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Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

theintercept.com

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Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#141

Post by jumelles »

undseg wrote: post #110
windowshopping wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assange is a hero? Last I checked he was working with Russia to support the Trump campaign. Used to respect him a lot, lost all my respect for him and WikiLeaks when he got involved in trying to influence elections. That was not that site's mandate.

Can you elaborate on that? Provide sources etc. Genuinely curious

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/26/assange-slams-inc...

"Assange also accused the Clinton campaign of stoking "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria" about Russia's alleged role in the DNC hacking and Moscow's purported links to the Trump campaign."

Meanwhile a recent federal indictment has accused Russia of doing exactly that: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/07/13/rosenstein-says-1...

The indictment is here: https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download

More info here: https://www.2016activemeasures.org/#involved

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#142

Post by anothergoogler »

nostrademons wrote: post #137
anothergoogler wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the meaning of your comment change in any way if you replace Obama with Trump, or "a sitting president"? I don't believe in the "deep state", but I think all presidents are equally beholden to the intelligence apparatus, and none would dare provoke it.

I would assume he used Obama's name because Chelsea Manning's conviction, and Snowden & Assange's exile, all happened during Obama's presidency. I think it's likely that Trump, Bush, and all other sitting presidents would do the same thing, but the only other prominent example we have is Reality Winner, who just pled guilty last month, hasn't really occupied the headlines, and isn't the subject of discussion here.

Thanks for the reference, I hadn't heard about Winner and will have to read up on it now. (Also that's quite the name!).

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#143

Post by nradov »

guitarbill wrote: post #35
panarky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spend 8 years confined to a small space, unable to travel freely due to a well-grounded fear of physical harm, you're most definitely "effectively imprisoned".

Plus, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has also found that he is in arbitrary detention... in 2016. The UK has conveniently ignored this breach of human rights. Whatever Assange did or didn't do, and whatever this media and political spectacle is, it isn't justice.

UN working groups have no legal authority.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#144

Post by s73v3r_ »

garmaine wrote: post #104
jumelles wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if secret constitutional abuses are happening/begin to happen Have you heard about an organization called ICE that illegally locked children inside office buildings and strip centers?

I don't like it any more than you do. But was that a constitutional abuse?

YES. You cannot describe the way those children were treated as anything less than torture.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#145

Post by jumelles »

resters wrote: post #111
windowshopping wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assange is a hero? Last I checked he was working with Russia to support the Trump campaign. Used to respect him a lot, lost all my respect for him and WikiLeaks when he got involved in trying to influence elections. That was not that site's mandate.

It's not really accurate to say he was trying to influence elections. His goal is to publish verifiable documents that bring transparency to important political issues. He did not take sides whatsoever in the 2016 election, and obviously would have loved to publish information about Trump if any had been leaked to WL.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/wikileaks-fue...

WikiLeaks promoted false conspiracy theories.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#146

Post by einarfd »

ddebernardy wrote: post #113
einarfd wrote: post #97

To a lot of people Assange is a hero, and I'll grant that I liked a lot of the early actions of Wikileak under him. But to me, he is first and foremost someone that ran from a sexual assault investigation and has spent the years since that trying to evade justice. I have no regard left for the man after doing that. Some will argue that he would not have gotten a fair hearing in Sweden, and that they would have extrad…

Then again, to his credit, he eventually met his Swedish prosecutors from the safety of the embassy (and released the gory details a month later [1]). And there were genuine concerns from the get go that he'd get booted across the Atlantic had he stepped out of the embassy. I've honestly no idea how warranted the rape claims in Sweden were - and to be clear, I'd tend to side with the women who filed them - but you ca…

Sweden has a long history of being a neutral country, it spent the whole of the cold war as that, and is still not a member of NATO. They did departure that doctrine somewhat when they joined the European Union. But it is still very much alive.

Extraditing Assange to the USA over a political charge would have been a huge departure of the neutrality doctrine, I have a hard time seeing how any Swedish government would have survived doing something so blatantly un Swedish.

The UK on the other hand, is a country that boost it has a special relationship with the USA, and is imo. the European country most likely to extradite him. So it fairly weird he went there, if not getting extradited to the USA was the goal.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#147

Post by slg »

resters wrote: post #131
slg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it really is a disservice for people to lump them all together. Whisleblowing is an important act and it needs to be protected. But there is more to whisleblowing then just revealing secrets. Snowden handled things better than Manning by being more focused in what was revealed and filtering things through journalists. Both of them are worlds better than Assange. Lumping them together will only help turn peop…

I'd argue that Snowden's leaks would have been better sent to Wikileaks. We've seen perhaps 5% of the information, and much of the illegal behavior is likely still going on. The only hope that US intel agencies have to redeem themselves as working toward the interests of the people and not against them is to be totally transparent about all illegal behavior and to undergo a full audit to stop all of it.

Which is exactly my point. Whistleblowing shouldn't be done with a shotgun approach that reveals all secrets. Every piece of information should be reviewed and judged in a vacuum as to whether there is a benefit to the public for it to be revealed. Wikileaks just releases everything and doesn't care about the public value or any negative results from that release. That isn't whistleblowing. You are free to agree politically with Wikileaks, but don't pretend it is something it is not. That only ends up hurting the real whistleblowers.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#148

Post by severine »

blhack wrote: post #24
mark212 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glenn Greenwald isn’t a reporter? I’m sure that’s news to him

I wonder if the parent is being a pedant here, and meaning to say: "Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, not simply a reporter."

I think he's actually a lawyer, turned blogger/writer/editor/pundit.

> He received a BA in Philosophy from George Washington University in 1990 and a JD from New York University School of Law in 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald#Early_life_and...

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#149

Post by ibejoeb »

occamrazor wrote: post #62
ibejoeb wrote: post #19

>highly unlikely that Moreno...will obtain a guarantee that the U.K. not extradite Assange to the U.S. I'm not remotely convinced that Moreno had any capability to obtain such an assurance. By what mechanism can a foreign agent nullify terms of a treaty between two unrelated states, even if the subject were an ecuadorian national?

It is a standard clause in most extradition treaties: if country A extradites person X to country B for a specific crime, country B is not allowed to to extradite person X to a third country, or even try them for a different crime (except crimes committed after extradition).

But that's not what's happening here, is it?

It used to be that Assange feared extradition to Sweden, and then Sweden would send him to the US. You covered this.

Now, since Sweden has dropped the charge, his fear is that the UK will send him to the US. This is a different scenario.

In either case, though, how does Ecuador intervene?

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#150

Post by isostatic »

SyneRyder wrote: post #93
briandear wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a curiousity, is “far left” and “liberal” even related? Seems like the far left and far right are two sides to the same totalitarian coin. Liberal implies a respect for the freedom of individuals while “far left” puts the collective over the rights of the individual. The word liberal has lost its meaning. The far left (and far right) is incompatible with freedom. Cases in point: Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union…

You might like the website The Political Compass, a quiz/self-test where authoritarian / libertarian are on a separate axis from the typical left / right of economic planning. It at least shows the lack of nuance in trying to reduce all politics to a single "left & right" dimension - and that by doing so, we ignore ways where both "sides" may actually share common views. https://www.politicalcompass.org/

It's also rather biased in questioning
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