I agree! He’s made many moves that have made him unpopular, even (and especially) among his former champions. Let him be, let him go live in exile somewhere, see his family, have the dignity and rights that any person deserves.
I don’t there’ll ever be concrete evidence about sealed federal indictments – unless someone blows the whistle on them and then someone publishes the leaked evidence. Who could do that? The US has made it clear that whistle-blowers and their collaborators are dead meat. Mirror universe Spock puts it nicely:
http://www.youtube.com/v/mn09yexmwSI?version=3&start=9&end=12&autoplay=0&hl=en_US&rel=0
Surely you mean families.
Ah, the call of the wild conspiracy theorist. It must be Spring…at least, that’s what THEY want you to think!
Hyperbole doesn’t serve your point well. Whistleblowers who seem to still be alive:
-Chelsea Manning
-Edward Snowden
-Reality Winner
-Rex Tillerson
-etc.
If you’re going to use a phrase like “dead meat,” maybe check to see if there’s even a whiff of truth behind it.
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Yeah, but what about Vince Foster, eh? Clearly he was killed by the Clintons! /s
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The cat is the only one in this bad courtroom drama I feel sorry for.
Assange even lied about where he got it.
“Julian stared at the cat for about half an hour, trying to figure out how it could be useful, and then came up with this: Yeah, let’s say it’s from my children. For a time, he said it didn’t have a name because there was a competition in Ecuador, with schoolchildren, on what to name him. Everything is P.R.— everything .”
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He also said this, apparently:
“I’m in my element. Battles with governments come easy. Battles with treacherous women are another matter.”
Fucking gross.
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Don’t forget Seth Rich.
Ah, that triumvirate of great journalists: Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and Julian Assange.
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I see a common factor in the group of names you mention as whistleblowers (save Tillerson – was he tried for leaking? I don’t remember that.): they’re all US citizens and each released information to be published. Each was addressed by the justice system. Assange is not a leaker or whistleblower, nor has he broken any confidentiality oaths by his publications. Thus, he should be in the clear. But, he’s widely believed to be the subject of sealed indictments. Sounds like persecution of a publisher to me and, while I have suggested that the US may misuse its courts to try him, as a non-US citizen, the current administration does not believe he is protected by the First Amendment. I think they could make that argument in court, but how much easier it would be to disappear him, IMHO.
Evidence may yet come to light of sealed indictments – if they are unsealed after Assange is in custody. Too late for him. Sort of my point here. Better safe than sorry when you’re talking about an actual human being facing potential persecution for breaking so many great, interesting and important stories. I really hope you’re right, though, and it’s just a fevered conspiracy theory. At least there would be a better chance for mercy then.
”What can be alleged without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” (Christopher Hitchens)
Once more: The US government has nothing whatsoever to gain from making Assange “disappear” and a lot to lose, certainly in the PR department, which is why it’s very unlikely indeed to happen. If the US really wanted him and bad PR wasn’t an issue they’d have him by now, courtesy of SEAL Team 6 or something; they know exactly where to find him and it’s not as if Ecuador could do a lot about it. (What would Ecuador do, invade Washington, D.C.? They’d send a strongly-worded note of complaint to the State Department, and, less publicly, flowers and chocolate to the Joint Chiefs to thank them for taking Assange off their hands.).
If Assange does eventually end up in a UK jail the US may try and get him extradited but whether the Brits would go along with this is anyone’s guess. There would certainly have to be some sort of official (non-sealed) paperwork alleging credible crimes, or else, PR nightmare again.
It’s fairly safe to say that the importance of Assange when it comes to world politics is way overrated by him and his fans. The guy had his 15 minutes of fame (and then some, so he can’t really complain – most people never manage anywhere near his level of notoriety) but by now he’s obviously trying to stay relevant by whatever means available, including sleazy-douchebag moves like suing his hosts of seven years because they want him to be a reasonably hygienic house guest. Can we imagine what not actually being persecuted would do to Assange’s ego? Probably not, but it must be unthinkable. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that the absolutely worst, most horrific punishment anybody could ever inflict on Assange, in his own mind, is that early one grey London morning he gets shoved out of the front door of the embassy and nobody cares.
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I’m not saying there is or there isn’t reason for him to be concerned.
I’m trying to make the point that whether he is or is not a thoroughly unpleasant individual (and I think the evidence is pretty firmly on the ‘asshole’ side of the scales) is irrelevant to the question of whether he is entitled to asylum or not or whether he is at risk or not.
His moral character and socialisation as a human being shouldn’t factor into that.
I will say that if I were Assange, your list of reasons why he shouldn’t feel worried about the US would not calm my nerves in the slightest:
Hardly unheard of.
Certainly could. And have.
Don’t need to in this case since we have a lovely extradition treaty and keeping Assange locked up while all that rolls through the courts plays just as nicely for US politicians (if not better) than swooping in with a SEAL team to kidnap him.
Speaking from outside the US, I can’t see much sign the Republicans are worrying about that either.
Well except that he would say he skipped bail because he was afraid of being kidnapped to the US.
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And I’m suggesting that your definition of journalism is wrong. 
Fair point. I was trying to make the point that even if we take him at face value, there is nothing the UK or anyone else can do to persuade him he would be safe to come out.
He’s managed to lock himself into a position where he cannot move on without significant support from global powers or at least a global power.
Which is why annoying the one country that is helping you is a really stupid move.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
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He needs to do something to remind people that he still exists. Among the possible somethings that he could do this is probably not the most clever one, but then again, a clever person wouldn’t be in his predicament in the first place.
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I would argue that that is an insult to actual journalists, and probably dangerous for them and their profession if more people in power come to agree with you.
even if we take him at face value, there is nothing the UK or anyone else can do to persuade him he would be safe to come out.
I assume he’ll learn one way or the other soon, as certainly the Ecuadorian embassy cannot be compelled to act as a free hotel for him and his cat in perpetuity.
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But you’re the one who set up (what now appears to be a strawman) that Assange is a whistleblower or leaker, and that such people end up as “dead meat” if the US gov’t gets their hands on them. I was pointing out that, while Manning went through hell in their hands and I’m sure they would like to get their hands on Snowden, I don’t know of any whistleblowers or leakers, American citzen or not, who have been killed recently by the US government.
It is really frustrating to discuss this with you. You set up strawmen for people to disprove, then attack their disproving arguments. Your own arguments jump around like a greased Catherine wheel. You make assertions without anything to back them up.
I get it. You support Assange thick or thin, no matter what crap he pulls. I don’t. Just because he did something good a decade or more ago, doesn’t give him a pass for the shitty things he does in the here and now. It’s telling that the less relevant he becomes, the more outrageous his behavior in order to get attention.
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The one thing you have revealed here of any relevance is an incident where Brazile sent one debate question unsolicited.
How many voters are you claiming were peeled off by the fact that HRC got a hot tip that a town hall meeting in 2016 would have a question about the Flint water crisis?
The remainder of the 18 “revelations” are exactly the thing I was talking about: gossip that would have been relevant under the assumption that HRC won the presidency, as the gossip would inform who would remain with the administration and presumably how it would affect policy. The problem was that people acted on that faulty assumption and created the circumstances for that assumption to fail, by spending finite time and column-inches chewing on what it meant that Neera Tanden didn’t like David Brock, instead of following up on obvious, basic shit, like the fact that Trump’s doctor clearly lied about his health, or y’know the enormous black hole of Trump’s finances.
This distraction and embarrassment was the entire point of distributing the stolen DNC emails to the press, and Wikileaks traded on whatever credibility they had built up to that point in order to help distribute the emails. This decision was compounded by the decision to obscure the source of these stolen emails, falsely attributing them to a murdered employee in order to make covering them plausibly an act of whistle-blowing.
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I apologize – my post wasn’t terribly clear. I was responding to another post that pointed out that whisteblowers had been tried and jailed, not disappeared. The poster said that, thus, they really aren’t “dead meat” like I’d suggested. I was trying to argue that they had been punished very harshly, so they were dead meat. Plus, Assange not being a US citizen and not having broken any laws (like a whistleblower, who probably reveals things they swore not to) makes him MORE vulnerable than US-citizen whistelblowers. First, because folks in government claim he has no First Amendment protections because he’s not a citizen, and second, because he can’t be easily tried for releasing secrets he promised to keep. I think the First Amendment will still hold and make for a difficult fight in court and they can’t just put him in the bag for revealing government secrets (he never swore not to), it creates the temptation to disappear him. It would be much easier to just make him go away than to let him potentially win a First-Amendment fight in court.
Now what to call him is still a problem. He’s a not a whistleblower, technically, but he’s what a whistleblower needs to get his truth out there. There’s no word for that, but the two are so closely connected that I class them as facing a similar threat. Publisher-of-whistleblowers? People on the thread have drubbed me for calling him a journalist. Fine – let’s find another word that doesn’t feed him to the bone-saw people.
Listen, I support human rights first. The guy’s in his predicament originally because of persecution due to whatever-is-he-does – journalism, publishing, etc. He was very effective at that and the stories he broke were much followed here a BoingBoing, even last year. I’m not saying put the guy on the supreme court – all I’m saying is, don’t advocate violating his rights just because you find him disgusting personally or politically. Popular publishers largely don’t need First Amendment and human rights protections.
Just two more lousy hours to go…
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that’s not actually true though
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I’m a Democrat and it’s my party – that’s why I’m interested. Many of those revelations and the fact that they point to – that there was bias in the DNC in favor of HRC – are relevant and important to me and should be for all party members. That’s sort of the definition of newsworthy – relevant and important for at least its 44 million members!
