Julian Assange Arrested for Violating Bail

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.

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.

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…

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/

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.”

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.

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/

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

@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. 

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.”

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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

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

Z

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.