Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

Here are the allegations:

He had consensual sex, and the condom broke. He didn’t tell the woman after the fact, but she found it in the trash. She wanted him to get an HIV test. He refused. She tried to get the police to force him to get an HIV test.

To her dismay, they decided to charge him with rape. This is all in the UN special rapporteur’s report, and apparently uncontested by everyone involved.

That means more people can blow the whistle which should be no issue if you are the good ones and act ethically sound.

Your juxtaposition is wrong in the first place, but yes, that is a common line of thought in rationalizing breaking the laws you are supposed to protect. On the contrary, it leads down the same road, so there isn't any practical difference.

As for this fellow, intel agencies don’t get to both conjure lies AND claim guilt by association--with 5-year gap in the timing to boot--though surely they are not beneath trying. Surely the ends justify the means, right?

Quite the contrary to your misguided assertions, way back in 1993, Assange consulted for the Victoria Australia police to apprehend child molestors and pornography distributors.

Not that it'll matter if you're truly disinterested, but you posted a reply, so I guess you're not.

Their failure to actually prove that justice will catch up with the big fish at the top of the crime, drugs, and terror chains has resulted in the domestic extremism problem.

The FBI's continued incompetency laid bare. Possibly by design.

All that "drain the swamp" bullshit? The fever swamp made that up. That was never Trump's gig, not once, from the day he showed up until he fled.

>Currently Republicans though it used to be the Democrats.

This statement shows the absurdity of a two-party political system. Voting for either party will not change anything. You need to vote for particular politicians, and if that's not possible, then there is no way at all for reform or change.

You know, the FBI seems to have advanced notice and involvement with a lot of these kinds of plots...including the ones that actually go off. What is it that they're getting done with our tax money anyway?

Otherwise I agree. His treatment comes down to nothing other than the fact the USA govt want to make it very, very clear that they are willing to totally destroy anyone's lives who dare publish the horrific things they're doing.

Basically helping to break into the computer system moves you out of the realm of journalist and into the realm of political enemy which now makes you vulnerable to espionage.

I think there isn’t much case law around this stuff though.

The US government claims this, but it's not been proven.

>At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too.

This is just more Russiagate nonsense: https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the...

>To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling?

There are no charges. There never were any charges. There was an investigation and that's as far as it went.

>UPDATE GREAT NEWS: Swedish prosecutors are about to announce the dropping of the investigation into Julian Assange on sexual offence allegations. There never were any charges and the allegations were always nonsense, as detailed in the below article I wrote a month ago:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-char...

I think that, even in and of itself, if a nation state intelligence agency is attempting a smear campaign or outright character assassination, and the very best they can manage is "may have had sex that was consensual but unprotected without agreement"?

That's one hell of a sad state of affairs for that intelligence agency.

Like beyond "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity", "government incompetence" cliches. Like amazingly pathetic. I can't fathom that being the line they'd go for.

"Sir, we came up with a plan to destroy his character in the public's eye!"

"Great, what is it?"

"Well, uhh, he had a bit of a threesome-like affair, and he may not have used a condom even though he said he would... we can spin that so well that everyone will disown him!"

"..."

Yeah, but that's not stopping the US for charging him with the Espionage act for it anyway. Most of his charges are for leaking/seeking secret info. The charge for assisting Manning is 5 potential years of the 175 he faces.

> Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine.

They would just invent something else.

Not really and not after they faked witness reports. It is completely in line with what was published and there was no alternative in acquiring this information, which there certainly being enough public interest.

There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent. You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships. These initiatives are doomed to be used at some points as tools against healthy democracies/open states.

edit: the passage

> Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them:

>> The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

>> If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. WikiLeaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

>> This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture.

> Social media sites didn’t change the architecture. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the architecture changed us. The calculus of post–Cold War politics—that democracy spreads through engagement, that technology enhances freedom—was reversed. Hostile states used digital technology not only to attack their own citizens but to attempt to transform foreign democracies into dictatorships. We saw this with Russian influence operations in elections in the United States, France, and in the Brexit referendum, among others.10 The social media corporations that had once bragged of the internet’s liberating power now helped the hijackers of democracy. Networks like Facebook abetted, whether intentionally or not, the “iron triangles” of organized crime, state corruption, and corporate criminality, and they were aided by complicit Western actors content to let their own countries die while turning a profit.

It’s a bit dishonest to claim he’s been imprisoned without a trial when he skipped on bail in 2012 and chose to stay in an embassy instead of turn himself in to the UK government.

He was arrested in 2019 and promptly convicted of skipping on bail in the same year by the UK government.

Nothing in that article shows any evidence of tainted leaks in the DNC release. It claims some other leak had some tainted links, that they were carried out by the sane group, and that the Clinton team claimed emails were fake.

Wikileaks Twitter account has been full of madness, almost as if it was being run by someone suffering years of torture. That's a separate claim from the validity of the site.

The real big is UI elements that randomly appear and disappear in the browser chrome, such as scroll bars and address bars, that contribute to vh/vw randomly spazzing.

I can imagine what would happen if Russia tried the same tactic as the US and used diplomatic channels in order to successfully influence the legal systems in countries like the UK and Sweden.

The Panama Papers were first reported by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, not Stundin, but claiming credit for another paper's work is pretty standard for a tabloid.

Sure, it might report on real news occasionally. A number of U.S. tabloids have reported on scandals and crimes that eventually turned out to be true.

But if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, it's probably a duck.

You don't have to start OUT as a honeypot or a tool of foreign intelligence. It would be a pretty lousy intelligence service that had to start with pre-existing cooperation and alliance. Much better to work at twisting things, and then rely on rationalization and perhaps back it up with threat and intimidation. There's nothing new about any of this, it's just done with flair, ingenuity and determination. Or has been: I think there's a limit to how far that can go.

The org admitted to pushing it's own political positions. No idea why people defend the thing. All they publish now is the result of Russian hacks.

And he's not a journalist.