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Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

We still have the 8th and 14th Amendments. He's not going to get tortured.

Go read any first hand account of anyone who's spent time in solitary for more than a week and tell me that isn't torture. People go into solitary for years

The important point here is that it’s a tactic by Assange. He could at any time move this process forward.

Funny enough it’s likely a tactic that works! He’s likely to end up not doing any US time!

And what did those Amendments do in Guantanamo Bay and CIA blacksites?

Guantanamo bay and the black sites are a disgraceful legacy of US foreign policy but aren’t germane to this discussion.

Assange faces bog standard criminal charges in the US that have proceeded through our standard courts. The extradition is being overseen by 2 separate court systems in 2 separate nations.

The whole point of Guantanamo is that it's not in the USA and therefore the US constitution doesn't apply and they can do what they want.

Which is ridiculous given that Assange was also not in the USA. Somehow US law applies to him when he has nothing to do with the USA, but not to people imprisoned on a US government facility by the US government.

The crimes the US charged occurred in the United States, and the DOJ alleges Assange's role was central to them. It's the same idea as charging the head of an organized crime family overseas with the racketeering offenses the family committed in New Jersey.

If the DOJ cannot prove that Assange's role was fundamental to enabling the offenses, and Assange can prove instead that he merely published information that could have become available to anyone, the case as I understand it fails.

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