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Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

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Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#991

Post by blast »

attentive wrote: post #947
esnard wrote: post #45

JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK. This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators…

Julian Assange, on his leaking of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants into the hands of the Taliban: "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." that's rich coming from an informant.

That (alleged) quote is disputed and unproven, and came from writers openly hostile to Assange.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#992

Post by CRConrad »

faeriechangling wrote: post #50
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Assange was blatantly targeted by a US intelligence conspiracy against him and it's blindingly obvious that Sweden wouldn't have had an arrest warrant against him without their meddling. The US also brazenly suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the GWOT and was absolutely indefinitely detaining people. The secret CIA black sites that were part of the same GWOT were also very well covered. Beyond what others have sa…

> it's blindingly obvious that Sweden wouldn't have had an arrest warrant against him without their meddling.

No, that isn't "obvious" at all.

> Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.

Not that this has anything to do with anything, since Assange has never been neither a whistleblower nor a journalist.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#993

Post by 4bpp »

meowface wrote: post #899
4bpp wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of the US government or its decision-makers spent 10 years stewing in prison for bribing Afghans to expose themselves to that same risk of death, or straight up killing many more Afghans for no other reason that they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time? Does the US government have some special natural right to toy with the lives of Afghans that Assange does not have? Unless you believe it to…

I suspect even the vast majority of decision makers in the US government wouldn't have a conversation like that. And even if they somehow did , how does that change how one should feel about what Assange said? "Well, he was psychopathically toying with people's lives, but so do other people." Assange seemed virtuous at first but it appears he pivoted into an agenda-driven propagandist after Wikileaks grew more succes…

Neither you nor the other first-order responses seem to acknowledge that the two actions are not exactly independent - it's not like the US government did a bad thing, and then Assange went and did a completely unrelated bad thing. The problem (as also hinted at in kevinventullo's response to a different subthread) is that the USG set up a situation in which anyone revealing their misdeeds would basically have to reveal the identities of the translators, or at least pay a great cost (in effort, credibility (as they no longer can release quite "original documents") and possibly liability (if the "editorialising" can be spun by lawyers somehow)) to not do so. The situation is thus a lot more similar to someone shooting the hostage (except of course in this case the hostage was not even actually shot!) along with the terrorist that took it and was threatening to blow up the building, then someone shooting a random person because they are a psychopath.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#994

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

CRConrad wrote: post #978
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Assange operated in any kind of self-interest per-se, I think he operated based on a principle of maximum transparency. I definitely don't think that is always a positive thing but I struggle to think of anything which Assange leaked which I really disagree with. Probably some parts of cablegate should not have come out as they were very "inside baseball" talk between diplomats and were too easily const…

> Nudging and cajoling and perhaps berating our Swedish allies to jin up a "rape" case against him so he could be extradited from the UK to Sweden and then obviously to the US, and, denying that we were doing that was just dirty on our part. Dunno if there was any "nudging and cajoling and berating", but from all I saw, those Swedish women (yes, plural) seemed to legitimately have a case. As I understood it, the case…

My understanding of the case was that he consensually visited prostitutes in Sweden, which is legal, where he engaged in consensual sex with them.

Again, consensually, he did this without wearing a condom.

However, under Swedish law, that is rape and the charge is against the customer (not the provider).

So, yes, the women agreed on the facts of the case (Assange showed up and we had sex without a condom) but it was entirely consensual though illegal.

While I do have some understanding of why Sweden has a law like this (to encourage condom use) I don't think it fits anyones conventional definition of rape and under normal circumstances this would not be an offense that the Swedish government would be extraditing someone for (it's a nominal fine in most cases).

Please if I misunderstood something let me know, because, it has been years since I significantly researched this and it's one of the most politicized cases in memory.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#995

Post by ironcurtain »

esnard wrote: post #45

JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK. This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators…

[dead]

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#996

Post by globalnode »

jampekka wrote: post #762
globalnode wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we arent bootlickers, thats just our politicians and business leaders.

How do the politicians get elected then? You're not (on average) bootlickers but do prefer to be ruled by bootlickers?

people on average are naive about politics, even when they declare they dont trust politicians. they fall for the same tricks every time: fear and greed mostly. they then go and vote based on what they think will maximise their returns and the people they vote for turn around and start bootlicking while ignoring domestic concerns until the next election cycle. so no, we arent bootlickers, stupid yes, bootlickers no.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#997

Post by keepamovin »

mcmcmc wrote: post #422
mc32 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope he does something on X where he delivers dead drops given to him by whistleblowers on an episodal basis, and he grows big enough that he become _the_ place to go when you want to blow the whistle, whether it be rushed pharmaceuticals, govt morally dubious black ops, bad NGOs, front orgs, etc.

As soon as a whistleblower from one of Musk’s companies shows up you can guarantee he would get permabanned

Agreed. Musk’s free speech is an intuition based on perspective

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#998

Post by keepamovin »

nemo44x wrote: post #633
keepamovin wrote: post #296

Congratulations! I share in the popular jubilation and sense of epoch-making reconciliation, that aligns with the stars, even tho I think Assange acted like an egotistical fool who squandered the great lens of transparency and accountability he had created through misjudged self-importance and vulnerability to manipulation by his sources for their own ends. Hopefully his Second Act brings good fruits without the thor…

No one is perfect. But overall his actions were brave and he paid a terrible price. The worst part is probably that what he published ended up making no real difference.

Agree. But that’s the issue with modern discourse: no sense of values. We cannot discuss nuance without feeling desperate to reduce everything to safe binary moral surety

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#999

Post by keepamovin »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #743
nemo44x wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is perfect. But overall his actions were brave and he paid a terrible price. The worst part is probably that what he published ended up making no real difference.

It is difficult to see the difference but very few people are privy to the planning of the programs revealed. Only those who oversaw the entirety of the programs can really grasp the scope due to the compartmented nature of the programs. I think these disclosures helped arrest a rapid decay into a dystopian surveillance state. However the motivations and irrational belief systems behind these programs persist so the…

Doubt Assange arrested anything. The forces in league with survey are beyond government

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#1000

Post by keepamovin »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #425
keepamovin wrote: post #296

Congratulations! I share in the popular jubilation and sense of epoch-making reconciliation, that aligns with the stars, even tho I think Assange acted like an egotistical fool who squandered the great lens of transparency and accountability he had created through misjudged self-importance and vulnerability to manipulation by his sources for their own ends. Hopefully his Second Act brings good fruits without the thor…

I’m not sure if I care at all that he was capitalizing on it. Frankly, I wouldn’t care if this info was dropped by the Kardashians on a very special episode. It was crucial public information and it needed to get out one way or another. If vanity is an incentivizing factor toward someone taking that risk, so be it. What is it about someone being incentivized to be a whistleblower, in your mind, changes the validation…

That’s not it, but valid point in your domain. It’s what happened to him after fame
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