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Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

stundin.is

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Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#41

Post by Miner49er »

daenz wrote: post #9

For someone who has not followed Assange news for a long time, what is the general accusation of his crimes? Is it just that he published secret material that he received from other sources?

Pretty much, he's been indicted for 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, which yeah, is just for seeking/leaking confidential info. It's a huge attack on freedom of the press. The press has always been allowed to cover leaked stuff, the Espionage act has only been used against sources in the past, not reporters.

He's also facing a very minor charge (max 5 years in prison) for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for allegedly helping Manning attempt to hack a computer.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#42

Post by [deleted] »

gonehome wrote: post #15
NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. > At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniabi…

I think you’re overconfident in what you believe to be true based on the evidence that exists. The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.

[deleted]

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#43

Post by rendall »

extra88 wrote: post #37
rendall wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims (Trump colludes with Russians, Russians hack DNC) requires extraordinary evidence. In over 5 years, this has not been presented.

The claims are not extraordinary. The Trump Tower meeting [0] is clear evidence Trump campaign members' interest in colluding with foreign agents. Donald Trump personally had a fig leaf of deniability about that meeting but in interviews [1] he expressed his willingness to collude. The Trump campaign, at minimum Paul Manafort, colluded with agents of Russia [2]. I'm not going to research how strong the public evidenc…

Before you continue with a flood of poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify, the claim that a President colludes with a foreign power is extraordinary.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#44

Post by nnvcxsstb »

johnchristopher wrote: post #35
rendall wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims (Trump colludes with Russians, Russians hack DNC) requires extraordinary evidence. In over 5 years, this has not been presented.

> this has not been presented. s/presented/investigated There's a lot of things to investigate https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe... but since the whole world saw what happened on the 6th and what did not after I don't think there'll ever be evidences extraordinary enough to act on any kind of claims.

What happened on the sixth? You mean the Reichstag Fire?

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-ro...

The whole world saw what the FBI wanted them to see on the sixth. Time will tell what actually happened.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#45

Post by beebeepka »

elif wrote: post #29
beebeepka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am saying is that Manning was forced to take that path I actually have had sex, multiple times, with trans people. Careful with your assumptions. I find your response offensive

your sexual preferences and personal offense are irrelevant and the rule you are debating has about as close to consensus acceptance as you will find in the queer space. If you indeed think "dead naming" is something someone made up for an internet comment, you are missing a large portion of the picture.

Forgive me for saying that I find that a person would change their gender after being imprisoned and tortured rather suspicious

If you take that as some kind of attack on trans people, that's on you

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#46

Post by slg »

sonnyp wrote: post #21
johnchristopher wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent.…

I believe the reason you are getting down voted isn't because you don't cite your source, but because the reasoning is absurd. > You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships. Wikileaks isn't some sort Wikipedia of public/accessible records, it's a platform to publish confidential information. If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks…

>it's a platform to publish confidential information.

Phrasing it like this is misleading as it implies that Wikileaks is a neutral platform, a dumb tool that acts at the leaker's discretion. That isn't what we see when we look at their actual behavior. They do not publish every leak they receive and therefore they have editorial control over their platform. Assange himself has said they have received leaks about the Trump campaign that they wouldn't publish. That shifts Wikileaks from a neutral platform to publish confidential information to a political entity that uses leaked confidential information to achieve political goals.

EDIT: This is being downvoted so here is a source in which Assange talks about having leaked info about Trump and not publishing it.[1]

[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#47

Post by Miner49er »

gonehome wrote: post #10
daenz wrote: post #9

For someone who has not followed Assange news for a long time, what is the general accusation of his crimes? Is it just that he published secret material that he received from other sources?

No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. It’s hard to know the trut…

> No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance.

Yeah, but that's not stopping the US for charging him with the Espionage act for it anyway. Most of his charges are for leaking/seeking secret info. The charge for assisting Manning is 5 potential years of the 175 he faces.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#48

Post by rendall »

johnchristopher wrote: post #35
rendall wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims (Trump colludes with Russians, Russians hack DNC) requires extraordinary evidence. In over 5 years, this has not been presented.

> this has not been presented. s/presented/investigated There's a lot of things to investigate https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe... but since the whole world saw what happened on the 6th and what did not after I don't think there'll ever be evidences extraordinary enough to act on any kind of claims.

Lots of "evidence" in the form of breathless articles quoting anonymous sources who say they really have a smoking gun. This evidence is convincing only to those who are inclined to believe it. What we need is extraordinary evidence that is unambiguously convincing to everyone. That we do not have

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#49

Post by extra88 »

sneak wrote: post #23
plandis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He has also been effectively imprisoned without trial for about a decade now. It’s a bit dishonest to claim he’s been imprisoned without a trial when he skipped on bail in 2012 and chose to stay in an embassy instead of turn himself in to the UK government. He was arrested in 2019 and promptly convicted of skipping on bail in the same year by the UK government.

Not at all. The UN's human rights department has found it to be so: from https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/02/521632-wikileaks-founde... > The founder of the WikiLeaks website, which published confidential diplomatic information, has been arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the United Kingdom since his arrest in London in December 2010, as a result of the legal action against him by both Governments, the United Nation…

> when not skipping bail means you get extradited to a country that will torture you via extended solitary confinement prior to trial

On plenty of occasions, the UK has demonstrated its willingness to not extradite suspects to the US out of concern for their welfare.

> declared guilty in public by a sitting US president (also before trial)

Because the US has not yet fallen under authoritarian rule and has an independent judiciary, it's possible to have a fair trial even when the president offers an opinion about the case. But offering such opinions is frowned upon because it's bad optics. Before you bring up tainting the jury pool, an upside to the lack of civic engagement amongst Americans is it's not difficult to find people who won't have heard a president's or anyone else's opinions.

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