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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

#431

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Democratic-party affiliated journalists. Even left-of-center journalists. But the Clinton emails were an exposure of attacks against Sanders.

It's so bizarre that Glenn Beck's view of the world, making Wall Street Iraq Warriors who ended welfare as we knew it and who put more black people in prison than anyone while deregulating everything into basically Lenin, ate up even the libertarian right.

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

#432

Post by jl6 »

Shocking as it was, the Collateral Murder video was nothing exceptional. It didn’t reveal any secret truth or grand conspiracy. The unfortunate fact is that this is just what war is like.

War means high-stakes decision-making using low-quality information by agents who are human and therefore fallible. War means chaos and brutality and unjust death on a grand scale. When you vote for war, this is what you get, no matter how good your intentions. It happens every day in every war. The only difference here is that it was caught on camera and released.

So what did Assange achieve by releasing this video? We already knew war is bad. The existence of the video just evidences that the US military is good at record-keeping, which if anything points to an institution that cares about the actions of its soldiers and is capable, in principle, of holding them to account, rather than just unleashing men with guns to do random unsupervised violence, which is what war looks like in many corners of the world.

The people to get angry with are the politicians and media pundits who who rush other peoples’ kids to war for trumped up jingoistic reasons, not the kids who inevitably fuck up the operation on the ground.

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

#433

Post by ClumsyPilot »

bladegash wrote: post #116
tgv wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might have been partially activist, that still doesn't justify the extradition. The US had no standing, as I believe it's called. They can declare whatever they want "top secret", but that doesn't make a crime for a citizen of another country to publish it. The hacking and conspiracy claims have been added to make it appear as if they have standing, but these are empty. It's another triumph for big budget lawyer c…

I do not think it is a loss for freedom of the press, I think it is an opportunity for the courts to define what a journalist actually is, vs. not. Perhaps the courts will side with Assange and we will find that this is First Amendment protected activity. I personally do not believe it is, but I do think that this situation is a bit unique to modern times and is likely to set precedent one way or the other.

Zeems awfully convenient to label anything that embarrases the government as 'secret national security matter'. The government can literally get away with murder

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

#434

Post by Lucasoato »

pessimizer wrote: post #431
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.

Democratic-party affiliated journalists. Even left-of-center journalists. But the Clinton emails were an exposure of attacks against Sanders. It's so bizarre that Glenn Beck's view of the world, making Wall Street Iraq Warriors who ended welfare as we knew it and who put more black people in prison than anyone while deregulating everything into basically Lenin, ate up even the libertarian right.

What a different world we would be living in if Bernie Sanders had won the US presidential elections.

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

#435

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

bladegash wrote: post #340
pydry wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, that is not what I said, nor is that what my point is/was. I see no substantial difference. >To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done." I really don't understand what you being in Afghanistan is s…

The comment about being in Afghanistan was intended to convey that assuming information was released putting people in harms way, that I and people I cared about would have been directly impacted.

Your comment basically confirms what he said

> If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.

You realize you were the invader right?

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

#436

Post by hekette »

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…

You won't be able to trust any evidence they present. They've already exposed numerous times to have lied.

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

#437

Post by pmyteh »

kingcharles wrote: post #402
pmyteh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's entitled to a trial within 70 days of his first appearance in the US, if he demands one. Speedy Trial Act of 1974.

LOL. I've been waiting almost 9 years on a 120 day Speedy Trial. While you are 100% technically correct (minus COVID extensions), the defense team will need a bunch of extensions to go through everything and file motions. And that is where the delays will come from - the prosecutor and judge will make sure any motions take years to process and he'll languish in jail for infinity. He won't get a bond either because of…

Agreed. But "in front of a jury quickly" might be forensically a better idea than "wait in jail for years" while the prosecutor drags things out. [Edit: assuming that his team are confident in getting at least one vote to acquit from somebody angry]

Personally, I don't think we should extradite him simply because it's arguably a political 'crime'. The US/UK extradition treaty is so one-sided, though, and British extradition law so Executive-friendly, that that is essentially an impossible case to win if the Secretary of State wants to extradite.

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

#438

Post by justbored123 »

mercy_dude wrote: post #283
kstenerud wrote: post #204

This should be a sobering view of how the world really works. Above a certain threshold, every veneer of civilization vanishes no matter what the country (some have a higher threshold than others). At this level, only power matters. And the first rule of power is: Don't embarrass the powerful unless you can call on a lot of power to defend yourself. Laws can't protect you; they can be thwarted and bent, and the legal…

The most infuriating among all of them has been our media - specifically mainstream media. They have played the entire saga down and in many cases many mainstream media pundits actively espoused for Assanges punishment [1]. I no longer hold the view that our media deserves the first amendment protection that it does. Mainstream media right now has no other purpose other than being active vehicle of the powerful and b…

Dude google "Operation Mockingbird" and Chomsky's "Controlled opposition" talks (don't do it in google, the term "Controlled opposition" is shadow banned because is heavily used by the "fake news" crowd. Compare googles result's to Duck Duck Go, you'll love it).

The main media is a main target in the information wars so both local and foreign power players (mainly intelligence agencies) are going to fight to compromise the people in charge of it, so they can set the agenda and control information and perception. That is a given. That is the purpose of places like "Epstein's Island" and it has always been like that, at least from the time of J Edgar Hoover.

Any time that you have a strategically important target like that (for example Google or any similar key information hub) the power players are going to strive to control it and a simple way to control it is to get to the people in charge of those organizations. So that is what they do.

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

#439

Post by pessimizer »

petesergeant wrote: post #274
tifadg1 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you denying he released the truth or are you saying he released the truth, but "others" behaved similarly yet he withheld the truth on them?

> are you denying he released the truth Yes, 100%. I think the documents he released were all authentic, but that’s a great distance from either being “the truth” or being in service of “the truth”. The majority of propaganda is factual while attempting to subvert "the truth".

Propaganda isn't trying to subvert the truth, whether quoted or unquoted. Propaganda is trying to promote a particular position. Nobody has as a goal to subvert the truth, that's just a caricature of one's enemies.

What we do is public relations, what they do is propaganda.

It's just a rationalization to disregard the standards that one would normally use to judge information i.e. its accuracy.

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

#440

Post by hekette »

shadowgovt wrote: post #390
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.

If he was willing to be a martyr, he would not have holed up in an embassy seeking asylum for years.

Willing to be a martyr does not mean that he wouldn't try to avoid it.
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