I am very disappointed in Assange. He as been hiding in the same hole for so long, that his enemies have come to regard it as an asset. I get that he sucked up to the Republicans to avoid US justice, but why didn’t he take advantage of that and make a run early in the Trump presidency? Now that Trump and co are on the ropes, nobody is going to help him.
At least if he had made it to Australia (before messing in the election) there would be public opinion in his favor and he might avoid the worst of legal action in the US.
But he has missed that boat now. Its just Julian and his cat.
He’s holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London avoiding extradition to Sweden. Not much the US could do about that other than pressure UK not to arrest him. Although they’re getting pretty tired of their houseguest.
BTW, O’Brien also wrote a couple of songs for The Return of Captain Invincible, including a number performed by Christopher Lee. (Lee also was “The Narrator” in the 1995 Studio Cast recording of Rocky Horror.)
Sweden dropped the case against Assange during the spring of 2017. What he’s avoiding is arrest for breaching the conditions of his bail in the UK. As they say, six of one…
Assange is a total douche, but it is nevertheless worth remembering that the US government has been blatantly seeking his imprisonment and/or death for a long time. And the reason for that hostility is not due to his doucheitude, it’s because he helped to reveal a few of the crimes of the empire.
Sure, but if the wikileak connections to the Russian government are real, then he’s just seeking to fight one empire by helping out another.
To my mind, a major part of the problem was never just American empire, but how that’s competing with other powers on a global scale. It goes right back to the Cold War, where, the US (which had far more resources and reach than the Soviets) still were competing on the global stage (and which other actors attempted to manipulate). This is not a new phenomenon, either, with the example of the scramble for Africa in the late 19th illustrates - the destruction brought about by imperial competition from Europe drove the final wave of colonization across the African continent. I’d argue that a similar process drove the US and Soviet Union and today the US, Russia, and the Chinese. Assange very well might have decided to accept Russian support, because he (rightly) saw the US as more dangerous and destructive precisely because we had a larger reach. If his goal was to help destabilize American empire from within (while Bin Laden had talked about destabilizing it from without by drawing it into a global conflict it can’t decisively win, because you can’t defeat an idea), then he’s doing a bang up job.
