It's an awful ruling overall, from what I can tell from skimming it. It's great Assange won, but this ruling is not at all support for freedom of expression. This is the one part the judge agreed with the defense on as far as I can tell: > 363. I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America. For anyone not suffering from severe ment…
I really don't get it why the UK is even allowed to extradite a citizen of Australia to the US. Shame on Australia too for not protecting it's citizens.
A system of "mass incarceration" should have no impact on any individual case. That's beyond stupid.
It's a human rights issue. The US doesn't have a very good record. The most usual scenario in which this comes up is in extradition cases where the person involved could face the death penalty (of life imprisonment I think too). It wouldn't make sense for the UK (where there is no death penalty) to extradite a person to somewhere they no longer have that right to life. This is just a natural extension of that policy.
Kevin Gosztola: "The United States government's mass incarceration system just lost them their case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange" - https://twitter.com/kgosztola/status/1346048531249958914 Matt Kennard, investigative journalist: "Brilliant news, but be in no doubt. This ruling is utterly chilling for investigative journalism. Baraitser sided with US prosecutors on pretty much all of their arguments. It wa…
*> Baraitser sided with US prosecutors on pretty much all of their arguments. It was the barbaric nature of the US penal system that saved Assange.
Another interpretation is, the judge tried as much as s/he could to prevent extradition while "saving face" (either preventing a political conflict, or even saving themselves from assassination!)
How will this affect US and UK relations? They are brother/sister countries. Snowden and Assange are 2 Americans most wanted, US would do anything to get them. Btw I'm not in favor of US Gov. spying but what Snowden and Assange did (leak state secrets) is criminal and they need to face justice.
Last time I checked, the charges are related to Assange's alleged involvement in one or more accounts of hacking, not regarding the subsequent public release of the obtained documents.
Quite unexpected! Like many HNers who followed Craig Murray's reporting of the trial (see below), I thought Judge Baraitser was a compliant puppet and the extradition to the US was preordained. Will be interesting to see his take on this. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
>> I thought Judge Baraitser was a compliant puppet
Maybe this judgement will make people think a bit more deeply before jumping to ludicrous conspiracy theories in future. In the UK at least judge's are for the most part demonstrably non-political.
The entire US prison system feels abusive to me. I've said before that if I somehow magically were to find myself on a US jury (can't happen - I'm not resident in or a citizen of the US; this is a pure hypothetical), I'd be hard pressed to be able to justify voting "guilty" on a moral basis even for quite serious crimes. It feels designed for vengeance and inducing harm rather than for safety for society and rehabili…
In your scenario, the good news would be that you'd be within you're rights as a juror to vote not guilty on the grounds you did not think the law was just; it's called Jury Nullification. The bad news is, the "justice system" goes out of it's way to hide the existence of this right from U.S. citizens.
And they weed you out of the jury pool if you admit to knowing of its existence. And of course you can't lie when asked, as that's perjury.
US soldiers did not kill millions of people, Iraq is somewhere between 100000 and 650000 excess deaths to Oct 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_cas... The criticisms in the Wikipedia are very detailed and imply there are problems with the 650000 figure of which 186000 are due to US troops direct actions. That still seems high, but you know being caught in the middle of a civil war is chal…
I recall Iraq being more of an invasion than a civil war.
It's complicated, because it started out as "smash the state and let democracy reassert itself". Everyone involved in the room had such a broken mental model of what the Iraqi population was like. American politicians have been getting drunk off the rhetoric of democracy for some time, and we typically forget that most governments are precariously balanced between multiple competing socioeconomic elements with eternal and unending grudges between one another. In the case of Iraq, what started as "invade and impose democracy" quickly progressed into policing sectarian violence as America inherited Saddam's problems.
The entire US prison system feels abusive to me. I've said before that if I somehow magically were to find myself on a US jury (can't happen - I'm not resident in or a citizen of the US; this is a pure hypothetical), I'd be hard pressed to be able to justify voting "guilty" on a moral basis even for quite serious crimes. It feels designed for vengeance and inducing harm rather than for safety for society and rehabili…