7 ms·

Julian Assange: peering through the murk

77 points by curmudgeon22 5y ago

boomboomsubban 5y ago
Serving time in an Australian prison for violations of the US Espionage Act committed while in various European countries is a bizarre situation. And I can't help but notice that their assurance of treatment does not rule out any other maximum security prisons nor any alternative restrictions on correspondence. Still, these assurances suggest that the US's goal is more likely precedent than revenge. While it make it less likely Assange will be killed, its still a major attack against the freedom of the press.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > is a bizarre situation I agree that this outcome should cause people to stop and think about whether justice is really being done here, but the other side of the argument is that it's actually digital technology which is making our intuitions fail, and the justice system is just trying to catch up with that. If someone from country A travels to country B and uses a computer to gain access to information in country C without permission, and then distributes that information from a computer in country D to people in country E, then I think just about any legal outcome is bizarre to some extent, including acquittal.
  - tremon 5y ago
    If someone from country A travels to country B and uses an informant to gain access to information in country C without permission, and then distributes that information through a telegraph in country D to people in country E, then I think just about any legal outcome is bizarre to some extent, including acquittal. Why is "but on a computer" your focal line of reasoning here and not "distributes information"? If someone from country A distributes highly inconvenient but true information about country B, then is apprehended by country C, I think just about any legal outcome except acquittal is a gross miscarriage of justice.
    - loup-vaillant 5y ago
      This is the crux here: whatever Assange did, he did it out of US jurisdiction. Unless we accept that US jurisdiction span well beyond their borders, and we don't even care about the illusion of sovereignty outside superpowers. And that's if we can establish that Assange did anything more than normal investigative journalism.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        > Unless we accept that US jurisdiction span well beyond their borders Hypothetically, if an Italian citizen, living in Italy, hired an American hitman to kill someone in the US, would it be unjust for the US government to ask the Italian government to extradite the Italian?
        boomboomsubban 5y ago
        Two things. First, in your hypothetical the crime and I believe the hiring take place in America, while if memory serves Manning was in Afghanistan during their communication. Second, Italy presumably has a law against hiring hitmen. Printing classified US documents is unlikely to violate any Italian law.
        foldr 5y ago
        It seems unlikely that Italy doesn’t have any legal protections for government secrets. I don’t think it’s so clear that the “dual criminality” requirement would only be satisfied if Italy had laws against publishing documents classified by the US government. You could try to argue that, but it seems a rather pedantic semantic argument. I also wouldn’t necessarily assume that Italian law only covers Italian government documents. For example, the Official Secrets Act in the UK can apply to intelligence information more broadly in some cases. Anyway, extradition cases like this tend to raise quite complex legal issues, and the way the law works isn’t always very intuitive or in line with what you might think is fair and just.
      - ChrisKnott 5y ago
  - partomniscient 5y ago
    I agree that this outcome should cause people to stop and think about whether justice is really being done here If you get to this point and now wonder whether justice is being done, you haven't been paying attention or following it for a while. None of this is about justice. It's about powerful people trying to deny themselves truth/reality to maintain their illusory identity. They bought into the "truth, justice and the american way" and got caught out. Assange enabled the world to see their nation behaving as they do, not as they wanted to be seen, with the added irony that it was through collateral damage of their own journalists being blown away by a trigger happy numbskulled armed forces member out of control. Cue Jack Nicholson saying "You can't handle the truth!" - they can't. Making Assange guilty in any way possible is the only way 'the system' can make itself feel better about itself. All the laws and technicalities and ridiculous court theatre are just part of the sad misdirection show. The 'interpretations of law', bizarre courtroom requirements and treatment show that Assange was actually right to fear his situation. The fact they gamed the system to get a specific judge to preside over the trial while at the same time denying nearly all public eyeballs from actually being in the room whilst the case was being heard just shows how far they're willing to go to try to reinforce their self-righteous identity. As I said in another post: The US want to apply US law somewhere other than the US to someone who is not a US citizen. They can fuck off. And that's from someone who thinks 'the law' (or application thereof) is a crock of shit a lot of the time even if there were some well meaning intentions made back in the day. There's something very ominous about the line "The truth does not matter, there is only the power of men" in the trailer for the upcoming movie The Last Duel.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      > It's about powerful people trying to deny themselves truth/reality to maintain their illusory identity Like Assange fighting to not stand trial?
      - partomniscient 5y ago
        Don't you get the fact that there _is_ a trial is actually a key part of the problem?
    - 5y ago
  - hulitu 5y ago
    No, it is just a "show" process. The purpose is not to serve justice but to silence opposition.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  > the US government will let him serve his sentence in an Australian prison This just creates a situation where a criminal is deported to their home nation with an agreememt with said nation that they serve their prison time there. Nothing really that bizare at all.
  - sprkwd 5y ago
    How long does he have left to serve?
    - ectopod 5y ago
      The clock hasn't started. He is not serving a sentence. He is being held as a flight risk pending the US government's extradition appeal.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    You don't find an agreement to deport someone who isn't a resident bizarre? And presumably these deportations involve detention for things that would also be crimes in the "home" country. Would publishing classified US documents violate Australian law?
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      Not really. If I were a citizen of Russia, hacked the US government from there, and entered a country with an extradition treaty with the US (eg UK) I would expect to be extradited to the US. Taking computers out of the mix, if I ran a fraud ring from Russia defrauding US citizens of their money, I would expect a similar outcome.
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago
        >I would expect to be extradited to the US. But you wouldn't expect the US to agree to deport you back to Russia as part of the extradition assurance.
- PicassoCTs 5y ago
  Its also just words, this is a mean old empire handing over a journalist to a mean new empire. PR-stunts like treatment assurances are basically not worth the paper they are printed on.
  - aksss 5y ago
    It reminds me of the scene in The Princess Bride where, once the Princess had left after getting assurances that Westley would be repatriated to his ship unharmed if he surrendered, the Prince told Westley, “Come Sir, we must get you to your ‘ship’.” The DPR retorted, “We are both men of action; lies do not become us”. “Well said,” replied the Prince. I don’t mean to cheapen Assange’s predicament as I take it quite seriously and with the gravity it’s due, but these stories hold a mirror to our world.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  >Serving time in an Australian prison for violations of the US Espionage Act committed while in various European countries is a bizarre situation. What is bizarre about agreements between governments?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dane-pgp 5y ago
> the US government will let him serve his sentence in an Australian prison. It did seem logical that the US would try to offer the minimum assurances necessary to satisfy the British judges. One hypothetical that came to mind, though, was whether Biden could grant a pre-emptive commutation of his sentence. My understanding is that a president can issue a full pardon to someone who has not yet been indicted (let alone sentenced), but I'm not sure if there is a case of a president trying to commute a sentence that hasn't been issued yet. This would seem to allow various philosophical questions to arise, such as issuing a commutation of "half" the sentence, before discovering that the sentence issued is "life imprisonment". Also, what would happen if a president stated that the sentence should be reduced by 10 years, but the commutee only ended up being given an 8 year sentence? Would the government then owe the commutee compensation for 2 years of unlawful (albeit notional) imprisonment? Anyway, perhaps the best place to look for precedents here is a state governor pre-emptively granting a commutation of a death sentence to a defendant in a court case who had somehow won the sympathy of the public (possibly with an election coming up). I don't know if that has ever happened though.
- Proven 5y ago
  > One hypothetical that came to mind, though, was whether Biden could grant a pre-emptive commutation of his sentence. Are you kidding? American intelligence-industrial complex has enough material on the Bidens to keep that figurehead in check.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dominicjj 5y ago
I'll forgive the author for not mentioning it because it's gone completely unmentioned in the Western media: the case against Julian Assange has collapsed completely. The prosecution's star witness, a convicted child molester, has walked back all of his original accusations. https://archive.is/qNq8u https://archive.is/qNq8u
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  I think it's unmentioned because it has nothing to do with the US appeal of the extradition ruling, which is the topic of the article. And though I view the retraction as an important and under covered event, it does not collapse the case completely. The witness is only relevant to one of the eighteen charges against Assange, and even in that charge he was mostly used as a character witness to label Assange as a malicious hacker.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    It is definitely relevant, and the reason for all this legal "murk". The USG+SIGs don't have a good faith case against Assange, but want to punish him as much as possible. He's already where they want him--in and out of solitary confinement in a miserable 5EYES prison.
  - okamiueru 5y ago
    How is "The witness is only relevant to one of the eighteen charges against Assange, and even in that charge he was mostly used as a character witness to label Assange as a malicious hacker." logically congruent with "has nothing to do with the US appeal of the extradition ruling"? Seems a pretty good contradiction, unless I'm missing something.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      The appeal has nothing to do with any of the charges, the extradition was denied based on humanitarian grounds. Basically the ruling was "yes the US has valid reason to extradite Assange, but that's likely to kill him so we won't extradite." It's possible that they would not say the US has valid reason to extradite after the retraction, but unless the refusal is overruled, that doesn't matter.
justinclift 5y ago
> The US has also agreed that ... Wasn't it shown the US has broken it's previous promises to the UK government about other people that have been extradited? eg medical care, housing, etc. Being that's the case, it doesn't really make any sense to believe these promises would be upheld either.
- Traster 5y ago
  That would be a reasonable argument against accepting the extradition on the basis of those assurances, but not a reasonable argument against at least hearing the assurances - which is what the appeal will do.
aksss 5y ago
Still shipping prisoners to AUS, after all these years.

77 points by curmudgeon22 5y ago

Serving time in an Australian prison for violations of the US Espionage Act committed while in various European countries is a bizarre situation. And I can't help but notice that their assurance of treatment does not rule out any other maximum security prisons nor any alternative restrictions on correspondence. Still, these assurances suggest that the US's goal is more likely precedent than revenge. While it make it less likely Assange will be killed, its still a major attack against the freedom of the press.

dane-pgp 5y ago
> is a bizarre situation I agree that this outcome should cause people to stop and think about whether justice is really being done here, but the other side of the argument is that it's actually digital technology which is making our intuitions fail, and the justice system is just trying to catch up with that. If someone from country A travels to country B and uses a computer to gain access to information in country C without permission, and then distributes that information from a computer in country D to people in country E, then I think just about any legal outcome is bizarre to some extent, including acquittal.
- tremon 5y ago
  If someone from country A travels to country B and uses an informant to gain access to information in country C without permission, and then distributes that information through a telegraph in country D to people in country E, then I think just about any legal outcome is bizarre to some extent, including acquittal. Why is "but on a computer" your focal line of reasoning here and not "distributes information"? If someone from country A distributes highly inconvenient but true information about country B, then is apprehended by country C, I think just about any legal outcome except acquittal is a gross miscarriage of justice.
  - loup-vaillant 5y ago
    This is the crux here: whatever Assange did, he did it out of US jurisdiction. Unless we accept that US jurisdiction span well beyond their borders, and we don't even care about the illusion of sovereignty outside superpowers. And that's if we can establish that Assange did anything more than normal investigative journalism.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > Unless we accept that US jurisdiction span well beyond their borders Hypothetically, if an Italian citizen, living in Italy, hired an American hitman to kill someone in the US, would it be unjust for the US government to ask the Italian government to extradite the Italian?
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago
        Two things. First, in your hypothetical the crime and I believe the hiring take place in America, while if memory serves Manning was in Afghanistan during their communication. Second, Italy presumably has a law against hiring hitmen. Printing classified US documents is unlikely to violate any Italian law.
        foldr 5y ago
        It seems unlikely that Italy doesn’t have any legal protections for government secrets. I don’t think it’s so clear that the “dual criminality” requirement would only be satisfied if Italy had laws against publishing documents classified by the US government. You could try to argue that, but it seems a rather pedantic semantic argument. I also wouldn’t necessarily assume that Italian law only covers Italian government documents. For example, the Official Secrets Act in the UK can apply to intelligence information more broadly in some cases. Anyway, extradition cases like this tend to raise quite complex legal issues, and the way the law works isn’t always very intuitive or in line with what you might think is fair and just.
    - ChrisKnott 5y ago
- partomniscient 5y ago
  I agree that this outcome should cause people to stop and think about whether justice is really being done here If you get to this point and now wonder whether justice is being done, you haven't been paying attention or following it for a while. None of this is about justice. It's about powerful people trying to deny themselves truth/reality to maintain their illusory identity. They bought into the "truth, justice and the american way" and got caught out. Assange enabled the world to see their nation behaving as they do, not as they wanted to be seen, with the added irony that it was through collateral damage of their own journalists being blown away by a trigger happy numbskulled armed forces member out of control. Cue Jack Nicholson saying "You can't handle the truth!" - they can't. Making Assange guilty in any way possible is the only way 'the system' can make itself feel better about itself. All the laws and technicalities and ridiculous court theatre are just part of the sad misdirection show. The 'interpretations of law', bizarre courtroom requirements and treatment show that Assange was actually right to fear his situation. The fact they gamed the system to get a specific judge to preside over the trial while at the same time denying nearly all public eyeballs from actually being in the room whilst the case was being heard just shows how far they're willing to go to try to reinforce their self-righteous identity. As I said in another post: The US want to apply US law somewhere other than the US to someone who is not a US citizen. They can fuck off. And that's from someone who thinks 'the law' (or application thereof) is a crock of shit a lot of the time even if there were some well meaning intentions made back in the day. There's something very ominous about the line "The truth does not matter, there is only the power of men" in the trailer for the upcoming movie The Last Duel.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    > It's about powerful people trying to deny themselves truth/reality to maintain their illusory identity Like Assange fighting to not stand trial?
    - partomniscient 5y ago
      Don't you get the fact that there _is_ a trial is actually a key part of the problem?
  - 5y ago
- hulitu 5y ago
  No, it is just a "show" process. The purpose is not to serve justice but to silence opposition.
shapefrog 5y ago
> the US government will let him serve his sentence in an Australian prison This just creates a situation where a criminal is deported to their home nation with an agreememt with said nation that they serve their prison time there. Nothing really that bizare at all.
- sprkwd 5y ago
  How long does he have left to serve?
  - ectopod 5y ago
    The clock hasn't started. He is not serving a sentence. He is being held as a flight risk pending the US government's extradition appeal.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  You don't find an agreement to deport someone who isn't a resident bizarre? And presumably these deportations involve detention for things that would also be crimes in the "home" country. Would publishing classified US documents violate Australian law?
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    Not really. If I were a citizen of Russia, hacked the US government from there, and entered a country with an extradition treaty with the US (eg UK) I would expect to be extradited to the US. Taking computers out of the mix, if I ran a fraud ring from Russia defrauding US citizens of their money, I would expect a similar outcome.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      >I would expect to be extradited to the US. But you wouldn't expect the US to agree to deport you back to Russia as part of the extradition assurance.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
Its also just words, this is a mean old empire handing over a journalist to a mean new empire. PR-stunts like treatment assurances are basically not worth the paper they are printed on.
- aksss 5y ago
  It reminds me of the scene in The Princess Bride where, once the Princess had left after getting assurances that Westley would be repatriated to his ship unharmed if he surrendered, the Prince told Westley, “Come Sir, we must get you to your ‘ship’.” The DPR retorted, “We are both men of action; lies do not become us”. “Well said,” replied the Prince. I don’t mean to cheapen Assange’s predicament as I take it quite seriously and with the gravity it’s due, but these stories hold a mirror to our world.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
>Serving time in an Australian prison for violations of the US Espionage Act committed while in various European countries is a bizarre situation. What is bizarre about agreements between governments?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dane-pgp 5y ago

> the US government will let him serve his sentence in an Australian prison. It did seem logical that the US would try to offer the minimum assurances necessary to satisfy the British judges. One hypothetical that came to mind, though, was whether Biden could grant a pre-emptive commutation of his sentence. My understanding is that a president can issue a full pardon to someone who has not yet been indicted (let alone sentenced), but I'm not sure if there is a case of a president trying to commute a sentence that hasn't been issued yet. This would seem to allow various philosophical questions to arise, such as issuing a commutation of "half" the sentence, before discovering that the sentence issued is "life imprisonment". Also, what would happen if a president stated that the sentence should be reduced by 10 years, but the commutee only ended up being given an 8 year sentence? Would the government then owe the commutee compensation for 2 years of unlawful (albeit notional) imprisonment? Anyway, perhaps the best place to look for precedents here is a state governor pre-emptively granting a commutation of a death sentence to a defendant in a court case who had somehow won the sympathy of the public (possibly with an election coming up). I don't know if that has ever happened though.

Proven 5y ago
> One hypothetical that came to mind, though, was whether Biden could grant a pre-emptive commutation of his sentence. Are you kidding? American intelligence-industrial complex has enough material on the Bidens to keep that figurehead in check.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dominicjj 5y ago

I'll forgive the author for not mentioning it because it's gone completely unmentioned in the Western media: the case against Julian Assange has collapsed completely. The prosecution's star witness, a convicted child molester, has walked back all of his original accusations. https://archive.is/qNq8u https://archive.is/qNq8u

boomboomsubban 5y ago
I think it's unmentioned because it has nothing to do with the US appeal of the extradition ruling, which is the topic of the article. And though I view the retraction as an important and under covered event, it does not collapse the case completely. The witness is only relevant to one of the eighteen charges against Assange, and even in that charge he was mostly used as a character witness to label Assange as a malicious hacker.
- pphysch 5y ago
  It is definitely relevant, and the reason for all this legal "murk". The USG+SIGs don't have a good faith case against Assange, but want to punish him as much as possible. He's already where they want him--in and out of solitary confinement in a miserable 5EYES prison.
- okamiueru 5y ago
  How is "The witness is only relevant to one of the eighteen charges against Assange, and even in that charge he was mostly used as a character witness to label Assange as a malicious hacker." logically congruent with "has nothing to do with the US appeal of the extradition ruling"? Seems a pretty good contradiction, unless I'm missing something.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    The appeal has nothing to do with any of the charges, the extradition was denied based on humanitarian grounds. Basically the ruling was "yes the US has valid reason to extradite Assange, but that's likely to kill him so we won't extradite." It's possible that they would not say the US has valid reason to extradite after the retraction, but unless the refusal is overruled, that doesn't matter.

justinclift 5y ago

> The US has also agreed that ... Wasn't it shown the US has broken it's previous promises to the UK government about other people that have been extradited? eg medical care, housing, etc. Being that's the case, it doesn't really make any sense to believe these promises would be upheld either.

Traster 5y ago
That would be a reasonable argument against accepting the extradition on the basis of those assurances, but not a reasonable argument against at least hearing the assurances - which is what the appeal will do.

aksss 5y ago

Still shipping prisoners to AUS, after all these years.