The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Julian Assange Arrested for Violating Bail

Update 2: So, we have a US extradition charge. This is a direct assault on the freedom of the press and those who say it isn’t are fools. The DOJ claim is that Assange didn’t just accept Manning’s documents, he encouraged Manning to go get more. Journalists do this all the time. Likewise, Assange is not American and Wikileaks is not an American institution, so the US is claiming extraordinary extradition rights.

So, it begins. The US put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to make this happen:

Julian Assange

In itself, this isn’t a big deal, though Ecuador’s caving is pathetic (if rather expected). The question is: What comes next? If Assange is extradited to the US, it will be a huge blow for freedom of the press. Since the Swedish sexual assault charges have been rescinded, if that doesn’t happen this all seems rather overblown.

This has nothing to do with Assange being something of a piece of work. It has to do with the fact that the information Wikileaks released with collateral murder, and even with the DNC leak, was legitimate journalistic information. The idea that journalists don’t accept info from state actors or don’t have political biases and preferences is hilariously wrong and stupid.

It’s also absurd to pretend that Assange has been treated as any other suspect. He hasn’t. His entire case has been politicized from the start, with pressure exerted that is not routine for the sort of sexual assault of which he was accused.

This is a political situation, from its start to its conclusion, whatever that might be.

Remember that Manning was just recently sent to prison on contempt charges because she refused to cooperate with a US grand jury on Wikileaks.

Assange isn’t a nice guy and that isn’t relevant to either his rights, or the bad precedent which will be set if he is prosecuted for releasing information, no matter what the source or reason.

Discuss below, and we’ll see how this plays out.

Update: video of the removal. Pathetic.


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86 Comments

  1. The Swedish case against Julian Assange has been dropped. The British want him to stand trial for skipping bail. Or such is their official position. As you say, it is hard to imagine this being treated as a routine bail case.

  2. Hugh

    Assange committed serious crimes, most notably embarrassing our political classes. People leak information, even top secret information, all the time. It is more or less how places like Washington work. The Russians probably did use him as a conduit for the DNC leaks, but so what?And it would have been nice if he leaked info on the Russians and the Chinese, but again so what? His real crime was not what he did or did not do. It was whom he did it to.

  3. Ché Pasa

    My understanding is that the Swedish charges have not been dropped. Instead, the Swedes allowed the warrant to expire. In other words, he could face a Swedish court one day anyway.

    As for the political nature of the charges against him. Yes? So? This is where I differ from his many defenders. Political charges are leveled against journalists all the time, but because he is who he is, the charges — whatever they turn out to be, skipping bail is just one of a multitude of potential charges — the political oppression of Julian Assange is somehow the Worst Evah. Horseshit. He’s largely been the one responsible for making it a bigger deal than it really is. And oh my, many hundreds of journalists have faced far worse than he ever has. Far worse.

    In my view, he should have been brave enough to stand trial a long time ago, the way many journalists have done in the United States, Britain and other nations. He’s always had a very strong defense, and yet rather than present it in court he chose to skip bail, hide out, and thumb his nose at British, Swedish, and US law.

    I certainly understand being suspicious of a justice system that is often corrupt and biased and a tool for oppression. Nevertheless, journalists have many legal protections that civilians don’t and in the case of Assange, the charges we’ve heard about don’t have to do with Wikileaks publication of this or that forbidden video or document, they have to do with his contemptible and possibly criminal personal behavior. Sounds like he has pretty good defenses against those charges as well, even though they may be politically motivated.

    So why not let them be adjudicated in court? Why was he so convinced he’d lose that he holed up in a supporter’s house and then the Ecuadorean embassy in London for years? It never made any sense except as spectacle, show business. Well, obviously, the show isn’t over quite yet.

    I suspect the denouement of this long-running drama will be a let down for both his fans and his detractors, however. The there there is ultimately pretty minimal. Always has been.

  4. NoPolitician

    I used to support Assange, but I’m not sure that what he is doing is right anymore, because I think he is either aligned with Trump or is a foolish dupe to foreign powers.

    It does appear as though Russia is running a disruption campaign on democratic countries, and it seems as though they have figured out how to do it via the media – it’s hard to say “our” media because I’m not sure that concept even exists anymore.

    I don’t have a problem with journalists keeping a government honest. I do have a problem with journalists being used as an outlet for propaganda from a foreign power in such a way that it weakens our country.

  5. 1DQ

    Wikileaks claims a DNC insider leaked the DNC emails.

    The digital forensics on the DNC server are consistent with an inside leak and not with an outside hack.

    I rather doubt anyone commenting here is unaware of either of the above two facts.

    So…

  6. False Solace

    Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks. This is a fantasy pushed by Hillary Clinton, who never fails to cite “Russian WikiLeaks” whenever she speaks of them. Shame on commenters who suggest otherwise. Assange repeatedly said the leaks did not come from Russia or from a state actor. Who are you to contradict him, and based on what evidence? VIP says the DNC files were copied to USB, not stolen over the internet. The so-called intelligence report was cribbed from a bunch of Ukrainian spooks with zero actual investigation on the server itself. Again, what is your evidence? You have none — stop the wicked, uninformed smears. By repeating this nonsense you make yourself a tool for some very smug and self-satisfied shady people.

  7. someofparts

    The Obama DOJ considered prosecuting Assange but determined that it would violate the Constitution. If the prosecution of him is successful, the NYTimes is next. Just what Trump wants.

    The comments at Kos are worse than the ones at Breitbart. On the View just now Megan McCain was howling to see Assange hanged while Sonny Hoskins, the attorney in the group, patiently pointed out why Obama/Holder declined to prosecute. Even that doofus Joy Behar said that Assange worked with the Russians and that is why Hillary lost the election.

    Meanwhile, here is a glimpse of the American electorate that is so hard to fool – https://juanitajean.com/not-science/

  8. S Brennan

    False Solace; you are the only commenter that has a rudimentary grasp of the facts….the rest…pathetic. Anything approaching journalism in the US died in the great moral extinction that followed the FDR era [1932-1978], this half-hearted post is a salient testimony to that fact.

  9. Ven

    Ian

    “He isn’t a nice guy”. Really? Do you know him, or are you just repeating the crap the guardian et al have come out with.

    All of the western press has been subserviently publishing propaganda for elite-favouring, war-mongering governments. Have you forgotten who gave us the Iraq War, killing millions, aided by a compliant press? And the only person who exposed the war crimes of the US (remember the footage of the US helicopter shooting down Reuters journalists?) is Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.

    Absolutely stunning that at a time when we need to be outraged and defend the only person who had the guts to publish the truth . . . we have these half-baked comments.

    “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

  10. NR

    I don’t have any sympathy for Assange; he acted as a cutout for Russian intelligence operations which are directed by a murderous dictator.

    The irony is that if he’d done exactly the same thing for the CIA, you guys would be calling him a hundred different kinds of scum right now.

  11. ponderer

    On occasion I find my self wishing that the hypocritical idiots that fill our media with obvious lies and propaganda get what they ask for. It happened when Trump was elected. It happened when Russiagate was started (and now we start see the criminal referrals as the wheel turns). It happened when Mueller charged Russian companies with election influence and they had to walk back those accusations. I hate to see Julian imprisoned for award winning journalism. I hate to see a country walk back asylum. I don’t understand why anyone would try to justify the US actions and expense for a 5 year prison term on the basic exercise of journalism. The US MSM doesn’t do journalism they do stenography so I’m not sure what impact there will be on most of the media. There is a significant chance though that encouraging a source, of any kind, will be conflated with the breach of those systems where such information is stored (computers). In a just world the docket would then be full of Obama, Bush, Clinton era apparatchiks, the CIA, and media personalities who have done all of that without Presidential permisson. It won’t happen on Trumps first term, but if there is a second I look forward to watching Maddow and friends doing the same perp walk. Note, the danger with these charges is not that the information ends up in the hands of the public. It’s that a journalist “encouraged” an action that was then taken by a 3rd party. Everyone in the media that has ever had a confidential source is in that category.

  12. cripes

    “contemptible and possibly criminal personal behavior.”
    Such as?

    “he acted as a cutout for Russian intelligence operations which are directed by a murderous dictator.”
    For example?

    Mere assertion of your silly accusations–they’re not even accusations, just smears pretending to be accusations–Doesn’t. Say. Anything.

    Since when do we traffic in dopey character assassination when the cardinal issue here is the public’s right to know what crimes it’s own government is perpetrating and keeping secret?

    On what f*cked up planet is publishing thousands of emails the secretary of state, planning a failed presidential campaign, criminally tried to hide in a private server and then destroy worse than the betrayal of her office?

    Che Pasa: were you sleeping during Obama’s unprecendented campaign against journalists “from 1917 until 2009, only one government whistleblower was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917. But from 2009 to 2016, the Obama administration used it to prosecute eight whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.”

    I guess you’ve all been Rachel Maddowed.

  13. Mark Pontin

    Our vicious, pathetic elites.

    Obviously, this action against Assange was in part ‘pour encourager les autres.’ Nevertheless, I suspect this vindictiveness will rebound to some extent against them. “When you’ve lost Walter Cronkite —”

    ‘WikiLeaks-founder Julian Assange will be punished for embarrassing the DC establishment’

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/11/wikileaks-julian-assange-nsa-extradition-hacking-chelsea-manning-nobel-column/3434034002/

  14. NR

    cripes:

    For example, the fact that the information Assange published came from Russian hackers, as detailed in the Mueller indictments. Hence, Assange working as a cutout for Russian intelligence, which is, as I said, directed by a murderous dictator.

  15. S Brennan

    “information Assange published came from Russian hackers” lies upon lies, Cripes asked for credible documentation, NR you provided only additional lies and innuendo. Sophistry.

  16. NoPolitician

    False Solace, from what I understand you’re trafficking more in conspiracy theories about the DNC hacking than anything. All mainstream reporting and thought (including Mueller) say that Russian Intelligence, under the moniker Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC emails and provided them to Assange, who released them (with deliberate timing). While I’d be open to proof that this was instead an inside job, I trust US intelligence more than I trust Julian Assange and Russia.

  17. Temporarily Sane

    I see quite a few people here were taken in by the propaganda campaign against Julian Assange. A few things:

    – The charges being prepared by the secret grand jury in Virginia relate to the 2010 Manning leaks. There is no evidence WikiLeaks participated in any “hack” of the DNC in 2016.

    – A secret 2008 Pentagon document revealed a plan to discredit WikiLeaks by destroying Assange’s personal reputation.

    -Even the New York Times admits that Assange is a journalist and that putting him on trial would be detrimental to freedom of the press.

    – This fight is not about Assange’s character flaws, it is about freedom of the press and state power and whether the countries that claim to champion democracy are in fact still democracies.

    – John Pilger (johnpilger.com) and Consortium News (consortiumnews.com) have written extensively about Assange and WikiLeaks and are worth checking out if you want to learn more about this case.

  18. cripes

    “I trust US intelligence more than I trust Julian Assange and Russia.” Big Fat Fallacy of Authority.

    Well, given their history as proven liars, and 70+ years of laughable “evidence” justifying illegal wars of aggression discredited, I think that we are safe in ignoring your opinions, such as they are.

  19. cripes

    “All mainstream reporting and thought (including Mueller)…”

    oh brother, your Hillary 2020 buttons are in the mail.

  20. Ven

    “Russian intelligence directed by a murderous dictator”

    NR, I guess you have a pretty poor appreciation of history. Have a look at the tally of murders that the US’ direct and indirect interventions have notched up. Aided and abetted by US intelligence (or lack of it – vide WMD in Iraq, Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam) and mainstream propaganda, sorry “reporting”, outlets.

  21. nihil obstet

    Question on the authority of law: if a Nigerian citizen living in India published documents produced by the Chinese government and considered secret by them, would China be justified in demanding that the Nigerian be turned over to them for prosecution and imprisonment in China? Would other countries agree and assist the Indian government in arresting the Nigerian and putting her in the power of Chinese forces?

    Before anything else, I don’t understand what laws I, as a citizen of one country, have to obey in order not to be punished by another country.

    There are laws on freedom of the press, on whistleblowing, on defamation of the government, and more. The laws vary from country to country. Which laws must I obey for a foreign country not to demand my extradition? I have written on the internet views which I think are illegal in Saudi Arabia. If Saudi Arabia requested, would I be arrested and sent to stand trial there for my blasphemy?

    The American CIA director Mike Pompeo calls WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service”. Is there a boundary between “a non-state hostile intelligence service” and say, Amnesty International, which investigates incidents of human rights violations and publishes them. That’s hostile to the government which has committed the violations.

    Law has become just bullies’ word salad.

  22. Mark Pontin

    “I trust US intelligence more than I trust Julian Assange and Russia.”

    Oh, for God’s sake.

    A technical report by Skip Folden, IBM’s former Program Manager for Information Technology, US, by William Binney, former Technical Director at the National Security Agency, and by other former US intelligence officials — all drummed out for resisting the corruption, fraud, and law-breaking in the US intelligence-industrial complex — explained that: –

    [1] The central claim re Wikileaks/the DNC that somebody cracked the DNC server and copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device is _technically impossible_ with a hack, given the speeds of the US Internet. It had to be an inside leak done with a USB stick or similar memory-storage device inserted physically into the DNC server and networks.

    [2] The FBO were not even allowed/chose not to do any forensics on the original “Guccifer 2.0” material and the DNC’s computers. Only Crowdstrike, an organization of somewhat questionable provenance, that _the DNC hired_ issued a report that makes that claim. whichemains a mystery

    Here’s a memo Folden, Binney, et al submitted to the US president and to the press —

    July 24, 2017

    MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

    FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

    SUBJECT: Was the “Russian Hack” an Inside Job?

    Executive Summary

    Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.

    Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].

    Independent analyst Skip Folden, who retired after 25 years as the IBM Program Manager for Information Technology, US, who examined the recent forensic findings, is a co-author of this Memorandum. He has drafted a more detailed technical report titled “Cyber-Forensic Investigation of ‘Russian Hack’ and Missing Intelligence Community Disclaimers,” and sent it to the offices of the Special Counsel and the Attorney General. VIPS member William Binney, a former Technical Director at the National Security Agency, and other senior NSA “alumni” in VIPS attest to the professionalism of the independent forensic findings.

    The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original “Guccifer 2.0” material remains a mystery – as does the lack of any sign that the “hand-picked analysts” from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the “Intelligence Community Assessment” dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.

    NOTE: There has been so much conflation of charges about hacking that we wish to make very clear the primary focus of this Memorandum. We focus specifically on the July 5, 2016 alleged Guccifer 2.0 “hack” of the DNC server. In earlier VIPS memoranda we addressed the lack of any evidence connecting the Guccifer 2.0 alleged hacks and WikiLeaks, and we asked President Obama specifically to disclose any evidence that WikiLeaks received DNC data from the Russians [see here and here].

    Addressing this point at his last press conference (January 18), he described “the conclusions of the intelligence community” as “not conclusive,” even though the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6 expressed “high confidence” that Russian intelligence “relayed material it acquired from the DNC … to WikiLeaks.”

    Obama’s admission came as no surprise to us. It has long been clear to us that the reason the U.S. government lacks conclusive evidence of a transfer of a “Russian hack” to WikiLeaks is because there was no such transfer. Based mostly on the cumulatively unique technical experience of our ex-NSA colleagues, we have been saying for almost a year that the DNC data reached WikiLeaks via a copy/leak by a DNC insider (but almost certainly not the same person who copied DNC data on July 5, 2016).

    From the information available, we conclude that the same inside-DNC, copy/leak process was used at two different times, by two different entities, for two distinctly different purposes:

    -(1) an inside leak to WikiLeaks before Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016, that he had DNC documents and planned to publish them (which he did on July 22) – the presumed objective being to expose strong DNC bias toward the Clinton candidacy; and

    -(2) a separate leak on July 5, 2016, to pre-emptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish by “showing” it came from a “Russian hack.”

    END OF EXECUTIVE SUMMARY; FOR MORE, CLICK ON:

    https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

  23. cripes

    Mark: Thanks for your thorough explainer why Mueller and Hillary and Russia! Russia! Russia! ®hacking is just Olde Bull Crappe. Anyone still peddling that should slink away in shame.

    Nihil: Because USA is the world po-lice and po-lice work is so much easier when you don’t know what the laws are. Or there really aren’t any.

  24. different clue

    Separately, and in subordinate-parallel with the issues raised by the ongoing persecution of Assange; one hopes that the “personnel of Wikileaks” . . . the “human infrastructure” if you will . . . have spent all these years crafting Wikileaks to be a fully functional leaknpublishing organization apart from the personal will of Julian Assange. If either Assange or his WikiStaff or both together worked to keep Wikileaks functioning as Assange’s personal toy rather than a standalone organization outliving any founder or leader; then Wikileaks will die with Assange. One hopes that doesn’t happen.

    At the very least, one hopes that there is all kinds of ” Raze it! Raze it to its foundations!” material hidden in Wikileaks’s strong hands, all to be released all over everywhere all at once in a final Bonfire of Utter Vengeance if Assange goes down.

  25. Stirling S Newberry

    Pleasant people don’t rock the boat – he exposed crime against humanity. Yes, he was a dipshit – but that is what we needed. He is being jailed for publishing the truth.

  26. Ché Pasa

    Friendly reminder: Assange was not arrested or indicted for publishing. He was arrested for skipping bail and indicted for conspiracy.

    We can argue against the merits of these charges, but it is factually false to assert that his arrest and indictment charge him for publishing. They do not.

    In fact, it appears that both the US and British governments are trying to avoid freedom of the press issues at this point, and thus they are probably trying to reassure their otherwise compliant media friends that their roles in publishing various Wikileaks leaks won’t be subject to prosecution either.

  27. Rich

    “Assange isn’t a nice guy” and Stirling S Newberry’s “Yes, he was a dipshit” are the ways these debacles always start and the preferred method by which genuinely nice guys hedge their bets.
    How about it Stirling and Ian?

  28. Z

    “Assange isn’t a nice guy …”

    Well, I guess I just don’t know him as well as some of you folks do.

    I’d say the dude believes in justice though and showed a lot of character in being willing to sacrifice for that. You don’t have to know him to know that.

    Z

  29. Z

    “I trust US intelligence more than I trust Julian Assange and Russia.”

    Why?

    Z

  30. Heitzso

    I admit I’m pulling from an echo-chamber here … but my understanding is that Hillary had it in for Assange and if she had became president then Assange would have been trampled (disappeared, whatever). And, my thoughts are if I knew Hillary would (likely possibly) kill me if she became president, then I’d have a STRONG INCENTIVE to keep that from happening. That’s the excuse I come up with for the email dribble that dented Hillary’s campaign. I agree with Ian that Hillary lost the election for many reasons, most of which were self-inflicted. But the dribble of negative DNC emails did dent her campaign and the steady drip-drip-drip of emails coming out of WikiLeaks was designed to hurt her campaign and maximize the effect of the emails released. (YES, the DNC biased in a bad way, YES, the DNC did nasty things. YES, exposing that was good for democracy, etc. BUT the way the emails came out, which was a WikiLeaks decision, was, in my opinion, designed to dent Hillary’s campaign and that was, again in my opinion, political.) A lot of my understanding of the Hillary campaign came from a book on it, and the book said her team all expected her to win (hey, it was Trump, should be easy) and hence they DID NOT WORK AS A TEAM but rather constantly fought one another to gain position in the expected President Hillary team. And Hillary was so inept as a manager that she couldn’t keep her own campaign team working together. That was a tangent. …. Assange’s arrest is political, charge trumped up, anyone else and he’d have been free years ago.

  31. Hugh

    We live in a world where quite often there are no good guys, where the facts are incomplete, and everyone has an agenda. Many on the left and right in the face of these complexities construct a narrative which accords with their previous beliefs and prejudices, dismiss all the evidence and sources which contradict this narrative, and give absolute unquestioning credence to any snippet however doubtful which reinforces the narrative. I get this from Trump loving, Fox watching, climate change deniers, and I get this on the left from those who are so turned off by the US government that they kneejerk reject anything that comes out of it, and having patted themselves on the back for their insight proceed to embrace a clumsy, thuggish dictator like Putin.

    For myself, I want to understand the world in which I live, warts and all, complexities and all. The story first, facts second approach I see on both the right and left is a great way not to understand it. I have learned that it is futile to engage with these people because with them, it is not about evidence or argument, but belief. They have their story and are sticking to it.

  32. Tom

    Well, as said earlier, Assange should have gone to face the rape charges, and done so voluntarily. If the Swedes had then turned him over the US for a sham trial, he would have been a martyr, and the US would have then opened itself to its own citizens being detained abroad by third countries filing suit in 2nd countries.

    As it stands the US has 1000s of political prisoners rotting in its prisons, Guantanamo, and Black Sites, and holds the record for longest held political prisoners arising from the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO operations.

    Don’t even get me started on the US Military’s own covert kill groups which kill innocents as Military Policy and with full authorization to do so. Only when US Soldiers go off the reservation, do they get punished or if their faces get published do they get punished. Look at Abu Ghraib, the only reason a few low rankers got punished is because their faces were published in MSM outlets. There were dozens of abusers at Abu Ghraib, but since their faces weren’t published, they got off scot free.

  33. Z

    Hugh,

    The people you describe sound a lot like you when you talk about Putin, Trump, and Russia.

    Z

  34. Z

    I don’t know why anybody would trust U.S. Intelligence over Assange overall.

    Assange is willing to risk his life to get the truth out and U.S. Intelligence is willing to kill people that tell the “wrong” truths.

    Z

  35. someofparts

    “The Assange case is thoroughly embedded in this culture of illusion. I do not think it can be fully understood without this context. We are a nation hiding from who we are and how we conduct ourselves and how we view and treat the immense Other beyond our shores. We are dedicated to fooling ourselves while missing the fact that we fool only ourselves. Anyone who thinks this is a constructive and productive way to proceed into the 21st century is fooling himself or herself twice over. It is nothing more than our style of self-determined decline. It is in this context we must consider Assange’s sin as defined above.”

    http://patricklawrence.us/journal-entry-44/

  36. cripes

    Sometimes we just over-analyze these things.
    Really, if not for the damning evidence that wikileaks published, which was TRUE, none of us would be reading about a stale warrant about condoms in Sweden.
    I’m not saying Assange is a “nice” guy or not “nice.”
    I don’t think that’s in the statutes and reasonable people know better than to babble on about such nonsense.

    We’ll see if the indictment alleging that Assange had conspired with Manning to “hack” a password has any merit, or not. Don’t be surprised if this proceeding goes down the black hole of secret evidence neither the defense or the public will ever see.

    If you’re cool with that, you suck.

  37. Daize

    I am really very very saddened by a lot of the comments here (ie Assange is a Russian tool etc.). Just because you are leftist (I am) and he screwed Hillary (who is a right wing fucking bitch) you have to swallow the state agitprop on Assange???!! How god-damned stupid can you get??? I thought the quality of posters was better over here…. very saddened.

  38. Hugh

    Z, thank you for illustrating my point. The right has its stories. The left has its. Both reflect embedded prejudices. Neither has any explanatory value. This behavior simply puts the left on the same level as the right. I don’t see the advantage in the left striving to have as little credibility as the right, but whatever.

  39. Z

    Hugh,

    Sure, Hugh. I don’t quite understand how your characterization applies to me, but that’s probably why I’m an amateur and not a pro.

    Z

  40. Spring Texan

    I too am saddened by some of the comments here. I wish people would listen to Daniel Ellsberg on this matter. And it doesn’t matter what you think of Assange later – he may have been reckless in some of the Turkish stuff he published from what I understand and who knows what his mental state is after years in such a difficult situation – this is all about what happened when he published the Manning stuff. And yes who knows what one can believe of all the stuff that is said against him, but regardless, this is a vendetta against those who would publish war crimes – note that Manning is again imprisoned. And – he’s still a human being in the grip of the powerful – and one who revealed American misdeeds in Iraq. He also – to his credit – helped Snowden escape.

    Thanks to Ian and to all above who are not blinded in this matter.

  41. Jeff Martin

    Some of the commenters in this thread illustrate quite nicely two aspects of actually-existing left-of-centre politics in the US, aspects which demonstrate why liberals repeatedly lose on everything they pretend is important to them: first, there is the unquestioning faith in American institutions and those representatives of those institutions (yes, liberals are still Exceptionalists, in the most pejorative sense of that term), which leads them to vilify any figure who resists or traduces the prerogatives of those institutions and personages (and this is a ritual purity exercise, quite as it is for the dumb right-wingers who refuse to bake cakes); second, the pathetic, spiteful, slavish desire for vengeance and retribution against those figures who resist or traduce the prerogatives of American institutions and their representatives.

    Their fundamentalist faith in American institutions leads to both a valorization of process, which manifests in ways as diverse as lib skepticism about abolishing the filibuster and risible neoliberal administrative schemes like the Obamacare marketplace, because liberals, tending to be professional middle class types, love their forms and procedures and hoop-jumping, and either assume that everyone else does, too, or that everyone else should, and so should be made to do so as a condition of something as basic as getting health care and not dying. But it also leads to cults of personality, as the representatives of those wonderful institutions are invested with charisma and authority: they helm the Good Institutions (of whatever sector of government, even the economy), and so mediate the goodness of the Good to us proles, whence the risible cults that existed around Obama, Hillary, Mueller, etc.

    Because this whole mindset is a form of faith, it thus leads on to that spiteful desire to smite the adversaries of the Good Institutions and their Good People; and like any other form of spite, it neither forgives anything, nor learns anything, merely simmers, waiting for the heat of events to cause it to spike. If once you have sinned, whether by exposing the non-goodness of the institutions and their principals, or by questioning some aspect of the liberal faith, even anachronistically – if you have been prematurely correct, before the consensus moved, or wrong before adopting the consensus – their boiling, bilious wrath may spill over on you, and you will be ritually othered, cancelled, unpersoned.

    Assange went on exposing the crimes of American foreign policy long after the Cheney Regency departed office, and so traduced the liberal faith in the goodness of America under Obama. He exposed the corruption of the DNC under HRH HRC, and so traduced the cult of her “personality”. Hell, he traduced the norms of sexual propriety by (possibly) having sex with a ripped condom, or without one, and refusing an STD test, and those norms are all the stronger now, in the age of MeToo. But assume that everything alleged of his conduct in Sweden is correct; it can be regarded as serious, but not rape under any serious conception of that crime. Still, it does not follow that it is as serious as the crimes he exposed. The US is responsible for several millions dead and displaced as a direct and foreseeable consequences of the conflicts in the Middle East, exposure of crimes committed in the course of which initially brought Assange his notoriety. Liberals, though, with their faith in institutions and their heads, and their obsession with procedures, have no sense of proportion: let justice be done in this smaller thing, though every crime against humanity go unexposed and unpunished, and those who expose them suffer ‘justice’ to the uttermost extremity. And why not? America was Already Great, in itself, and in all its works, where even when things went badly, we “meant well”, because we were/are Good, and Already Great, all those victims sacrifices to the eternal flame of our Exceptionalism, mere matter in which our goodness was expressed. The result is that liberals will never securely achieve those things, domestically, that they profess to want, because American foreign policy will always be in the way, in every way conceivable, from the financial to the economy of sheer attention, and because they always strengthen the very apparatuses of surveillance and repression which have always, from their foundation, opposed to even tepid social democratic reforms. I’m not sure they care any longer, though. They seem to have made their squalid peace with the jackboots, all the better to seek vengeance against their enemies, petty, small, and slavish as they are.

    (And no, FTR, I am not a right-winger of any sort, and observed/experienced similar dynamics on the American right, so spare me that tiresome accusation.)

  42. Ché Pasa

    The arrest of Assange (for skipping bail, which he undeniably did and for which he has been judged guilty) has opened a huge box of grievances against The State, many of them valid, but most of which are irrelevant at law with regard to this case. 

    The grievances are vast and wide, but they exist and will continue to regardless of what happens to Assange.

    The fear that the arrest of Assange will somehow destroy “freedom of the press” is massively overblown. Realistically, the press and media, almost all, and almost always, serve power and money, and their “freedom,” such as it is, is to do just that. Even Assange is captive to that paradigm as we’ve seen when he and Wikileaks co-publish with major media institutions.

    As a side note: “Power and money” are highly factionalized and competitive. Factions seek to undermine one another and some will do anything in pursuit of their own dominance. What Wikileaks has been doing will continue with or without Assange and his organization.

    That he is personally strange, difficult, dishonest, or in other ways discomforting to “normal” people is irrelevant. That he is responsible for publishing forbidden documents and videos is also irrelevant with regard to the charges against him at this time.

    He isn’t charged with publishing. He wouldn’t be prosecuted for publishing if he were extradited to the US.

    But given the situation, it is highly likely that British courts will not allow his extradition to the US — a) because he is not a US citizen; b) because he is (at least in theory) subject to the Crown as an Australian citizen; c) because the US maintains the death penalty — though he would not be subject to it (supposedly); and d) because he is due to be sentenced for bail jumping (up to a year?).

    The likelier outcome in my view is that he will be sentenced to the maximum term for bail jumping, sentence suspended provided he returns to Australia and does not engage in further illegal activity however that’s defined. Swedish investigation will not be reopened — though it could be at any time. US extradition request might be presented to Australia, but likely it would be rejected for the same reasons the British reject it. Wikileaks folds, but other organizations continue to receive and leak forbidden documents and videos as they have been doing throughout this drama.

    The drama of Wikileaks comes to a close. Finally.

  43. Daize

    QP wrote: “The fear that the arrest of Assange will somehow destroy “freedom of the press” is massively overblown.”

    You are kidding right? Just the fact that Assange has had to hide out in the Ecuadorian Embassy all these years (add Snowdon to the list) has already been a HUGE dampener on our press/whistleblower freedoms. This is exactly the whole damn point by the way. The entire exercise from the very start is a government run attack on our freedom to know. You are living in some kinda Obama Unicorn (another fuckin’ right-winger posing as a lefty), “everything is fine” fantasy world mate.

  44. Jeff Martin

    The attempts to deny that the charges so far filed against Assange have anything to do with publishing are touching, truly. Apparently, in this wonderful world of ours, prosecutors and the political apparatchiks standing behind them are always wholly transparent as to their objectives in a prosecution, never engaging in lawfare (the polite term for chicanery), never employing one charge as a stand-in for another that might be more difficult to prove, more controversial, never attempting to send a message, never stacking or juggling charges as a means of coercing a defendant….

    Pardon me while I hook myself up to an oxygen tank, having laughed so hard….

    No, the picayune hacking charge – so far – is precisely the point: it is intended to send the message that the ordinary means by which a whistleblower might communicate with a journalist will subject the former to prosecution, and possibly also the latter. It is a salvo intended to lay the predicate for solving the “problem” – from the perspective of the national security state and its slithering sycophants, the propensity of those with conscience to leak the evidence of its crimes against humanity – at the source, precisely because openly going after the media in toto would be too controversial, not least because it would problematize the routine leaking to select press lackeys of information the security state is using to shape the “information environment”. Much of that doesn’t pass through the “proper” channels of declassification, but neither does it expose the nakedness and filthy hindquarters of the security state; only those unable to leak without consequences, because of the nature of their information, need worry about the “hacking” nonsense.

    Which, again, is the point. But then again, the liberals and right-wingers alike will insist that everyone face the “consequences” of their actions, because they demand that those willing to expose the criminality of the state become martyrs, and actually embrace their chains. This is in part because they obsess over procedures and correctness and norms and shit like that, but the deeper reason is that they believe in the security state and long for it to claim its victims: they want scapegoats and witches sent off or burned at the stake, for their want of faith the Already Greatness of America. And this is knowable not only because it is what they are objectively doing, but because it is what they do with regard to domestic policy broadly speaking, under neoliberalism: take responsibility for your own poor choices, which led you to not succeed in getting one of the three good jobs in one hundred, & etc. Same mentality, different sphere. Everyone must take responsibility, except elites, especially elites who commit crimes against humanity. They’re special, because America is Exceptional.

  45. NoPolitician

    > The central claim re Wikileaks/the DNC that somebody cracked the DNC server and copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device is _technically impossible_ with a hack, given the speeds of the US Internet.

    That has been debunked – it is very possible to transfer 2GB of information across the internet, yet that is their central argument as to why it couldn’t be Russia. The Nation – the outlet that originally ran the piece – seriously hedged on it later on.

    I would trust the US Intelligence over Julain Assange and Russian Intelligence because Assange is a single individual whose motives I do not understand, but am aware that he has an understandable intense dislike of Hillary Clinton. I don’t trust Russian Intelligence because I believe Russia to be a far more worse actor than the US.

  46. different clue

    I have not read Riverdaughter The Confluence to see what she and her fans think of this. So, without having read it yet, I will risk making a prediction about what she has said or what she will say . . . without even having read her site about this.

    I predict: she either has, or will, support the arrest of Assange and will hope for the very worst that can “legally” happen to him. Her fanbase of howling blood hungry hyenas will express the hope that Assange be put to death, or at least guantanamized or padillafied.

    Because the evil Assange, whom one of Riverdaughter’s little commenters cleverly called Vladissange once; helped the evil Putin steal the throne from the Great and Saintly Queen Hillary ” Jim Jonestown” Clinton the First.

    If my prediction comes true, my credibility will be raised just a little. If my prediction comes out false, my credibility will be lowered just a little.

  47. S Brennan

    NoPolitician;

    Again you argue dishonestly:

    BTW, Wikileaks didn’t debunk the “DNC server was hacked” story…top former US Intelligence officials did.

    It’s one thing to constantly repeat the same sophistry over and over, it’s quite another to infer that the intended reader is dumb enough to buy into your flimsy fabrications.

  48. Ché Pasa

    The issue I’m dealing with is law. And how the law is being applied to Julian Assange in this case.

    Much as we may deplore the way courts often behave in the US, Canada, and Britain — well, throughout the English-speaking world — the law is the law and courts are assigned responsibility for applying and interpreting it as fairly and judiciously as possible. That’s the theory anyway. It may fail in practice, but…

    While there’s been so much hand-waving about Julian’s “persecution” — most of it generated by Assange himself and his legal team — in fact, he is being accused at law of jumping bail (already found guilty for something he undeniably did) and is facing an extradition hearing on a request by the US Government (the Trump government, btw) that he be sent for trial in the US for the crime of conspiracy to hack government computers.

    He is not> facing extradition or trial for publishing. This is a matter of law. Yes, there is an underlying motivation for his arrest and possible extradition, but all the handwaving about it will have little or no effect in court. The trial, if there is one, which I doubt, will be focused on whether or not the charges in the indictment (conspiracy) are true beyond a reasonable doubt, and if he is found guilty, that is what he will be guilty of, not for publishing the material he received from Manning.

    He’s not charged with publishing forbidden material because it’s not illegal to do so (in most cases). In addition, charging him with publishing would mean that every other outlet that co-published with Wikileaks would also be subject to prosecution. And that’s not going to happen.

    After all, the government relies on them to pass on whatever they want and need the public to believe.

    There is a strong likelihood that British courts won’t agree to Assange’s extradition for the reasons I’ve already cited. People who aren’t looking at this through a partisan lens recognize that as a matter of law, Assange is less likely to be extradited to the US than some of the hyperbole makes it out to be.

    And while some see his plight as a threat to press freedom, many do not, largely because the “freedom of the press” has essentially long been limited to serving the interests of wealth and power, which ironically does not preclude the publication of embarrassing or classified information about wealth and power.

    I don’t think everything is all right by any means, or that this whole brou-ha-ha is not important. But it ain’t the Apocalypse either.

  49. Ian Welsh

    Oh my. A lot of people are upset that I said Assange isn’t a nice guy.

    First of all, while I don’t know him, I do know people who do know him, including people who were involved in Wikileaks.

    Second of all, most of the attacks on Assange are of the form, usually implicitly, that “he’s not a nice guy, therefore he doesn’t deserve rights”. What I am doing is simply saying, “it doesn’t matter whether someone is a nice guy to whether or not they have rights.”

  50. different clue

    I would agree that Assange is not a nice guy, and is sometimes a destructive little arsonist strictly in it for the LULZ (if I used that word correctly).

    Case in point in fact in case in point: someone gave him all the University of East Anglia climatologists’ private Emails and he posted them as a great gift to the Global Warming Deniers.
    These Emails have been called “Climategate” and have helped the Deniers impose further years of deny and delay on efforts to rebalance the Carbon and dewarm the global. Maybe Assange is still laughing over that one.

    The prediction that ” Assange likely won’t be extradited” is certainly a prediction and if it comes true, would indicate that the predictor is either lucky or good. My own feeling is that
    Assange will be extradited for ” Five Eyes” reasons. If he is not extradited, then I am either unlucky or bad on understanding this matter.

  51. S Brennan

    Political prisoner – Wikipedia
    [Search domain en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoner] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoner

    “Political prisoners are also arrested and tried with a veneer of legality where false criminal charges, manufactured evidence, and unfair trials (kangaroo courts, show trials) are used to disguise the fact that an individual is a political prisoner.”

    Look for Wikipedia to change that entry.

    The fact is, Assange sought political refuge [and was granted diplomatic immunity] from being extradited to face criminal charges in a country where he did not reside.

    So while some commenters above declare, with the greatest gravitas that skipping bail is a crime of such magnitude that, the state is justified in defiling multiple century-old international laws and norms, desecration’s so repulsive, that they that have in the past, led to wars and decade long sieges.

    These tin pot legal eagles ignore that the original warrant is unique to this case, they ignore that Sweden, when challenged to show that a similar case existed, conceded that the prosecution was a singularity and without one precedent. Not to mention that, in Sweden, since the original indictment, immigrant non-citizens have raped underage girls and have been freed without serving a day…the contrast is glaring and without precedent.

    These tin pot legal eagles ignore that Assange sought refuge [and was granted diplomatic immunity], not to avoid a prosecution to a charge that would be laughable to all but the most hypocritical of zealots but, to evade a secret indictment, in a country that has now declared it’s laws supreme in all countries, that all people of the globe are subject it’s laws and secret trials.

    And all this is done to obscure the fact that Hillary lost the effing election because she was too lazy to get off her fat ass and campaign in WI, MI & PA. Centuries of legal rights thrown under the bus because some corrupt & copious medusa went too far in showing her fangs to the common people all the while displaying obsequious obedience to the elitists who have enriched themselves at the expense of hardworking people.

  52. Daniel

    Assange is no hero. Remember when Wikileaks posted (fake) documents online a decade ago saying that Steve Jobs had died of HIV, not pancreatic cancer? Assange was a failed hacker chasing fame and women, not a journalistic messiah. The fact that some of the documents he blasted out onto the web were in the public interest does not absolve him.

  53. Jeff Martin

    Ian, I’m not upset that you said Assange isn’t a nice guy. I’ve never given a shit one way or the other about his character, because the issues surrounding Wikileaks, government secrecy, American foreign policy, and so forth, are all structural in nature, and not primarily matters of whether person X is a nice guy, or person Z is a nice woman. Hillary wasn’t. But her horridness wasn’t the problem with her; the problem was her track record of horrific policies fully in line with the ingrained interests of factions deeply burrowed into the structures of American government, maybe fully fused with it. A focus on personalities is a hallmark of small minds.

    What pisses me off is the effete and legalistic proceduralist moralism people are spewing. “Oh, the law says this, and authorities try to enforce it impartially, and even if they don’t, it’s such an important ideal…” Blah blah blah. I’m tired of throwing up in my mouth while reading that sort of nonsense in comment threads. It’s not true; it has never been true; and it will never be true at any time during my life. It is the fallacy of the law’s majesty: the law, in its majesty, forbids the small and the great alike to do X, Y, or Z. No. The law is only ever enforced upon the weak, and the worst violations of the law by the great and their servants go unpunished. So Assange “should answer for jumping bail & etc.”; but not even the fucking Blackhawk jockeys who lit up civilians on a Baghdad street corner, and double-tapped the medics, have faced, or will ever face justice for their crimes. And the architects of the Iraq War would not face justice in a thousand lifetimes in actually-existing America, and everyone knows it. So, yeah, I’m pissed at those who, like Clinton with welfare deform, or Obama with the bailouts, can only, in this case, punch down: Assange jumped bail or something, so nail him, because the law is the law; as for the whole vile apparatus of American power and its misdeeds, meh – in fact, that apparatus should punish Assange, because The Law.

    Trusting American institutions with justice is like trusting Theodore McCarrick with your sons.

  54. 1DQ

    Not a fan of Riverdaughter, but she posted a withering broadside against the bizarre Swedish charges.

    (It′s worth noting that the only material evidence ever submitted — the alleged broken condom — turned out to be bogus. Funny how many Assange accusers overlook that minor detail.)

  55. nihil obstet

    Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Solicitor General 1938 – 1940, U.S. Attorney General 1940 – 1941, U.S. Supreme Court 1941 -1954, U.S. Chief Counsel at Nuremberg trials (on leave of absence from Supreme Court) said on prosecuting offenses:

    If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants.

    Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.

    In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.

    It’s hard to read what Justice Jackson said about the “abuse of prosecuting power” without seeing that prosecuting Assange for jumping bail is abuse.

  56. Ché Pasa

    @Brennan

    If your argument is correct, let it be tested in court. Except your argument (re: Assange as political prisoner) is not correct, at least not yet. In fact it’s laughable.

    He has largely made himself a “political prisoner” by his refusal to answer in court or even to investigators the charges against him and dramatically running away first to a supporter’s house in Britain, then to the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he found it meet to insult and defame his hosts. Asylum was withdrawn and Metropolitan police extracted him to face the court. He had seven years of “diplomatic immunity” which was granted and extended as a courtesy — which he repeatedly abused.

    I’m not surprised that the current government of Ecuador didn’t take kindly to his behavior. I also question the granting of asylum in the first place as his overwrought fear of a secret indictment in the US — which apparently did exist and which he apparently knew about though it was so very, very secret — never put him in the kind of jeopardy he constantly yowled about: rendition, torture, disappearance, even execution. We’ve seen the formerly secret indictment. Nothing in it is even remotely tied to the kind of activity that might have led to those consequences. It is not an indictment for publishing forbidden materials. It is not even close to an indictment for terrorism or anything like that. It is an indictment for conspiracy to hack a government computer which may or may not be provable in court (I suspect not). But that’s what trials and appeals are for.

    The motivation to seek his indictment and extradition may well be the fact that he published the material he received from Manning. I happen to think it’s a lot more complicated than that. But whatever the case, he is not charged with publishing and won’t be. The conspiracy charge is — or should be — fairly easy to beat especially with the team of lawyers he has. But there is a good likelihood that British courts will not agree to his extradition — even if the May government tries to intervene. So his trial in the US for conspiracy likely won’t happen.

    Until now, Assange has demanded complete immunity from any prosecution for anything. The law is not to apply to him in any way.

    This is not the way to achieve his objectives — as he is finding out. 

  57. capelin

    what have any of you side-with-power apologist cheerleaders done that even comes close to a fraction of the bravery, tangible difference, and price paid, by any of these wikileaks folks?

    yeah, i thought so. nice blood-soaked pom-poms though.

    half the commentators i used to have respect for on this site have shown their true colours.

    which is about the only useful thing that comes out of these sad, sad proceedings.

  58. capelin

    from the chris hedges article:

    “WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization.”

  59. S Brennan

    While it’s not worth dealing with our ever present hipster “Ché” and his banal sophistry, Daniel’s wretched attempt at the villainous art is worthy of rebuttal, below in the Wikileaks link “Daniel” is exposed as a common con artist of low faculty.

    https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_purported_HIV_medical_status_results,_2008

  60. the pair

    again: saying \”oh i just mentioned it cuz other folks did\” and \”i only said he\’s \’not nice\’ based on what i heard second or third hand\” is bringing that garbage into the discussion where it has zero place.

    the entire case against assange is in the court of public opinion. from the stupid \”bail jumping\” charge that landed him in the embassy (6 to 7 years of house arrest for not showing up to court seems a bit steep while we\’re on the subject) to the – sorry, screeching hipster feminists and their ilk – highly questionable accusations in sweden to the 2010 charges getting a \”reboot\” this week: it\’s all crap. steaming crap. and yet crap that could get him tortured and possibly killed.

    so we have the \”he\’s not nice\” and \”he\’s a smelly weirdo\” and the \”he wanders the streets of sweden with his fly open like an ivory haired jack the ripper\” arguments. they\’re just stupid rumors and ad hominem feces flung by simians who resent seeing an actual journalist with actual spine.

    and while i\’m reminding whoever reads reads this what adults think: anyone can tell a second anyone a third anyone is anything. rapist. jerk. WITCH! that doesn\’t make it true. maybe your \”friends\” are the actual worthless pricks. maybe they resent seeing someone they dislike in the spotlight because they have mommy/daddy issues. in any case, it\’s superfluous wank and should be left out completely.

    decent writing otherwise. turns out people can be annoying humans and still do good work. let the irony of that sink in.

  61. different clue

    @1DQ,

    Yes, she did. I think I remember it. I will risk standing by my current prediction now. If she writes the same sort of withering broadside against taking of Assange and the prospective extraditing of Assange to the US, then I will stand proven wrong.

    ( Though an interesting caveat occurs to me . . . . if she objects to Assange going to face Trump’s Dept. of Justice because it would go ” too easy” on Assange; that would not be defending Assange or supporting fairness for Assange or support for leaking emails that we were better off knowing about).

  62. clemetra

    Assange’s explicitly stated goal is to provoke great power tension through the release of information. If Judith Miller is to be condemned for her stenography and Hillary Clinton for her self-serving sabre rattling, so is Assange. The only reasons people like Assange is because he’s effective at weaponizing blame.

  63. Ché Pasa

    @n.o.

    Justice Jackson is describing how prosecutorial discretion and disparate justice worked in his day as it largely still does. But he errs in individualizing it when in fact it did and does apply to whole classes of people who are seen by the (in)justice system as intrinsically criminal — while other classes are largely absolved and immune.

    What’s happening in the Assange case — and why, I believe, there is such outrage over it among his defenders — is that the standards of injustice routinely applied to the Lower Orders are being applied to a high-status individual who they deem unworthy of this treatment — largely because of his status in their minds.

    To those engaged in attempting to prosecute him, however, he has no status, and I’m sure they believe they are going very lightly on him compared to what they could do. This is a typical attitude of prosecutors who have to cycle through hundreds of cases of low status criminals every day. They could be much harsher than they are.

    Would you say that prosecution for skipping bail is an abuse and wrong in the case of a low status individual? It happens every day in almost every jurisdiction. It is one reason why so many are incarcerated. It happens even when the underlying charges are dismissed.

    Assange has been specifically targeted IMHO because he’s a wild card who’s been thumbing his nose at a faction of the power structure he clearly despises and seeks to destroy. He is therefore seen as a danger to be suppressed. My own sense from the beginning of his notoriety is that there is a good deal more going on here than we know. But that aside, his prosecution is seen by his opponents as a matter of necessity “if the rule of law is to mean anything at all.”

    We’ll see what happens, but my sense is that his prosecutors want more than anything for him to just go away. That’s why I think they won’t do anything to martyr him. It’s very hard to make a martyr of anyone given a suspended sentence for bail jumping, for example. Somewhat the same with the extradition request. The answer is — or should be — “No.” Because again, if he’s extradited to stand trial in the US he becomes a martyr to his fans. Let alone what would happen if he were actually tried in the US. Of course they could do it anyway. But they do have discretion, and who knows, maybe a tiny bit of wisdom.

    We’ll see.

  64. nihil obstet

    @d.c.

    Would you say that prosecution for skipping bail is an abuse and wrong in the case of a low status individual?

    YES!!!

    The carceral state is totally wrong. There is a good move underway to end bail altogether because it simply means that a poor person who is accused languishes in jail prior to conviction while a rich person walks out.

  65. Mark Pontin

    Che Pasa wrote: ‘But they do have discretion, and who knows, maybe a tiny bit of wisdom.’

    As regards the latter, you overestimate current Washington elites. When it’s not about enriching themselves, it’s about their own power and demonstrating it ‘pour encourager les autres’. They neither know nor can conceive of anything else.

    Forex –

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2019/apr/12/hillary-clinton-julian-assange-must-answer-for-what-he-has-done-video

  66. I agree that Assange should not be extradited, and his personal niceness aside, Assange was playing at a political level at which you really can’t survive without some sort of sufficiently powerful backer. All such, he went out of his way to alienate. You really can’t be “equal opportunity, everyone is fair game” at that level. Basically, he lost the game when he lost American liberals.

  67. S Brennan

    Today’s “Liberal” speak: ” You really can’t be “equal opportunity, everyone is fair game” at that level.”

    “Liberal” Translation: “either you are with us or…against us”

    That’s the same thinking that makes right right-wing fascists wet their pants with joy.

    Today’s freedom of choice? Hitler or Stalin? YOU MAKE THE CALL!

    Today’s “liberal” isn’t a liberal, far from it, just a tyrannical steel blade cloaked beneath the satin sheath of ornamental rhetoric.

  68. paintedjaguar

    All these idiotic comments about facing the music and due process… with the whole weight of the lawless US and allied interests arrayed against one. If I were Assange I wouldn’t be worrying about going to court, I’d be thinking along the lines of “suicide” or small aircraft accidents. No I am NOT making a joke.

  69. different clue

    I have just run across a video by left wing you tube commentator Jimmy Dore about the Assange expulsion-seizure and arrest. He starts by featuring a clip of Tucker Carlson noting that Assange has broken precisely zero laws in his acquired-material releasing and publicising. He notes that the Fox News audience is now more well and better informed about Assange than is the Liberal MSM audience. He goes on from there. His style is very loud and linear and repetitive. But the video is worth watching. Here it is.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwC_1Pf9VQ

  70. cripes

    Given the long history–from slavery to jim crow to Red Scares, union busting, “expert” forensic frauds, mass warrant-less body searches and, let’s not forget, the worlds largest Gulag built on massive over-charging, brutal plea bargains and sentencing and no trials, the faith I see here in American Justice is beyond naive.

    Given that “at least 54 governments reportedly participated in the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition program” faith in the integrity of the UK or any other country’s justice regarding US demands is similarly incredible.

    Considering obama’s war on press “leaks” — “During the Obama administration, the Department of Justice brought charges against eight people accused of leaking to the media — Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden.” more than in the entire prior history of the 1917 espionage act, tells us all we need to know that the Pentagon Papers day is long gone.

    In short, the UK is likely to do what the US tells it to do and the US is likely to make Assange a martyr or not according to their calculation of what serves their interests and power, procedure and precedent be damned.

    At least we can all agree that Hillary’s Hordes baying for Assange’s crucifixion to avenge their loser queen is a contemptible display of the fetid retainer class’s bloodlust and impotence.

    Trump, who I expect was largely out of the loop on this one, may yet find a way to make them looks like the fools they are once again.

  71. That’s the same thinking that makes right right-wing fascists wet their pants with joy.

    Today’s freedom of choice? Hitler or Stalin? YOU MAKE THE CALL!

    Today’s “liberal” isn’t a liberal, far from it, just a tyrannical steel blade cloaked beneath the satin sheath of ornamental rhetoric.

    *shrug* People get angry when you impose perceived costs upon them that they didn’t agree to bear. If affirmative action and identity politics are supposed to alienate white males, and their anger at this is not to be taken as a sign of collective bad character, the same should apply to Hillary-supporting American liberals, who were robbed of their “loser queen” as cripes put it, or the first female president, however you see it. And for what? (The theory of Trump as some sort of less warlike president is not bearing fruit, what might be a hiatus in foreign interventions is gradually resolving itself merely into a pivot towards a greater state of belligerence towards Iran etc.)

    Assange is still in the UK and may yet wriggle out of it. Perhaps they will send him to Sweden and drag out his prosecution under Sweden’s feminist ethics-inspired concept of sexual crime, maybe even long enough for the US establishment to move on to other things or to find other uses for him. It’s not “tyrannical” to say that you need political allies when you are in a weak position and acting against the state apparatus. If he *is* eventually extradited to the USA, even Chelsea Manning will be in a better position than him.

  72. Trump, who I expect was largely out of the loop on this one, may yet find a way to make them looks like the fools they are once again.

    “If only the czar knew!”

  73. Ché Pasa

    “If only the czar knew!”

    It’s hilarious — not in a good way — to witness the cognitive dissonance among Trump fans at the Assange spectacle. Many seemed to believe that his indictment and arrest was all Hillary’s doing. Trump couldn’t have been involved. As we all know, Hillary actually runs the government with an iron fist from her Chappaqua garage or basement. Or wherever.

    Trump expressed his undying love for Assange and WikiLeaks over and over and over again, and FOX continues to promote the notion that Assange is blameless as a baby lamb, and so Assange’s persecution could ONLY be the work of Hillary and her deep state minions. Trump would never do something like this. And he would stop it if he knew. Now he claims not to know Assange or WikiLeaks. Not his “thing.” Never was.

    In the former Soviet Union, the party line could and often did change in a twinkling, opposite land was routine. And they say it was actually surprisingly easy to accept an opposite line to the one the state propaganda had delivered only the day before. But the people’s innate cynicism at anything the government said only grew and grew until nothing was believed, nothing was true, nothing was false, and nothing mattered.

    We’re not quite there yet, but getting there seems like a very smooth path from here.

  74. Z

    This is a hilarious Jimmy Dore episode with a mainstream NY Times reporter:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS-sxJFn6O0

    Z

  75. S Brennan

    For the very few who still judge a case on the merits, for the few left on this board that can manage a trace of intellectual honesty…for the few that are not DNC hacks. I leave this link at the bottom of my comment.

    WARNING: Not for DNC hacks who insist that a sondergericht*, will enlighten or, more pathetically, result in a rough approximation of justice.

    *The 3rd Riech’s version of our N. Virginia based secretive, extra-constitutional courts, where neither evidence or arguments are publicly presented.
    =============================================================

    “The Justice Department wanted a deal and made on offer to Assange. But intervention from then FBI director Comey sabotaged it”:

    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/394036-How-Comey-intervened-to-kill-Wikileaks-immunity-deal

  76. cripes

    Mandos:

    I was pointing out that your faith in the integrity of american “justice” is both laughable and indefensible.

    Not only did I spend the bulk of my comment detailing Obama’s service to the intelligence czars in his attack on press freedom and the public’s right to know the crimes of their government, but it is a historical fact Hillary pushed him into the the Libya debacle he was initially reluctant to engage.

    The “Liberal” penchant for wars of aggression cloaked in humanitarian interventions is well-known featuring Samantha Power and Victoria Nuland/Robert Kagan, et al.

    Inept, ignorant and small-minded as Trump is, the hypocrisy and venality of liberal warmongers allowed him to position himself as the anti-war candidate and contributed substantially to his victory for which we can blame the Hillary faction and, since you persist in defending it, you. The Podesta emails showed the role Hillary’s campaign had in promoting Trump as their preferred republican candidate. Who’s the Trump fan now?

    He barely understands what Wikileaks is and his statements now that he doesn’t know much about them are as as accurate as his previous comments that he loves them for releasing hillary’s emails. He views everything from the perspective of how it benefits him personally.

    You have degenerated into a standard-issue defender of liberal war criminals, whose first reflex to well-founded criticism from the left is to falsely shout “Trumper” in a burning theater. Next, you’ll tell us we can’t criticize the warmonger liberals because Supreme Court!

    Most of all, this kind of smoke-blowing obscures the central fact: wikileaks and all other efforts to shed light on the conduct of our very un-democratic spook agencies, war crimes, vote-rigging or droning need to be defended.

  77. Hugh

    cripes, I understand your anger, but my take is different. I do think Clinton wanted to run against Trump because she perceived him to be the weakest candidate, but 1) she always had the biggest tin ear in American politics (it was simply incomprehensible to her how widely and deeply she was disliked. Still her campaign would have been the same regardless of who the Republican candidate was: you must vote for me because Trump or whomever), and 2) she had very little say in his choice. Trump was chosen by the Republican base because, unlike the Democrats, the Republicans, to the chagrin of their leaders, had a much more open and democratic candidate selection process. 3) It is hard to reconcile Clinton being the deep state’s choice with Comey, a Republican, dropping his last minute and highly irregular memo on the FBI’s Clinton investigation while there was also a Trump investigation at the time. While you could argue that the Trump probe was ongoing and that the FBI did not comment on ongoing investigations, this doesn’t get to why Comey felt he could act inappropriately with regard to Clinton but not Trump, or why he didn’t just hold off on both until after the election. Even so, Clinton did get nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, horrendous candidate and person that she is, and it was mostly a fluke, not Russian interference, that caused her to lose in the electoral college.

    I view our ruling classes as filled with liars and black hats. This does not mean that the liars lie all the time or that the black hats are all the same, or that they are consistent or don’t make mistakes. The choice between Clinton and Trump was always a false one. Either way someone from our ruling classes won. Either way we were screwed. The how and where are different under Trump. The take on the wars is different, but the wars don’t really end. The names just change. Trump is not liked by a lot of our ruling class, but he still delivers for them where it counts. He is still very much a part of them. They could remove him if they wanted to, but the key point is they don’t want to. The rationales vary, but with such a flagrant in your face whackjob as Trump is, if they wanted Trump gone, he would be.

  78. I was pointing out that your faith in the integrity of american “justice” is both laughable and indefensible.

    It’s a rather unexpected reading of what I wrote to say that I was expressing “faith” in the “integrity of American ‘justice'” — when I am literally saying that Assange needs political friends in order to evade a system that is out to get him, and that he may not have enough of them.

    Inept, ignorant and small-minded as Trump is, the hypocrisy and venality of liberal warmongers allowed him to position himself as the anti-war candidate and contributed substantially to his victory for which we can blame the Hillary faction and, since you persist in defending it, you. The Podesta emails showed the role Hillary’s campaign had in promoting Trump as their preferred republican candidate. Who’s the Trump fan now?

    On this topic, people lose the ability to make distinctions. I am not “defending” the Hillary faction *ritual declaration that she was a bad candidate*, merely pointing out that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. You can only blame Clinton supporters for being angry at Assange to the extent that you can blame white males for being angry at attempts to rectify identity-based imbalances. I presume we are at least as excited against the structural inequalities that millions face due to their personal background, sometimes with life or death consequences, as we are against the life of imprisonment that Julian Assange may face.

    He barely understands what Wikileaks is and his statements now that he doesn’t know much about them are as as accurate as his previous comments that he loves them for releasing hillary’s emails. He views everything from the perspective of how it benefits him personally.

    I tire of speculation over whether Trump personally or Obama personally or whoever personally is stupid or evil or venal or whatever. The czar is the office in the political context of the system, not the person inhabiting it. What surrounds Trump is John Bolton, Jared Kushner, and other malefactors. They are almost inevitably what you got when some Americans decided that Trump is somehow the “anti-war” candidate, despite the clear evidence from the Republican party that it continues to be the party of the Iraq war. Here, Hugh is right.

  79. S Brennan

    Mandos constantly uses misleading”quotes” to make fallacious arguments.

    For example, above with me, he quotes my ENTIRE post EXCEPT the ONE SENTENCE which was the point of the post. The sentence mildly castigates Mandos for repackaging Bush’s call to fascism, “either you are with us or against us” when Mandos says:

    “You really can’t be “equal opportunity, everyone is fair game” at that level.” – Mandos

    This Mandos’s justifications for either imprisoning Assange for life or, his execution. Mandos’s endorsement of tyranny is for Assange having the impertinence to display the manifestly corrupt machinations of those people who stole the Democratic party from it’s working class affiliation. Something Mandos and many others wildly approve of.

    Whether Mandos is one of DNC’s legions of hacks or just a useful tool I do not know but, he is one or the other.

    Ignore Mandos quotes, they intended to deceive and misguide, they are untruthful representations.

  80. Cripes

    It was Mandos that wrote ” if only the Czar knew!” and Che Pasa that wrote about “Trump fans” cognitive dissonance in response to my remarks. I conflated my reply without noting Che Pasa’s fetishism with procedural law as of that’s really a constraint on the actions of the intelligence state and their well-documented alliance with the DNC/Clinton/Obama racket.
    It’s not.
    Neither does criticism of the liberal record of illegal wars and human rights violations and repression of the press and the Peoples Right to Know in any way suggest support for Trump.
    It isn’t.
    Indeed I blame the liberals 40-year drift to the right and failure to offer any alternative to militarism abroad and corporate rapine at home for it. The imperfect Sanders has shown what the electorate can do when alternatives are offered. Unfortunately, they were forced to choose between Clinton and Trump. We know the results. We also know a hundred million chose correctly by not voting at all.

    In any case I see no conditions under which we should not always support disclosure of military, corporate, and government malfeasance. Period. And I don’t really give a damn how they get it.

  81. Cripes

    Hugh:

    I’m not so sure that
    “she had very little say in his choice.” It was precisely to have her allies in the mainstream media give Trump constant exposure on their Networks that the Podesta emails revealed

    You are certainly correct though, that “unlike the Democrats, the Republicans, to the chagrin of their leaders, had a much more open and democratic candidate selection process.” Which should be yet another state through the heart to the Corpus of liberal corruption.

  82. Alright, I will quote you in full:

    Mandos constantly uses misleading”quotes” to make fallacious arguments.

    For example, above with me, he quotes my ENTIRE post EXCEPT the ONE SENTENCE which was the point of the post. The sentence mildly castigates Mandos for repackaging Bush’s call to fascism, “either you are with us or against us” when Mandos says:

    “You really can’t be “equal opportunity, everyone is fair game” at that level.” – Mandos

    I cannot read your mind and guess that you meant that to be the “ONE SENTENCE which was the point of the post.” It seemed to me instead to be a rather picayune and non sequitur taunt, a deliberate worst-possible misreading of what I had written, so I attempted to salvage what I could of it, and respond to the more general point about liberal tyrannical reaction/overreaction.

    It is merely a description of reality that the politics of espionage and leaking of state secrets is one in which one needs allies, and therefore needs to be selective about who you support or oppose. What this has to do with a crudely normative Bushian “with us or against us” is quite beyond my meagre intepretive ability.

    This Mandos’s justifications for either imprisoning Assange for life or, his execution. Mandos’s endorsement of tyranny is for Assange having the impertinence to display the manifestly corrupt machinations of those people who stole the Democratic party from it’s working class affiliation. Something Mandos and many others wildly approve of.

    Whether Mandos is one of DNC’s legions of hacks or just a useful tool I do not know but, he is one or the other.

    Ignore Mandos quotes, they intended to deceive and misguide, they are untruthful representations.

    I have really no idea what you’re talking about here. I “justified” nothing, merely pointed out Assange’s strategic error.

  83. S Brennan

    “I “justified” nothing, merely pointed out Assange’s strategic error.” – Mandos

    And that error was….

    ….not to conform to Bush/Cheney’s dictum “either you are with us or…against us” but, spoken on behalf of the DNC in regard to Assange’s release of emails that “display the manifestly corrupt machinations of those people who stole the Democratic party”

  84. “I “justified” nothing, merely pointed out Assange’s strategic error.” – Mandos

    And that error was….

    ….not to conform to Bush/Cheney’s dictum “either you are with us or…against us” but, spoken on behalf of the DNC in regard to Assange’s release of emails that “display the manifestly corrupt machinations of those people who stole the Democratic party”

    No. Bush’s call for unquestioning loyalty is not the same as a suggestion that Assange should not have opened wars on too many fronts simultaneously. You are drawing an equivalence where none exists, for reasons that are hard to fathom.

  85. Sid Finster

    Even if we pretended that Assange were really a “cutout for Russian intelligence”, we now know that no Russian person or institution ever must express an opinion or release information concerning a United States election or politician, lest some innocent American overhear and be led astray.

    UK people and institutions can be trusted, however. Saudi people and institutions? They practically own us.

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