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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

The plans you hear of, those are the failures.

A well-executed assassination is one that is never linked back to them.

Julian Assange was not murdered, but we're hearing about it.

Yes, that's a double failure. And it will be triple when he's locked away - the US will suffer a reputational hit as big as (or even bigger than) the one it suffered from the material that him and Chelsea Manning surfaced.

Doubt it.

Assange is a bad faith actor that has shown that he has no problem kissing Russian boots to attack the US.

With Russia's invasion and desire to genocide Ukraine, associations with Russia are looked upon much less kindly.

He's still effectively a journalist being thrown in jail for doing journalism. From Europe, even given all that's going on, the optics are terrible.

Guilt by association is a terrible mindset.

What do you mean?

WikiLeaks has intentionally not published documents damaging to the Russian govt

Uh...and? That has no bearing on the fact that Russia -- not Wikileaks -- is responsible for "Russia's invasion and desire to genocide Ukraine". I may not like Wikileaks a lot but I won't blame them for invasions and genocides.

Furthering Russia's interests over the past few years does not make them culpable for Russia's invasion but it does show that they are more allied with Russian interests than the US's

>WikiLeaks has intentionally not published documents damaging to the Russian govt

For the reason that they thought those documents had already been published elsewhere. And a lot of the documents had been, though there were some new ones. Oddly, the leaked chat never mentions that to Wikileaks. It instead apparently assumed an organization with no Russian speakers and it's leader essentially imprisoned must have fully vetted all the documents.

Since when has wikileaks fully vetted any document?

Since around halfway through the Diplomatic Cables, when the Guardian published the encryption key while they were meticulously going through the documents. Shortly after Assange was basically imprisoned, making it very difficult for him to do anything of the sort.

edit I really shouldn't answer in good faith when you completely ignored my point to make a cheap attack.

Well, you can still hear of it -- JFK and Shinzo Abe spring to mind -- but yes, the "never linked back" part is key.

What would be the point of killing Abe after he's already out of office?

Perhaps threat messaging to current leaders who feel safe and protected by the spotlight of political coverage. It would have to be paired with additional messaging to indicate the bad actors demands but I imagine most politicians anticipate and hope for life after office.

This person gets it.

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