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Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

theintercept.com

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Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#41

Post by mkempe »

The lasting message will be that if, as a private person, you help people reveal State Secrets of the most powerful countries on Earth --especially including evidence of war crimes, illegal spying, and assorted abuses of power-- you will be hounded and end up a forced recluse, tortured prisoner, and dead. The widening use of drones is likely to provide evil politicians with the shortcut they generally desire.

Could Assange have organized Wikileaks and gotten such impact as he did while remaining safely anonymous? he must have known he was going to make countless enemies in seats of extraordinary power.

[added] My own lesson from this thread is that Assange is amazingly polarizing in this forum, and there is more bile here than I have ever witnessed in HN (almost half of the comments are greyed out at the moment). Much of it seems driven by political inclination rather than reasoned discussion, driven by the substrate of the government abuses of power he set out to disrupt.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#42

Post by glogla »

mark212 wrote: post #17
dmix wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about nominally imprisoned absent fair treatment upon extradition?

How will we know he won’t get fair treatment upon release until he’s actually released?

Because he's wanted by the US?

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#43

Post by jstarfish »

mark212 wrote: post #17
dmix wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about nominally imprisoned absent fair treatment upon extradition?

How will we know he won’t get fair treatment upon release until he’s actually released?

That isn't how prosecution for high crimes works these days.

No nation exerts so much effort recovering someone with a bench warrant for failure to appear unless there's an empty cell in a black site with your name on the door. They even tried playing the "...but he's a filthy rapist!" card to turn the public against him. It's disgusting.

There are actual murderers on the lam who aren't being pursued as aggressively as this. They want him this badly and they don't even have any substantial charges to bring. It's an unfair fight by any measure.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#44

Post by imh »

Journalists love to argue that journalists should enjoy special first amendment rights, and a central theme of OP is the government prosecuting whistleblowers but not the media companies who publish the info. Even the most Snowden friendly outlets seem to write like that. That seems super weird. The exceptions should be due to public interest, not due to being a newspaper.

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#45

Post by rndgermandude »

tptacek wrote: post #3

This is less a news story than a coat rack Greenwald uses to hang a bunch of loosely-related political arguments he wants to make: * That Ecuador under Moreno is subservient to western powers, this according in part to Correa, who ran the previous Ecuadorian administration, which was widely considered one of the most corrupt in the western hemisphere (I have no idea if Moreno's was as well). OK? None of us are equipp…

> That the UK might (based on no evidence presented in this article) be wrangling to convict Assange under contempt statutes, because, I don't know, the UK is super corrupt and out to get Assange.

The UK police basically besieged the embassy for 8 years, spending literal millions of GBP to do so[1]. The prosecution already talked about "contempt of court"[2]. But yeah, it's all in Greenwald's and Assange's head.

As for "corruption" in the UK, Greenwald might be a bit biased[3]. If your partner is essentially taken into Sippenhaft to bully you, you might be too. And it's not like the UK even extradites it's own citizens to the US, so why would Assange have any reason to worry given he is not even an UK citizen?[4]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31159594

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/world/europe/julian-assan...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/nov/14/amber-rudd-appro...

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#46

Post by [deleted] »

ibejoeb wrote: post #19

>highly unlikely that Moreno...will obtain a guarantee that the U.K. not extradite Assange to the U.S. I'm not remotely convinced that Moreno had any capability to obtain such an assurance. By what mechanism can a foreign agent nullify terms of a treaty between two unrelated states, even if the subject were an ecuadorian national?

[deleted]

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#47

Post by firasd »

blhack wrote: post #9

What I've wanted for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, and if Obama would have done it before leaving office, it would have earned him infinite respect: Try them, possibly even find them guilty of something, but also award them with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. What these people have done is probably illegal, but it is unquestionably about the most American, patriotic act you could commit. Sp…

It makes me profoundly sad how the world (or at least my world, mostly far left, liberal, educated, etc.) has turned so hard against Julian Assange. He's a hero in every sense of the word.

If this Assange guy hadn’t gone all-​in on supporting Trump, Russia, & co., he would still have a broad base of support among liberal Americans—many of the same people who lobbied for Chelsea Manning’s release. Epic bad strategy on his part.

Also, beyond partisan alignment, another reason I view him more dimly than I used to is his habit of dumping entire inboxes. Compare to something like the Panama papers that was vetted by journalists...

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#48

Post by raverbashing »

rndgermandude wrote: post #21
timmytokyo wrote: post #4

Julian Assange is not "effectively imprisoned". He can leave the Ecuadorian embassy any time he chooses. Ecuador is under no obligation to provide him domicile.

Assange is a naturalized citizen of Ecuador[1]. Now the question is whether Ecuadorian law allows to extradite it's own citizens to the UK, and for a minor UK charge of "failure to surrender". [1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/11/julian-assange...

"its own citizens", now for the issue of extradition, I'm not sure it even counts as an extradition in the case of an embassy (though theoretically at first glance it would count)

Re: Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

#49

Post by squirrelicus »

rgbrenner wrote: post #6

last April, Trump’s then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now his Secretary of State, delivered a deranged, rambling, highly threatening broadside against WikiLeaks. I watched the video linked and I wouldn't describe it as "deranged" or "rambling". Just because the author disagrees with Pompeo does not make him deranged. When reporters write blatantly political things like this, it really makes me question the fairness of t…

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