Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

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There was a scandal in Sweden too. It’s telling that you Assange conspiracists have been referring to an isolated event in 2007 for over a decade now. There is simply no factual basis for the assertion that it would be easier to snatch Assange from Sweden than from the UK. Especially when you consider what a huge international scandal that would inevitably have caused either government. The idea only makes sense as part of a silly conspiracy theory. If you want sensible people to believe the conspiracy theory, you'll have to do offer more than a largely irrelevant Wikipedia article plus a ton of wild speculation.

The trial is going to be public, as I understand it, so who cares if Amnesty International are there or not? They'll see and hear the same things as anyone else who is there. But anyway, if you are right, this just goes to show that the US can avoid a fully public trial and yet still extradite him, which by your logic gives them even less motive for using extraordinary rendition!

There was a scandal, yes, and then cablegate revealed rendition-flights via Sweden kept happening for years afterwards and the Swedish government kept it quiet when they discovered it.

It's quite likely that such flights also took place in the UK. Kidnapping Assange would have been an entirely different affair in any case. It would have created an enormous international scandal whichever country the kidnapping took place in.

There is not a shred of evidence to show that the US had any intention of kidnapping Assange. We are in the realm of pure conspiratorial speculation here. ("They are bad guys; this would be a bad thing; therefore they would do that thing.")

> It's quite likely that such flights also took place in the UK.

Can you give any examples of this happening? Particularly given that we have access to the same diplomatic cables from the US embassy in the UK as the Swedish one which showed continued rendition flights from Sweden?

If you take the UK government at its word, none of the many rendition flights that indubitably passed through the UK contained any prisoners. But if you consistently took the UK government at its word, you could hardly maintain the positions that you do.

You don't take the UK government at it's word. You take the leaked cables at their word that cover renditions in Sweden and other countries, but not the UK.

Which leaked cables establish that there were no prisoners on board rendition flights passing through the UK? And moreover, establish that this was a matter of policy?

Zooming out a bit, there is very little analogy between the Agiza/Alzery case and anything that could conceivably have happened to Assange. Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Alzery were asylum seekers whose asylum applications failed and who were then deported to their home country. The correct legal procedures around deportation were not followed (and of course the Egyptians broke their promise not to torture the two men), but it is a huge stretch to try to make an analogy between this case and some supposed plot to kidnap Assange once he was in Sweden. The latter would have been a vastly more flagrant breach of the law than a rushed deportation, and would have made a mockery of Sweden's original extradition request.

The simple fact is that it is extremely unlikely that the US would have kidnapped Assange from any location.

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