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Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

bbc.com

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Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#421

Post by gonehome »

jollybean wrote: post #322
pydry wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Assange doesn't regret this. I kind of get the impression that becoming a martyr was a sacrifice he was prepared to make if he managed to rip off the mask and expose the unbridled imperialist evil lurking underneath the "civilized press conference veneer" presented by the US government.

"he managed to rip off the mask and expose the unbridled imperialist evil lurking" That's a bit absurd given showed the total opposite: Gigabytes of diplomatic cables of highly sensitive data revealed a US Diplomatic Corps trying to do a decent job in a world rife with ugly corruption. The 'Arab Street' saw the information and they saw the US trying to assuage and nudge brutally corrupt leaders. The cables didn't uni…

This is basically my takeaway, I think Snowden has a lot stronger of an argument frankly.

Assange also editorialized his leaks to be damaging towards the US rather than just leak them. IIRC this lead to conflict within the org. The CM video was awful, but as I understand it was a mistake made within the bounds of acceptable ROE? Similar to the recent drone strike mistake in Afghanistan. War sucks and these accidents are awful, but we live in an imperfect universe. These things don’t really say much in isolation. If anything the cables showed the US in a positive light (most on HN probably didn’t actually read them).

I found the US’s media response to be stupid as it often is, rather than engage honestly on these issues. Over the years Wikileaks went from something that could have had a genuine media purpose to a way for intelligence agencies hostile to the US to leak hacked materials to the world with plausible deniability. It was no longer a neutral actor (and frankly the editorialization by Assange in the “CM” video wasn’t neutral either).

He crossed the line with aiding the hack which gave legal recourse - this is the rule of law bit, we’ll see what happens.

I do think the “sex crimes” stuff could have been Intel doing stupid shit (imo) but that’s just speculation on my part.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#422

Post by axiolite »

pydry wrote: post #228
ben_w wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complicated. I feel that an Australian citizen should not expect to be extradited to the USA for publishing information the USA would rather not be published. Still true even if he is an activist, would still be true even for someone genuinely trying to systematically destroy America and American values, if it’s just publication. Free speech etc. For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the…

>For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the non-legalese summary of the accusation? Were Gandhi/MLK/Rosa Parks wrong when they made a point of breaking unjust laws and encouraging others to follow along? Many liberals at the time thought yes - "the law being the law" and all that. It does sound like you're making the same argument they were?

> Were Gandhi/MLK/Rosa Parks wrong when they made a point of breaking unjust laws and encouraging others to follow along?

Your question of right/"wrong" is a matter of morality, not legality. Stealing bread to feed a starving person might be morally good, but legally wrong, and nobody should expect to avoid legal consequences because of it.

In the case of civil disobedience, those involved do NOT attempt to flee from justice. Being arrested and facing the legal system is an integral part.

Assange may just get his chance to emulate Ghandi by spending years in prison...

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#423

Post by alexvoda »

elif wrote: post #392
lenkite wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most left journalists were dancing in joy when Assange got arrested. They never forgave him for exposing the Clinton emails and ensured he was heavily character assassinated over the next several years. He also became a victim of the #MeToo movement at its height. He was openly called evil/narcissist/etc in many "opinion" pieces. All the other important stuff he revealed never got the level of attention it deserved.

Yep. 100% this. After 2016, i went from getting "oh you radical crazy commie" looks wearing a wikileaks shirt to immediately "oh you're a republican, let me guess you listen to alex jones and joe rogan?"

I believe somewhere in here lies a fundamental problem with today's society. We have reached an absurd level of polarization. Any opinion you hold that is in contradiction with someone else's opinion, qualifies you for membership of the opposing camp.

We should really work on depolarisation.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#424

Post by kingcharles »

One problem is that he likely won't be held in a prison, he'll be held in a pre-trial detention facility. The conditions in pre-trial detention in the USA, on the whole, are considerably worse than any prison because they are designed for "short-term" holding only.

I did a deposition a few years back with the warden of a detention facility and asked him why the conditions were so bad. "The average stay here is 30 days", which justified everything. That figure came because a large number of people were able to bond out on day one and skewed the average he was using. It did not take into account the significant number of people who were in the facility for close to a decade or more awaiting trial. For instance, at the Cook County Jail in Chicago there are several people who have been waiting over 11 years and still have no trial in sight.

A lot of pre-trial facilities do not have any access to sunlight. I was held in a windowless room for five years with 24x7 fluorescent lighting and no access to sunlight or fresh air. Then I was held at another facility for three years that had a sealed "window" but also, essentially, no access to sunlight or fresh air.

In prisons you will generally find that you can get outside several times a week. But prisons are usually only used for those who have been convicted of a crime, and not those presumed innocent.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#425

Post by ben_w »

pydry wrote: post #228
ben_w wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complicated. I feel that an Australian citizen should not expect to be extradited to the USA for publishing information the USA would rather not be published. Still true even if he is an activist, would still be true even for someone genuinely trying to systematically destroy America and American values, if it’s just publication. Free speech etc. For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the…

>For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the non-legalese summary of the accusation? Were Gandhi/MLK/Rosa Parks wrong when they made a point of breaking unjust laws and encouraging others to follow along? Many liberals at the time thought yes - "the law being the law" and all that. It does sound like you're making the same argument they were?

Judging if any given law is or isn’t just is too far outside my skills to have strong feeling about what Assange did one way or the other.

I do know that rule of law doesn’t function if everyone gets to decide for themselves what is and isn’t an unjust law, even though I can say with the benefit of hindsight that Rosa Parks deserved her Congressional Gold Medal, and that I hope I would’ve recognised the law as unjust at the time.

The reference that comes to mind is the four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and cartridge, which should be used in this order. Breaking unjust laws counts as #3, normal journalism is #1, Assange didn’t have the option of #2 with regard to the USA.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#426

Post by disambiguation »

zepto wrote: post #348
brandelune wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect Assange does not want to be tortured and murdered and thus does not want this. Are you insane ?

I doubt the US intends to murder him.

There are worse things than dying.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#428

Post by marcus_holmes »

lenkite wrote: post #383
mrsuprawsm wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a sad sacrifice, though. Nothing (significant) has changed about the US's imperialism as a result of his disclosures, it's just mildly more acknowledged.

Most left journalists were dancing in joy when Assange got arrested. They never forgave him for exposing the Clinton emails and ensured he was heavily character assassinated over the next several years. He also became a victim of the #MeToo movement at its height. He was openly called evil/narcissist/etc in many "opinion" pieces. All the other important stuff he revealed never got the level of attention it deserved.

not only because of the left/right politics, but also because defending Assange as a "journalist" caused them grief. The definition of journalism is at stake: if someone who just posts to the internet is a journalist and can defend their actions as necessary for the operation of a free press, then that includes bloggers[0] and all sorts of riff-raff.

Craig Murray's trial had a similar outcome: he's not a "proper" journalist because he doesn't work for a media/newspaper company. And the judge gave an opinion that bloggers should get tougher sentences than journalists[1].

It'll come back to bite the journos, and some of them know this and are saying it. But most are keen to carve out special exemptions for themselves from laws that the rest of us have to follow.

[0] In journalism circles, "blogger" is an insult. Source: I used to run a newspaper.

[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/06/the-mind-of-...

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#429

Post by jjulius »

ianhawes wrote: post #312
regnull wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of the “crimes” happened on US soil He is charged with helping Chelsea Manning to hack into a government computer which did happen on US soil. “ they charged him with conspiring to commit unlawful computer intrusion based on his alleged agreement to try to help Ms. Manning break an encoded portion of passcode that would have permitted her to log on to a classified military network under another user’s identity…

> He is charged with helping Chelsea Manning to hack into a government computer which did happen on US soil. IIRC Manning was in Iraq at this time. Were servers they accessed in the US? Probably. But that would be a crime Manning committed.

>IIRC Manning was in Iraq at this time. Were servers they accessed in the US? Probably.

Should the military personnel who were responsible for abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib not have been charged with crimes because they weren't in the US?

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#430

Post by klibertp »

bladegash wrote: post #331
klibertp wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If only we could all flee Tell that to Snowden. > There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and Sorry, I have to: that's just, like, your opinion man. Have you ever thought that you might be wrong on this? How about the state stops doing the things they need to keep secret? You may call it naive, but some will call it being just, you know?

Fortunately you and I do not individually make that decision. Society does and it has deemed, through democratically elected leaders and participation in a social contract that there is a case to be made to state secrets.

The fact that something can be done doesn't mean it should.

At one point, society deemed it acceptable to amputate various parts of a body as a form of punishment. Imagine you have a time machine and get to go watch a public torture and execution ca. 1200AD. Would you consider literally frying someone slowly into charcoal something you can "make a case" for? Why not? The social contract of there and then says it's fine?

There are places today where the social contract is still pretty much the same it was throughout human history: "we'll murder our way to any resources we need, and if you try to stop us you're dead (and if not, we might even share a bit)". Would you say this contract is good and just? Would you support it? And if not, why should we support yours, if it's precisely how your own "social contract" looks like to anyone that is not you?

Which part of the Afghan society voted you and your friends in? Why is your social contract important and just, yet theirs doesn't mean anything to you? Moreover, you went there specifically to break their contract: there's no way a full-scale invasion doesn't break at least the guarantee of single jurisdiction. So, your social contract - good; their - bad. Because terrorists?

On a related note: "society does and it has deemed" sounds to me like "and God said it was good". It's not an argument, it's an observation at best, but most often utterly empty. If you want to tell us that killing civilians with an attack helicopter should be kept under wraps, you should really give us the reasons why you personally think so. You really cannot speak for the "society", now can you? Or are you Borg?

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