201–210 of 225 posts
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We still have the 8th and 14th Amendments. He's not going to get tortured.
Go read any first hand account of anyone who's spent time in solitary for more than a week and tell me that isn't torture. People go into solitary for years
Funny enough it’s likely a tactic that works! He’s likely to end up not doing any US time!
As someone who wants to see Assange go free, I continue to believe the best outcome here is for him to be extradited and face trial in the US. I do not think the government's case is strong enough to convict him, and his being acquitted at trial would be by far the best outcome possible here. The fact that he has been imprisoned in the UK without trial or conviction for the last four years is insane (he has been impr…
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If you insult the prophet Mohammed in a Facebook post should Iran be able to extradite you from the USA to Iran in order to charge and punish you for committing that crime in their country? Obviously not. Yet the USA does this routinely. It's effectively what Assange did.
Normally I think it has to be a crime in both countries. Breaking into computers is.
Publishing US state secrets is not a crime in any other country.
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He will not be tried as a journalist. The US govt will not recognise his status as a journalist, so none of the legal protections and precedents will be applied. He's just some foreign civilian who aided Manning in obtaining state secrets and then published those state secrets on his blog. He doesn't/didn't work for a recognised journalistic organisation, he doesn't belong to a journalist union or professional body,…
> He will not be tried as a journalist. The US govt will not recognise his status as a journalist It's not something that the US govt gets to decide. They can argue it in court, but this sort of finding of fact is a matter for the jury, not for the prosecutor or even the judge to decide. Unless he opts for a bench trial, in which case the judge gets to decide, but that is at his option -- nobody can force him to forg…
In his shoes, given that we already know the US govt had a plan to poison and/or kidnap him, I would not trust that I'd receive a fair trial in the USA.
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Doesn't help if the US sentences him to death.
True. Or, they might shoot him out of a cannon. Or even nuke him. The guy is in talks right now with the DOJ for a misdemeanor plea, a mercy termination of a prosecution in which the accused appears to have voluntarily served out the sentence pre-trial. If the extradition had gone perfectly smoothly, the C.W. seems to be that he would have been facing single-digit years. Assange is not in fact all that important.
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> I wonder what would happen if the US gave these assurances then broke them ? Regarding the death penalty part: extraditions from Germany (and probably all of Europe) would immediately stop in capital cases. Those all rely on American assurances, and the first time it's broken, courts will disregard them for a long time.
"Would" is a strong word. "Might" seems a bit more reasonable. There is currently an escalating war in Europe and Germany has already rolled over and accepted the Nord Stream pipe as an act of God. Well, I don't actually know where their investigation is up to, but they're not acting like their infrastructure was attacked by a military. They're just taking it on the chin, probably some strongly worded diplomatic prot…
The problem is which country? No one seems to know who did it.
I saw that they were considering giving him a plea deal. If the Biden admins give Assange a plea deal similar to Manning it will be a good thing because the crimes were similar and motivated similarly.
What a catastrophe. This is the ultimate evidence that there is no such thing as a free press; People are only allowed to report what their masters allow them to. The day you cross a line and in Assange's case, the day you report the crimes commited by The Empire, they crush you.
>allegations that in 2010, Assange offered to help Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, crack a password to break into a classified U.S. government network, an act that would have gone beyond journalism.
People report crimes committed by the empire all the time without difficulties. Here's a wikipedia with some for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
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True. Or, they might shoot him out of a cannon. Or even nuke him. The guy is in talks right now with the DOJ for a misdemeanor plea, a mercy termination of a prosecution in which the accused appears to have voluntarily served out the sentence pre-trial. If the extradition had gone perfectly smoothly, the C.W. seems to be that he would have been facing single-digit years. Assange is not in fact all that important.
The USA is being asked for assurances that they won't charge him with anything that carries a death sentence. They're not being asked for assurances about nukes or cannons. So the UK judiciary are taking the threat of a death sentence seriously.