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Assange Hearing Day 8
- adrianmsmith 6y agoIndependent of the more important points of the article, this quote provided some amusement :) > Lewis then asked Timm if he had seen the actual evidence that supports the indictment. Timm replied only some of it, in particular the Java script of the messages allegedly between Assange and Manning.
- jacquesm 6y agoClever of them to communicate in Java Script.
- csharptwdec19 6y agoI'm imagining this github repo with rules like "Locations are the 3rd letter of private fields. People are first letter of public properties" Just throw a few bits of data into a large codeset
- jacquesm 6y agoI'm sure if you start analyzing everything on github using those rules a lot of real names are going to turn up.
- natcombs 6y ago>> particular the Java script of the messages allegedly between Sounds like they were conspiring via a web-based client and the prosecution is going to read the functions to the jury ;-)
- rurban 6y agoWhow. They really met on a south-east asian island to conspire against the state?
- grandinj 6y agoIt strongly seems to me that the British establishment is incredibly pissed at Assange for the trouble he caused by holing up in the embassy, and is therefore making life as difficult for him as possible.
- me_me_me 6y agoHe made us waste so much money, lets waste even more money. If that were the reason for this whole thing than its kindergartner level of spite.
- duncan_bayne 6y ago... and? I've seen similar, in all walks of life. Politicians and civil servants are by no means immune to pettiness. Especially when setting an example might spare them work and money in the future.
- mothsonasloth 6y agoCivil servants in the UK are renowned for being inherently lazy, incompetent and devious. Its no wonder when you have to interact with politicians on a day to day basis that the cultures should mirror each other. I would much prefer Microsoft Civil Servant sp4 or an IBM Civil Servant AI powered by Big Blue.
- BusTrainBus 6y ago“Civil servants in the UK are renowned for being inherently lazy, incompetent and devious.” Depressing to see such low-quality nonsense on HackerNews.
- mothsonasloth 6y agoLikewise with your comment mate https://www.clivebates.com/documents/lazycivilservant.pdf https://www.clivebates.com/documents/lazycivilservant.pdf
- guerby 6y ago"Lewis asked why Timm had omitted Kromberg’s reference to the grand jury decision? Timm replied that it meant very little: 99.9% of grand juries agree to return a prosecution. An academic study of 152,000 grand juries had revealed only 11 which had refused the request of a federal prosecutor to prosecute." That's some statistics ...
- natcombs 6y agoIt’s almost worth asking what those 11 were. The prosecution must have really failed
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago> It’s almost worth asking what those 11 were. The prosecution must have really failed $5 says they were police shootings of black suspects.
- recuter 6y agoAll 11? I'll take that bet.
- reallydontask 6y agofor a fiver you are on :)
- whosgonnacheck 6y agoI'll add a fiver for whomever wins just for answering this question (with reasonable evidence) :D
- Miner49er 6y agoYou are right, police shootings are something that grand juries regularly decline to prosecute for. I'm not sure that all 11 of were police shootings, however. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ferguson-michael-brown-indictment-darren-wilson/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ferguson-michael-brown-...
- friendlybus 6y agoOdd characterizations. "At this point he was grinning very strangely indeed, looking up at the judge, leaning back with one arm wide across his chair back, in some sort of peculiar alpha male gesture." Similar to a roald dahl book.
- nmeofthestate 6y agoMurray is a 'colourful character'. He thinks the Skripal poisoning was a false flag executed by the UK government. He produced an string of soon-debunked conspiracy theories about it, but has stuck with it nonetheless.
- nmeofthestate 6y agoAnd now, the Navalny poisoning was a US/Saudi false flag. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/novichok-navalny-nordstream-nonsense/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/novichok-nav...
- Loq 6y agoThe article you cite does not claim that the Navalny poisoning was a US/Saudi false flag. On the contrary, Murry states: "I should state that I have no difficulty at all with the notion that a powerful oligarch or an organ of the Russian state may have tried to assassinate Navalny". The article states that "[T]he US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a split between Germany and Russia at this time." The US has gone out of the way to prevent the NordStream 2 pipeline, and directly after Navalny was flown to Germany, several high-ranking German politicians (including Merkel), have began publicly to question whether NordStream 2 should be reconsidered, in the light of Navalny, see [1]. May I gently request that you exercise more care when representing Murray's views? Please reconsider the HN guidelines for comments [2], reproduced here for your convenience: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54070046 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54070046 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- chmod775 6y agoWhile I appreciate the reporting from inside the court room, Craig Murray is clearly biased and thus predisposed to seeing what he wants to see. His characterizations paint the prosecution as ridiculous characters and their case as laughable at best, which may not reflect reality as much one would hope. So what he is describing might be very unlike what the judges are experiencing, and if they end up giving the extradition of Assange's the go-ahead, a lot of people are going to be very surprised. Edit: This rollercoaster of upvotes and downvotes on a post that just reminds people to not blindly trust someone who tells them what they want to hear is interesting in itself.
- pmachinery 6y agoI'm pretty sure people who read Murray/support Assange believe his extradition is a foregone conclusion.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoI am pretty sure your comment brings zero value to this conversation.
- pmachinery 6y agoThe point of my post is that supporters of Assange / readers of Murray's site are unlikely, as the other poster suggested, to be surprised by Assange's extradition. What was the point of your post?
- heavenlyblue 6y agoThe point of my post is that your opinion is irrelevant to the matter and contains none of the supplementary evidence that I would expect from a constructive argument.
- bbsimonbb 6y agoI've been reading Murray since about 2005. He's always interesting and it would be a mistake to dismiss him on one opinion. I lose count of the number of big stories he's broken, or found himself in the middle of. He wasn't as radical in 2005 as he's become. His book on Alexander Burnes is serious and fascinating history. If you google his site for "Guardian" or "Rusbridger", you can follow the evolution that has led me, and perhaps readers of his site, to have a great deal more confidence in what we read there than in, scary quotes, the main-stream media.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoThe surreal aspect of this is the UK prosecution's assertions that the US prosecution is not politically motivated. All you have to do is look at the speech that CIA Director (now Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo made about Wikileaks and Assange in April 2017.[1] These passages give a taste of his remarks: > It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. > No, I am quite confident that had Assange been around in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, he would have found himself on the wrong side of history. > We know this because Assange and his ilk make common cause with dictators today. > That Assange is the darling of terrorists is nothing short of reprehensible. > No, Julian Assange and his kind are not the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom. They have pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice. They may have believed that, but they are wrong. > Assange is a narcissist who has created nothing of value. He relies on the dirty work of others to make himself famous. He is a fraud—a coward hiding behind a screen. > First, it is high time we called out those who grant a platform to these leakers and so-called transparency activists. We know the danger that Assange and his not-so-merry band of brothers pose to democracies around the world. Ignorance or misplaced idealism is no longer an acceptable excuse for lionizing these demons. > Third, we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now. But if you listen to the UK prosecutor, Assange is just being prosecuted because some low-level prosecutor in the US decided, on their own initiative, to build a case against him. The fact that high-level officials in the US government have been openly calling for an example to be made of Assange is supposed to be irrelevant. The UK should have dismissed this extradition request out-of-hand when it was first made, given the obvious political motivations behind it. The US-UK extradition treaty makes it very clear that extradition is not allowed in such cases. 1. https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2017-speeches-testimony/pompeo-delivers-remarks-at-csis.html https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2017...
- salawat 6y agoThis is the problem of interpretivelaw in the hands of a politically ductile interpreter. This is the same type of abuse around structure on political extradition that the United States Second Amendment (whether you agree with it philosophically or not) gets treated with. The plain, unambiguous English contextually tortured to confer that which it in no way does. The Interstate Commerce clause and regulatory mandate is perhaps a less controversial example where jurisprudence has recognized that the Federal Government can assert authority in ways completely counter to a straightforward reading of the law. Words, statutes, and legal language are meaningless theater if all we do is lampshade or cast them aside when they are inconvenient or the first time they are found to be politically inconvenient or unpopular. I weep for Justice. She's out in a dark alley somewhere in a dumpster while political expedience seems to win in the limelight lately.
- candiodari 6y agoThing I don't get about this case: the UK will refuse to extradite Assange because he will be tortured if they do that (ironically for exposing proof that the US tortures prisoners). And then the UK proceeded to torture him themselves (torture are the words "The Lancet" used [1], they cannot reasonably be dismissed as cranks) ... Illegally, by UK laws, and refuse to be held accountable for that in their own courts. Not that the judge even tries to demand reasonable treatment for Julian Assange from the prosecutor. UK laws are very clear on what should happen in this case: because of the government's treatment of Assange the case should be thrown out, because obviously the government has acted illegally against him on MANY occasions, they don't even give him his rights INSIDE THE COURTROOM (to talk to his lawyer privately and however much he wants without interference). The government DOES NOT have the right to sue somebody for anything once they have tortured him. Once they have lied about the case, they lose the right to sue. Once they refuse medical aid to a prisoner, they lose the right to sue. They have spied on his communication with his lawyer, again grounds for dismissal. They are obviously not feeding him right, which again would normally disqualify the government's case. Or at the very least, warrants a delay in the case with him decently taken care of until he is once again strong and fit enough to stand trial. Note that this is completely independent of the merit of the case itself: the QC in any normal case like this would never be allowed to make their case without fixing these issues first. Some of these reasons for dismissal the judge has seen happen right in front of him with his own eyes. Then there is the fact that the UK government does not have evidence against Assange on this crime (because he violated US law, not UK law), furthermore I do not see how it could -legally- obtain any such evidence. And yet this farce continues. The judge systematically refuses to face issues of fairness of the case and is obviously intimidated by the government. This shows one thing very clearly : the United Kingdom's government (the "executive") has ZERO intention of following through on their commitment to either follow their own laws, respect human rights and has no qualms whatsoever to threaten their own branches of government, when they want to violate laws. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30383-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...