Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning to see that Assange has a very real basis for believing that he would not have his rights respected (which in his case, as far as I can see, could very well include application of the death penalty).
Just to clarify what I originally replied. I'm saying that the very willingness of the US to charge Assange under the espionage act shows their willingness to apply a law that could potentially be used to seek capital punishment. That is what people are complaining about, not that he has actually at this time been charged with a specific violation that would result in the death penalty.
I absolutely think the case should go to the Supreme Court, if only to clarify the culpability journalists and news agencies have when they publish illegally obtained information.