It's remarkable that so many news outlets are permitted to discuss the content of these obviously actively strategically important leaks while assange rots in solitary for revealing war crimes.
Discussing leaked material isn’t a crime. Leaking material is.
(edit - was)
It's not exactly the same thing, but similar things happen in private industry. If an employee of a company posted a trade secret the employee had agreed to keep secret, that's legally actionable, while others sharing it without any agreement with the company generally can't be sued.
That said, IANAL. If you need legal advise, I'm not it :-).
He did however skip bail, and rightly paid for that.
I was disappointed by the high court's view to allow extradition, especially given the one-sided approach to extradition that US takes with its citizens, but it was hardly surprising given how far up the US's ass the UK is. Of course a decade ago it was all "I don't want to go to Sweden because I'll be extradited", despite that easily being the case from the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_an...
The UK at least follows their own legal system for such matters.
Hell nowadays the UK would not just allow, but probably pay the US to take asylum seekers somewhere else
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/iraq-war-tor...
That particular rendition didn't rely on UK refueling the planes; the CIA's planes don't need to be refueled from somewhere as close as Sweden. And it was a minor scandal when it came out that the UK even allowed rendition flight refueling on one of it's territories in the Indian ocean. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/22/ciarendition.f...
> Seems a very tenuous link to me - the idea that the US would illegally kidnap someone from the streets in Sweden but not do the same thing in the UK
Then you should be able to produce an example of this happening. The big difference is that for western Europe, the US gov generally requires that the host country cooperates with renditions. Sweden cooperates with renditions, the UK requires the normal extradition process.
Reporting on it after the fact when you had nothing to do with the removal of classified material in the first place is not.
Suffice to say, that without the intense high-level political pressure being constantly applied Assange would not be incarcerated today as he would either have won in court or convicted on a substantially lesser crime. Thus, I don't think it matters much whether he's technically guilty.
To me, the key meta-point is that the things Assange leaked weren't of much actionable value to the military enemy. Most of what Assange (and Snowden) leaked were already known or reasonably assumed by military adversaries.
The reality is that he is officially being charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for coaching Manning on how to get around the military's encryption.