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I forget. Anyone know why we’re treating Julian Assange like the worst criminal that ever existed? “ Those two shootings were a thousand times repeated, thoug

I forget. Anyone know why we’re treating Julian Assange like the worst criminal that ever existed? “ Those two shootings were a thousand times repeated, though the reports were rare in admitting that the victims were civilians. More usually, the dead were automatically identified as ‘terrorists’ caught in the act, regardless of evidence to the contrary. ” Here’s an argument against Leetcode. There are real patterns in our work. That quote is a real pattern in law enforcement. Test for the patterns, not how slick someone is in a contrived scenario. We seem to be stuck in deja vu world. The same problems over and over, everywhere, with an unwillingness to fix or acknowledge it. Not many body cams existed for those deaths, huh? Sad, I’ll erase it from my mind and move on for this evening, as usual. Don’t stick the guy that showed it to us in jail. Don’t be the emperor that killed the messenger. Goals, I guess.

fit2rule 6y ago
Because he revealed evidence of one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Was WikiLeaks part of exposing Prism as well? Or was that mostly The Guardian? I remember after 9/11 I grabbed a bunch of books about the Taliban from the library, and my dad said ‘look, the government is going to put you on a list now’, and I naively said ‘No dad, this is America’ (he was an immigrant). Sad stuff, they did put people on a list.
  - AndrewBissell 6y ago
    It was really Greenwald and Poitras, and the Guardian just happened to be Greenwald's main outlet at the time. However WikiLeaks did help Snowden with his legal defense and flight to asylum in Russia.
    - asjw 6y ago
      > flight to asylum in Russia. Ironically Snowden tweets about freedom of information from Russia, where Putin literally kills journalists
      - phkahler 6y ago
        Snowden is like a thorn in the side to some people in the US government. Putin probably like him right where he is.
        selectodude 6y ago
        No different than all of the Soviet dissidents we gave asylum to for no reason other than to piss off the soviets.
        netsharc 6y ago
        Sadly Snowden is in a position where Putin can use him for a trade. One possible scenario I thought is Trump getting desperate and asking Putin for Snowden to be extradited so Trump can rah rah about being the man that got "the traitor". Meanwhile Putin would get whatever it is Putin wants from this trade, because as we know Trump is an unparalleled genius in deals...
        jerkstate 6y ago
        Come on. Trump's base thinks Snowden is a patriot. Do you even know Roger Stone?
        fit2rule 6y ago
        Snowden is a patriot in my mind, and I'm no Trump supporter. Just because you associate Snowden with Trump, as per standard agitprop victim procedure, doesn't mean that you should ignore the very real criminal behaviour that Snowden revealed to the world. You should probably pay more attention to the fact of illegal behaviour, more than playing cult doll games ..
- deathgrips 6y ago
  >4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    I think the suggestion was that the actual war was illegal, mostly proven by now, there was no basis for it. As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.
    - deathgrips 6y ago
      This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?
      - runawaybottle 6y ago
        Money? Grab some books on the Iraq war. There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics). In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
        Emma_Goldman 6y ago
        There is no doubt whatsoever that the war on terror has been a calamitous waste of money. One reason for the precipitous decline in war over the last seventy year is precisely that it no longer pays: (i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas. (ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain. I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.
- asjw 6y ago
  > one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east. If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone ordered the killing of 34 millions of US citizens. Lucky us the red army is not the red army anymore. He founded and promoted terrorism in Ukraine, shot down civilian airplanes, bombed refugees camps, used chemical warfare, prohibited by international treaties, on civilians He also ordered the assassination of a number of journalists But Snowden is his guest, so he must be a good man...
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    > If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin
    - fractallyte 6y ago
      Yes, and one would think that after all those examples of fine leadership, us 'civilized' nations would have learned a thing or two? Putin's regime carried out these crimes in the Caucasus in the 21st century (and earlier), and they are continuing even as you read this comment...
      - barry-cotter 6y ago
        The Human Rights ideology is a con. No one is willing to make it real, i.e. to wage war to force other nations to conform to it. Absent that it will continue to be internationally irrelevant, window dressing that occasionally effects marginal decisions and never impacts anyone powerful.
      - fractallyte 6y ago
        OK, for the people who disagree with my comment, here is the reason we should support investigative journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_of_Chechnya_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_... Chechnya has been essentially cut off - considering its recent history, any guesses why??
- catalogia 6y ago
  > 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars You've mentioned this number a few times, but I can't find a source for it. Can you point me in the right direction?
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    I don’t think 4 million will be a verifiable number, but the wiki on Iraq war details somewhere in the half a million via various examinations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War If we include Afghanistan, we could be in the million range.
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      Physicians for Social Responsibility did a very interesting report on this a few years ago - the figures have risen steadily since, however: https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ Focusing on Iraq alone: -- "From the relation between the current number given by IBC and the one given for the end of June 2006 (43,394), it concludes that the number of Iraqis killed up to September 2011 is at around 1.46 million" ... "This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely." -- And then .. there is the situation in Yemen. Americans are very, very quiet about that. And there is an evil reason for that. 2 million people have starved to death as a result of American-supported genocide by the KSA.
- fractallyte 6y ago
  4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    Not really, no. This is a common justification that Americans use to excuse themselves for any responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, but anyone outside the American bubble knows that those refugees and war orphans weren't happening before some kids in Arizona went to work in a strip mall to cowardly drop bombs from robot planes half-way around the world ..
deathgrips 6y ago
The feds don't like him because he leaks their secrets. The Republicans don't like him because he makes our military look bad. The Democrats don't like him because he leaked Clinton's emails. There's no longer anyone in America willing to stop his incarceration so he can pester their political rivals.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
He’s not the worst criminal that ever existed. He’s also not the best whistleblower that ever existed. He’s a guy who helped expose things that were important to know about, who’s also a narcissist and very probably a rapist. He doesn’t deserve to be punished inappropriately for exposing what he exposed, he doesn’t deserve to be exonerated for the actual crimes he committed, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated as a hero for accepting a role as an agent of weaponized information for a global fascist movement. He’s a guy who did one good thing with questionable motives, did at least one bad thing, and is otherwise just a guy.
- sneak 6y ago
  He was never charged with rape, and neither of the women who were involved in those cases ever accused him of rape. I encourage you to read their own words.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    I'm a victim of sexual assault, I know how to read the words and how to read charges.
    - alentist 6y ago
      I’m a victim of sexual assault as well, and what you said is not true.
      - eyelidlessness 6y ago
        You are welcome to disagree with me about what constitutes consent. But what I don't accept is randos on the internet defining consent on "were charges filed". You likely know as well as I do that the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported, and that most which are reported either go uninvestigated or are retraumatizing for the victim. I stand by my position that having sex with someone in a way they explicitly did not give consent to, even if they consented to other terms, is rape.
sneak 6y ago
> Anyone know why we’re treating Julian Assange like the worst criminal that ever existed? Because the CIA had an explicit goal of destroying his reputation in the media, and getting the most damaging headlines possible run about him in an effort to destroy any meaningful support he may have garnered by exposing war crimes. For example: he was never once charged with any sexcrime in any country, but you'd never know that from the headlines which almost universally referred to "charges" when there were none. It's a real shame what the US military intelligence community will do when threatened. Snowden himself explicitly specified, at least twice, that they would have summarily executed Barton Gellman if they thought that he was the single point of failure for the release of the Snowden documents, for example. They operate entirely beyond the reach of oversight or the law. None of this is an accident. They couldn't lay hands on him for a while, so plan B was a character assassination in the media.

fit2rule 6y ago

Because he revealed evidence of one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..

runawaybottle 6y ago
Was WikiLeaks part of exposing Prism as well? Or was that mostly The Guardian? I remember after 9/11 I grabbed a bunch of books about the Taliban from the library, and my dad said ‘look, the government is going to put you on a list now’, and I naively said ‘No dad, this is America’ (he was an immigrant). Sad stuff, they did put people on a list.
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
  It was really Greenwald and Poitras, and the Guardian just happened to be Greenwald's main outlet at the time. However WikiLeaks did help Snowden with his legal defense and flight to asylum in Russia.
  - asjw 6y ago
    > flight to asylum in Russia. Ironically Snowden tweets about freedom of information from Russia, where Putin literally kills journalists
    - phkahler 6y ago
      Snowden is like a thorn in the side to some people in the US government. Putin probably like him right where he is.
      - selectodude 6y ago
        No different than all of the Soviet dissidents we gave asylum to for no reason other than to piss off the soviets.
      - netsharc 6y ago
        Sadly Snowden is in a position where Putin can use him for a trade. One possible scenario I thought is Trump getting desperate and asking Putin for Snowden to be extradited so Trump can rah rah about being the man that got "the traitor". Meanwhile Putin would get whatever it is Putin wants from this trade, because as we know Trump is an unparalleled genius in deals...
        jerkstate 6y ago
        Come on. Trump's base thinks Snowden is a patriot. Do you even know Roger Stone?
        fit2rule 6y ago
        Snowden is a patriot in my mind, and I'm no Trump supporter. Just because you associate Snowden with Trump, as per standard agitprop victim procedure, doesn't mean that you should ignore the very real criminal behaviour that Snowden revealed to the world. You should probably pay more attention to the fact of illegal behaviour, more than playing cult doll games ..
deathgrips 6y ago
>4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  I think the suggestion was that the actual war was illegal, mostly proven by now, there was no basis for it. As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      Money? Grab some books on the Iraq war. There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics). In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
      - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
        There is no doubt whatsoever that the war on terror has been a calamitous waste of money. One reason for the precipitous decline in war over the last seventy year is precisely that it no longer pays: (i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas. (ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain. I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.
asjw 6y ago
> one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years? As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east. If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone ordered the killing of 34 millions of US citizens. Lucky us the red army is not the red army anymore. He founded and promoted terrorism in Ukraine, shot down civilian airplanes, bombed refugees camps, used chemical warfare, prohibited by international treaties, on civilians He also ordered the assassination of a number of journalists But Snowden is his guest, so he must be a good man...
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin. Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin
  - fractallyte 6y ago
    Yes, and one would think that after all those examples of fine leadership, us 'civilized' nations would have learned a thing or two? Putin's regime carried out these crimes in the Caucasus in the 21st century (and earlier), and they are continuing even as you read this comment...
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      The Human Rights ideology is a con. No one is willing to make it real, i.e. to wage war to force other nations to conform to it. Absent that it will continue to be internationally irrelevant, window dressing that occasionally effects marginal decisions and never impacts anyone powerful.
    - fractallyte 6y ago
      OK, for the people who disagree with my comment, here is the reason we should support investigative journalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_of_Chechnya_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_... Chechnya has been essentially cut off - considering its recent history, any guesses why??
catalogia 6y ago
> 4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars You've mentioned this number a few times, but I can't find a source for it. Can you point me in the right direction?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  I don’t think 4 million will be a verifiable number, but the wiki on Iraq war details somewhere in the half a million via various examinations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War If we include Afghanistan, we could be in the million range.
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    Physicians for Social Responsibility did a very interesting report on this a few years ago - the figures have risen steadily since, however: https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/ Focusing on Iraq alone: -- "From the relation between the current number given by IBC and the one given for the end of June 2006 (43,394), it concludes that the number of Iraqis killed up to September 2011 is at around 1.46 million" ... "This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely." -- And then .. there is the situation in Yemen. Americans are very, very quiet about that. And there is an evil reason for that. 2 million people have starved to death as a result of American-supported genocide by the KSA.
fractallyte 6y ago
4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...
- fit2rule 6y ago
  Not really, no. This is a common justification that Americans use to excuse themselves for any responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in their name, but anyone outside the American bubble knows that those refugees and war orphans weren't happening before some kids in Arizona went to work in a strip mall to cowardly drop bombs from robot planes half-way around the world ..

deathgrips 6y ago

The feds don't like him because he leaks their secrets. The Republicans don't like him because he makes our military look bad. The Democrats don't like him because he leaked Clinton's emails. There's no longer anyone in America willing to stop his incarceration so he can pester their political rivals.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

He’s not the worst criminal that ever existed. He’s also not the best whistleblower that ever existed. He’s a guy who helped expose things that were important to know about, who’s also a narcissist and very probably a rapist. He doesn’t deserve to be punished inappropriately for exposing what he exposed, he doesn’t deserve to be exonerated for the actual crimes he committed, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated as a hero for accepting a role as an agent of weaponized information for a global fascist movement. He’s a guy who did one good thing with questionable motives, did at least one bad thing, and is otherwise just a guy.

sneak 6y ago
He was never charged with rape, and neither of the women who were involved in those cases ever accused him of rape. I encourage you to read their own words.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I'm a victim of sexual assault, I know how to read the words and how to read charges.
  - alentist 6y ago
    I’m a victim of sexual assault as well, and what you said is not true.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      You are welcome to disagree with me about what constitutes consent. But what I don't accept is randos on the internet defining consent on "were charges filed". You likely know as well as I do that the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported, and that most which are reported either go uninvestigated or are retraumatizing for the victim. I stand by my position that having sex with someone in a way they explicitly did not give consent to, even if they consented to other terms, is rape.

sneak 6y ago

> Anyone know why we’re treating Julian Assange like the worst criminal that ever existed? Because the CIA had an explicit goal of destroying his reputation in the media, and getting the most damaging headlines possible run about him in an effort to destroy any meaningful support he may have garnered by exposing war crimes. For example: he was never once charged with any sexcrime in any country, but you'd never know that from the headlines which almost universally referred to "charges" when there were none. It's a real shame what the US military intelligence community will do when threatened. Snowden himself explicitly specified, at least twice, that they would have summarily executed Barton Gellman if they thought that he was the single point of failure for the release of the Snowden documents, for example. They operate entirely beyond the reach of oversight or the law. None of this is an accident. They couldn't lay hands on him for a while, so plan B was a character assassination in the media.