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I supposed it's possible but the CIA would have to be pretty reckless. When I said high level people I was thinking their Secretary of State or higher. Becaus

I supposed it's possible but the CIA would have to be pretty reckless. When I said high level people I was thinking their Secretary of State or higher. Because if the CIA (or whoever in the US government) is trying to use another country's legal system to frame someone that would be considered the conducting operations on foreign soil. That's very much against International Law without getting the permission of the Swedish State Department. So if they did that without the very highest levels of government being involved they'd be risking a very public international incident plus they'd be cutting themselves off from ever being able to impeach Assange's credibility in the future (because once you have a verified attempt to discredit him in such a manner no one's ever going to believe a claim against him again). Again I'm sure it's possible but it just seems too reckless to be plausible to me.

ryoshu 16y ago
There are 21 arrest warrants for suspected CIA operatives that kidnapped someone in Italy: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4297966.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4297966.stm
- rdtsc 16y ago
  Exactly. After all these years people still defend the CIA with the phrase "This is so low they couldn't have possibly done it."
- tptacek 16y ago
  There are 21 convictions of CIA operatives in Italy. They were convicted for capturing Abu Omar and delivering him to Egypt in 2003. This happened at the height of the US/Middle East conflict (before major combat started in Iraq). Abu Omar was a prominent member of Jamaat Islamiya, a peer organization of Egyption Islamic Jihad, a group publicly affiliated with "al Qaeda" (probably more for PR purposes, though) and a group led in part by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who coordinated the first bombing of the WTC. Julian Assange is not a leader of a violent Islamist movement. We are not at war with Julian Assange. No foreign policy objective is accomplished by kidnapping him off the streets of Sweden or Iceland or wherever he is now. I don't want to sound (too much) like I'm advocating for the capture of alleged terrorists off western city streets. That's not my point. My point is this: do I believe that the CIA might try to kidnap or kill someone they believe to be a key figure in a bona fide "terrorist" (ie: organized, violent, competently armed, transnational militant Islamist) organization? Absolutely. Does that mean kidnapping is S.O.P. for the CIA any time anybody antagonizes the US? Ralph Nader better watch his ass, then; third-party left-wing candidates pose a greater danger to the current administration.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    Julian Assange is not a leader of a violent Islamist movement Interestingly enough, it seems that neither is Abu Omar. After rendering him to Egypt where the secret police tortured him for a few years (electric shocks to the genitals, rape, beatings, the usual), an Egyptian court finally freed him declaring that there was no evidence against him. So, to recap: the CIA kidnapped a guy and delivered him to the Egyptian secret police for torture. But even in an insanely corrupt dictatorship like Egypt, where prosecutors have, um, very wide discretion let us say, they couldn't get any charges to stick. Including association with a terrorist organization, which is a serious crime under Egyptian law. So as far as we know, there's no reason to believe this guy has ever done anything wrong. I mean, if a police state like Egypt can't manage to find (or concoct) something, anything with which to convict him, how dangerous can he be? And if he's not actually dangerous, then sending 20-odd CIA agents to kidnap him and render him for torture seems kind of crazy....My point is: the CIA sometimes acts in ways that make very little sense on the outside. Would it make sense for them to kill Assange? No, it would be insane. But this isn't an organization that has historically demonstrated an overabundance of sanity. I doubt they're trying to kill him, but arguments premised on CIA sanity seem...rather weak.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      It was not insane to kidnap Abu Omar. From what I can tell, it was coldly rational and warranted in a cost/benefit sense, based on the evidence available to the government at the time. Should the CIA have kidnapped him? No. We can see one strong argument against extrajudicial detention and exfiltration right here: it puts us on a slippery slope, where we have to take pains to argue about why we might kidnap a "terrorist" ("ah, but what's a terrorist! it's whatever you say it is, righ!"... sigh), but wouldn't kidnap a free-speech activist. You can present no evidence that the "CIA" or any other agency in the US government is plotting the kidnap, murder, or even the propaganda-based discrediting of Julian Assange. All you can do is posit that something like that might happen, and sit back waiting for everyone else on the message board to try to prove the negative. Isn't that fun?
      - 16y ago
rdtsc 16y ago
> Because if the CIA (or whoever in the US government) is trying to use another country's legal system to frame someone that would be considered the conducting operations on foreign soil. CIA has been doing that and worse for many years. Look at South America for example. "Using another country's legal system" is just child's play compared to training assassins, installing brutal dictators, and overthrowing democratically elected governments. > they'd be risking a very public international incident Rendition flights in Europe, the rape of South America, torture, and assassinations, training terrorists didn't phase them. Do you really think they'll back down in front of the Swedish press. They can launch their own PR campaign in the US media to protect their image, they certainly have the funds for that. > CIA would have to be pretty reckless Sometimes that would be appropriate as well. Some campaigns are designed to intimidate and make it circumstantially obvious what it is, while still officially maintaining their distance from the case.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Do I believe that the "CIA" might arrange to have a head of state or key political actor killed --- in circumstances where the likelihood of such a figure being killed was already nonzero --- if doing so would help tip the foreign policy of an entire region of the world in a US-friendly direction? Absolutely. But Julian Assange is not Salvador Allende. The US can't even figure out how to assassinate key military adversaries based on Baluchistan, one of the most violent and contentious areas in the world. The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence. I reply to comments like this not because I'm a great believer in US intelligence and foreign policy (I'm not) and not because I'm a philosophical opponent to Wikileaks (though I am). I reply because my nerdy brain just can't accept notions as wrongheaded as the idea that Assange is important enough to merit "executive action". I'd be shocked and offended --- not on moral grounds but on practical grounds --- if there had been a single executive order with Assange's name on it.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    The US can't even figure out how to assassinate key military adversaries based on Baluchistan, one of the most violent and contentious areas in the world. I'm not sure this is relevant. Life in Baluchistan is not nearly as amenable to government surveillance as life in Sweden. And besides, I'd say that the US government is pretty skillful at killing people with drones by the point. Not always the people they meant to kill.... The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence. One thing that has surprised me is the degree to which people in the US national security community believe that organizations can be stopped by killing the right leader. It seems like a case of "if all you have is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail" -- we're good at killing individuals but pretty clueless when it comes to understanding mass movements let alone engaging with them or changing their incentives. For example, there was a lot of internal resistance behind backing the Anwar Awakening in Iraq as opposed to continuing the status quo of killing insurgency leaders. So I agree with you: killing Assange would do nothing to stop WikiLeaks. But I'm not sure that understanding is commonly held in the national security bureaucracy.
earl 16y ago
Seriously? I really don't understand how someone can be an adult and not understand the CIA is reckless. One can just start with the Bay of Pigs, or Allende, or hell, all of South America for the last 40 years. Or Iraq's WMD. Or black prisons in E Europe. Or waterboarding. Or illegal renditions.

ryoshu 16y ago

There are 21 arrest warrants for suspected CIA operatives that kidnapped someone in Italy: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4297966.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4297966.stm

rdtsc 16y ago
Exactly. After all these years people still defend the CIA with the phrase "This is so low they couldn't have possibly done it."
tptacek 16y ago
There are 21 convictions of CIA operatives in Italy. They were convicted for capturing Abu Omar and delivering him to Egypt in 2003. This happened at the height of the US/Middle East conflict (before major combat started in Iraq). Abu Omar was a prominent member of Jamaat Islamiya, a peer organization of Egyption Islamic Jihad, a group publicly affiliated with "al Qaeda" (probably more for PR purposes, though) and a group led in part by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who coordinated the first bombing of the WTC. Julian Assange is not a leader of a violent Islamist movement. We are not at war with Julian Assange. No foreign policy objective is accomplished by kidnapping him off the streets of Sweden or Iceland or wherever he is now. I don't want to sound (too much) like I'm advocating for the capture of alleged terrorists off western city streets. That's not my point. My point is this: do I believe that the CIA might try to kidnap or kill someone they believe to be a key figure in a bona fide "terrorist" (ie: organized, violent, competently armed, transnational militant Islamist) organization? Absolutely. Does that mean kidnapping is S.O.P. for the CIA any time anybody antagonizes the US? Ralph Nader better watch his ass, then; third-party left-wing candidates pose a greater danger to the current administration.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  Julian Assange is not a leader of a violent Islamist movement Interestingly enough, it seems that neither is Abu Omar. After rendering him to Egypt where the secret police tortured him for a few years (electric shocks to the genitals, rape, beatings, the usual), an Egyptian court finally freed him declaring that there was no evidence against him. So, to recap: the CIA kidnapped a guy and delivered him to the Egyptian secret police for torture. But even in an insanely corrupt dictatorship like Egypt, where prosecutors have, um, very wide discretion let us say, they couldn't get any charges to stick. Including association with a terrorist organization, which is a serious crime under Egyptian law. So as far as we know, there's no reason to believe this guy has ever done anything wrong. I mean, if a police state like Egypt can't manage to find (or concoct) something, anything with which to convict him, how dangerous can he be? And if he's not actually dangerous, then sending 20-odd CIA agents to kidnap him and render him for torture seems kind of crazy....My point is: the CIA sometimes acts in ways that make very little sense on the outside. Would it make sense for them to kill Assange? No, it would be insane. But this isn't an organization that has historically demonstrated an overabundance of sanity. I doubt they're trying to kill him, but arguments premised on CIA sanity seem...rather weak.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    It was not insane to kidnap Abu Omar. From what I can tell, it was coldly rational and warranted in a cost/benefit sense, based on the evidence available to the government at the time. Should the CIA have kidnapped him? No. We can see one strong argument against extrajudicial detention and exfiltration right here: it puts us on a slippery slope, where we have to take pains to argue about why we might kidnap a "terrorist" ("ah, but what's a terrorist! it's whatever you say it is, righ!"... sigh), but wouldn't kidnap a free-speech activist. You can present no evidence that the "CIA" or any other agency in the US government is plotting the kidnap, murder, or even the propaganda-based discrediting of Julian Assange. All you can do is posit that something like that might happen, and sit back waiting for everyone else on the message board to try to prove the negative. Isn't that fun?
    - 16y ago

rdtsc 16y ago

> Because if the CIA (or whoever in the US government) is trying to use another country's legal system to frame someone that would be considered the conducting operations on foreign soil. CIA has been doing that and worse for many years. Look at South America for example. "Using another country's legal system" is just child's play compared to training assassins, installing brutal dictators, and overthrowing democratically elected governments. > they'd be risking a very public international incident Rendition flights in Europe, the rape of South America, torture, and assassinations, training terrorists didn't phase them. Do you really think they'll back down in front of the Swedish press. They can launch their own PR campaign in the US media to protect their image, they certainly have the funds for that. > CIA would have to be pretty reckless Sometimes that would be appropriate as well. Some campaigns are designed to intimidate and make it circumstantially obvious what it is, while still officially maintaining their distance from the case.

tptacek 16y ago
Do I believe that the "CIA" might arrange to have a head of state or key political actor killed --- in circumstances where the likelihood of such a figure being killed was already nonzero --- if doing so would help tip the foreign policy of an entire region of the world in a US-friendly direction? Absolutely. But Julian Assange is not Salvador Allende. The US can't even figure out how to assassinate key military adversaries based on Baluchistan, one of the most violent and contentious areas in the world. The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence. I reply to comments like this not because I'm a great believer in US intelligence and foreign policy (I'm not) and not because I'm a philosophical opponent to Wikileaks (though I am). I reply because my nerdy brain just can't accept notions as wrongheaded as the idea that Assange is important enough to merit "executive action". I'd be shocked and offended --- not on moral grounds but on practical grounds --- if there had been a single executive order with Assange's name on it.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  The US can't even figure out how to assassinate key military adversaries based on Baluchistan, one of the most violent and contentious areas in the world. I'm not sure this is relevant. Life in Baluchistan is not nearly as amenable to government surveillance as life in Sweden. And besides, I'd say that the US government is pretty skillful at killing people with drones by the point. Not always the people they meant to kill.... The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence. One thing that has surprised me is the degree to which people in the US national security community believe that organizations can be stopped by killing the right leader. It seems like a case of "if all you have is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail" -- we're good at killing individuals but pretty clueless when it comes to understanding mass movements let alone engaging with them or changing their incentives. For example, there was a lot of internal resistance behind backing the Anwar Awakening in Iraq as opposed to continuing the status quo of killing insurgency leaders. So I agree with you: killing Assange would do nothing to stop WikiLeaks. But I'm not sure that understanding is commonly held in the national security bureaucracy.

earl 16y ago

Seriously? I really don't understand how someone can be an adult and not understand the CIA is reckless. One can just start with the Bay of Pigs, or Allende, or hell, all of South America for the last 40 years. Or Iraq's WMD. Or black prisons in E Europe. Or waterboarding. Or illegal renditions.