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Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

572 points by eplanit 5y ago

wyck 5y ago
Rats tend to be complete sociopath's and in many cases psychopaths, the police need to be held more accountable for onboarding these personalities instead of covering their own asses. There are several cases in Canada in which paid informants lied for years (decades) causing massive harm, and 2 cases which ended in mass murder, while still on police payroll. Yet the police somehow wash their hands of it all.
- tgv 5y ago
  In this case, he was diagnosed as such. The article claims he simply did it to avoid prosecution.
beebeepka 5y ago
I am shocked, shocked I tell you. Same with ridiculous rape charges. The spooks must have scared that poor woman to death. I guess that what you get for exposing major war crimes by the good guys. He is alive but his life is ruined and Bradley is a woman. Yay for justice Edit: I really don't understand the downvotes. What, exactly, do you find objectionable?
- hedora 5y ago
  The woman never accused Assange of rape. The police did, over her objections. The UN special rapporteur’s report goes into more detail, though the UN has produced so many documents detailing all the ways in which his detention is illegal, I can’t find the right link.
- jasonvorhe 5y ago
  You don't have to dead name trans people. Chelsea Manning chose her name, please respect that.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    What I am saying is that Manning was forced to take that path I actually have had sex, multiple times, with trans people. Careful with your assumptions. I find your response offensive
    - elif 5y ago
      your sexual preferences and personal offense are irrelevant and the rule you are debating has about as close to consensus acceptance as you will find in the queer space. If you indeed think "dead naming" is something someone made up for an internet comment, you are missing a large portion of the picture.
      - beebeepka 5y ago
        Forgive me for saying that I find that a person would change their gender after being imprisoned and tortured rather suspicious If you take that as some kind of attack on trans people, that's on you
        dang 5y ago
        You've been posting tons of flamewar and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. That's not cool here and we ban accounts that do it, so if you'd please stop doing it, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Medicineguy 5y ago
While scrolling, the web page shifts up a couple dozens of pixels (Android, Firefox) . It's very annoying. I had to stop reading after the second paragraph. Am I the only one?
- n8ta 5y ago
  You are not the only one. Site is rough.
- EvRev 5y ago
  It is a bug when you use VH instead of VW on your height attribute. Always use VW on mobile because of the default behavior on mobile browsers to show the address bar when scrolling.
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    But that breaks a lot of design assumptions, since many times the use of vh vs vw is to avoid assuming which of the height or width is greater. You’d have to use a min/max calculation to avoid aspect ratio mayhem whn comparing landscape to portrait. The real big is UI elements that randomly appear and disappear in the browser chrome, such as scroll bars and address bars, that contribute to vh/vw randomly spazzing.
juanani 5y ago
This abuse of power won't end well.
daenz 5y ago
For someone who has not followed Assange news for a long time, what is the general accusation of his crimes? Is it just that he published secret material that he received from other sources?
- fossuser 5y ago
  No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. So, who knows?
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    >The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. >At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. This is just more Russiagate nonsense: https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the-dnc-emails-that-showed-they-34778084.png https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the... >To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? There are no charges. There never were any charges. There was an investigation and that's as far as it went. >UPDATE GREAT NEWS: Swedish prosecutors are about to announce the dropping of the investigation into Julian Assange on sexual offence allegations. There never were any charges and the allegations were always nonsense, as detailed in the below article I wrote a month ago: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-charges-julian-assange-sweden-espionage-charges-julian-assange-usa/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-char...
encryptluks2 5y ago
I honestly have very little sympathy for Assange at this point. The entire organization either appears to have been a honey pot or front for foreign election interference.
- rendall 5y ago
  This is a badly uninformed opinion
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    Not at all: from what I've seen, that sort of thing doesn't have to start out as intentional nefariousness. We've just got some state actors who've developed real skill and determination at twisting all sorts of existing entities to their ends: this is considerably easier in the service of chaos politics than it would be if they were trying to set up an orderly, top-down spy network or some such thing. You don't have to start OUT as a honeypot or a tool of foreign intelligence. It would be a pretty lousy intelligence service that had to start with pre-existing cooperation and alliance. Much better to work at twisting things, and then rely on rationalization and perhaps back it up with threat and intimidation. There's nothing new about any of this, it's just done with flair, ingenuity and determination. Or has been: I think there's a limit to how far that can go.
  - anothernewdude 5y ago
    Look to cryptome for what it would've looked like if it wasn't an engine for Assange's ego. The people who just wanted to host leaks left more than a decade ago. The org admitted to pushing it's own political positions. No idea why people defend the thing. All they publish now is the result of Russian hacks. And he's not a journalist.
    - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
      Accusing them of pushing political positions and the saying they're not journalists feels like conflicting arguments in this day and age. It's also difficult to appear politically neutral when publishing truths that are (or should be, but aren't) existentially inconvenient to any particular person or group.
tootie 5y ago
This article seems awfully biased. Calling him a sociopath isn't very objective.
- chmod775 5y ago
  From the article: > According to a psychiatric assessment presented to the court Thordarson was diagnosed as a sociopath
fscksnowden 5y ago
If Greenwald suggest to Snowden in Dec 2012 that he should steal more, is comrade Greenwald complicit We all know Assange not only encouraged but participated. Snowden is a thief and liar who encouraged others to leak in his capacity at fpf. Complicit. Snowden and Assange are traitors, in the non legal definition
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Assange is not even a US citizen. How can he be a traitor?
  - fscksnowden 5y ago
    fair enough, he runs a so called "hostile intel svc"
    - Synaesthesia 5y ago
      For what, reporting the truth to the US public? That's called journalism and ought to be praised.
      - fscksnowden 5y ago
        Opinion split, many think he's an arch criminal. Certainly hasn't made US diplomacy any easier. I'd gander that Assange, Snowden and Trump are the main reasons why our alliances are shaky. (I'm an American but this affects the whole Western alliance)
        TheGigaChad 5y ago
        Suck dick, idiot.
        h_anna_h 5y ago
        Not committing warcrimes, not going after whistleblowers and journalists, not torturing people in prison and keeping them confined for years without trial, and not spying on the citizens of your own and foreign countries would help the US diplomacy. It is like saying that rape victims who went to the police are the reason that the life of the rapist is ruined instead of his choice to rape people.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
Important to note that nothing Wikileaks has published has ever had to be retracted. They've told the truth to the public about governments, which is why they're targeted. In fact several Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded thanks to their efforts. They've never been shown to put anyone at risk either, a testament to their careful vetting process, showing that they're responsible too. This is clearly a political attack on someone who has exposed some uncomfortable truths. Even if Assange is a criminal, which I don't think he is, there's no excuse for holding him in the manner which they are, treating him worse than the worst criminals. Finally it's been shown that the rape accusations were an orchestrated smear campaign as well.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  > They've never been shown to put anyone at risk This is false. They've denied putting people at risk, but there's decent evidence that their leaks have directly shared pii and harmed large numbers of random unimportant people.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Could you share this decent evidence for us who haven't seen it before?
    - billyhoffman 5y ago
      Wikileaks posted diplomatic cables without redacting the names or other forms of PII. Actual journalists from the New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde, The Guardian, and El País all signed a statement saying this was a gross breach of people’s privacy and potentially put these people in danger. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/leader-wikileaks-unredacted-release https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/leader... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cab...
      - jude- 5y ago
yownie 5y ago
Local Icelander here, this kid has been known to be a real scumbag to most people here for years with much coverage of his sociopathic tendencies. https://grapevine.is/?s=siggi+hacker https://grapevine.is/?s=siggi+hacker
gamblor956 5y ago
Stundin is a tabloid. Let's wait until this report is confirmed by more reputable sources before declaring Assange innocent.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Never heard of Stundin before, but it reads like a pretty well done report.
- yownie 5y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting that its a tabloid it's one of the more reputable papers here in Iceland, and broke the Panama papers stories here years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stundin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stundin
  - gamblor956 5y ago
    The front page of Stundin shows a number of articles about celebrities and uses the word "scandal" more than a dozen times. The Panama Papers were first reported by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, not Stundin, but claiming credit for another paper's work is pretty standard for a tabloid. Sure, it might report on real news occasionally. A number of U.S. tabloids have reported on scandals and crimes that eventually turned out to be true. But if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, it's probably a duck.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  The size of the physical paper makes a difference to the integrity of the content?
2939223 5y ago
Nothing more jarring than the harrowing treatment of Assange by the US, contrasted with their subsequent lecturing and sanctioning of Belarus re Roman Protasevich, or Russia re Navalny. Zero integrity.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lbwtaylor 5y ago
  Has the US tried to extra judicially murder Assange?
  - 2939223 5y ago
    Yes: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/30/us-intelligence-sources-discussed-poisoning-julian-assange-court-told https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/30/us-intelligenc...
    - threeseed 5y ago
      That's an unproven allegation. Navalny was actually poisoned.
      - ComputerGuru 5y ago
        These were claims made in court, during formal hearings. They weren’t disputed, and as such, they are part of the official court record and are worth more than random hearsay. The US’ repsponse (as quoted) was that these allegations were “wholly irrelevant.” That doesn’t sound like a denunciation or denial to me.
        threeseed 5y ago
        Anybody can make claims in court and the US government is hardly going to confirm or deny poisoning someone. It's an unproven allegation and a world away from Navalny who was actually poisoned.
DevKoala 5y ago
Is there any way to vote against the current way the FBI/CIA operates? They are straight up coercing witnesses with fake testimonies to get a man prison, whose only crime was sharing the truth about the shameful inner workings of our American government.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  > Is there any way to vote against the current way the FBI/CIA operates? The SES is more equal than you, citizen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Executive_Service_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Executive_Service_(Unit...
- deadite 5y ago
  This sounds like a very anti-American sentiment. You don't get to air the dirty laundry of a country trying to keep a lid on chaos because they do something you don't like now and then. I want to know that the intelligence agencies, and the military that safe guard us, are able and willing to go to any length to preserve our way of living, even if it means they overstep. Not just one country, but all Five Eyes and then some. Because if they don't, there are actors all over the world who will take advantage of any "shame" and use it as a weapon until they subjugate you to their rule. Look at Russia and China for great examples of that. If you think the things these agencies do are so bad that they need to be voted against, you have no idea how bad things really are. So no, Assange's "only crime" wasn't "sharing the truth about the shameful inner workings of our American government." There's nothing to be ashamed about. He should be thankful he's still alive, and you should be thankful you can post this kind of a sentiment without having any repercussionary fear. Hope for your sake that it doesn't change.
  - cmckn 5y ago
    This is insane, “even if they overstep”? No one is above the law. What’s more American than democratic accountability? Telling American citizens to stop asking questions is appalling.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    Reading this comment gave me anxiety. Liberty is unchecked authority. That's a take.
lenkite 5y ago
Well, the FBI has been revealed to be thoroughly corrupt. You can also take it for granted that all the so-called conspiracy theories that are tagged as "misinformation" and "propaganda" by the US media "fact-checkers" will be revealed to be true within a few years. Of-course by then everyone will just shrug and move on since the public has the memory of a goldfish.
freeflight 5y ago
Not really surprising considering the many other blatant lies in the Assange case. For example to this day barely anybody seems aware about the fact how Swedish police changed witness testimonies to create rape accusations that were never even made by the two women, to have these nasty accusations leaked to the press only hours later, in the middle of the night. That's only one of the many findings by the UN rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer. His investigation into the Assange case is probably one of the best and most neutral takes on it, but if true also a really scary one [0] [0] https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikilea...
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Are you saying there was no credible rape accusation?
  - puchatek 5y ago
    That's what I recall from an interview with Melzer a while back too. Don't recall the details though.
  - hedora 5y ago
    There was no rape accusation, full stop. Here are the allegations: He had consensual sex, and the condom broke. He didn’t tell the woman after the fact, but she found it in the trash. She wanted him to get an HIV test. He refused. She tried to get the police to force him to get an HIV test. To her dismay, they decided to charge him with rape. This is all in the UN special rapporteur’s report, and apparently uncontested by everyone involved.
    - dariusj18 5y ago
      I'm not an expert on Swedish law, however rape is often a crime that people lobby to not require the victim to ask for charges. aka, The police/prosecutors get to make that decision.
  - 5y ago
the_optimist 5y ago
What an absolute joke. FBI/CIA recruits a child molester to lie about Assange. https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/09/25/siggi_the_hacker_gets_three_years_in_prison/ https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/09/25/siggi_the... Who on earth isn’t asking at this point “Are we (US intel agencies) the baddies?”
- jacobolus 5y ago
  I guess “I and most of my associates (including the ones who provided evidence against me) are pathological liars and criminals” is one kind of defense Assange can mount, but it doesn’t exactly build sympathy from at least this disinterested third-party reader.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    I believe it should give you pause to adjust your point of view of the history. Not that it'll matter if you're truly disinterested, but you posted a reply, so I guess you're not.
  - the_optimist 5y ago
    Well, you invented the “most of my associates” part which is the substance of your smear, so you seem a bit disingenuous. As for this fellow, intel agencies don’t get to both conjure lies AND claim guilt by association--with 5-year gap in the timing to boot--though surely they are not beneath trying. Surely the ends justify the means, right? Quite the contrary to your misguided assertions, way back in 1993, Assange consulted for the Victoria Australia police to apprehend child molestors and pornography distributors.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      As they take Assange to court, they’ll have to mount credible legal arguments, present convincing evidence, and deal with counter-evidence / cross examination from the defense. As I said, “these witnesses who worked with my client have admitted to being liars” can sometimes be a good legal argument. But as a third party observer, it doesn’t seem like the slam-dunk vindication of Assange that some here are implying. For better or worse, when bringing legal action against criminals, law enforcement sometimes needs to use evidence from other criminals and various kinds of unsavory characters.
ostenning 5y ago
Really interesting to see some of the criticisms of federal police and intelligence agencies here, to which I have to agree with. What I find interesting though is that the public approval rating of these organisations “seems” to have plummeted, I guess once upon a time they could get away with their lies and manipulation but not anymore?
seaorg 5y ago
Mars will be rough but at least there won’t be a tyrannical police state there to bend you over.
fscksnowden 5y ago
My comment got flagged due to bias towards supporting Assange
a0-prw 5y ago
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and just as much the propaganda build up to it), I believe nothing Western msm says. Assange was stitched up, but we still constantly have to hear claims of the superiority of Western "democracies", freedom of speech and justice.
Det95twins 5y ago
What is more dangerous? A government lying to you to protect the country or their power or an obsessed hacker who wants to expose all secrets with little or no consideration of the consequences. The truth is somewhere between these two extremes.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  No. Those in power have compromised the values of their own country and want to safe their hides. There is little gray area, the Iraq war has been started under false premises for imperalistic and strategic reasons. Assange is no threat here.

572 points by eplanit 5y ago

wyck 5y ago

Rats tend to be complete sociopath's and in many cases psychopaths, the police need to be held more accountable for onboarding these personalities instead of covering their own asses. There are several cases in Canada in which paid informants lied for years (decades) causing massive harm, and 2 cases which ended in mass murder, while still on police payroll. Yet the police somehow wash their hands of it all.

tgv 5y ago
In this case, he was diagnosed as such. The article claims he simply did it to avoid prosecution.

beebeepka 5y ago

I am shocked, shocked I tell you. Same with ridiculous rape charges. The spooks must have scared that poor woman to death. I guess that what you get for exposing major war crimes by the good guys. He is alive but his life is ruined and Bradley is a woman. Yay for justice Edit: I really don't understand the downvotes. What, exactly, do you find objectionable?

hedora 5y ago
The woman never accused Assange of rape. The police did, over her objections. The UN special rapporteur’s report goes into more detail, though the UN has produced so many documents detailing all the ways in which his detention is illegal, I can’t find the right link.
jasonvorhe 5y ago
You don't have to dead name trans people. Chelsea Manning chose her name, please respect that.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  What I am saying is that Manning was forced to take that path I actually have had sex, multiple times, with trans people. Careful with your assumptions. I find your response offensive
  - elif 5y ago
    your sexual preferences and personal offense are irrelevant and the rule you are debating has about as close to consensus acceptance as you will find in the queer space. If you indeed think "dead naming" is something someone made up for an internet comment, you are missing a large portion of the picture.
    - beebeepka 5y ago
      Forgive me for saying that I find that a person would change their gender after being imprisoned and tortured rather suspicious If you take that as some kind of attack on trans people, that's on you
      - dang 5y ago
        You've been posting tons of flamewar and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. That's not cool here and we ban accounts that do it, so if you'd please stop doing it, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Medicineguy 5y ago

While scrolling, the web page shifts up a couple dozens of pixels (Android, Firefox) . It's very annoying. I had to stop reading after the second paragraph. Am I the only one?

n8ta 5y ago
You are not the only one. Site is rough.
EvRev 5y ago
It is a bug when you use VH instead of VW on your height attribute. Always use VW on mobile because of the default behavior on mobile browsers to show the address bar when scrolling.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  But that breaks a lot of design assumptions, since many times the use of vh vs vw is to avoid assuming which of the height or width is greater. You’d have to use a min/max calculation to avoid aspect ratio mayhem whn comparing landscape to portrait. The real big is UI elements that randomly appear and disappear in the browser chrome, such as scroll bars and address bars, that contribute to vh/vw randomly spazzing.

juanani 5y ago

This abuse of power won't end well.

daenz 5y ago

For someone who has not followed Assange news for a long time, what is the general accusation of his crimes? Is it just that he published secret material that he received from other sources?

fossuser 5y ago
No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. So, who knows?
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  >The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. >At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. This is just more Russiagate nonsense: https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the-dnc-emails-that-showed-they-34778084.png https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the... >To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? There are no charges. There never were any charges. There was an investigation and that's as far as it went. >UPDATE GREAT NEWS: Swedish prosecutors are about to announce the dropping of the investigation into Julian Assange on sexual offence allegations. There never were any charges and the allegations were always nonsense, as detailed in the below article I wrote a month ago: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-charges-julian-assange-sweden-espionage-charges-julian-assange-usa/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-char...

encryptluks2 5y ago

I honestly have very little sympathy for Assange at this point. The entire organization either appears to have been a honey pot or front for foreign election interference.

rendall 5y ago
This is a badly uninformed opinion
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Not at all: from what I've seen, that sort of thing doesn't have to start out as intentional nefariousness. We've just got some state actors who've developed real skill and determination at twisting all sorts of existing entities to their ends: this is considerably easier in the service of chaos politics than it would be if they were trying to set up an orderly, top-down spy network or some such thing. You don't have to start OUT as a honeypot or a tool of foreign intelligence. It would be a pretty lousy intelligence service that had to start with pre-existing cooperation and alliance. Much better to work at twisting things, and then rely on rationalization and perhaps back it up with threat and intimidation. There's nothing new about any of this, it's just done with flair, ingenuity and determination. Or has been: I think there's a limit to how far that can go.
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  Look to cryptome for what it would've looked like if it wasn't an engine for Assange's ego. The people who just wanted to host leaks left more than a decade ago. The org admitted to pushing it's own political positions. No idea why people defend the thing. All they publish now is the result of Russian hacks. And he's not a journalist.
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    Accusing them of pushing political positions and the saying they're not journalists feels like conflicting arguments in this day and age. It's also difficult to appear politically neutral when publishing truths that are (or should be, but aren't) existentially inconvenient to any particular person or group.

tootie 5y ago

This article seems awfully biased. Calling him a sociopath isn't very objective.

chmod775 5y ago
From the article: > According to a psychiatric assessment presented to the court Thordarson was diagnosed as a sociopath

fscksnowden 5y ago

If Greenwald suggest to Snowden in Dec 2012 that he should steal more, is comrade Greenwald complicit We all know Assange not only encouraged but participated. Snowden is a thief and liar who encouraged others to leak in his capacity at fpf. Complicit. Snowden and Assange are traitors, in the non legal definition

rbanffy 5y ago
Assange is not even a US citizen. How can he be a traitor?
- fscksnowden 5y ago
  fair enough, he runs a so called "hostile intel svc"
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    For what, reporting the truth to the US public? That's called journalism and ought to be praised.
    - fscksnowden 5y ago
      Opinion split, many think he's an arch criminal. Certainly hasn't made US diplomacy any easier. I'd gander that Assange, Snowden and Trump are the main reasons why our alliances are shaky. (I'm an American but this affects the whole Western alliance)
      - TheGigaChad 5y ago
        Suck dick, idiot.
      - h_anna_h 5y ago
        Not committing warcrimes, not going after whistleblowers and journalists, not torturing people in prison and keeping them confined for years without trial, and not spying on the citizens of your own and foreign countries would help the US diplomacy. It is like saying that rape victims who went to the police are the reason that the life of the rapist is ruined instead of his choice to rape people.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

Important to note that nothing Wikileaks has published has ever had to be retracted. They've told the truth to the public about governments, which is why they're targeted. In fact several Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded thanks to their efforts. They've never been shown to put anyone at risk either, a testament to their careful vetting process, showing that they're responsible too. This is clearly a political attack on someone who has exposed some uncomfortable truths. Even if Assange is a criminal, which I don't think he is, there's no excuse for holding him in the manner which they are, treating him worse than the worst criminals. Finally it's been shown that the rape accusations were an orchestrated smear campaign as well.

joshuamorton 5y ago
> They've never been shown to put anyone at risk This is false. They've denied putting people at risk, but there's decent evidence that their leaks have directly shared pii and harmed large numbers of random unimportant people.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Could you share this decent evidence for us who haven't seen it before?
  - billyhoffman 5y ago
    Wikileaks posted diplomatic cables without redacting the names or other forms of PII. Actual journalists from the New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde, The Guardian, and El País all signed a statement saying this was a gross breach of people’s privacy and potentially put these people in danger. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/leader-wikileaks-unredacted-release https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/leader... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cab...
    - jude- 5y ago

yownie 5y ago

Local Icelander here, this kid has been known to be a real scumbag to most people here for years with much coverage of his sociopathic tendencies. https://grapevine.is/?s=siggi+hacker https://grapevine.is/?s=siggi+hacker

gamblor956 5y ago

Stundin is a tabloid. Let's wait until this report is confirmed by more reputable sources before declaring Assange innocent.

denton-scratch 5y ago
Never heard of Stundin before, but it reads like a pretty well done report.
yownie 5y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting that its a tabloid it's one of the more reputable papers here in Iceland, and broke the Panama papers stories here years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stundin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stundin
- gamblor956 5y ago
  The front page of Stundin shows a number of articles about celebrities and uses the word "scandal" more than a dozen times. The Panama Papers were first reported by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, not Stundin, but claiming credit for another paper's work is pretty standard for a tabloid. Sure, it might report on real news occasionally. A number of U.S. tabloids have reported on scandals and crimes that eventually turned out to be true. But if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, it's probably a duck.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
The size of the physical paper makes a difference to the integrity of the content?

2939223 5y ago

Nothing more jarring than the harrowing treatment of Assange by the US, contrasted with their subsequent lecturing and sanctioning of Belarus re Roman Protasevich, or Russia re Navalny. Zero integrity.

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lbwtaylor 5y ago
Has the US tried to extra judicially murder Assange?
- 2939223 5y ago
  Yes: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/30/us-intelligence-sources-discussed-poisoning-julian-assange-court-told https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/30/us-intelligenc...
  - threeseed 5y ago
    That's an unproven allegation. Navalny was actually poisoned.
    - ComputerGuru 5y ago
      These were claims made in court, during formal hearings. They weren’t disputed, and as such, they are part of the official court record and are worth more than random hearsay. The US’ repsponse (as quoted) was that these allegations were “wholly irrelevant.” That doesn’t sound like a denunciation or denial to me.
      - threeseed 5y ago
        Anybody can make claims in court and the US government is hardly going to confirm or deny poisoning someone. It's an unproven allegation and a world away from Navalny who was actually poisoned.

DevKoala 5y ago

Is there any way to vote against the current way the FBI/CIA operates? They are straight up coercing witnesses with fake testimonies to get a man prison, whose only crime was sharing the truth about the shameful inner workings of our American government.

fidesomnes 5y ago
> Is there any way to vote against the current way the FBI/CIA operates? The SES is more equal than you, citizen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Executive_Service_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Executive_Service_(Unit...
deadite 5y ago
This sounds like a very anti-American sentiment. You don't get to air the dirty laundry of a country trying to keep a lid on chaos because they do something you don't like now and then. I want to know that the intelligence agencies, and the military that safe guard us, are able and willing to go to any length to preserve our way of living, even if it means they overstep. Not just one country, but all Five Eyes and then some. Because if they don't, there are actors all over the world who will take advantage of any "shame" and use it as a weapon until they subjugate you to their rule. Look at Russia and China for great examples of that. If you think the things these agencies do are so bad that they need to be voted against, you have no idea how bad things really are. So no, Assange's "only crime" wasn't "sharing the truth about the shameful inner workings of our American government." There's nothing to be ashamed about. He should be thankful he's still alive, and you should be thankful you can post this kind of a sentiment without having any repercussionary fear. Hope for your sake that it doesn't change.
- cmckn 5y ago
  This is insane, “even if they overstep”? No one is above the law. What’s more American than democratic accountability? Telling American citizens to stop asking questions is appalling.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  Reading this comment gave me anxiety. Liberty is unchecked authority. That's a take.

lenkite 5y ago

Well, the FBI has been revealed to be thoroughly corrupt. You can also take it for granted that all the so-called conspiracy theories that are tagged as "misinformation" and "propaganda" by the US media "fact-checkers" will be revealed to be true within a few years. Of-course by then everyone will just shrug and move on since the public has the memory of a goldfish.

freeflight 5y ago

Not really surprising considering the many other blatant lies in the Assange case. For example to this day barely anybody seems aware about the fact how Swedish police changed witness testimonies to create rape accusations that were never even made by the two women, to have these nasty accusations leaked to the press only hours later, in the middle of the night. That's only one of the many findings by the UN rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer. His investigation into the Assange case is probably one of the best and most neutral takes on it, but if true also a really scary one [0] [0] https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikilea...

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Are you saying there was no credible rape accusation?
- puchatek 5y ago
  That's what I recall from an interview with Melzer a while back too. Don't recall the details though.
- hedora 5y ago
  There was no rape accusation, full stop. Here are the allegations: He had consensual sex, and the condom broke. He didn’t tell the woman after the fact, but she found it in the trash. She wanted him to get an HIV test. He refused. She tried to get the police to force him to get an HIV test. To her dismay, they decided to charge him with rape. This is all in the UN special rapporteur’s report, and apparently uncontested by everyone involved.
  - dariusj18 5y ago
    I'm not an expert on Swedish law, however rape is often a crime that people lobby to not require the victim to ask for charges. aka, The police/prosecutors get to make that decision.
- 5y ago

the_optimist 5y ago

What an absolute joke. FBI/CIA recruits a child molester to lie about Assange. https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/09/25/siggi_the_hacker_gets_three_years_in_prison/ https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/09/25/siggi_the... Who on earth isn’t asking at this point “Are we (US intel agencies) the baddies?”

jacobolus 5y ago
I guess “I and most of my associates (including the ones who provided evidence against me) are pathological liars and criminals” is one kind of defense Assange can mount, but it doesn’t exactly build sympathy from at least this disinterested third-party reader.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  I believe it should give you pause to adjust your point of view of the history. Not that it'll matter if you're truly disinterested, but you posted a reply, so I guess you're not.
- the_optimist 5y ago
  Well, you invented the “most of my associates” part which is the substance of your smear, so you seem a bit disingenuous. As for this fellow, intel agencies don’t get to both conjure lies AND claim guilt by association--with 5-year gap in the timing to boot--though surely they are not beneath trying. Surely the ends justify the means, right? Quite the contrary to your misguided assertions, way back in 1993, Assange consulted for the Victoria Australia police to apprehend child molestors and pornography distributors.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    As they take Assange to court, they’ll have to mount credible legal arguments, present convincing evidence, and deal with counter-evidence / cross examination from the defense. As I said, “these witnesses who worked with my client have admitted to being liars” can sometimes be a good legal argument. But as a third party observer, it doesn’t seem like the slam-dunk vindication of Assange that some here are implying. For better or worse, when bringing legal action against criminals, law enforcement sometimes needs to use evidence from other criminals and various kinds of unsavory characters.

ostenning 5y ago

Really interesting to see some of the criticisms of federal police and intelligence agencies here, to which I have to agree with. What I find interesting though is that the public approval rating of these organisations “seems” to have plummeted, I guess once upon a time they could get away with their lies and manipulation but not anymore?

seaorg 5y ago

Mars will be rough but at least there won’t be a tyrannical police state there to bend you over.

fscksnowden 5y ago

My comment got flagged due to bias towards supporting Assange

a0-prw 5y ago

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and just as much the propaganda build up to it), I believe nothing Western msm says. Assange was stitched up, but we still constantly have to hear claims of the superiority of Western "democracies", freedom of speech and justice.

Det95twins 5y ago

What is more dangerous? A government lying to you to protect the country or their power or an obsessed hacker who wants to expose all secrets with little or no consideration of the consequences. The truth is somewhere between these two extremes.

raxxorrax 5y ago
No. Those in power have compromised the values of their own country and want to safe their hides. There is little gray area, the Iraq war has been started under false premises for imperalistic and strategic reasons. Assange is no threat here.