Originally published at: Trump CIA made plans to kidnap, assassinate Assange | Boing Boing
…
11 Likes
Weren’t there people who proclaimed that it was better to have Trump in office than Clinton, because he made nice noises about Assange and wikileaks?
Well, those people can fuck off.
54 Likes
It used to be that if you went above and beyond to put somebody in office, you got a cabinet position or at least an ambassadorship. With Trump, you get shit on the moment he no longer needs you.
10 Likes
The Assange Assassination plans were low-hanging fruit for a gov’t agency in need of a success story to parade before the short attention span commander-in-chief. Any Pompeo clamor to Trump could be succinctly presented as evidence of progress.
7 Likes
Isn’t that the CIA’s job? Plan to put a knife in every back including your own?
8 Likes
I’m shocked that the Trump administration would want to silence someone who could testify about Trump’s illegal election activities. Lay down with Roger Stone, wake up with fleas.
This should put the kibosh on extradition to the US.
Doesn’t change a bit about the sexual assault allegations and his fleeing from prosecution from sexual assault charges.
31 Likes
The charges weren’t all that strong, it would have been word against word, and even if convicted he would have been out of Swedish jail long ago.Trying to escape was a stupid decision. On the other hand, with CIA breathing up your neck, it might be hard to be entirely rational.
3 Likes
I’m getting the impression that Trump personally never much cared what happened to Assange one way or another. He was obviously happy that Wikileaks helped get him elected but never saw the point in taking a public stance on someone like Assange, who was at least as likely to piss off the right as the left.
This feels more like something that Pompeo and embittered folks in the CIA came up with than Trump himself. We know he didn’t give two shits about undermining the U.S. Intelligence apparatus.
22 Likes
That’s what court is for, isn’t it? To determine the truth of charges.
You can make a negative inference about the defendant based upon them fleeing prosecution.
It makes it much more likely that they’re guilty.
The women certainly weren’t guilty.
Why do so many men want to dismiss sexual assaults that people report?
28 Likes
Because they legit don’t care? 
18 Likes
These allegations against the CIA could be politically motivated and haven’t been proven in court!
/s
18 Likes
So diplomacy won in the end. /s
7 Likes
The number of ostensibly “left-wing” folks who refused to even entertain the possibility that Assange was really guilty of sex crimes has been really disheartening. Especially in the pre-Trump era when progressives were able to imagine that Assange as a principled champion of truth rather than a boorish, self-serving diva.
28 Likes
Dirtbag left strikes again…
21 Likes
Not that it excuses the CIA, because it doesn’t, but I would imagine they have drawn up plans like this for every single one of “America’s Enemies.” I can see assange on that list not because he is or isn’t an enemy (though him basically feeding Chelsea Manning to the wolves was disgusting and he’s got a lot of other really /interesting/ disclosures that he made that he probably should explain) , but because he MIGHT have information on Trump to leak too now that basically Trump did nothing to help him after Assange definitely helped Trump win 2016.
I don’t know , though. I always felt Wikileaks was a good and needed site, that needed to be run by someone other than the egomaniac Assange has become. But, then again, you convince someone they’re on a holy mission, you can’t be surprised when they radicalize themselves.
2 Likes
50 posts were split to a new topic: The value of Wikileaks
I forget who, some ex-CIA insider was on NPR a while back. He said that a trend among administrations, both Democratic and Republican is that they are trying to fight transparency, and by extension leakers.
Leakers used to be more tolerated, because they acted as a “Pressure Valve”. The lines were drawn where they were because there was a thought process, “What would the reaction be if this was on the front page of the New York Times?..”
9 Likes
A better way of making this point, I think, is that even if he’d have done everything he was accused of and served time, the maximum sentence was only one year—about the same as he received for jumping bail in the UK. So as appalling as his behavior was, extradition to the U.S. on specious “espionage” charges was always the more significant problem for him.
22 Likes
Truth be told, I don’t know how specious the “espionage” charge actually is in this case. There’s definitely evidence that he instructed Manning how to steal the information from the DOD/Army, and there’s evidence he forwarded information on to Russia and other antagonistic intelligence agencies. If Assange were directly a state actor running an asset like he ran Manning, we’d definitely call what he was doing “state sponsored espionage.” That he’s hiding under a “news organization” is very confounding and probably enough for the first amendment / freedom of the press side of me to say that he’s a reporter, but goodness this is an edge case that’s ripe for exploitation and I don’t know how it can be solved.
5 Likes
Disheartening, but not surprising.
Never get involved in any political movement where leaders cannot be criticised.
17 Likes
