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Comment by Mugwort | Hacker News Reader

It's worth keeping in mind that when they say Assange is guilty of violating the espionage act, did illegal hacking etc. what they really means is that he's guilt of publishing video showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians. If people are going to place emphasis on Assange's crimes and make them a high priority then it's hypocrisy of the worst possible kind to ignore the serious war crimes committed by the US armed forces in Baghdad in 2007. The crimes exposed by Assange are far more worthy of attention than any criminality Assange could possibly be found guilty of in exposing those crimes.

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> he's guilt of publishing video showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians

Another view is that he published evidence of alleged American war crimes. Then he published a bunch of other stuff of zero public interest, but damaging to innocent people (e.g. medical records of gay Saudis, rape victims, et cetera [1]).

The former should be clearly held as being First Amendment protected. The latter is reasonably questionable. The merit of the former does not automatically absolve the harms of the latter.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/new-report-highl...

Yeah. It's not a binary where you've done the right or the wrong thing. If they enumerated every disclosure, they could find him not guilty on some of them and guilty on others. And that's how it should work, no?

Basically as I've read it the charge isn't about the disclosures themselves but Assange's assistance in cracking a password to get to the documents.

> Another view is that he published evidence of alleged American war crimes. Then he published a bunch of other stuff of zero public interest, but damaging to innocent people (e.g. medical records of gay Saudis, rape victims, et cetera [1]).

That's not what he's extradited for.

Strictly speaking, he's been indicted for his part in assisting Chelsea Manning US diplomatic cables leak and not for exposing either the war crimes or gay Saudis.

"The 17 counts were tacked on to a single count accusing Assange of conspiring with Manning to crack a Department of Defense password." [1]

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-founder-julia...

Exactly. If people actually read the initial and subsequent indictments against Assange they'd realise he was actively encouraging and assisting Chelsea Manning to attempt to further compromise DoD databases beyond Chelsea's level of access. This included Assange providing instructions to Chelsea on how to obtain an administrator password hash from said DoD DB server which Chelsea then provided to Assange who attempted to brute force the hash. I don't really consider that journalism; at best Assange is a co-conspirator.

Very well put. It's not just the war crimes committed (or indirectly caused) by the US, it's the major financial crime of the war spending and the crime of falsifying intelligence information to sell the war.

Assange helped shed light on all of it, and one would think that after such a humiliating series of revelations the US would find it harder to sell the public on new wars and new enemies. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

I'm not in the slightest surprised. Assange pissed off a lot of high level political/power figures in the US by exposing them.

Remember in 2016 when Clinton was accused of getting leaked debate questions? Personally I expected that to be the end of her run. At the very least for everyone to say "wow, she actually did that. A candidate should never be able to do that". Instead, assange was the bad guy. People who believed it were nutjobs. Bernie and trump were the "real" bad guys. No accountability - they just misdirected and anyone in Clinton's camp or even the anti trump camp said "well so?"

So im not surprised now that people are being led to this propaganda like sheep. Our populace has disgraced any sense of intelligence it may have had. We really cant look at our average citizen and think anything positive about their critical thinking.

Edit: Downvote if you can't provide any logical counter to what I've said. Nothing up there is untrue, but there are a lot of butt hurt Clinton fans still lingering I'll say.

What war crimes did Assange expose?

this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

Physically sickening.

[Voice 1] Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.

[Voice 2] That's right.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&has_verified=1&t...

"Battle" my ass.

The only reason those targets were engaged is because they were thought to be combatants. Do you think the gunner/pilot are happy about it? It's collateral damage in a warzone and horrible but it's not murder or a warcrime.

> Do you think the gunner/pilot are happy about it?

Maybe you haven't seen the whole video -- they were laughing about it during and afterwards, and then blamed the people they just killed for "bringing their kids to a battle" (ignoring the that US was invading the country, so really the US had brought the "battle" to them).

In addition, the reporter's deaths were covered up by the government instead of being honest to Reuters and the reporter's families -- saying they were collateral deaths. In addition, the war logs showed evidence of civilian death and friendly-fire figures being intentionally manipulated by the US government (as well as many other things such as blatant examples of corruption).

Your question was perfectly reasonable and should not have been downvoted.

That said I'd recommend a quick keyword search on "assange" + "collateral damage" (which was the name of a polished version of the video he helped leak).

Where has it been stated that Assange is being extradited for publishing the 'Collateral Murder' video? So far the only charges I've seen were for his assistance to Manning in cracking a password for an entirely different leak.[1] I suppose one could argue that charges are a pretext, but the diplomatic cable leak was by far more damaging to US interests than the leaked video so that doesn't really make any sense. The only reason I can think of to argue that this is really about 'Collateral Murder' is that it makes the US Government look worse to some people. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but I haven't seen it.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-founder-julia...

> he's guilt of publishing video showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians.

I am not aware that Mr. Assange ever published anything 'showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians,' although I have read allegations in the press that he published video of people being killed collareally to lawful military action. Collateral damage is not murder. Yes, innocents get killed in armed conflict. The frequency needs to be minimised, of course.

International law forbids intentionally attacking civilians or attacking an otherwise-legitimate military target when civilian casualties are clearly excessive in relation to the military advantage; it doesn't forbid belligerents from taking a course of action which will result in unintentional civilian casualties.

I am neither a lawyer nor a targeteer, though, so I could have gotten some of the wording or details wrong, but I believe the general principle is true.

This right here.

Murder is the unlawful killing of another human. Unintended civilian casualties or collateral damage in war are a tragedy but they are not murder and are almost never a war crime.

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