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Quite! But lets assume I am being intellectually honest (though it is an heroic assumption). This is an opportunity for falsification of my hypothesis, and they dont come around that often. If the US were driving this, then he would probably not be going to Sweden. There are definitely holes in this, but it would certainly give me even more reasons to pause for thought.
To reiterate my usual (banal) observation - its not so unusual for me to be utterly wrong.
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I think believing in one’s own bottomless capacity to be wrong is fantastic! I guess I just lament the fact that reality is rarely in a position to actually confirm whether we’re right or wrong. When you are wrong you never really know you didn’t hit on 12 get a face card, and when you are right you never know you didn’t hit on 20 and get an ace.
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The McKinnon case seems relevant. USA wanted him for hacking but Theresa May, then Home Secretary, refused.
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Absolutely - but I would really hate to miss one of these infrequent opportunities to get a slightly improved understanding of reality. Part of the problem is the lack of trusted sources these days. There was a time when I felt I knew who to believe. I dont have that confidence anymore, even if it was misplaced in the past. So now I am forced to grope towards an understanding of things by seeing if new information better fits one theory or another. Without this I am completely at the mercy of my biases, which I know from past experience are fundamentally unreliable.
It’s also common for statutes of limitation to be placed on hold if the party being investigated prior to any possible charges goes fugitive.
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I was not aware of that. Your comment made me go look it up on Wikipedia and it seems the concept you’re refering to is called “tolling” and it seems to be very limited. It’s entirely possible that Swedish law is different than the generalization on Wikipedia. I’d be curious to know more on this. It’s always fun to become less ignorant.
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McKinnon was seriously ill. Assange had 7 years to make the argument that he is ill, unfit to stand trial. He has not done so.
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I agree, and didn’t say it couldn’t be both.
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If you think that Assange was exposing the secrets of the world’s largest military power without placing himself as an individual at the centre of the effort you were watching different press conferences and reading different press releases than I was. One can do heroic things and be a glory-hogging egomaniac in the process.
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He might well be better off in Sweden, since they’re pretty strict about refusing to extradict people to where they might face the death penalty (or, IIRC, any penalty that would be excessive in Sweden.) Theoretically Assange could be sentenced to death under some of our espionage statutes and although that might have been brushed off as only theoretical lately there’s been an uptick in prosecuting them in unprecedented ways.
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The death penalty thing is moot, because the UK would also demand a promise not to apply the death penalty. That’s not protection against extradition, that’s a protection about what eventual sentencing is available.
What’s actually critically important is that Sweden has explicit language in their constitutional laws to not extradite people from Sweden for crimes deemed political, and that protection is not there in the UK.
It’s why Assange was in Sweden in the first place.
(These laws were broken after 9/11 for CIA rendition flights but 1. Those were unfamous people in secret, not wildly public like Assange. and 2. They were found to be wildly illegal, and done by the CIA misleading Sweden to use it as a stopover point. Not something they’d re-try in a public trial. Wikileaks actually helped reveal that these rendition flights were done without active Swedish co-operation.)
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The ironic thing is if he had stood trial and been convicted from the start, I bet dollars to donuts he’d be in prison less time than he was cooped up in the Embassy.
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everything he has released about the US government is apparently true.
So Seth Rich really was the source for hacked DNC documents? Which lent credence to the theory he was killed for doing so?
Ultimately, we all benefit from someone making it clear when our government is lying to us, and should encourage people to do that.
Is that what’s going on in the US today? We’re benefiting from the Trump administration? So just to clarify, it’s OK to lie about the source of your information if it protects Russian sources. Even though the Russian government is historically less truthful and usually far more repressive than the US government. As long as in doing so you point out people lying that you personally dislike.
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I couldn’t find stats on average sentences, but it appears that depending on the version of the crime he’d be in for 2-6 or 4-10 years. As distasteful as it is like to compare “how bad” on rape is to another, that’s exactly what sentencing judges do, and what I recall from the reporting there weren’t a lot of aggravating factors for sentencing. I think there is every reason to believe he would have gotten closer to 4 than 10 years and would be out by now.
I’m not even sure that conditions in Swedish prison are all that much worse than conditions in that embassy. I mean, not being able to go outside for years seems like it would eventually drive you insane (from someone who hates going outside).
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I’m guessing you had a one-character typo, but I’m not sure whether you meant to say “I think you’re right” or “I think you’re high”.
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Why not both? Being high and right sounds like the best way to be high/right.
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Didn’t Nixon teach you anything? I take for granted that it is always lying…
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