Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he is considering a request from Australia to drop the decade-long US push to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing a trove of American classified documents.
I have never understood under what justification the US is demanding Assange is extradited to them and charged with espionage. He is not American, doesn’t live in the US and owes no allegiance to the US. Does the US claim some kind of universal jurisdiction in this case?
In the name of national security, who cares about the rights of a few foreigners living on foreign (allied) soil? This isn’t a coincidence, this is literally a core component of US foreign policy.
Every country has “universal” jurisdiction in the sense that they can request the extradition of any foreign individual for any reason.
It’s then up to the rest of the world whether to grant that, or more specifically whatever country the individual happens to be in.
Extradition exists because otherwise crimes commited remotely across borders would be even more rampant than they already are, and it is in the interest of governments to allow other governments to prosecute individuals that commit particularly egregious crimes across a border, or escape across a border.
Whether Assange is one of those is debatable, but the US has a lot of weight to throw around and Wikileaks offended the government specifically. So here we are.
Whether Assange is one of those is debatable, but the US has a lot of weight to throw around and Wikileaks offended the government specifically. So here we are.
Isn’t there some big nuclear submarine deal going on right now between America and Australia?
Yes, this guy. This messenger you’re currently shooting deserves a pardon and multiple awards.
He exposed more corruption and illegal actions than either of us ever will. We need to encourage these heroic deeds. The FBI planted evidence on him. His client attorney privilege was violated. If he was actually such a bad person, these illegal lengths should never have been used to frame him.
Wikileaks and Assange have both tried to sell themselves as whistle blowers fighting for truth and while they have revealed evil and wrongdoing. They utilize Russian information networks and specifically place focus on the US.
In anyone reasonable’s eyes you would tell Assange isn’t a whistle blower, he is a player in the game and WikiLeaks is literally just another propaganda outlet like the rest of them that tries to act differently.
No. Timed to maximise the exposure for wikileaks, to encourage more leaking.
Assange’s hatred of Clinton was well established long before.
More because she hates him. She was pushing to indict him after publishing the 2010 diplomatic cables showing complicit spying during her tenure as secretary of state. The same ones he’s now being held in prison for.
I’d compare him to a cop who selectively polices crime gang A but ignores crime gang B. And whose phone number is found with members of crime gang B, together with evidence that they could call the cop at any time (and did so) to appear inside crime gang A’s territory. Yes, technically, the cop has apprehended more criminals than either of us ever will and we could give him a medal for his work (and crime gang B is certainly motivated to help that along to get this cop more entrenched and promoted).
“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.
Assange has mentioned on numerous occasions that they get a lot of fake leaks sent by ABCs designed to hurt WikiLeaks’ credibility. Unless there is concrete evidence of him being a Russian asset (and it has to be concrete, especially knowing that he has literally been framed by the FBI on multiple occasions), I’m not going to immediately drop my support for whistleblowers.
“We had several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack. It would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services,” the source who provided the messages wrote to FP. “Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse.”
Neither of our quotes really adds anything to the discussion.
A nebulous policy to reject “anything WL can’t verify” or “has been published elsewhere” or “is likely to be considered insignificant” or is “diversionary (to WL’s election interference)” is a carte blanche for Assange to turn down anything that he doesn’t like.
I won’t even ask for concrete evidence that the FBI has framed Assange, because in the big picture, it doesn’t change who he is or what he does. To me, it’s been sufficiently proven that he takes sides (that’s an ‘F’ for integrity, report the story, don’t be part of the story), that he collaborated in anti-democratic GOP activities and that his promotes views that align with the gunk spread by “Russia Today” or “Sputnik.” Whether that’s because he a Russian asset or because he’s had a false awakening into the conspirational world view Russian information warfare uses to twist people, who knows. I’ll withhold judgment on that one, but I also won’t expect him to do anything good for the world.
I just want to say I don’t disagree with anything you said on in facts of your comment (like WikiLeaks’ chatlogs). Those are facts. The other things like what WikiLeaks can or cannot verify are the he said/she said, and I’m cautious to blame WikiLeaks for it because of all the BS and slander (much of which was later found out to be false) that Assange faced.
Even if we ignore the fact of who Assange is - I don’t want future whistleblowers to get the same illegal treatment (like the attorney client privilege abuse) as Assange. Precedence matters in cases like this. It determines what future whistleblowers will face.
He would be easier to support if he had just kept releasing important news/evidence when it was morally justified, and not got into the more questionable activities of private intelligence - such as election meddling.
Bad move on his part, makes him a lot harder to defend.
A million people died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, despite global protests and outrage. Sometimes it feels like there must be better systems than the current set up of “democracy”.
I din't think we have to defend what he did in order to defend his human rights.
The US itself has spies and espionage in many countries.
It's crazy hearing people talk like Assange's journalism/espionage/whatever is somehow this unheard-of thing that is deserving of whatever torture gulag/Guantanamo type situation the US wants to dream up.
I have a slight worry that pardoning Snowden would result in his disappearance/death since Putin would no longer have any use for him. Right now they are protecting someone who is considered an enemy of the US government and has embarrassed the US intelligence apparatus, if that changes then he no longer fills a purpose for the Russian government.
I want Snowden to be home free but right now I think he’s in a precarious situation.
If the options are “pardon” and “not pardon”, “not pardon” just means he stays in that exact same precarious situation. At least a pardon stands to change it, with the added benefit of being morally correct.
Even if the change is that he gets sent to a Siberian prison and/or executed? As long as the war in Ukraine is ongoing, I sincerely doubt he has any chance of getting out of Russia.
He’s not doing much inside Russia one way or another. At least a pardon gives him a way out. And if he gets sent to a gulag, that’s not on whoever pardoned him. That’s on whoever sent him to the gulag.
I’m genuinely curious, is that how it works? If you refinance, the new loan loses the “student loan” earmark and you’re no longer eligible? Or did you consolidate two/multiple loans and the student loan was one of them?
It sounds a bit unfair in the former case because in my mind it’s still the student loan debt, just with (hopefully) better conditions.
But I agree, it’s good that at least some headway has been made. I miss the “investment into the future” perspective we had from before the news became so gloomy :)
It was the former. The wounded pride of having to actually pay for my unused degree* is somewhat lessened by having the interest paid to a credit union rather than a national telecom/finance conglomerate.
Or getting mandatory the overtime pay cutoff more than doubled, OTC birth control, investment in renewables and infrastructure, new anti-redlining regulations, fighting junk fees in finance, advising the DEA to reschedule MJ, domestic semiconductor investment, getting more pro-union leadership back at the NLRB, better consumer protections for flight delays an cancelations, healthcare for veteran burn pit victims…
I wish the guy was further left but there’s plenty of stuff he’s gotten done that under four more years of the orange menace would have never happened.
Yeah I guess the only option would’ve been to continue funding a war we had no fucking business being in the first place thanks to ANOTHER Republican president.
This comment was removed for saying “I’m sure the girls who got to go to school would appreciate it. Now there’s no hope for them except as obedient wives.”
It wasn’t breaking any rules, so I’m reposting it.
It’s kind of dumb that Biden gets to be a great president just for erasing some of the mess Trump made. I miss the days when we were actually talking about things like better healthcare, meaningful gun legislation, and education, not back to basic human fucking rights.
When he's being actively undermined by Republicans the whole way, just cleaning up Trump's mess can be an accomplishment. The Inflation Reduction Act went against heavily entrenched interests to restart the US federal government's response to climate change. It took real finesse to get that through Congress.
That’s kind of bullshit. With a divided government, Biden has managed to do more than most of his recent predecessors, much with bipartisan support. I didn’t expect much from him when I voted -was more of a “not Trump” thing - but I have to give him credit, he’s done a lot. Even just the infrastructure bill is a big deal, with positive impacts in several needed areas. The inflation reduction act is pretty major, too.
Not trying to disparage this list, but we all know the Paris Agreement is bullshit, and not a single country is on pace to meet it, despite signing it.
FYI, the biggest thing Biden had done for climate change is indefinitely halt approvals for LNG export terminals in the US, this headline went completely under most people’s radar (Biden did a trash job of even trying to make a big deal out of it) but environmental activists and experts like Bill Mckibben say this is actually a massive deal. Decades of investment won’t be put into export terminals and so the incentive to keep going down the LNG road becomes significantly less attractive for energy companies.
Add comment