Why is Biden Prosecuting Assange for Telling the Truth?

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kuze
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13 Sep 2021, 4:37 pm

Julian Assange, a fellow autistic human, has been incarcerated for way too long for telling the truth about corruption in governments around the world including the USA. Trump tried to extradite him but was denied by a British judge, however Biden, now in office , is actively pursuing the extradition appeal. Western governments have openly condemned the abhorrent actions of Russia and Belarus for imprisoning Alexei Navalny and Raman Pratasevich whose only crime, like Assange was also to speak the truth. This is blatant hypocrisy by Western governments who want to teach an autistic journalist a lesson with a long prison sentence for doing his job.

https://www.newsweek.com/why-biden-pros ... on-1627963

A penny for your thoughts?

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Fnord
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13 Sep 2021, 4:45 pm

Julian Assange engaged in acts of espionage against the people and government of the United States of America.


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13 Sep 2021, 6:22 pm

Fnord wrote:
Julian Assange engaged in acts of espionage against the people and government of the United States of America.


Eh, the most you could plausibly argue is that he published the fruits of leakers and might have helped one get around a security feature, I don't think he's accused of doing any actual spying himself. He's obviously being made an example of to deter others, a project that has spanned multiple administrations of various ideologies, though I wish Trump had pardoned him if only to spite Obama.


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DW_a_mom
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14 Sep 2021, 4:32 am

I think the problem is that the law is the law, and his actions broke the law. While not all breaks of laws cause real damage, laws exist for a reason, and failing to enforce them increases the odds they will be broken in a way that will cause real damage.

It is possible that there has been more deep and real damage from some leaks than we've been privy to. I don't have a good memory of what all he's been involved with exposing. Not all truth should be exposed. Exposing spies, for example, tends to get them killed.

Still, no one can say enforcement of laws is ever completely consistent. For that reason, I do think Dox47 has a point that an element of example setting is likely involved. Democrats are also at a disadvantage when it comes to leniency for anyone who has broken the law, in that every instance of leniency becomes a "Democrats are soft on crime" hammer for Republicans.


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Dox47
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14 Sep 2021, 5:00 am

DW_a_mom wrote:
I think the problem is that the law is the law, and his actions broke the law.


Did he? He's not a US citizen, so he can't be charged with any kind of treason, and the Pentagon Papers case established that a journalist can't be prosecuted for publishing stolen classified information. The only thing they're going after him for is claiming he helped Manning crack the encryption on some of the files, which is very thin for how hard we're going after him.


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ezbzbfcg2
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14 Sep 2021, 5:16 am

Dox47 wrote:
DW_a_mom wrote:
I think the problem is that the law is the law, and his actions broke the law.


Did he? He's not a US citizen, so he can't be charged with any kind of treason, and the Pentagon Papers case established that a journalist can't be prosecuted for publishing stolen classified information. The only thing they're going after him for is claiming he helped Manning crack the encryption on some of the files, which is very thin for how hard we're going after him.

I'm not anti-Assange, per se. The argument is that he's a citizen of a country allied with the USA. If he were a Chinaman, or even a Russian, the US would have a hard time getting to him. Reminds me of the Englishman who hacked NASA's servers. You don't actually have to be the citizen of a country to violate its laws, even if violating them from afar. How much of an ally your country is with the prosecuting country may determine your fate.

On paper, pre-9/11, Osama bin Laden was wanted in Federal court in the USA for acts of terrorism, though there was no legal way of getting to him. It was mostly symbolic. An Australian citizen, however, may be more easily-attained. And as an American, if I were to hack into classified, top-secret British servers, or EU servers, or Australian servers, or simply publish classified information from those countries, would I expect to get away scot-free? Or would the benevolence between America and those countries whose laws I'd violated make me an extradition case?

But you're correct. As an Australian, he's technically not a traitor to the USA as he's not an American.



kuze
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14 Sep 2021, 5:43 am

DW_a_mom wrote:
I think the problem is that the law is the law, and his actions broke the law. While not all breaks of laws cause real damage, laws exist for a reason, and failing to enforce them increases the odds they will be broken in a way that will cause real damage.

It is possible that there has been more deep and real damage from some leaks than we've been privy to. I don't have a good memory of what all he's been involved with exposing. Not all truth should be exposed. Exposing spies, for example, tends to get them killed.

Still, no one can say enforcement of laws is ever completely consistent. For that reason, I do think Dox47 has a point that an element of example setting is likely involved. Democrats are also at a disadvantage when it comes to leniency for anyone who has broken the law, in that every instance of leniency becomes a "Democrats are soft on crime" hammer for Republicans.


Heres a quote from the Huffington Post in 2010:

'Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. It’s only because of his leaks that we know the US government has secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians — five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them — and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.'

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/julian-a ... u_b_793504

kuze


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Benjamin the Donkey
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17 Sep 2021, 10:05 pm

Fnord wrote:
Julian Assange engaged in acts of espionage against the people and government of the United States of America.


Espionage usually means one country or company using spies to acquire secrets about a competing country or company. However, Assange was not working as an agent of a government but, he says, as a whistle-blowing journalist, a very different matter.


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05 Oct 2021, 1:00 pm

Politicians don't like the truth because it exposes their secrets. The work of a politician is to influence the population to buy into their story, so no other option is possible.



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28 Oct 2021, 8:12 am

Lawyer: Julian Assange suffers from autism and could commit suicide if sent to United States

Quote:
A lawyer for Julian Assange told a British court Wednesday that the WikiLeaks founder is suffering from an autism disorder that could drive him to suicide were he extradited to the United States to face trial for publishing classified documents.

“This is someone suffering from a mental disorder who would find [extradition] unbearable because of his Asperger's,” said Edward Fitzgerald, a British barrister representing Assange during the opening day of a two-day hearing on the high-profile case. “And that’s a direct result of what he describes as rumination of his predicament, increasing his anxiety, worsening his condition of imprisonment, that would lead to his attempt of suicide being higher.”

The case before the British appellate court has taken on new urgency for Assange’s defenders in recent weeks, after a Yahoo News story disclosed that the CIA under its then director, Mike Pompeo, in 2017 developed plans to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorean Embassy — and even discussed options for assassinating him — following WikiLeaks' publication of documents disclosing details of the agency’s highly sensitive “Vault 7” hacking tools.

In court papers filed with the court and released Wednesday, Assange’s lawyers cited the Yahoo News story as further grounds for the British courts to reject the U.S. government’s request for extradition.

In fact, as the Yahoo News story reported, neither the plans to abduct Assange nor the internal talk of assassinating him moved forward after senior lawyers at the Trump White House raised objections to some of Pompeo’s plans. But other aggressive measures targeting Assange and WikiLeaks were undertaken, including undercover surveillance of him inside the embassy and intercepting the communications of his associates.


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28 Oct 2021, 8:32 am

Ah, yes ... the old "I get my way or I kill myself" bluff ...

:roll: As if autism automatically confers suicidal tendencies.



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31 Oct 2021, 9:38 pm

Fnord wrote:
Julian Assange engaged in acts of espionage against the people and government of the United States of America.


He shamed your government, yes.
There was a lot to be ashamed about.
The pollies simply didn't want the public to know. 8)



Pepe
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31 Oct 2021, 9:44 pm

Dox47 wrote:
DW_a_mom wrote:
I think the problem is that the law is the law, and his actions broke the law.


Did he? He's not a US citizen, so he can't be charged with any kind of treason, and the Pentagon Papers case established that a journalist can't be prosecuted for publishing stolen classified information. The only thing they're going after him for is claiming he helped Manning crack the encryption on some of the files, which is very thin for how hard we're going after him.


Speaking of laws:

Quote:
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws (also known as miscegenation laws) were laws passed by most states that prohibited interracial marriage, and in some cases also prohibited interracial sexual relations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-misc ... ted_States

8)



Pepe
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31 Oct 2021, 9:50 pm

kuze wrote:
DW_a_mom wrote:
I think the problem is that the law is the law, and his actions broke the law. While not all breaks of laws cause real damage, laws exist for a reason, and failing to enforce them increases the odds they will be broken in a way that will cause real damage.

It is possible that there has been more deep and real damage from some leaks than we've been privy to. I don't have a good memory of what all he's been involved with exposing. Not all truth should be exposed. Exposing spies, for example, tends to get them killed.

Still, no one can say enforcement of laws is ever completely consistent. For that reason, I do think Dox47 has a point that an element of example setting is likely involved. Democrats are also at a disadvantage when it comes to leniency for anyone who has broken the law, in that every instance of leniency becomes a "Democrats are soft on crime" hammer for Republicans.


Heres a quote from the Huffington Post in 2010:

'Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. It’s only because of his leaks that we know the US government has secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians — five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them — and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof.'

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/julian-a ... u_b_793504

kuze


Also, a number of years ago on WP, someone mentioned that the names of people who may have been harmed by the leak were redacted.

I don't know if this is actually true, but I would be surprised if Assange didn't.
He isn't a stupid man, except when it comes to sexual protection. :mrgreen:



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31 Oct 2021, 9:54 pm

Benjamin the Donkey wrote:
Fnord wrote:
Julian Assange engaged in acts of espionage against the people and government of the United States of America.


Espionage usually means one country or company using spies to acquire secrets about a competing country or company. However, Assange was not working as an agent of a government but, he says, as a whistle-blowing journalist, a very different matter.


He was exposing the despicable acts of the US.
For this, he was and is being punished.

Moral of the story:
Only tell the Truth when you know you can get away with it. :mrgreen:

Fixxer wrote:
Politicians don't like the truth because it exposes their secrets. The work of a politician is to influence the population to buy into their story, so no other option is possible.


Totally agree. :thumright:



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31 Oct 2021, 11:50 pm

Fnord wrote:
Julian Assange engaged in acts of espionage against the people and government of the United States of America.


I have never quite understood what was going on with that.

Can you in simple terms say what specifically was wrong with what he did? Like on one hand if he was just 'saying the truth' seems wrong to be persecuted, but I feel there is probably more to the story and he is not the hero some seem to think he is.

So idk I guess I'd like to hear more about your perspective that he is in fact a criminal deserving of legal prosecution. I suppose I don't quite understand the crimes he committed but I am also not so on bored with seeing him as someone who did no wrong.


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