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Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

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Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#281

Post by refurb »

anongraddebt wrote: post #122
Synaesthesia wrote: post #82

Wikileaks has a faultless record. They’ve never had to retract a publication. Assange, like him not not, was a reporter, who reported uncomfortable facts about the military and our ruling class. He is being punished, tortured really for this “crime”. He has been endlessly and baselessly slandered. All that alleged bad behaviour while he was imprisoned in the embassy ... funny how there’s been no footage of it, despit…

I used to be a fairly strong supporter of our military. Not blanket support (since there are always exceptions to anything), and I wasn't super enthusiastic/patriotic like some are, but in general I had a pretty positive view. My uncle is a general in the Air Force, all three of my grandfathers fought in WW2 (my Dad's biological father was killed by a drunk driver when he was 7), etc etc. I have pictures of my grandf…

I assume you’re talking about this video.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airst...

Reading the Wikipedia entry seems to indicate the Apache’s has reason to believe they were hostile forces. Indeed, some of the men with the journalists had weapons and were in the same spot as harassing fire had come from earlier.

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#282

Post by LyndsySimon »

threeseed wrote: post #116
droithomme wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Former Ambassador Craig Murray has stated that a disgruntled DNC employee, unhappy with the treatment of Sanders, personally gave him the emails in Washington and he couriered the emails to his friend Assange who then published them. And as has been pointed out the Podesta emails were taken through a phishing email which was sent to thousands of people (so it wasn't spear phishing) and which he foolishly fel…

Craig Murray's statements are highly disputed and some of them are just plain ridiculous e.g. you can't transfer data to Russian servers at > 6MB/s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Murray

If this were true, my World of Tanks client would take much longer to update.

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#283

Post by forgetfulusr »

peteretep wrote: post #119
forgetfulusr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, maybe if our 'fourth estate' actually wasn't the govs bitch, Assange's org wouldn't have looked so moral. But here we are.

Your point and the publication of Snowden’s material by the mainstream media can’t both be true

For some reason I thought that Snowden went to a UK publisher because the US outlets were not interested. Once the Guardian agreed, were the outlets here expected to ignore it?

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#284

Post by tehjoker »

tehjoker wrote: post #168
chillwaves wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not doing a very good job of whatever it is you are claiming to support (why not post some information?). Julian Assange is a Russian asset and is getting what he deserves via due process in a court of law.

I wish these paranoid conspiracies about Russia would die. Even if he got info from Russia, so what? Nation states publishing derogatory information on each other is great for the people so we can know what the hell our government is actually doing.

Thank you to whomever upvoted this. I am now at 666 karma and am invincible.

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#285

Post by exikyut »

exikyut wrote: post #9
sixQuarks wrote: post #2

I'm surprised Julian Assange doesn’t have a kill switch in place, where sensitive info which has been held up to this point will be released upon his death or conviction. At least none that we know of.

The problem is, the chaos and shockwave caused by such an event would a) only induce further chaos as a response, and b) likely be interpreted as an attack. Considering the fairness and justice of current proceedings, the response would not only likely be ugly, it would set a precedent difficult to answer. Many possibilities there. While I don't know, I would be very surprised if Wikileaks itself wasn't sitting on mo…

Ooh. This is at -4 at the moment. Very fascinating.

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#286

Post by sneak »

nabla9 wrote: post #66
sneak wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has not yet been put on trial. He must be presumed innocent of all charges until such time that he is. Torturing even a guilty person is not acceptable. Torturing an innocent one is presumably less so.

Assange is presumed innocent. Assange is in jail because his lawyers are challenging the US extradition request and there is legal process going on. There is no evidence of him being tortured. He seems to have mental problems. People getting mentally ill in jails is very common.

Why do you think that might be?

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#287

Post by jacobush »

raindeer3 wrote: post #161
jacobush wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to be very exact in these matters. The problem with the rape charges is that very, very likely he would have been convicted under Swedish law, which is very strict on what counts as rape. (If proof could be produced.) What is a farce is how the case went on and on, and how the plaintiffs didn't even seem to want to hang on the to case, and how a crime which is routinely buried in cold cases by Swedish Police…

It never became a top priority for the Swedish state. But since he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy the investigation just dragged on. This was never a high priority case other than for the press. And as soon as he could be inteterogated the investigation was closed. He is and has been mistreated in may ways, but the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden was not part of some US lead conspiracy against him.

The public prosecutor can press charges, which is what happened here. They don't for a boatload of would be cases. With Assange, they did, which is not exactly true to form.

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#288

Post by Lammy »

zepto wrote: post #239
Lammy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what they’re trying to say is that the context clues in the top-level comment tell us that the comment author defines “faultless record” as “no retractions”. You, me, or any other person can have a different definition of “faultless”, but that is just making conversation break down when we’re all replying to one particular definition that seemed (to me at least) clearly spelled out.

Not really - we don’t have to accept a false framing. If they mean no retractions, they can just say no retractions. ‘Faultless record’ is a deliberate overgeneralization to make it sound like WikiLeaks is more reputable than it actually is. Consider that Donald Trump has an equally ‘faultless record’ based on this criterion , and yet many people consider this to be sociopathic behavior, ‘No retractions’ is not a mea…

We're saying the same thing! A supporter of Trump or any other politician might think "their guy" is faultless, and I would probably disagree, but I wouldn't sit there arguing with them about how and why they _should_ find fault. The original comment framed their personal definition of 'faultless' by following it immediately with their definition (no retractions). You or I don't have to agree with that, and it just derails the entire conversation to sit here and argue (myself included) about the definition of a throwaway word. Nobody in this conversation is trying to convince you that their definition of faultless matches yours or that Wikileaks fit that criteria, whatever it may be.

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#289

Post by Lammy »

lisper wrote: post #273
Lammy wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we allow a precedent like that it will some day inevitably be turned on somebody you think speaks objective truth. The past few years have shown me there is no such thing.

I didn't say anything about how this distinction is to be made, only that it needs to be made somehow. And yes, I'm aware of the dangers of false positives. That's a smaller risk than doing nothing and allowing misinformation to propagate unfettered and unlabeled.

It is a fools' errand to think we will ever be able to get 100% of humanity to agree on objective truth, because there is no such thing. The only 'truth' is the truth of majority, and the only path forward for us as humans is to build a society that can contain, tolerate, and function in spite of all the icky fringe beliefs out there. Think of how many people there must be who are just as convinced as you are or I am that their version of reality is correct. Now think about what it would take to get you to change your mind on some of your deepest beliefs, if it's even possible. _Then_ multiply that problem hundreds of thousands of times over. We don't have enough time left as a species to sit here and argue until we declare one viewpoint "truth" and all the others "un-truth". It is more important for humanity as a species to come together and survive than it is for any individual viewpoint to be "right".

Re: Julian Assange “slowly dying” and “often sedated” in Belmarsh prison

#290

Post by droithomme »

threeseed wrote: post #116
droithomme wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Former Ambassador Craig Murray has stated that a disgruntled DNC employee, unhappy with the treatment of Sanders, personally gave him the emails in Washington and he couriered the emails to his friend Assange who then published them. And as has been pointed out the Podesta emails were taken through a phishing email which was sent to thousands of people (so it wasn't spear phishing) and which he foolishly fel…

Craig Murray's statements are highly disputed and some of them are just plain ridiculous e.g. you can't transfer data to Russian servers at > 6MB/s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Murray

Murray was citing the findings of a forensics team comprised of veteran members of the intelligence community.

There's two aspects to the time stamps. One is that based on the time stamps, the emails were all copied on Nov 7 2016 at rates of up to 49.1 megabytes per second.* This is fairly high for internet transfers. The other aspect is that the last modified timestamps of all emails and attachments were quantized to a 2 second granularity. This means this was not a hacked internet server to server transfer but was a copy to an intermediary drive that was formatted with the old FAT format.

The forensics show it wasn't a hack. No one competent in security or forensics would honestly come to that conclusion based on what is known. When coupled with Murray's testimony that he personally couriered the emails from a park near American University in DC back to Assange himself, it's curious Murray has not been subpoenaed to name the leaker, also it's curious the FBI had no interest in inspecting the DNC servers or drives.

* The wikipedia article deceptively misrepresents this as 49.1 megabits per second. Both its own sources explicitly say megabytes, and this is confirmable by examining the original data, which anyone competent can easily do themselves if they have doubts.

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