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> Innocent until proven guilty And for that to hold, you have to let him be tried. Justice isn't automatic. But people (maybe not you) seem far too quick to s

> Innocent until proven guilty And for that to hold, you have to let him be tried. Justice isn't automatic. But people (maybe not you) seem far too quick to start muddying up the due process. It seems that if he is found guilty, nobody will accept that. From here, it seems perfectly plausible that he actively helped Manning leak. If the US have evidence to that end, they have a case. Can we just let that case be heard and stop assuming that every actor here is a Bond villain?

roenxi 7y ago
> It seems that if he is found guilty, nobody will accept that. It depends what they find him guilty of and what the sentence is. It is unacceptable to have someone on trial for openly telling the truth about what a foreign country is doing. He went into the Ecuadorian embassy saying that the Swedish case against him was basically trumped up and that he was going to be extradited to the United States. His justification for staying in the embassy on the basis that he would be extradited to the US if he walked out. His excuses were dismissed by critics as unconvincing. He is now out of the embassy and, surprisingly, appears to be going through an extradition process to the US. The US is reaching out and nabbing him on the flimsiest of pretexts; more a process crime than doing anything material. Australians in Europe cannot be reasonably held subject to US laws related to classified documents. And how materially he helped Manning is a very open question. Maybe the US government is going to have something convincing but the odds are great it is some word game that they are going to try and nail him with. > Can we just let that case be heard and stop assuming that every actor here is a Bond villain? If the US government is going to treat Assange the way they treat other non-US-citizens they don't like then by the time the case is heard it will be too late.
- FireBeyond 7y ago
  > The US is reaching out and nabbing him on the flimsiest of pretexts; more a process crime than doing anything material. Allegedly actively assisting a US military member to a) crack other military passwords, and b) work with them on covering said attempts is a mere "flimsy pretext, [not] material"?
  - whamlastxmas 7y ago
    Telling someone to Google a publicly available tool is hardly assisting in any criminal way
    - oliwarner 7y ago
      And if he stopped resisting, he'd have the opportunity to test that view in a court.
      - mmjaa 7y ago
        As we have seen, "stop resisting" is a sure-fire way to have yourself turned into a chemical zombie by the state that's supposed to be protecting you. I doubt very much that the 'rational approach' of giving oneself up to the very people whose crimes you've been revealing is going to be a productive way to continue the effort of revealing crimes against humanity.
        oliwarner 7y ago
        > As we have seen We have? Where?
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        In mmjaa's fevered imagination. To him, Assange's reported lack of clarity in court is proof that the state is chemically lobotomizing him. Actual evidence has not so far been presented.
        mmjaa 7y ago
        "mmjaa is insane" - ah, there we go, the standard response for anyone challenged by the thought that, perhaps, they're not living in as free a society as they think - especially when all it takes to get someone chemically lobotomized, is to challenge their sanity. Lets come back to this in a few months when there will be evidence of Assanges' torture by the UK on behalf of its masters in the USA, presented to the relevant authorities. Remember this: Medicating people with psychotropic drugs designed to radically alter their minds, against their will, is a crime against humanity.
- oliwarner 7y ago
  Well it seems there's always something else. He's a journalist. He's committed a political crime and that rules out extradition. He's being targeted by a state entity so this isn't fair. The only crime he may have committed is only a minor felony. He probably didn't know that it was a minor felony. Sweden weren't going to treat him fairly. She was a CIA plant. Uruguay didn't treat him fairly. The US won't treat him fairly. They'll torture and execute him. All I've seen is a man dodging the law, over and over and over again, exploiting means and influence that most people could only dream of, while those friends point out the toll this self-inflicted purgatory is having on him as another form of "this isn't fair!" excuse. It's all tosh. Negotiate your extradition, get to court, get this sorted. The time he takes to get there is all on him.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    You've identified 9 good reasons there. There probably weren't any CIA plants involved and the US is unlikely to execute him.
    - mmjaa 7y ago
      The US will medicate him until he is chemically lobotomized and no longer a threat to their war-fighting operations, which are paramount to all other exercises in civil discourse, such as civil rights, human rights, not killing innocent people at scale, etc.

roenxi 7y ago

> It seems that if he is found guilty, nobody will accept that. It depends what they find him guilty of and what the sentence is. It is unacceptable to have someone on trial for openly telling the truth about what a foreign country is doing. He went into the Ecuadorian embassy saying that the Swedish case against him was basically trumped up and that he was going to be extradited to the United States. His justification for staying in the embassy on the basis that he would be extradited to the US if he walked out. His excuses were dismissed by critics as unconvincing. He is now out of the embassy and, surprisingly, appears to be going through an extradition process to the US. The US is reaching out and nabbing him on the flimsiest of pretexts; more a process crime than doing anything material. Australians in Europe cannot be reasonably held subject to US laws related to classified documents. And how materially he helped Manning is a very open question. Maybe the US government is going to have something convincing but the odds are great it is some word game that they are going to try and nail him with. > Can we just let that case be heard and stop assuming that every actor here is a Bond villain? If the US government is going to treat Assange the way they treat other non-US-citizens they don't like then by the time the case is heard it will be too late.

FireBeyond 7y ago
> The US is reaching out and nabbing him on the flimsiest of pretexts; more a process crime than doing anything material. Allegedly actively assisting a US military member to a) crack other military passwords, and b) work with them on covering said attempts is a mere "flimsy pretext, [not] material"?
- whamlastxmas 7y ago
  Telling someone to Google a publicly available tool is hardly assisting in any criminal way
  - oliwarner 7y ago
    And if he stopped resisting, he'd have the opportunity to test that view in a court.
    - mmjaa 7y ago
      As we have seen, "stop resisting" is a sure-fire way to have yourself turned into a chemical zombie by the state that's supposed to be protecting you. I doubt very much that the 'rational approach' of giving oneself up to the very people whose crimes you've been revealing is going to be a productive way to continue the effort of revealing crimes against humanity.
      - oliwarner 7y ago
        > As we have seen We have? Where?
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        In mmjaa's fevered imagination. To him, Assange's reported lack of clarity in court is proof that the state is chemically lobotomizing him. Actual evidence has not so far been presented.
        mmjaa 7y ago
        "mmjaa is insane" - ah, there we go, the standard response for anyone challenged by the thought that, perhaps, they're not living in as free a society as they think - especially when all it takes to get someone chemically lobotomized, is to challenge their sanity. Lets come back to this in a few months when there will be evidence of Assanges' torture by the UK on behalf of its masters in the USA, presented to the relevant authorities. Remember this: Medicating people with psychotropic drugs designed to radically alter their minds, against their will, is a crime against humanity.
oliwarner 7y ago
Well it seems there's always something else. He's a journalist. He's committed a political crime and that rules out extradition. He's being targeted by a state entity so this isn't fair. The only crime he may have committed is only a minor felony. He probably didn't know that it was a minor felony. Sweden weren't going to treat him fairly. She was a CIA plant. Uruguay didn't treat him fairly. The US won't treat him fairly. They'll torture and execute him. All I've seen is a man dodging the law, over and over and over again, exploiting means and influence that most people could only dream of, while those friends point out the toll this self-inflicted purgatory is having on him as another form of "this isn't fair!" excuse. It's all tosh. Negotiate your extradition, get to court, get this sorted. The time he takes to get there is all on him.
- roenxi 7y ago
  You've identified 9 good reasons there. There probably weren't any CIA plants involved and the US is unlikely to execute him.
  - mmjaa 7y ago
    The US will medicate him until he is chemically lobotomized and no longer a threat to their war-fighting operations, which are paramount to all other exercises in civil discourse, such as civil rights, human rights, not killing innocent people at scale, etc.