To be clear: I'm not offering an opinion either way on the rights and wrongs of that, but the piece itself comes down very much on one side of the fence.
I really do think somebody would have to be either hopelessly, desperately naive or deliberately lying to themselves to believe Assange could receive a fair trial in the US, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that the US has any kind of jurisdiction over him.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/27/22696436/cia-kidnap-julia...
I've read the allegations. If the allegations are true, he's guilty of hacking. It does not seem to be a case of the law being perverted past its intent. I'm sure the extradition and prosecution is politically motivated, but the problem with doing something that's squarely, dead-to-rights illegal that also happens to piss off the government is that they are within their rights to put you away for doing it.
It'd be one thing if his supporters accepted the dead-to-rights-guilty part, and were making the claim that it was something akin to civil disobedience - illegal, but in service to a higher cause. Unfortunately, most of them are instead bending over backwards to argue that he can't actually guilty of anything. It's not very convincing.
Probably because the most noteworthy accomplishment of that higher cause seems to be 'spending the next decade being a shill for the Kremlin' and 'helping Trump win 2016'. Sorry, but not sorry - I can't say I have an iota of sympathy for the architects of either.
Who, precisely, are you referring to here?
This is kind of interesting. To me, it seems convenient to the point of being totally unbelievable that the person who leaked evidence of US war crimes, who the US has been hounding for a decade now, is also dead-to-rights guilty of a charge that justifies the extradition they've been gunning for the whole time.
Not being particularly engaged in the case, or the guy, it seems that this must be obvious to everyone.
What's weird about it is that using a spurious charge as a form of harassment for a political dissident is a really big no-no for a liberal democracy. And that's exactly what this appears to be.
I honestly expected some check or balance to step in at some point and point out that, no matter what you think about this guy, manipulating the legal system in such a blatant manner to produce a predetermined result is corrosive to legitimacy on every scale.
Fortunately, we have a process, called a trial, that can determine whether or not they are.
What's wild to me is that so many people are OK with this. Politically motivated prosecution is not normal in a democracy.
Yeah, but he helped trump get elected so he doesn't deserve human rights.
(/s; but people are genuinely making this argument)
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Everyone else has to deal with the consequences of their actions, but when the same rules are applied to Assange, it is somehow a cruel and unusual outrage, and he is a saint that we've already determined could have done no wrong.
If the same rules were, as you say, being applied to Assange, he would have been freed a long time ago.
Hard to see where you're coming from. Trials aren't the only stage at which accused people can be released.
It's the difference between a journalist spending a week in the jungle with a group of partisans, and a journalist spending a week in the jungle shooting guns at convoys and blowing up rail lines with a group of partisans. The former's a journalist, the latter's a guerrilla.
If the allegations are correct, Assange is closer to the latter. If they aren't, he's closer to the former. Right now, he's doing his best to make sure we'll never know, because the latter carries serious consequences.
There is also 1 count of "Conspiracy to Commit Computer Intrusion" which is minor compared to the 17 other indictments. It related to him trying to crack offline a password hash to let Manning log in as a different user. Which is assisting someone who does the actual collection of information.
The remaining indictments are for "Conspiracy to Receive" NDI or for obtaining it.
In other words he was embedded with the partisans and when asked to pass a box of ammo, did so. The hacking count can lead to 5 years in prison with possible parole. It's a tortured interpretation to suggest he hacked/blew up rail lines.
The rest, the REAL reason to pursue someone internationally for a decade for extraterritorial acts is for his journalistic function. To make an example. Otherwise this case would have been dropped.
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Assa...
Have you watched Collateral Murder? To see that and think justice would be served by burying it would be like watching The Running Man and rooting for the game show host. Again, hard to understand where you're coming from.
Oh, certainly not. A fair trial, however, is probably impossible.
However, what I usually comment on is that there is a large enough corpus of evidence to indicate that he's being tortured.
Regardless of everything else I believe about the case: his human rights are certainly being suspended for now; if I ever talk about that then people are quick to point out that he assisted in the rise to power of Trump; as if that invalidates his human rights.
Regardless of what you believe (IE: I'm not happy about Trump either) you shouldn't be so quick to repeal peoples rights, and that's what people are doing, and that's what I'm commenting on.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3160861/torturi...
I could go on-and-on about how he was hounded and character assassinated, but you wouldn't believe me because thats the very nature of character assassination.
I would like him to stand trial, but I suspect it cannot be a fair trial. Sham trials are very common, I wouldn't consider them to be an indicator that your human rights are not being eroded.
If you're interested in learning more about "unfair"/human rights abusing/unjust trials; Amnesty international has a few: https://www.amnesty.org/en/topic/unfair-trials/
Oh sweet summer child, enjoy the bliss till it lasts. Once you open your eyes it will never come back.
Are you throwing the whole concept of trials out with the bathwater, or is Assange just special, and the rules don't apply to him?
The US legal system has problems, in terms of which cases it chooses not to pursue, and in terms of the deficiencies of public defenders, and long sentences. But these are problems that affect ~everyone else going through it a lot more than they will affect this golden boy.
And then there are exceptions. Yes, Assange is just special, special rules apply.
If you're going to deny that, I guess, as GP says, enjoy the bliss till it lasts.
I think when historians look back at this era, from the second gulf war on, they'll see it as an era where the US essentially squandered an amazing soft-power position by ridiculously clumsy, arrogant, and petty behavior. And it's being enabled by group think. It's obvious from an outside perspective that all this kind of thing does is undermines the US at home and abroad, and gives ammunition to the Chinese or Russian state line that basically the US are a bunch of hypocrites, and the rules based global order is a sham, or gives ammunition to the left and right of american domestic politics to say that DC is a swamp, for literally no strategic gain. I mean, who really cares about Assange? I certainly don't. I do care about the ability of journalists to do their work without fear of persecution, and even if people don't care about that, they should care about the raw strategic incompetence of what the US is trying to do here.
It's called The Dissenter and they explicitly mention that they support whistleblowers in their about page.