They could make something up. Look at Guantanamo. Probably “a threat to US national security”.
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We don’t need charges any more. Well, maybe for extradition. Easier just to put him in one of those rendition jets people used to track and take him to a black site. Sweden is famous for having done just that, What do you think the people intelligence services render are charged with? Nothing – they disappear into black sites where they’re tortured and held without access to process. That’s what rendition is all about.
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Assange was smart not to bet his life on that notion. I think you may have overlooked some cases from the US and Sweden in forming your rosy opinion of what they would do to Assange if they had him.
Sweden has rendered people:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-ban-cia-rendition
World-famous planner of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was tortured by being waterboarded 186 times in US custody:
I think it’s very naive to think the US would not deny Assange his rights if they got their hands on him.
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Look again at the last line of the post to which you were responding. However, if Assange’s followers want to compare him to Khalid Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, well, he should look for new friends.
You’re supposed to claim the torturing was an aberration that could never happen again
— or fake news invented by America’s enemies
“America only tortures brown people who deserve it” is not a good look here
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Not skip bail for rape charges?
Not run away from Sweden to a country which was way more likely to extradite me to the USA?
Not ignore someone’s request to wear a condom in the first place?
Yes, Wikileaks did good work in the past, but over time it turned from being a group effort into the Julian Assange Personal Ego Project™, where he’ll say anything to anyone to stay in the limelight.
I suspect that the British government will arrest him, throw him in jail for skipping bail, and then extradite him back to Australia after telling him not to come back. Just treat him like a common criminal and not play up to his persecution complex.
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Trump has already messed up stuff internationally much worse than Clinton.
And Greenwald, sadly, has gone 'round the bend.
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It is not the US at its best. Even a nation of laws sometimes fails, and with the US it has been far too often in recent years. However, Assange is not a criminal on the order of the architects of 9/11, and nobody cares enough about him to send him to Gitmo, a place which incidentally has a new lease on life in part due to his monomania.
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Yes, back in December 2001, with two Egyptian asylum-seekers. Which caused a major scandal when it came out. The idea that a high-profile person like Assange, very publicly sought by the Swedish justice system (which is famously independent) for questioning, would have been shadily renditioned to the US by the at-the-time leftist government, is idiotic. Only someone who doesn’t know anything about Sweden or the UK and their relationship to the US, could possibly buy that.
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As far as I can tell, he was never asked in extradition, or even charged with a crime in the US.
He was charged of sexual assault in Sweden, and for skipping bail in the UK. How are Clinton and Obama supposed to show mercy?
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I’ll gladly bear your disappointment. I’ll save my compassion for those who matter to me. It’s a harsh life, I’m barely able to say I survived this far. I really don’t care about your judgement. It would be pretty sad if I put my own values aside to feel sorry for a rapey shitbag because some one on the internet tried to make me feel bad about myself for it. Nah… not gonna work. Try some one else. If my emotions are so important to him he can sit next to the bench with Melania waiting for the day I give a shit.
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He’s not a journalist. He is a muck raker gathering and using information for his own personal agendas, as you said earlier - " I’m sure that Assange saw this as a way to strike at Clinton, his enemy,…"
Running away from being asked or even questioned about two rape charges (which he was never charged with) certainly makes him as asshole of the highest order in my mind.
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No, he’s a source. Or, more precisely, his organisation Wikileaks acted as a secure clearinghouse between whistleblower sources and actual journalists.
Assange did several things wrong. First, he made it about himself rather than about Wikileaks or the whistleblowers. Second, he exposed himself as a target by engaging in alleged rapey behaviour with a fan. Third, when he went on the run as a result he didn’t prepare accordingly and ended up in an unsustainable but flashy situation (see Snowden, in contrast). Fourth, he exhausted many of his supporters’ goodwill by using Wikileaks in service to his personal situation in a way that helped Il Douche. Fifth, he acted like an entitled arsehole to his hosts, who were trying to protect him but are now getting fed up. And here we are.
See if you can figure out the throughline here.
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RE: The persecution of Assange.
So does that mean the persecution of Manning and Snowden and Winner are also warranted? If not, how are they different? Because he is an asshole? OK, but that isn’t a crime. If whistle-blowing is supposed to be a protected act, even if it was done in less than ideal ways, wouldn’t that protection be afforded Assange?
I am talking about Assange’s work with Wikileaks, not anything else he may be accused of. If the prosecute him on some other charge, that’s on him.
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You’ve seen through Assange’s defensive strategy, which is throwing out all sorts of claims to generate FUD, leading to people assuming he’s just being persecuted for nebulous good-guy journalistic deeds. Instead of hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy because he didn’t want to answer for the Swedish sexual assault charges.
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OK, I’ll bite: what criminal or civil wrongdoing did the DNC email leaks reveal? In the two years since their release, what lawsuits or criminal prosecution have been filed, by either Bernie Sanders or the Justice Department?
While it is true that the DNC has recently reformed their nomination process, none of these changes are in response to the specific allegations and insinuations made concerning the treatment of the Sanders campaign.
The DNC emails were ‘newsworthy’ only as a way to gossip about future problems the HRC administration would have, part of the self-defeating prophecy of The Most Winnable Election Ever. Media outlets used the plausible deniability provided by Assange’s Seth Rich lies to capitalize on this gossip, and while you are right that they share some blame in not being more critical of who they were dealing with, Assange himself chose to make those implications as a way to cover for what was pretty clearly a successful Russian kompromat operation.
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I get it – he’s a douche and so shouldn’t be protected from the vengeance that US is seeking on him for his groundbreaking journalistic efforts. You’re not going to rip away the protection of the press from him by calling him a “clearinghouse” or whatever. A lot of people wanted to do that under Bush II – define who the press is (certainly not bloggers), “embed” them with the military, give them government credentials, etc. Why, I suppose we even could say that Jamal Khashoggi was a columnist, not a “real journalist”. See if you can follow my line of reasoning here.
If that happens, we should send him a gift basket:
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No, he’s a douche and an incompetent and any protection he’s lost is the result of his own narcissism and arrogance.
And again, he’s not a journalist and never really claimed to be one until it became convenient. If you don’t understand the distinction between a journalist (e.g. Khashoggi) and a source (e.g Snowden) you can’t expect people to take your “line of reasoning” seriously any more than you can expect them to have sympathy for an egomaniac who’s scored a bunch of own goals.
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All I’m saying is that past is prologue. Unusual and embarrassing things are done by governments in search of leakers: remember when Evo Morales’s plane was grounded and searched in the hopes that Edward Snowden would be found hiding aboard it?
