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Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

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Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#221

Post by cassepipe »

anm89 wrote: post #166
cassepipe wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what Chibber calls the "pluralist theory" which he argues is not entirely false but rather incomplete. I hope this will be of interest to you : https://youtu.be/R5R-9X_BtP4

I'd be more interested to hear what a local bartender might have to say about any of this than a marxist scholar. Hard pass. Also, naming a theory does not give it credence. So simply saying that a person said a thing and gave it a name tells me nothing if you don't tell me what they said. Linking to a hour long video is not a good substitution for defining your terms.

I'd be interested if it came from a Marxist scholar that is a critic of Marxist scholars and university politics :) I was not naming a theory of his but the name he uses to refer to a group of theories that basically see society as a mere product of the efforts of social groups to advance their interests.

Otherwise you have to admit that there are many groups who have many competing points and goals for legal systems.

I thought it was pretty clear that "pluralist theory" was referring to that last bit so I did not feel the need to define but I guess it was not so sorry about that.

The hour long video was for the purpose of investigating further the matter rather than providing a definition.

I do understand that you are wary of scholars, I am myself. A title is not a guarantee of truth and knowledge is valuable when it is the product of good research and good method, something an academic title cannot guarantee alas.

I guess that now I should add that being a barman is how I currently sustain myself while learning to code. :)

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#222

Post by ficklepickle »

HugeAcumen wrote: post #25
Deukhoofd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54060427 Very limited what they reported on to be sure. AP News has more in depth reporting: https://apnews.com/hub/julian-assange

Dear lord. Zero articles in the past two weeks. If you've been following the case at all, there's been a Hell of a lot to report, from Amnesty and EU ministers despairing at having their monitor access revoked at the last minute, to Khaled El Masri's absolutely jaw-dropping testimony [1]. They have a front page post right now about "concern" over a "fan invasion" of the pitch in a GAA game (Gaelic Athletics Associati…

Holy shit. They sodomized him. They abducted, tortured and raped him. And Assange is going to jail for life because he offered to help crack a password. What a farce.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#223

Post by contingencies »

rayiner wrote: post #200
agd wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists have already testified in this case to the contrary of what you said. I.e. They do help sources stay undetected, providing advice and sometimes help where appropriate.

Journalistic practice doesn’t define what is and isn’t illegal in connection with collaborating with a source.

Similarly, military and political practice don't define what is and isn't illegal in connection to launching and justifying wars, frequently and repeatedly killing innocents and journalists, setting up a highly illegal system of secret sites and covert armies explicitly for the purpose of abducting people globally (including random innocent members of the general public) and torturing and killing them, conspiring to lie about it all to the general public, then phoning up your cronies and launching a transparent international extra-legal persecution of someone who has embarrassed you.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#224

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

rayiner wrote: post #207
cmiles74 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US Department of Justice issued a press release in June that tries to summarize the charges in the superseding indictment.[0] For most of the document it's hard to tell what is part of the idictment and what may be simply a recap of other things the US DOJ believes he may have done. In regards to Chelsea Manning, that bit is quite short: "In addition, the broadened hacking conspiracy continues to allege that Assa…

Here is the superseding indictment itself: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1289641/downl... Assange is alleged to have actively recruited hackers and directed them to find particular information from particular sources. Among other things, agreed to assist Manning in deriving a password from a hash file. (It is irrelevant whether he succeeded or not—the crime of conspiracy is complete upon taking the f…

This logic would render all national security reporting illegal. The job of national security reporters is to convince people in government to divulge information they're legally barred from divulging.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#225

Post by moomin »

alex_young wrote: post #168

The idea of this law is really interesting to me. Assange is being charged under the US 1917 Espionage Act. How can the US reasonably charge him with espionage? Has Assange ever even been to the US? If we can charge a foreign reporter with espionage for the mere publication of something we consider secret, and force their international extradition, how would we feel about a foreign government doing the same to one of…

I’ve said this before, but I think people focus on the wrong thing with the Assange case. They 100% can do this, because the U.K. signed a treaty that let them do so without _even_ getting reciprocal rights.

I mean, congratulations to the US negotiators but the UK 100% should not have agreed to it.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#226

Post by sneak »

rayiner wrote: post #201
sneak wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This posits that it should be illegal to expose classified war crimes. Sometimes, the law is wrong, and should be broken. Nonviolent disobedience of the law is a moral obligation in many instances. There is a long and glorious history of this happening throughout modern history. This is why we have juries: to make that instance not illegal.

No it doesn’t. It posits that the purpose of “exposing classified war crimes” shouldn’t immunize conduct that’s otherwise illegal. According to the indictment, Assange was running a whole operation where he was recruiting hackers to get sensitive data from protected computer systems. You’re positing that we should basically have vigilante hackers that expropriate and publish confidential data so long as they purport…

> According to the indictment, Assange was running a whole operation where he was recruiting hackers to get sensitive data from protected computer systems.

This is an accusation, and is not fact. You'd be wise not to treat it as such until it's proven.

The main issue with the course that you seem to suggest is that by the time he might obtain a jury trial in the US, he will already be subject to US imprisonment, and thus, torture (which is precisely what happened to Manning). Countries that purport to be free (such as the UK) should prevent extradition to countries that torture suspects prior to trial, such as the US.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#227

Post by rayiner »

sneak wrote: post #226
rayiner wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t. It posits that the purpose of “exposing classified war crimes” shouldn’t immunize conduct that’s otherwise illegal. According to the indictment, Assange was running a whole operation where he was recruiting hackers to get sensitive data from protected computer systems. You’re positing that we should basically have vigilante hackers that expropriate and publish confidential data so long as they purport…

> According to the indictment, Assange was running a whole operation where he was recruiting hackers to get sensitive data from protected computer systems. This is an accusation, and is not fact. You'd be wise not to treat it as such until it's proven. The main issue with the course that you seem to suggest is that by the time he might obtain a jury trial in the US, he will already be subject to US imprisonment, and…

> This is an accusation, and is not fact. You'd be wise not to treat it as such until it's proven.

Sure. But extradition hearings necessarily operate on allegations because they come before a jury trial that will determine the facts.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#228

Post by adrian_b »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #141
alex_young wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assange has spent his career defending a natural right to whistleblowing. If you find fault with him for other reasons that is fine, but the core issue here seems to be one of of ‘do you believe that there is such a natural right?’, and not one of ‘do you believe Assange is a likable person?’. If you’re fine with governments using extrajudicial systems to exact revenge on whistleblowers in distant lands then it reall…

I don't think the core issue of the court case is "is there such a natural right"? It is whether Assange broke laws in the process of carrying out the whistleblowing. Or do you think that whistleblowing is so fundamental that it supersedes all normal laws? Whistleblowing is in fact protected, by law, in many circumstances, at least in the US. That doesn't mean that you can stomp all over other laws, and plead whistle…

The problem is that the US in its international relationships never cares about any laws, normal or otherwise.

In this case they demand the extradition of Assange for supposedly having done some minor crime, but in the past the US have refused to extradite their people wanted for major crimes, like manslaughter, which were proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

For example, one of the cases that I am aware of happened some years ago at the US embassy from Bucharest, Romania.

Someone from the military personnel of the US embassy has driven a SUV while drunk and he hit a taxi cab killing the passenger. The American ran away from the accident place and in a few hours he was smuggled from the country by the embassy, so when the police came in the morning to arrest him he could no longer be found.

There was absolutely no doubt about his guilt, but nevertheless the US refused to extradite him and he was never punished for taking a human life.

There have been many such cases with US citizens in many countries, so whenever the US demands that other countries should extradite their people for supposedly breaking US laws, the US government shows extreme shamelessness, by asking others to do what the US will not do.

Unfortunately there are many servile foreign governments who accept this asymmetry in their relationship with the US.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#229

Post by zepto »

mariusor wrote: post #212
zepto wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take your point - Assange does not have a media empire and is not like Murdoch in that way. However I disagree with your reframing. News room editors answer to the publisher (I.e. whoever owns the publishing organization), and generally have been promoted from the ranks of journalists. None of that is true about Assange. He was never a journalist and never did investigative reporting, or any of the other things a j…

I've been following the reporting from the witness testimonies and some of them detailed that a lot of work has went into editing (and supressing some of) the documents that he supposedly released without censoring names of assets. I posted these links previously in the thread but Daniel Ellsberg talks a bit about how this was handled: https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/16/pentagon-papers-ellsberg-... https://www.craigm…

Those actually seem to confirm my view. They don’t talk about Assange writing a story, or editing reports.

They talk about Wikileaks, his publishing organization, working as a peer in cooperation with the NYT, the Guardian, and other publishers. They describe his priorities and concerns and the protocols he wanted to use.

All of these are consistent with Assange as the creator of Wikileaks standing as a publisher.

Also, that testimony looks very good for Assange.

Re: Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing?

#230

Post by ribs »

rayiner wrote: post #175
LatteLazy wrote: post #85

I feel like the powers that be have decided to make this extradition happen. Most people don't care because they don't pay attention. Of those that do, the noisy attention payers like us, a sizeable group have decided Assange isn't likeable and so should suffer for upsetting people more powerful than him. Now we have to go through all this theatrics simply so those people can say things like "he got a fair hearing" a…

I’m not sure I parse things the way you do. Assange is accused of going beyond leaking into assisting Chelsea Manning get pass security systems. If he was not only the distributor of classified material, but actively participated in expropriating it, he’s on the wrong side of the law. Folks had been willing to overlook that, because they viewed him as sympathetic. But he’s undermined that with his connections to Russ…

And if your trial won’t be subject to the oversight that other trials gets. In fact, just that one fact means you’ve got a problem.
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