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and considering the public mood after a several year campaign to demonize Wikileaks and Assange by the US media, chances are pretty high that he will rot in a U

and considering the public mood after a several year campaign to demonize Wikileaks and Assange by the US media, chances are pretty high that he will rot in a US prison for life or have his ashes thrown into the sea the same way as they did with Osama bin Laden. The US is a terror state that uses torture and secret prisons. I hope that EU countries will stop extradition asap.

Crosseye_Jack 8y ago
> or have his ashes thrown into the sea the same way as they did with Osama bin Laden. The UK won't extradite if the death penality is on the cards. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/41/section/94 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/41/section/94
- techntoke 8y ago
  This is ridiculous. No one is talking about death penalty except people trying to inflame the situation.
  - alex_young 8y ago
    Tell that to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. We've executed for sharing secret documents before, and may again.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      The Rosenbergs weren't extradited from a country which would require a formal guarantee that the death penalty would not be used, so are not a relevant precedent.
      - thefounder 8y ago
        I bet the formal guarantee will be negotiable, especially when on the other end is the US. That's why UK has a special relationship after all. Assange would have been safer in Russia than UK for sure.
        umanwizard 8y ago
        It's not an unprecedented thing. Mexico forced the US to agree not to seek the death penalty for Joaquín Guzmán ("El Chapo") before extraditing him, and the US has kept to that agreement.
        Symbiote 8y ago
        If the US executed someone extradited from the UK, that would be the last person extradited from the UK to the US.
        Tomte 8y ago
        No, it isn't negotiable, by both the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.
        thefounder 8y ago
        And Trump cares deeply about both of them.
    - danso 8y ago
      The Rosenbergs were executed almost 70 years ago.
    - GVIrish 8y ago
      The Rosenbergs were executed for treason, not just sharing some secret documents. They actively spied for an adversary of the United States, recruited other spies, and stole some of the United States' most powerful secrets. The gravity of what Assange and Manning did doesn't compare to what the Rosenbergs did, which is why Manning didn't get a life sentence or death penalty, and why Assange won't either. Only way Assange ends up on the precipice of capital punishment is if he did far, far worse things than what has been revealed so far.
      - baybal2 8y ago
        Rosenburgs were not convicted for treason, but espionage. The judge convicting them worked along with the prosecutor on the bar to make sure that they got a clean cut, and more easily prosecutable charge of _espionage_ instead of original treason. But yes, his ultimate reason was his personal insecurity about seeing his fellow Jewish American giving the public even more reason to doubt the loyalty of Jewish Americans (given how all things were at the time...) Excerpt from wiki. > Kaufman is best remembered as the judge who presided over the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and imposed their controversial death sentences. Roy Cohn, one of the prosecutors in the case, claimed in his autobiography that his influence led to Kaufman's being appointed to the case, and that Kaufman had imposed the death penalty on Cohn's personal advice. This claim has not been verified, although it has been shown that after Kaufman learned that the FBI and Justice Department opposed death penalties in the case, he asked the prosecution to withhold its recommendation before issuing his death sentence. In his summing up Judge Irving Kaufman was considered by many to have been highly subjective: "Judge Kaufman tied the crimes the Rosenbergs were being accused of to their ideas and the fact that they were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. He stated that they had given the atomic bomb to the Russians, which had triggered Communist aggression in Korea resulting in over 50,000 American casualties. He added that, because of their treason, the Soviet Union was threatening America with an atomic attack and this made it necessary for the United States to spend enormous amounts of money to build underground bomb shelters." [5] Kaufman said that he had gone to synagogue to pray before issuing his death sentence; this enraged Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who later wrote to judge Learned Hand, "I despise a judge who feels God told him to impose a death sentence," and also told Hand that he was "mean enough" to stay on the court long enough to prevent Kaufman from having a chance to take Frankfurter's place in the so-called "Jewish seat" on the Court.[4][6]
  - antt 8y ago
    No one was talking about extradition until an hour ago either. Yet here we are.
    - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
      nobody talked about him losing his shelter in the embassy until Goldman Sachs puppet Moreno came into power, yet here we are. sorry I don't see your point.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        I think you're arguing the same "side"? GP was just referring to centrists' embarrassing goalpost relocation.
  - alexandercrohde 8y ago
    Eh, how can you know that? The US government has two contradictory personalities. A justice personality that is procedural and fair, and a military/spy personality that executes via drone and sets up Guantanamo. Since the latter seems to think it owes no explanation to anyone of whatever it does (and moreover tries to use courts to hide its mistakes after the fact), who are you to say that it's above executing?
    - isostatic 8y ago
      The latter group would have no qualms about assassinating anywhere, but they want it known that the U.S. punished Assange, not simply throw him under a bus.
    - GVIrish 8y ago
      The fact that Assange is being extradited not snatched via rendition means he is going to face the US justice system. He is being charged in Eastern District Virginia with conspiracy to commit computer hacking. If Assange just disappeared one day, then maybe worries that he is going to receive extrajudicial punishment or indefinite detention would be warranted.
  - SkyBelow 8y ago
    In the US they don't need to use the death penalty, they can just put him in certain prison situations where he will be killed. The US has a massively corrupt prison system.
  - rurban 8y ago
    There are many well known US members of congress and senate who promised to bring him to death. That was one of Assange lawyers arguments, until they all started dying suddenly.
    - rurban 8y ago
      The relevant US law with the death penalty is the Espionage Act from 1917, Section 704. It prohibits anyone from obtaining national defense–related information and making national defense–related information available to a foreign government. Due to this the UK is disallow to extradite him, because that are the exact allegations prominent US politicians and lawmakers accuse him of.
  - Miner49er 8y ago
    Trump has called for the death penalty for people working with/on Wikileaks. It's definitely a possibility.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  is this the case also for foreign nationals (e.g. Australians)? and in combination with terror laws and agreements[1] between UK/US (not just civil/criminal law)? I think if he does a little bit of time for jumping UK bail then the second he walks out from a UK prison the CIA will be all over abducting his ass. And he'll never be heard off again. I recall Hillary Clinton wasn't ashamed of suggesting "Can't we drone the guy?"* She and her ilk was considered a lot more moderate compared to the criminals in DC right now. [1] edit: never mind I found it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-wont-send-terrorists-to-their-death-9159131.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-wont-send-ter... - seems that prosecutors would have to play their cards right and just promise to give him life in prison instead. Spending the rest of his life in solitary isn't really much of a consolation.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > is this the case also for foreign nationals (e.g. Australians)? and in combination with terror laws and agreements between UK/US (not just civil/criminal law)? Extradition is based on criminal law, even if the offense is terrorism; and, yes, it's a matter of human rights law without exception. (That is not to say they might not do a covert rendition rather than an extradition with death on the table, but the fact that the formal process of extradition is being used means, with a high degree of certainty, that it will not go forward absent a formal guarantee that capital punishment is off the table.) > I recall Hillary Clinton wasn't ashamed of suggesting "Can't we drone the guy?"* She and her ilk was considered a lot more moderate compared to the criminals in DC right now. Perhaps in some general sense, but certainly not on the specific issue of WikiLeaks and Assange.
    - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
      thanks for clarifying this
    - crdoconnor 8y ago
      She almost certainly did say "can't we just drone this guy?" as a joke about assange. She later issued a non-denial denial about the rumor.
- hu3 8y ago
  They might just let him rot in Guantanamo instead of executting. I don't know which one is worse.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - beat 8y ago
    They almost certainly can't send him to Gitmo, if he's been extradited on formal charges. That puts him in the hands of the regular legal system. What makes Gitmo a special case is that it's an end-run around both American and international law... prisoners there aren't in the American legal system and subject to awkward rights like habeus corpus and fair trial, but likewise aren't prisoners of war and subject to the Geneva Convention (which calls for freeing enemy soldiers as quickly as possible unless they are being charged with war crimes for an international tribunal, which is highly unusual). This is why Gitmo is a shame on our national honor, but it also means Assange won't be going there.
qnsi 8y ago
Why would EU support Russian asset?
- rurban 8y ago
  First, Assange is certainly not a Russian asset. If, the Russian's would not had to face their publishing disasters they had with MacronGate and Gulliver 2. With Assange as their asset it would have been actually successful. Second, Russia is an european nation. With a corrupt and criminal leadership, yes, but not as frightening as the corrupt and criminal leadership in the US with actual offensive strategies and media dominance. Russia only interferes with its direct neighbors for centuries. The US interferes everywhere else. With aircraft carriers. Russia has no aircraft carriers. For selfdefense submarines are enough. Europe always tries to be friends with both, esp. since they rely on them for their exports (us) and gas (russia). Many russian assets happily live either in Vienna, Monaco or London. The russian narrative "workers rules" was quite successful over the fascist narrative "industry rules". There are legitimate friends of both factions.
  - clubm8 8y ago
    > Russia has no aircraft carriers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers#Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers#Russ...
criley2 8y ago
It's pretty shocking here to see pro-fascist comments like this which reward the Russian Intelligence operation called "Wikileaks" and its constant war against democracy, liberty and free elections in not just the U.S., but also Europe. Sometimes you have to wonder why folks this guy truly hate the U.S. and the West and side openly with mediocre spies involved in intelligence operations against his own home. But this is our reality: the new fascist right storming the world doesn't care about elections, democracy, liberty, or anything. I proudly stand against the rising tide of dictators and fascism and the intelligence war they operate against the free people of the world, a war in which Julian Assange proudly operated in on the side of fascist dictatorships. Our freedoms, our ability to conduct fair elections, our very ability to communicate is under concerted nation-state attack and if we do not rise to defend ourselves and our ability to associate like we do, we will lose it. It is already on life-support. We are losing it in real time.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Honestly, either side of this argument feels like attempts at manipulation to me. The end result is that it is becoming harder to trust any statement, not really what we want either.
  - tomstockmail 8y ago
    >The end result is that it is becoming harder to trust any statement, not really what we want either. This is a tactic in itself. I can't find the details behind it, but the act of so much misinformation at once that helps drowned out more factual news while simultaneously making it so that you don't believe what you're reading. It's not a new tactic, but it's well used.
    - criley2 8y ago
      Ironically, it's a famous Russian propaganda tactic that is in heavy use in Russian propaganda and the subsequently nearly identical Wikileaks propaganda that follows. This tactic played heavily with Russia's troll farms on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. It also played heavily in Wikileaks propaganda on twitter and other platforms. For me to be accused of the exact evil that Wikileaks uses to manipulate its readers is very ironic, but this kind of dishonest "projection" of accusing the other side of committing your own crimes is precisely the standard operating procedure for far-right propaganda.
bogomipz 8y ago
>"and considering the public mood after a several year campaign to demonize Wikileaks and Assange by the US media" The "public mood"? Seriously? That's a pretty ridiculous phrase. There is no "public mood" in the US about Julian Assange. In fact outside of today's news cycle he's barely been mentioned. Wikileaks itself has been mentioned mostly as part of Mueller investigation stories but there's not been much about Assange personally in years.
dang 8y ago
Would you stop taking HN threads further into political flamewar? This is not helpful. If you can't make your points without going over the top with fiery hyperbole, please don't post here. I appreciate your positive contributions to this site, but we've had to warn you about breaking the guidelines so often that if you keep doing it we're going to ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632957 and marked it off-topic.

Crosseye_Jack 8y ago

> or have his ashes thrown into the sea the same way as they did with Osama bin Laden. The UK won't extradite if the death penality is on the cards. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/41/section/94 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/41/section/94

techntoke 8y ago
This is ridiculous. No one is talking about death penalty except people trying to inflame the situation.
- alex_young 8y ago
  Tell that to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. We've executed for sharing secret documents before, and may again.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    The Rosenbergs weren't extradited from a country which would require a formal guarantee that the death penalty would not be used, so are not a relevant precedent.
    - thefounder 8y ago
      I bet the formal guarantee will be negotiable, especially when on the other end is the US. That's why UK has a special relationship after all. Assange would have been safer in Russia than UK for sure.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        It's not an unprecedented thing. Mexico forced the US to agree not to seek the death penalty for Joaquín Guzmán ("El Chapo") before extraditing him, and the US has kept to that agreement.
      - Symbiote 8y ago
        If the US executed someone extradited from the UK, that would be the last person extradited from the UK to the US.
      - Tomte 8y ago
        No, it isn't negotiable, by both the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.
        thefounder 8y ago
        And Trump cares deeply about both of them.
  - danso 8y ago
    The Rosenbergs were executed almost 70 years ago.
  - GVIrish 8y ago
    The Rosenbergs were executed for treason, not just sharing some secret documents. They actively spied for an adversary of the United States, recruited other spies, and stole some of the United States' most powerful secrets. The gravity of what Assange and Manning did doesn't compare to what the Rosenbergs did, which is why Manning didn't get a life sentence or death penalty, and why Assange won't either. Only way Assange ends up on the precipice of capital punishment is if he did far, far worse things than what has been revealed so far.
    - baybal2 8y ago
      Rosenburgs were not convicted for treason, but espionage. The judge convicting them worked along with the prosecutor on the bar to make sure that they got a clean cut, and more easily prosecutable charge of _espionage_ instead of original treason. But yes, his ultimate reason was his personal insecurity about seeing his fellow Jewish American giving the public even more reason to doubt the loyalty of Jewish Americans (given how all things were at the time...) Excerpt from wiki. > Kaufman is best remembered as the judge who presided over the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and imposed their controversial death sentences. Roy Cohn, one of the prosecutors in the case, claimed in his autobiography that his influence led to Kaufman's being appointed to the case, and that Kaufman had imposed the death penalty on Cohn's personal advice. This claim has not been verified, although it has been shown that after Kaufman learned that the FBI and Justice Department opposed death penalties in the case, he asked the prosecution to withhold its recommendation before issuing his death sentence. In his summing up Judge Irving Kaufman was considered by many to have been highly subjective: "Judge Kaufman tied the crimes the Rosenbergs were being accused of to their ideas and the fact that they were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. He stated that they had given the atomic bomb to the Russians, which had triggered Communist aggression in Korea resulting in over 50,000 American casualties. He added that, because of their treason, the Soviet Union was threatening America with an atomic attack and this made it necessary for the United States to spend enormous amounts of money to build underground bomb shelters." [5] Kaufman said that he had gone to synagogue to pray before issuing his death sentence; this enraged Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who later wrote to judge Learned Hand, "I despise a judge who feels God told him to impose a death sentence," and also told Hand that he was "mean enough" to stay on the court long enough to prevent Kaufman from having a chance to take Frankfurter's place in the so-called "Jewish seat" on the Court.[4][6]
- antt 8y ago
  No one was talking about extradition until an hour ago either. Yet here we are.
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    nobody talked about him losing his shelter in the embassy until Goldman Sachs puppet Moreno came into power, yet here we are. sorry I don't see your point.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      I think you're arguing the same "side"? GP was just referring to centrists' embarrassing goalpost relocation.
- alexandercrohde 8y ago
  Eh, how can you know that? The US government has two contradictory personalities. A justice personality that is procedural and fair, and a military/spy personality that executes via drone and sets up Guantanamo. Since the latter seems to think it owes no explanation to anyone of whatever it does (and moreover tries to use courts to hide its mistakes after the fact), who are you to say that it's above executing?
  - isostatic 8y ago
    The latter group would have no qualms about assassinating anywhere, but they want it known that the U.S. punished Assange, not simply throw him under a bus.
  - GVIrish 8y ago
    The fact that Assange is being extradited not snatched via rendition means he is going to face the US justice system. He is being charged in Eastern District Virginia with conspiracy to commit computer hacking. If Assange just disappeared one day, then maybe worries that he is going to receive extrajudicial punishment or indefinite detention would be warranted.
- SkyBelow 8y ago
  In the US they don't need to use the death penalty, they can just put him in certain prison situations where he will be killed. The US has a massively corrupt prison system.
- rurban 8y ago
  There are many well known US members of congress and senate who promised to bring him to death. That was one of Assange lawyers arguments, until they all started dying suddenly.
  - rurban 8y ago
    The relevant US law with the death penalty is the Espionage Act from 1917, Section 704. It prohibits anyone from obtaining national defense–related information and making national defense–related information available to a foreign government. Due to this the UK is disallow to extradite him, because that are the exact allegations prominent US politicians and lawmakers accuse him of.
- Miner49er 8y ago
  Trump has called for the death penalty for people working with/on Wikileaks. It's definitely a possibility.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
is this the case also for foreign nationals (e.g. Australians)? and in combination with terror laws and agreements[1] between UK/US (not just civil/criminal law)? I think if he does a little bit of time for jumping UK bail then the second he walks out from a UK prison the CIA will be all over abducting his ass. And he'll never be heard off again. I recall Hillary Clinton wasn't ashamed of suggesting "Can't we drone the guy?"* She and her ilk was considered a lot more moderate compared to the criminals in DC right now. [1] edit: never mind I found it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-wont-send-terrorists-to-their-death-9159131.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/uk-wont-send-ter... - seems that prosecutors would have to play their cards right and just promise to give him life in prison instead. Spending the rest of his life in solitary isn't really much of a consolation.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > is this the case also for foreign nationals (e.g. Australians)? and in combination with terror laws and agreements between UK/US (not just civil/criminal law)? Extradition is based on criminal law, even if the offense is terrorism; and, yes, it's a matter of human rights law without exception. (That is not to say they might not do a covert rendition rather than an extradition with death on the table, but the fact that the formal process of extradition is being used means, with a high degree of certainty, that it will not go forward absent a formal guarantee that capital punishment is off the table.) > I recall Hillary Clinton wasn't ashamed of suggesting "Can't we drone the guy?"* She and her ilk was considered a lot more moderate compared to the criminals in DC right now. Perhaps in some general sense, but certainly not on the specific issue of WikiLeaks and Assange.
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    thanks for clarifying this
  - crdoconnor 8y ago
    She almost certainly did say "can't we just drone this guy?" as a joke about assange. She later issued a non-denial denial about the rumor.
hu3 8y ago
They might just let him rot in Guantanamo instead of executting. I don't know which one is worse.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- beat 8y ago
  They almost certainly can't send him to Gitmo, if he's been extradited on formal charges. That puts him in the hands of the regular legal system. What makes Gitmo a special case is that it's an end-run around both American and international law... prisoners there aren't in the American legal system and subject to awkward rights like habeus corpus and fair trial, but likewise aren't prisoners of war and subject to the Geneva Convention (which calls for freeing enemy soldiers as quickly as possible unless they are being charged with war crimes for an international tribunal, which is highly unusual). This is why Gitmo is a shame on our national honor, but it also means Assange won't be going there.

qnsi 8y ago

Why would EU support Russian asset?

rurban 8y ago
First, Assange is certainly not a Russian asset. If, the Russian's would not had to face their publishing disasters they had with MacronGate and Gulliver 2. With Assange as their asset it would have been actually successful. Second, Russia is an european nation. With a corrupt and criminal leadership, yes, but not as frightening as the corrupt and criminal leadership in the US with actual offensive strategies and media dominance. Russia only interferes with its direct neighbors for centuries. The US interferes everywhere else. With aircraft carriers. Russia has no aircraft carriers. For selfdefense submarines are enough. Europe always tries to be friends with both, esp. since they rely on them for their exports (us) and gas (russia). Many russian assets happily live either in Vienna, Monaco or London. The russian narrative "workers rules" was quite successful over the fascist narrative "industry rules". There are legitimate friends of both factions.
- clubm8 8y ago
  > Russia has no aircraft carriers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers#Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers#Russ...

criley2 8y ago

It's pretty shocking here to see pro-fascist comments like this which reward the Russian Intelligence operation called "Wikileaks" and its constant war against democracy, liberty and free elections in not just the U.S., but also Europe. Sometimes you have to wonder why folks this guy truly hate the U.S. and the West and side openly with mediocre spies involved in intelligence operations against his own home. But this is our reality: the new fascist right storming the world doesn't care about elections, democracy, liberty, or anything. I proudly stand against the rising tide of dictators and fascism and the intelligence war they operate against the free people of the world, a war in which Julian Assange proudly operated in on the side of fascist dictatorships. Our freedoms, our ability to conduct fair elections, our very ability to communicate is under concerted nation-state attack and if we do not rise to defend ourselves and our ability to associate like we do, we will lose it. It is already on life-support. We are losing it in real time.

rocqua 8y ago
Honestly, either side of this argument feels like attempts at manipulation to me. The end result is that it is becoming harder to trust any statement, not really what we want either.
- tomstockmail 8y ago
  >The end result is that it is becoming harder to trust any statement, not really what we want either. This is a tactic in itself. I can't find the details behind it, but the act of so much misinformation at once that helps drowned out more factual news while simultaneously making it so that you don't believe what you're reading. It's not a new tactic, but it's well used.
  - criley2 8y ago
    Ironically, it's a famous Russian propaganda tactic that is in heavy use in Russian propaganda and the subsequently nearly identical Wikileaks propaganda that follows. This tactic played heavily with Russia's troll farms on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. It also played heavily in Wikileaks propaganda on twitter and other platforms. For me to be accused of the exact evil that Wikileaks uses to manipulate its readers is very ironic, but this kind of dishonest "projection" of accusing the other side of committing your own crimes is precisely the standard operating procedure for far-right propaganda.

bogomipz 8y ago

>"and considering the public mood after a several year campaign to demonize Wikileaks and Assange by the US media" The "public mood"? Seriously? That's a pretty ridiculous phrase. There is no "public mood" in the US about Julian Assange. In fact outside of today's news cycle he's barely been mentioned. Wikileaks itself has been mentioned mostly as part of Mueller investigation stories but there's not been much about Assange personally in years.

dang 8y ago

Would you stop taking HN threads further into political flamewar? This is not helpful. If you can't make your points without going over the top with fiery hyperbole, please don't post here. I appreciate your positive contributions to this site, but we've had to warn you about breaking the guidelines so often that if you keep doing it we're going to ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632957 and marked it off-topic.