Ironic that Jeff Sessions and the American neoliberal “left” (and a lot of BBers, apparently) agree on something. Criminalizing journalism shouldn’t be something we encourage, maybe?
1 Like
Maybe they’re tired of him consuming so much bandwidth on their wifi?
Snowden never needed Assange, and personally I think Assange handled the Manning leaks rather poorly.
4 Likes
I don’t think anyone here wants to criminalise journalism, but being a journalist shouldn’t give you carte blanche to rape people. I don’t support his extradition to the US, but Sweden and the UK may have a case against him.
6 Likes
Sessions wants him in custody to have leverage over him and what he might say about his supporting Trump, Roger Stone’s involvement and Russian involvement.
3 Likes
Assange has said for YEARS that he was perfectly willing to go to Sweden to be questioned if they would guarantee that he would not be extradited to the U.S., where he could be disappeared into a black site prison and tortured. Regardless, Assange has never been charged with any crime in relation to the Swedish case and there is no current case against him in Sweden. That you throw around a term like “rape” shows how thoroughly the disinformation campaign (which is easily debunked) has worked.
And you believed him. Just like Chelsea.
6 Likes
Considering Assange referred to the last U.S. presidential election as "a choice between cholera or gonorrhea,’ any suggestion Assange “supported Trump” is patently absurd. Wikileaks did what they always do: released true documents in the public interest. The ones that upset the neoliberal establishment and media showed how the sleazy DNC conspired with the Clinton camp to suppress Bernie Sanders’ candidacy.
As far as the claim (still unproven with actual evidence) that Russia hacked the DNC, aybe they did, maybe they didn’t. At least we know (thanks to Wikileaks) that the CIA has the technology to mask their own dirty work as that of another country.
The possibility that someone other than Russia hacked the DNC emails remains well above 0%, at least. And the possibility that Wikileaks didn’t know or care who their source was (they pioneered the system to maintain source anonymity long before Secure Drop) is also way above 0%. The idea that Julian Assange, a man who has literally put his life on the line to expose the secrets of the powerful worldwide, is somehow an ally of either Putin or Trump, is pure delusion.
1 Like
More likely his extradition to the U.S. will, per @KathyPartdeux, result in his being locked away from public view for the rest of his life so he can’t spill the beans on how he worked with the regime, perhaps the worst fate imaginable for someone so obviously addicted to celebrity.* Assange is about to be the latest person to find out how Il Douche shows gratitude to those who’ve helped him.
[* which exhausted any goodwill among most of his early supporters at a rate I’ve seldom seen from actual celebrities. The only people I now see supporting him are those who appreciate the work he unwittingly did on Putin’s behalf and useful idiots who confuse a personal grudge against Clinton with a political statement of principle.]
2 Likes
Rape is the exact thing Sweden wanted to question him about. I’m not just throwing it about, it’s the exact reason why they want to question him.
I understand the fear of US black site prisons, but I don’t think Sweden has a history of questionable extraditions to the US, does it? That’s the UK’s thing, actually.
Whatever the case, the investigation is (or was) about rape, and the evidence as we know it sounds like it may indeed have been rape. It’s not all clean-cut. How the investigation was initially dropped, allowing him to leave the country, and later picked up by another prosecutor, is certainly odd.
None of that changes the core of my argument, though: being a journalist does not give you diplomatic immunity. Rape is legitimately a crime that deserves investigation.
6 Likes
There were some questionable extractions in the noughts, IIRC, but they caused something of a scandal. In any case, Assange’s fears of Sweden (of all countries) extraditing him to the US for dubious reasons are either raving paranoia, or (IMO much more likely) self-serving lies to make him look like a martyr and give a palatable excuse why he’s bent over backwards to avoid answering to the charges of sexual assault in Sweden.
3 Likes
“The revelation that WikiLeaks secretly offered help to Donald Trump’s campaign, in a series of private Twitter messages sent to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr., gave ammunition to the group’s many detractors and also sparked anger from some longtime supporters of the organization and its founder, Julian Assange.”
"One of the most high-profile dissenters was journalist Barrett Brown, whose crowdsourced investigations of hacked corporate documents later posted on WikiLeaks led to a prison sentence.
Brown had a visceral reaction to the news, first reported by The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks had been advising the Trump campaign. In a series of tweets and Facebook videos, Brown accused Assange of having compromised “the movement” to expose corporate and government wrongdoing by acting as a covert political operative.
Brown explained that he had defended WikiLeaks for releasing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, “because it was an appropriate thing for a transparency org to do.” But, he added, “working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting.”
He was particularly outraged by an Oct. 21, 2016 message, in which Assange had appealed to Trump Jr. to let WikiLeaks publish one or more of his father’s tax returns in order to make his group’s attacks on Hillary Clinton seem less biased. “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” the Assange-controlled @Wikileaks account suggested. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.”
As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”"
If you’re a transparency org - you release the docs globally. If you’re helping a campaign - you work with the campaign to release information in a way that helps them.
7 Likes
Yes. Barrett Brown went to prison over his involvement with transparency orgs - Chelsea Manning went to military prison - as a trans women in a male prison.
Assange is charged with rape. Not much of a comparison here.
5 Likes
Because of the way the Swedish justice system works, Assange hadn’t been charged with anything yet. Also, Sweden has a graduated scale of sexual offenses, from minor to major. The minor ones that they might have had a chance of convicting him on timed-out a couple years ago, and he can no longer be charged with those. There are majors ones that haven’t timed-out, but they would be unlikely to get a conviction. (I am not a Swedish lawyer.)
Putin answered the question directly in Helsinki: He ordered the hacking. “Yes, yes I did.”
It doesn’t support your argument to use Drumpf’s talking points.
2 Likes
I have a great admiration of Barret Brown. Very principled and very amusing.
Obama did NOT pardon Manning; he merely commuted her sentence. She remains a convicted felon, a disgrace considering she one of the most heroic and consequential whistleblowers of our time.
Or to quote Malcolm X out of context within the same thread…
SMH
3 Likes
Manning is out of jail. She is not a disgrace, compared to say Lynndie England. But she did commit a crime. People did die during the Arab Spring, and not everywhere is better off for the uprisings. Bet she’s doing a lot better than Lynndie England, money and support network wise.
