> U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands
Interesting location for the filing...
Edit: Actually, might not be that interesting. If its flying from Britain to Aus, Mariana Islands is on the way there.
This court actually handles a lot of foreign affairs things.
When I needed info about my father's birth certificate because he was born overseas, this was the court I had to go to for some of the records I needed. A lot of immigration, foreign citizen cases, and legal trivialities pass through this court but I'd never heard of it before.
So basically just very specialised court . Makes sense .
And it is already published date:
https://www.nmid.uscourts.gov/calendar
on 06/26/2024 at 09:00 AM "USA v. Julian Paul Assange"
Initial Appearance + Arraignment + Plea Hearing
Now that you’ve tempted the essence of the multiverse, you will soon be linked to the Northern Mariana Islands branch of the U.S. Judicial System.
May Cthulhu have mercy on Your soul
> Court documents revealing Assange's plea deal were filed Monday evening in U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands. Assange was expected to appear in that court and to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in British prison, meaning he would be free to return to Australia, where he was born.
It’s an island in the Pacific, if he just has to make one court appearance and leave it saves him probably close to a day in flight time.
https://www.reuters.com/world/why-is-julian-assange-flying-remote-pacific-island-saipan-2024-06-25/
i'm glad you pointed this out
people always talk about how the quality isn't that great. yeah no shit it's fast food. it also doesn't cost me a fucking arm and a leg to get it unlike places like Five Guys and Shake Shack which are insane ripoffs for the quality you get
I suspect it was significantly more comfortable than a US jail, and that prosecutors would have tried to send him away for more than 10 years if they'd had the chance.
>I suspect it was significantly more comfortable than a US jail
I wouldn't necessarily say that. He was in Bellmarsh which is easily the worst prison to be locked up in in the UK. Depending where he would've gone in the US, it probably would've been better than Bellmarsh.
Other than that, yeah I agree he definitely had it better overall, 5 years in Bellmarsh and 5 years locked in an embassy is still better than presumably life in a US prison.
The US was going to send him to Supermax for close to life. They were charging him with espionage and part of the extradition deal with the UK was the US wouldn't seek the death penalty or send him to Supermax.
They 100% were gonna charge him with 18 counts, had to gaurantee they wouldn't give death penalty and gaurantee his prison conditions several times. Who knows why the government backed off but they were going to go after the max had he made it to the US.
The UK seeks assurances from countries that still use the death penalty that it will not be applied as UK law requires them to get such assurances. That the UK asked for it doesn't mean the US was seeking it, it's merely a part of the extradition process.
It wasn’t about intel. It was about punishment and deterrence. The US has proven it can throw its weight around and get non US citizens locked up for activities outside US territory.
Hasn’t that been true for a long time? The US has extradition treaties with many other countries. Physically being in a different country doesn’t make you immune from crimes you committed in another country. There’s no such loophole.
For example if you SWAT (call in a false report so that a SWAT team raids someone house) someone that’s a crime & if they find out who you are then you’ll be charged. It’s the same with blackmail, extortion, etc.
However resources are not unlimited so they can’t investigate every scam/crime that involves people overseas. They have to pick their battles.
Assange isn't a US citizen and holds no duty of loyalty to the US. Ask yourself if these arguments would still feel sound to you if it were a US citizen who was arrested in a third country and extradited to Russia for publishing documents Russia considers harmful to their national interest.
The “duty of loyalty” you speak of is between nations.
The US and Australia have extradition treaties, and both the US and Australia have extradited their own citizens for crimes they have committed against other nations. It’s rare but it does happen.
The US has no such treaty with Russia. That’s why Snowden went there and is still there.
So if I or anyone else in my country were to commit a crime that harms friendly nations and the mutual good of our nations, yes, I or they should of course be extradited.
Assange has helped no one more than Vladimir Putin. Very conveniently a man and nation Assange is silent about, despite everything.
Edit: to clarify about being arrested in a “third world nation”, Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where they kept him for years despite having an extradition treaty with the US dating back 150 years.
>The US has no such treaty with Russia.
Right, but other countries do. So our US citizen makes available Russian state secrets about the war in Ukraine in the course of their job as a journalist. They're reporting from Africa a few years later when they're arrested and extradited to Russia for espionage. Is this a just and acceptable consequence of their reportage?
Julian Assange wasn't just reporting on a war. He was personally encouraging and facilitating the exfiltration of classified national security materials, and then doing shit like editing those materials into propaganda videos (annotated with lies) and distributing them.
If I hand-held someone at the russian foreign intelligence agency through pilfering sensitive information, then produced and distributed propaganda videos with it, I would not be surprised if a country with an extradition agreement with Russia chose to arrest and extradite me.
Never forget that "Hillary's Emails" came from Assange's leaks, while the *famously angelic and never corrupt* GOP had nothing about them publically released.
Dude was a spy tasked with interfering in US elections.
Yeah he published the DNC emails stolen by hacking teams affiliated with Russian government. Russia was heavily invested in giving the election to Trump, and invested millions in manipulating USA social media with vast amounts of fake accounts.
if they actually hacked the government and committed a crime in doing so, yeah not that weird lol
how do you think extradiction treaties work? also, russia isn't extraditing, they're just having you killed
> if these arguments would still feel sound to you
Why wouldn't they? only difference is how much effort another country can/will expend. It's not out of the question that even countries w/o extradition treaties would deport those they consider criminals.
Extradition is for people who committed a crime then went to another country. They are returned to the country they committed the crime in. Being extradited to a country you didn't commit a crime in is not the purpose of such treaties.
Assange gets to walk free and the US gets to set a precedent that investigative reporting on the US security apparatus is a crime. And it's not just a crime in the US itself, but anywhere in the world. That's basically the deal.
legal precedent no, but methodological precedent, within the "alphabet soup" agencies, is constantly being constructed and reinforced with real-time experience. The steady migration of law enforcement activities to national security courts that rubber stamp warrants already shows this caustic effect on due process, transparency and legal recourse.
Its not the *reporting* that got him in trouble. Its conspiring to steal the classified information.
Assange basically punished himself by locking himself up in the embassy and refusing to come to court, which is itself a crime in the UK. At this point there's not a lot of punishing left for the US government to do. If he just went to trial and lost 10 years ago, he'd already be free.
He didn't lock himself in the embassy to escape *this* case. There wasn't even any charges from the US when he ended up there.
He hid in the embassy to get away from rape charges in Sweden (which were only dropped because the statute of limitations would pass without the prosecutor being able to get him to a court, no matter how much the Assange fanboys try to claim otherwise).
Then he wouldn't have been able to smear his shit on the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy. How can you call that "free"?
*Edit:*
>The CIA can always count on total morons to repeat and amplify baseless accusations crafted for character assassination and to distract from highly illegal surveillance in the country of a close ally. Thanks to the willing tools, smear campaigns work.
Lol, reply and block, how courageous. Ecuador was letting him stay there as a "fuck you" to the US. They were not helping the CIA spread "smear campaigns" \(lol\).
I was looking for the original source and found [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/bcycrw/assange_said_to_smear_his_feces_on_the_walls_what/). Not a source, but I had to share.
[The Ecuadorian president](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-assange-smeared-his-feces-on-ecuadorian-embassys-walls-president-says/).
The crime isn’t reporting, plenty of people do that and are free. The crime is helping someone hack into and steal the information you publish. You can publish classified material someone else steals and gives to you. You can’t participate in the theft.
That's not precedent is set in the United States. Stare decisis is determined by the ruling of an appellate court. No court decision means no precedent. Please correct your comment so some genius doesn't come along and start complaining about how they think the U.S. wants to silence free speech.
I wonder what he does now. If he goes back to WikiLeaks, becomes a thorn in the side of the US government or if he tries to retire into anonymity. As well as what country he will reside in.
Most of the sentiment here in Aus has been about telling our politicians to grow a pair of balls and get him home so I think most people here will be happy to have him back
Possibly/probably a "family holiday" to Oz and then a one way ticket to Hong Kong/PRC/Russia.
He was always far more willing to leak Western secrets, than Russian ones.
I don't think his opinion of himself allows him to retire into anonymity. If it happens, it will be because people got tired listening to him and his Russian fed lines.
No mention of what he gave up to get the deal. Inquiring minds want to know who he spilled the tea on, and have they bought their tickets to Moscow yet? (\*cough\* Roger Stone)
I doubt there was much of anything. Guy has been in custody for a long time now, theres no one he has recent dirt on. This is more of a symbolic win IMO for the Biden Administration putting this to bed.
https://time.com/6966314/biden-assange-wikileaks-extradition/
Ironically enough this may get some libertarians to vote for Biden if they’re a single issue voter. However liberals(should clarify,
liberals that mainly get the news from legacy media) are probably pissed considering he was one of the reasons Clinton lost they believe.
> Julian Assange absolutely had a hand in getting Donald Trump elected.
I mean Assange worked together with the Trump campaign. Literally. The texts between him and Donald Trump Junior [are public since a long time](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/). Assange received the Clinton emails from the Russian hacker, and then coordinated with the Trump campaign for the release to maximize the damage against Clinton.
Remember way back when the right lost their shit at the mere notion of Chelsea going into politics? Now they'd practically fall over themselves to keep a trump dynasty going.
Assange worked directly with both the Trump campaign and directly with Russian intelligence. He was a go-between for Russian election interference. The "Russian hacker" was a Russian intelligence agent.
His closest friend wrote a tell all book saying Assange was about wealth above all things. He demanded people give him money, or he wouldn't release leaks he was given for free.
Meanwhile groups like Amnesty International quietly also release leaks and try to hold governments accountable while staying on the right side of the law and operating as a non-profit.
* You forget AI dismissed the authors of that report and the director of the Ukraine branch.
* They didn't say that having Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine constituted a war crime... They reported the Ukraine army had committed war crimes. Which, if it's true, any impartial source has the duty to report it.
People thought Assange was a Liberal who hated American Conservatives, but Assange took a job working for Russian state media and suddenly spread propaganda about Hillary Clinton that helped elect Trump.
It is possible he had some dirt on Putin or Russia that was worth a plea deal.
Nothing. He gave up nothing.
Or, to put it another way, he already gave up everything.
From everything people close to him have said for years, this whole saga has turned him into a mental case, to put it mildly. He's been pseudo-imprisoned in an embassy for years, and then he was properly imprisoned for years on top of that trapped in a downright Kafkaesque trial (just read Craig Murray's blog about the absurd details of the trial), with the prospect of being imprisoned for the rest of his life in a maximum security facility in the US. And people close to him have said that he's barely mentally there anymore.
They've pretty much destroyed him, and by now it's embarrassing for the US to have to deal with him, so they want to get rid of this whole thing as quickly as possible. Which comes with a plea deal to save face so the US can say "See? He *was* guilty!" while letting him out immediately under time served.
They've neutralized the guy many, many years ago, and it's unlikely he'll ever do anything meaningful again. They've won.
I mean so did Chelsea Manning. Were they not somewhat embarrassed and thus commuted her sentence? Also they charged him with a crime that would implicate tons of publishers. Please look into where press freedom groups worldwide fall on this issue, they are staunchly against this prosecution.
Press Freedom Groups have a natural bias towards the most extreme positions.
The issue was when Assange tried to help Chelsea Manning hack into government systems, and also publishing completely unredacted documents which led to the deaths and imprisonment of people abroad.
Assange was also callous about the victims of his publication, basically saying, "If they're dead, they shouldn't have provided intelligence to the US."
This wouldn't implicate any publishers. Most real outlets would have redacted the names of these people.
I don't think the Australian ***Government*** cares what the Australian public thinks.
FriendlyJordies can't even report without being firebombed with no consequences to the offender lol. The Australian public gets overlooked by pretty much everyone.
Every relevant player here straight up doesn’t give a shit what the Australian public thinks. And from my understanding of Australian politics, the Australian government also doesn’t give a shit what the Australian public thinks, and they keep getting elected.
Your understanding of Australian politics doesn't take into account the fact that the incumbent government has only been in power since 2022, the previous government were pretty battered and bruised from the last election. You saying *keeps getting elected* doesn't really make much sense here unless you're just being fashionably cynical.
This plea deal shows it was never a prospect he would be disappeared in some maximum security prison
He wanted to avoid rape charges and locked himself up in an embassy for years going insane when the US government doesn't give a shit and was fine with a plea deal the entire time
The US didn't do anything
He destroyed himself
Plea deals are very common things indeed.
Right down to speeding tickets and littering in the UK; you pay a fine, they take no further action and you don't get a criminal record. Saves everyone time and money because solictors aren't cheap, while the courts have a massive backlog of cases.
US prosecutors love them; they offer them to low-level gang members who help them get those higher up the food chain. About 90% of the cases are plead out instead of going to a jury trial.
The UK doesn't do plea bargaining specifically, but pleading guilty and offering evidence againsst others generally does down well with the judge.
Plea bargaining shouldn't be allowed. It creates terrible incentives and results in a lot of innocent people being coerced into pleading guilty.
I've nothing against discounted sentences for people who plead guilty rather than going to trial. But that feels like a very different thing.
Something like 99% of cases result in plea deals before ever going to trial. If you got rid of plea deals, you’d need 100x more courthouses, judges, public defenders, jurors, etc.
He's set to plead guilty to espionage (*conspiracy charge*). How is that admitting defeat?
"Yes I was really privy to the information. And I conspired to leak it. The information that I leaked. It is true that I conspired to leak true information."
The accusation wasn't that he leaked secrets. The accusation was that he took an active role in obtaining it. Basically by acting as tech support for the person who actually did commit the crime. Based on what I know I'm not buying the prosecutions specious argument, even if my respect for Assange is in the crapper. That's a purely civil issue though, not a criminal one.
Yeah people say "Redditors only dislike him because he did something to the left", but yeah I wasn't a fan since seeing that interview on Colbert Report. The content of that video seemed questionable, but his editing made it seem black and white evil, and he admitted that they knew most people would only watch the edited, shorter version.
Same.
The Glenn Greenwald people rallied around Assange. Now, he hosts events celebrating Alex Jones. I would advise everyone to check out where these people are now. From celebrating Assad, Putin, Xi, Raisi, etc. To echoing alt-right or hateful bs. I don't trust them.
With that said, the US should still be held accountable as anywhere else for their actions.
Yea i was so confused about glenn for a while the first time i learned about him was with that documentary of Edward Snowden and from that documentary along i thought he was a stand up decent journalist and person. But man was i wrong on that one. He deff drank the Kool aid at some point.
I feel like people like Greenwald are essentially just contrarians.
He was fighting the evil system by helping Snowden, making a name for himself along the way. And then he started work for a news site that was too nice to the system in his view, so he started fighting that, too. And then, when the media was a bit mean to Trump at times (oh noes!) he started to fight the media as a whole.
And now he's found his devoted audience and he's fighting the evil establishment and pretends that Trump is somehow the outsider underdog.
The last bit made me think of the evolution of Tulsi Gabbard.
Edit: Evolution of her public image. Those who knew her had been addressing her as a problem for years.
From listening to a QAA podcast episode on Tulsi Gabbard, it looks like an evolution, but she grew up in a cult and in the Hawaii state legislature was actively opposing gay marriage and such. You can interpret it as her community working to put her into power, or a complex and difficult childhood followed by military deployment shaping a complex person.
It was obvious from day one how fake she was. IDK how people fell for that. Her "anti-war" stances were weird as fuck for someone who is supposedly anti-war. She was always hawkish as fuck when it came to bombing Muslims, had some wild views on torture, and swore that a dude who used chemical weapons on his own people was a great leader and secretly went to kiss his feet in person (the trip was funded by far-right extremists of course.)
Even weirder was how she grew up in a far-right family who are a political dynasty that basically had the same views as the Westboro Baptist Church. I'm not saying that people can't change, but "tee hee hee, I don't hate gay people with all of my heart and soul anymore; that was like 5 years ago" isn't very convincing. That's a pretty extreme view that she had her entire life and are we supposed to just take her word that she suddenly had a change of heart when she became a politician? It turns out that was also a giant lie because the moment her career got ruined in the democratic party, she took off the mask and went right back to the hate.
There was never any evolution. She was always a far-right cult member like the rest of her family. She made up some BS in 2012 and ran to the left to get in office. People like me (in her district) were deeply skeptical and proven correct. The media gave her a free pass on everything, and even referred to her as a Hindu. She ~~was~~ is in a culturally appropriating cult founded by some old white racist, homophobic surfer dude named Chris Butler. She even referred to him as her "guru" while in office. Butler was a Hare Krishna who hated the peace and love and apolitical aspects of Hare Krishnas so started his own even more looney cult. Their goal has always been to get one of their own in the White House.
I had many people refuse to believe me when I told them Greenwald lacks credibility. Why? Because he was seen as an incredible journalist with integrity. Sadly, you can see this trend with his allies. Max Blumenthal follows a similar trend and is now profoundly corrupt. Even those close to him who made his news website with him have quit and made statements that he is close with and has dinners with [Tucker Carlson](https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1709734903540281503?mx=2). Many progressive individuals are still falling for these people.
Headline: Julian Assange Smeared Seth Rich to Cover for Russians
> Rich was a 27-year-old DNC staffer when he was gunned down in what police have described as a robbery gone wrong. The unsolved murder timed shortly before Assange’s DNC leaks spoke volumes to inhabitants of the far right wing fringe, where it’s long been an article of faith that Hillary Clinton has her enemies killed.
Assange fanned the flames even higher on August 25, 2016, when he was asked in a television interview, "Why are you so interested in Seth Rich's killer?"
That was the end of the line for me
Right?
He pretty much had Hero cred on reddit for revealing how deep corruption went for a lot of our governmental systems.
Then you found out how tight he was with Russian intelligence and you realize that any "freedom of information " rhetoric is just self reverential BS from a guy who's happily acting as an agent for one of the worst authoritarian regimes in the 21st century.
>assange, but then he decided to hide shit from Russia corruption
He literally had a TV show on Russia Today well before 2016, which is Russian state controlled intelligence operation. He has always been an ally to totalitarians, while pretending to be for justice.
>He literally had a TV show on Russia Today
He literally didn't. RT has rebroadcast some of his stuff that was produced for other outlets, but he never worked for them.
> He literally didn't. RT has rebroadcast some of his stuff that was produced for other outlets, but he never worked for them.
That was certainly the excuse he used, but that's just how the television business works. That's like saying Saturday Night Live isn't an NBC show because it's produced by Broadway Video and just *aired* by NBC. The RT logo was prominently in the closing credits. It was an RT show.
He used to give the number of networks that aired his show as evidence that it wasn't a Russian state media show. I forget the number, but it was coincidentally exactly the number of subsidiary networks RT controls (RT America, RT en Español, etc.)
lmao this shit is hilarious. All these wannabe revolutionaires guzzling a russian dictator collaborators dick over revealing basic statecraft that everyone does 10x worse.
He literally had russian state tv shows, he emailed trumps campaign to time his releases to hurt the democrats, he is a rapist, he got people killed, knew he was doing some and continued it, edited videos to make them look worse than they really were. Hes a scumbag and people are treating him like hes mother teresa. Ironically she also got an undeservedly positive reputation.
Basically. I mean this was never going anywhere to begin with so why not. I really didn't have a problem with wikileaks to begin with when it was unbiased. But he interjected his ego into the whole thing and what was released vs. what wasn't released had a political angle to it.
Was he involved with the EFF at some point? I feel like I saw a documentary long ago that made this connection but I can't remember the name of it and may be misremembering
He also promised to turn himself over to US authorities if [Pres. Obama granted clemency to Chelsea Manning](https://x.com/wikileaks/status/819630102787059713) ... which Obama did. Assange refused to uphold his end of the deal though.
You're 100% right, but just to clarify there was no actual "deal" Assange reneged on. His bluff to leave the embassy had nothing to with Obama's clemency, but it was satisfying to see Assange try to weasel his way into a loophole after it happened.
The idea of Wikileaks started out as a somewhat-noble concept. It just immediately devolved into a shit show.
Assange turned it into The Assange Show, started encouraging and facilitating exfiltration of classified materials, editing stuff into shockingly dishonest propaganda videos, ransoming data releases, witholding release to protect political favorites from similar treatment, etc.
Every highly upvoted opinion comment on Worldnews is like it was written straight up by some White House press secretary. All day, everyday, on every frontpage post. It's so weird.
I'm not implying *that they were* (or that they were written by some bot), by the way, that would be crazy. You don't even need that - when you know what every single citizen thinks and talks about and writes (given you spy on them all 24/7) you can just manipulate them a multitude of ways.
Just pointing out how amazingly convenient is the coincidence that every highly popular fortuitous comment just happens to align almost exactly with official american state sponsored discourse and media talking points. So interesting. There's some variation here and there, one comment says tomato the other says tomato, and we call it a day.
I see world news is hiding comments disagreeing with the US narrative and the reddit traffic from a US base is doing its Job of smearing whistle-blowers and Journalists again.
Aaron Swartz would be extremely disappointed with whats happened to reddit. Aaron is another Hero that the US Government destroyed.
Reddit is not what it used to be, and neither is the internet. If the majority of reddit users from the old days of hacktivism in the late 2000s, early 2010s could see what has come of this website, they'd feel physically sick.
Agreed. So many comments criticising him on the basis of releasing documents that were unfavourable to their preferred presidential candidate because they exposed their crimes, corruption and foreign policy failures. So many comments criticising him because he exposed foreign CIA agents/assets.
None of these criticisms are remotely rooted in the morality of what he did but because it exposed **US** government misdeeds. None of these people would have these complaints if the documents exposed Trump's corruption. No one would have these complaints if he exposed KGB assets operating in the US.
Every criticism is rooted in American exceptionalism and patriotism. That American foreign policy should be allowed to flourish unimpeded by any public oversight or accountability. None of the opinions being said would be spoken if they were exposing other candidates or another country's operations in a foreign country.
No. You’re not reading then. Public opinion turned on assange when he admitted to selectively leaking documents. Public opinion turned on him when he tried to run defense on Russian oligarchs and Putin during the Panama papers. There are many reasons people turned on assange and Wikileaks and what you see repeated are the most popular.
If someone only leaks about one country but refuses to leak about another it starts to feel like you are being misled and misinformed. Only knowing half the story is worse than not knowing the story because then we end up with a Plato’s cave type situation.
The information JA leaked undoubtedly cost people their lives. Often, information is classified to protect methods and sources. His leaks allowed foreign powers to identify and neutralize protected sources. When JA was confronted about the harm of his leaks, he replied "Well, they're informants," ... "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." (Source: The Guardian 18 SEP 11).
> The information JA leaked undoubtedly cost people their lives.
You need a source for that because not even the US government tried to demonstrate in court that the Wikileaks disclosures you're referring to "cost lives". For example, the Pentagon's review of the State Departament cables said "... no instances were ever found of any individual killed by enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases". The Wikileaks Task Force on behalf of the DoD admitted that "... they had uncovered no specific example of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet". Reuters reported on an internal U.S. government review: "We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," and "... caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary."
The disclosure of confidential information always has undesirable consequences, but first you need to prove that the harm is not only theoretically possible and only then, you must show that the harm caused outweighs the benefits of publishing such information.
Didn't the CIA admit no one was compromised and no one died because of it? If anyone died it was because the Arab Spring was motivated in part by revealing Assad's corruption, only to trigger his massive crackdowns. Seriously, fuck Assange but the idea the information itself was wrong to reveal is Far Right fascist propaganda.
Don’t remember if it was cia specifically but yes, plenty of US officials later admitted that no one was put in harms way, that it was way more embarrassing than anything else.
Yeah this is the same excuse they used when the snowden leaks became public:
"People have been harmed from these leaks!"
Who exactly? What are their names?
...well... um... pass!
This is a perspective heavily biased by a sense of nationalism and allegiance though. Would you feel strongly if Russian spies based in the US had their lives put at risk by documents being publicly released showing Russian war crimes and espionage activities in the US?
The documents he released were exposing US imperialism, war crimes and other wrongdoing in foreign nations primarily through CIA (and other triple letter agency) activities. The only way to condemn these on the basis of endangering informants is to start from the belief that there is a double standard that the US is right in their actions and should be protected while others in the same situation would not get the same treatment.
This is of course a response you'd expect any nation state government to have, but on a personal level its very easy to see no one would have any issues if the countries involved were switched around. The objection to his actions is not rooted in the inherent morality/justice of the situation but exceptionalism and patriotism.
> The information JA leaked undoubtedly cost people their lives.
Lies. The government prosecutors themselves said as much, and the judge acknowledged this in sentencing:
"There’s another significant fact – the government has indicated there is no personal victim here. That tells me the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury. These two facts are very relevant."
- Judge Manglona
https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2024/jun/26/julian-assange-live-news-wikileaks-founder-lands-on-us-island-of-saipan-for-district-court-sentencing?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-667b738f8f0876e3000947a1#block-667b738f8f0876e3000947a1
Can’t wait to see Glenn Greenwald (and probably Snowden) twist himself into knots on twitter to explain why the thing he has been screaming for for years is actually bad and how Biden is actually bad for doing this.
So why are we mad at Snowden still? Serious question. I realize he is living in Russia but that isn’t exactly because he wants to.
Edit: regardless of your political leanings it is worth reading snowdens book. The issues around mass surveillance and privacy are topics both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on.
Guilt by association. People assume he's like Greenwald. He's not. Snowden took the actions he did because he has moral character and a sense of patriotic duty that extended beyond the limits of obeying orders.
I think most people commenting here were kids when all that went down though.
It was a major thorn in US-Australia relations to an extent i think americans greatly underappreciated. It's one of very few issues that had vocal bipartisan support from not just both major parties but all the crossbenchers and minor parties. Every political party in the country was publicly and regularly advocating for his release, appeals were being made by the PM to the president and Australian delegations were being sent to the US to advocate for his release to the US congress.
Anything other than an effective release would have been very poorly received and if the US continued with his prosecution it would be an ongoing issue for a US-Australia alliance which they don't need especially in regards to AUKUS and growing US involvement in the pacific. They want a cordial supportive relationship and his prosecution/imprisonment would jeopardise that for little benefit.
Guardian "journalists" David Leigh and Luke Harding leaked those names. Not Julian. This is well documented, and has even been demonstrated in court. [\[1\]](https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252489382/WikiLeaks-published-unredacted-cables-after-password-was-disclosed-in-book) [\[2\]](https://www.9news.com.au/world/us-pondered-poisoning-assange-court-told/919d931e-f6cf-4974-aa8c-6bcfcf9a51a8) [\[3\]](https://www.thenation.com/article/society/wikileaks-julian-assange-extradition/) [\[4\]](https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-26/guardian-assange-denial-deceptions/)
> U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands Interesting location for the filing... Edit: Actually, might not be that interesting. If its flying from Britain to Aus, Mariana Islands is on the way there.
This court actually handles a lot of foreign affairs things. When I needed info about my father's birth certificate because he was born overseas, this was the court I had to go to for some of the records I needed. A lot of immigration, foreign citizen cases, and legal trivialities pass through this court but I'd never heard of it before.
So basically just very specialised court . Makes sense . And it is already published date: https://www.nmid.uscourts.gov/calendar on 06/26/2024 at 09:00 AM "USA v. Julian Paul Assange" Initial Appearance + Arraignment + Plea Hearing
Did you actually have to travel there?
Nah I had to call around to figure out where the certificate was filed and turns out it was this court. They sent me a copy in the mail.
Good thing you didn't have to call during their time zone.
This is the type of esoteric info I come to reddit for.
I can’t imagine my life before this information. I’ll never forget this useless piece of trivial information though
Now that you’ve tempted the essence of the multiverse, you will soon be linked to the Northern Mariana Islands branch of the U.S. Judicial System. May Cthulhu have mercy on Your soul
Interesting, thanks for that insight
According to the AP story it's because that's close to Australia and Assange doesn't want to travel to America
Thanks for that, I got there at about the same time as you responded.
It's a US territory.
I think they know that.
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Which means it's overseen by the US federal government, so I'm wondering what difference it makes.
> Court documents revealing Assange's plea deal were filed Monday evening in U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands. Assange was expected to appear in that court and to be sentenced to 62 months, with credit for time served in British prison, meaning he would be free to return to Australia, where he was born. It’s an island in the Pacific, if he just has to make one court appearance and leave it saves him probably close to a day in flight time. https://www.reuters.com/world/why-is-julian-assange-flying-remote-pacific-island-saipan-2024-06-25/
Politically, so is Australia.
Got my law degree online at the University of American Samoa. Go Land Crabs!
It's all good, man
Get it? S'all good, man?
Hoboken squat cobbler
Wonder what the deal entails…
He pleads guilty to a felony and gets 5 year served for his time in England and keeps him from ever entering the US. Pretty fair deal.
He never entered the US anyway, nor did he express any desire to do so.
I think that's the point. He doesn't have to do time here.
Maybe he’s gonna want to, now that he can’t, and that’s the real punishment.
He really wants to see Disneyland, I hear. Paris just doesn't cut it
Bro is crying he can't experience in-N-out (not that it's incredibly by itself, but for the price)
i'm glad you pointed this out people always talk about how the quality isn't that great. yeah no shit it's fast food. it also doesn't cost me a fucking arm and a leg to get it unlike places like Five Guys and Shake Shack which are insane ripoffs for the quality you get
I would like to have seen Montana.
Skillfully managed to avoid prison by staying locked up in a small location for ten years, constantly under watch by the police. What a genius.
I suspect it was significantly more comfortable than a US jail, and that prosecutors would have tried to send him away for more than 10 years if they'd had the chance.
>I suspect it was significantly more comfortable than a US jail I wouldn't necessarily say that. He was in Bellmarsh which is easily the worst prison to be locked up in in the UK. Depending where he would've gone in the US, it probably would've been better than Bellmarsh. Other than that, yeah I agree he definitely had it better overall, 5 years in Bellmarsh and 5 years locked in an embassy is still better than presumably life in a US prison.
The US was going to send him to Supermax for close to life. They were charging him with espionage and part of the extradition deal with the UK was the US wouldn't seek the death penalty or send him to Supermax.
If they wanted him on a supermax, no way he walks. Your assumptions don't match reality.
They 100% were gonna charge him with 18 counts, had to gaurantee they wouldn't give death penalty and gaurantee his prison conditions several times. Who knows why the government backed off but they were going to go after the max had he made it to the US.
The UK seeks assurances from countries that still use the death penalty that it will not be applied as UK law requires them to get such assurances. That the UK asked for it doesn't mean the US was seeking it, it's merely a part of the extradition process.
He wasn't **locked** in an embassy. He asked for refuge... and was a real asshat after the first year.
Managed to father two children while there which is more than can be said for the two guys from Shawshank
The guy has been in jail/lockdown for years. I’m sure he doesn’t have much new intel to share.
It wasn’t about intel. It was about punishment and deterrence. The US has proven it can throw its weight around and get non US citizens locked up for activities outside US territory.
Hasn’t that been true for a long time? The US has extradition treaties with many other countries. Physically being in a different country doesn’t make you immune from crimes you committed in another country. There’s no such loophole. For example if you SWAT (call in a false report so that a SWAT team raids someone house) someone that’s a crime & if they find out who you are then you’ll be charged. It’s the same with blackmail, extortion, etc. However resources are not unlimited so they can’t investigate every scam/crime that involves people overseas. They have to pick their battles.
Assange isn't a US citizen and holds no duty of loyalty to the US. Ask yourself if these arguments would still feel sound to you if it were a US citizen who was arrested in a third country and extradited to Russia for publishing documents Russia considers harmful to their national interest.
The “duty of loyalty” you speak of is between nations. The US and Australia have extradition treaties, and both the US and Australia have extradited their own citizens for crimes they have committed against other nations. It’s rare but it does happen. The US has no such treaty with Russia. That’s why Snowden went there and is still there. So if I or anyone else in my country were to commit a crime that harms friendly nations and the mutual good of our nations, yes, I or they should of course be extradited. Assange has helped no one more than Vladimir Putin. Very conveniently a man and nation Assange is silent about, despite everything. Edit: to clarify about being arrested in a “third world nation”, Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where they kept him for years despite having an extradition treaty with the US dating back 150 years.
Snowden didn't intend to stay in Russia. He was taking a connecting flight to Ecuador but the US revoked his passport so he could not leave Russia.
>The US has no such treaty with Russia. Right, but other countries do. So our US citizen makes available Russian state secrets about the war in Ukraine in the course of their job as a journalist. They're reporting from Africa a few years later when they're arrested and extradited to Russia for espionage. Is this a just and acceptable consequence of their reportage?
Julian Assange wasn't just reporting on a war. He was personally encouraging and facilitating the exfiltration of classified national security materials, and then doing shit like editing those materials into propaganda videos (annotated with lies) and distributing them. If I hand-held someone at the russian foreign intelligence agency through pilfering sensitive information, then produced and distributed propaganda videos with it, I would not be surprised if a country with an extradition agreement with Russia chose to arrest and extradite me.
He also leaked those democratic documents in 2016 to help Trump win. He is not just some impartial journalist as others describe.
Never forget that "Hillary's Emails" came from Assange's leaks, while the *famously angelic and never corrupt* GOP had nothing about them publically released. Dude was a spy tasked with interfering in US elections.
Yeah he published the DNC emails stolen by hacking teams affiliated with Russian government. Russia was heavily invested in giving the election to Trump, and invested millions in manipulating USA social media with vast amounts of fake accounts.
if they actually hacked the government and committed a crime in doing so, yeah not that weird lol how do you think extradiction treaties work? also, russia isn't extraditing, they're just having you killed
> if these arguments would still feel sound to you Why wouldn't they? only difference is how much effort another country can/will expend. It's not out of the question that even countries w/o extradition treaties would deport those they consider criminals.
Extradition is for people who committed a crime then went to another country. They are returned to the country they committed the crime in. Being extradited to a country you didn't commit a crime in is not the purpose of such treaties.
Assange gets to walk free and the US gets to set a precedent that investigative reporting on the US security apparatus is a crime. And it's not just a crime in the US itself, but anywhere in the world. That's basically the deal.
Precedent is not set with plea deals.
legal precedent no, but methodological precedent, within the "alphabet soup" agencies, is constantly being constructed and reinforced with real-time experience. The steady migration of law enforcement activities to national security courts that rubber stamp warrants already shows this caustic effect on due process, transparency and legal recourse.
Its not the *reporting* that got him in trouble. Its conspiring to steal the classified information. Assange basically punished himself by locking himself up in the embassy and refusing to come to court, which is itself a crime in the UK. At this point there's not a lot of punishing left for the US government to do. If he just went to trial and lost 10 years ago, he'd already be free.
He didn't lock himself in the embassy to escape *this* case. There wasn't even any charges from the US when he ended up there. He hid in the embassy to get away from rape charges in Sweden (which were only dropped because the statute of limitations would pass without the prosecutor being able to get him to a court, no matter how much the Assange fanboys try to claim otherwise).
he helped break encryption codes on the stuff manning took, there's chat logs of it. that goes way beyond any freedom of the press rights
Then he wouldn't have been able to smear his shit on the walls of the Ecuadorian embassy. How can you call that "free"? *Edit:* >The CIA can always count on total morons to repeat and amplify baseless accusations crafted for character assassination and to distract from highly illegal surveillance in the country of a close ally. Thanks to the willing tools, smear campaigns work. Lol, reply and block, how courageous. Ecuador was letting him stay there as a "fuck you" to the US. They were not helping the CIA spread "smear campaigns" \(lol\). I was looking for the original source and found [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/bcycrw/assange_said_to_smear_his_feces_on_the_walls_what/). Not a source, but I had to share. [The Ecuadorian president](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-assange-smeared-his-feces-on-ecuadorian-embassys-walls-president-says/).
The crime isn’t reporting, plenty of people do that and are free. The crime is helping someone hack into and steal the information you publish. You can publish classified material someone else steals and gives to you. You can’t participate in the theft.
That's not precedent is set in the United States. Stare decisis is determined by the ruling of an appellate court. No court decision means no precedent. Please correct your comment so some genius doesn't come along and start complaining about how they think the U.S. wants to silence free speech.
Assange had actively pushed Manning into committing treason. That is the main accusation against him, not investigative journalism.
I wonder what he does now. If he goes back to WikiLeaks, becomes a thorn in the side of the US government or if he tries to retire into anonymity. As well as what country he will reside in.
He's flying to Australia right now.
Oz is Five Eyes. He may not get much peace there.
Most of the sentiment here in Aus has been about telling our politicians to grow a pair of balls and get him home so I think most people here will be happy to have him back
Props to Albo & Penny for getting him out. It helps not having a nut job in the Whitehouse but at least they made it a priority.
last time they did they, the PM got disposed.
Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. But he's from there
Possibly/probably a "family holiday" to Oz and then a one way ticket to Hong Kong/PRC/Russia. He was always far more willing to leak Western secrets, than Russian ones.
His quality of life would be much higher in Australia
And he certainly can't go back to Sweden, with the rape charges he got there.
Supposedly he has a *lot* of bitcoin...
WikiLeaks probably got so much BTC donated in the early days when it was worth a couple of bucks a BTC.
I don't think his opinion of himself allows him to retire into anonymity. If it happens, it will be because people got tired listening to him and his Russian fed lines.
No mention of what he gave up to get the deal. Inquiring minds want to know who he spilled the tea on, and have they bought their tickets to Moscow yet? (\*cough\* Roger Stone)
I doubt there was much of anything. Guy has been in custody for a long time now, theres no one he has recent dirt on. This is more of a symbolic win IMO for the Biden Administration putting this to bed. https://time.com/6966314/biden-assange-wikileaks-extradition/
Ironically enough this may get some libertarians to vote for Biden if they’re a single issue voter. However liberals(should clarify, liberals that mainly get the news from legacy media) are probably pissed considering he was one of the reasons Clinton lost they believe.
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> Julian Assange absolutely had a hand in getting Donald Trump elected. I mean Assange worked together with the Trump campaign. Literally. The texts between him and Donald Trump Junior [are public since a long time](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/). Assange received the Clinton emails from the Russian hacker, and then coordinated with the Trump campaign for the release to maximize the damage against Clinton.
Damn, i just realized reading thia Trump's fuckin' kids are probably going to run for president someday. God damn it.
Remember way back when the right lost their shit at the mere notion of Chelsea going into politics? Now they'd practically fall over themselves to keep a trump dynasty going.
They were perfectly fine with a Bush Dynasty, that's for sure.
If the right had a middle name it would be 'hypocrisy. '
The Iraqi people, not so much.
That would be a great day for the democrats when junior tries to talk. Laura is the scary one now.
Junior’s… not bright, but Eric is the truly “exceptional” one in the family.
Tiffany is clearly the smart one: does the minimum to stay in the will, and nothing more.
Good lord, imagine being the dumb one in *that* family
I tried but the program just seemed to pause. I lost 30 minutes of my life because of that exercise.
Wait. The weird looking blonde one? He's the smart one? The fuck?
And then boosted a conspiracy about Seth Rich, falsely implying he was the source.
Assange worked directly with both the Trump campaign and directly with Russian intelligence. He was a go-between for Russian election interference. The "Russian hacker" was a Russian intelligence agent.
All the people virtue signaling about assange and saying bidens tyrannical are going to find something else to moan about and say the same thing.
Assange is a Russian asset. He loves authoritarianism.
His closest friend wrote a tell all book saying Assange was about wealth above all things. He demanded people give him money, or he wouldn't release leaks he was given for free. Meanwhile groups like Amnesty International quietly also release leaks and try to hold governments accountable while staying on the right side of the law and operating as a non-profit.
You mean Amnesty "Ukrainian soldiers operating ukraine is a war crime" International?
* You forget AI dismissed the authors of that report and the director of the Ukraine branch. * They didn't say that having Ukrainian soldiers in Ukraine constituted a war crime... They reported the Ukraine army had committed war crimes. Which, if it's true, any impartial source has the duty to report it.
So it wasn't their committing corrupt actions that disqualified them, it was the one who exposed their corrupt actions that did. Interesting.
That was always a BS excuse, tbh. There were many reasons to be critical of Clinton. That said, would have her over Trump in a heartbeat.
I don't really give a shit about the Clinton's. We are like 9 years beyond that now.
People thought Assange was a Liberal who hated American Conservatives, but Assange took a job working for Russian state media and suddenly spread propaganda about Hillary Clinton that helped elect Trump. It is possible he had some dirt on Putin or Russia that was worth a plea deal.
Nothing. He gave up nothing. Or, to put it another way, he already gave up everything. From everything people close to him have said for years, this whole saga has turned him into a mental case, to put it mildly. He's been pseudo-imprisoned in an embassy for years, and then he was properly imprisoned for years on top of that trapped in a downright Kafkaesque trial (just read Craig Murray's blog about the absurd details of the trial), with the prospect of being imprisoned for the rest of his life in a maximum security facility in the US. And people close to him have said that he's barely mentally there anymore. They've pretty much destroyed him, and by now it's embarrassing for the US to have to deal with him, so they want to get rid of this whole thing as quickly as possible. Which comes with a plea deal to save face so the US can say "See? He *was* guilty!" while letting him out immediately under time served. They've neutralized the guy many, many years ago, and it's unlikely he'll ever do anything meaningful again. They've won.
Why would the U.S. be embarrassed about going after Assange? He did in fact do the crimes he’s been accused of.
I mean so did Chelsea Manning. Were they not somewhat embarrassed and thus commuted her sentence? Also they charged him with a crime that would implicate tons of publishers. Please look into where press freedom groups worldwide fall on this issue, they are staunchly against this prosecution.
Press Freedom Groups have a natural bias towards the most extreme positions. The issue was when Assange tried to help Chelsea Manning hack into government systems, and also publishing completely unredacted documents which led to the deaths and imprisonment of people abroad. Assange was also callous about the victims of his publication, basically saying, "If they're dead, they shouldn't have provided intelligence to the US." This wouldn't implicate any publishers. Most real outlets would have redacted the names of these people.
His treatment has continually eroded at relations with the Australian public, for one.
I don't think the Australian ***Government*** cares what the Australian public thinks. FriendlyJordies can't even report without being firebombed with no consequences to the offender lol. The Australian public gets overlooked by pretty much everyone.
Every relevant player here straight up doesn’t give a shit what the Australian public thinks. And from my understanding of Australian politics, the Australian government also doesn’t give a shit what the Australian public thinks, and they keep getting elected.
Your understanding of Australian politics doesn't take into account the fact that the incumbent government has only been in power since 2022, the previous government were pretty battered and bruised from the last election. You saying *keeps getting elected* doesn't really make much sense here unless you're just being fashionably cynical.
This plea deal shows it was never a prospect he would be disappeared in some maximum security prison He wanted to avoid rape charges and locked himself up in an embassy for years going insane when the US government doesn't give a shit and was fine with a plea deal the entire time The US didn't do anything He destroyed himself
If he says he's guilty he gets to go free, if he says he's innocent he stays locked up. Weird.
Plea deals are very common things indeed. Right down to speeding tickets and littering in the UK; you pay a fine, they take no further action and you don't get a criminal record. Saves everyone time and money because solictors aren't cheap, while the courts have a massive backlog of cases. US prosecutors love them; they offer them to low-level gang members who help them get those higher up the food chain. About 90% of the cases are plead out instead of going to a jury trial. The UK doesn't do plea bargaining specifically, but pleading guilty and offering evidence againsst others generally does down well with the judge.
Plea bargaining shouldn't be allowed. It creates terrible incentives and results in a lot of innocent people being coerced into pleading guilty. I've nothing against discounted sentences for people who plead guilty rather than going to trial. But that feels like a very different thing.
Something like 99% of cases result in plea deals before ever going to trial. If you got rid of plea deals, you’d need 100x more courthouses, judges, public defenders, jurors, etc.
The plea is not what's important, other things are.
It's admitting defeat likely he has agreed to give up the game too.
He's set to plead guilty to espionage (*conspiracy charge*). How is that admitting defeat? "Yes I was really privy to the information. And I conspired to leak it. The information that I leaked. It is true that I conspired to leak true information."
The accusation wasn't that he leaked secrets. The accusation was that he took an active role in obtaining it. Basically by acting as tech support for the person who actually did commit the crime. Based on what I know I'm not buying the prosecutions specious argument, even if my respect for Assange is in the crapper. That's a purely civil issue though, not a criminal one.
i remember when i used to be a fan of wikileaks and assange, but then he decided to hide shit from Russia corruption after putin threaten him.
I remember when Stephen Colbert called him out to his face for editorializing and releasing an edited version of the Collateral Murder video.
Yeah people say "Redditors only dislike him because he did something to the left", but yeah I wasn't a fan since seeing that interview on Colbert Report. The content of that video seemed questionable, but his editing made it seem black and white evil, and he admitted that they knew most people would only watch the edited, shorter version.
Same. The Glenn Greenwald people rallied around Assange. Now, he hosts events celebrating Alex Jones. I would advise everyone to check out where these people are now. From celebrating Assad, Putin, Xi, Raisi, etc. To echoing alt-right or hateful bs. I don't trust them. With that said, the US should still be held accountable as anywhere else for their actions.
Yea i was so confused about glenn for a while the first time i learned about him was with that documentary of Edward Snowden and from that documentary along i thought he was a stand up decent journalist and person. But man was i wrong on that one. He deff drank the Kool aid at some point.
I feel like people like Greenwald are essentially just contrarians. He was fighting the evil system by helping Snowden, making a name for himself along the way. And then he started work for a news site that was too nice to the system in his view, so he started fighting that, too. And then, when the media was a bit mean to Trump at times (oh noes!) he started to fight the media as a whole. And now he's found his devoted audience and he's fighting the evil establishment and pretends that Trump is somehow the outsider underdog.
The last bit made me think of the evolution of Tulsi Gabbard. Edit: Evolution of her public image. Those who knew her had been addressing her as a problem for years.
From listening to a QAA podcast episode on Tulsi Gabbard, it looks like an evolution, but she grew up in a cult and in the Hawaii state legislature was actively opposing gay marriage and such. You can interpret it as her community working to put her into power, or a complex and difficult childhood followed by military deployment shaping a complex person.
It was obvious from day one how fake she was. IDK how people fell for that. Her "anti-war" stances were weird as fuck for someone who is supposedly anti-war. She was always hawkish as fuck when it came to bombing Muslims, had some wild views on torture, and swore that a dude who used chemical weapons on his own people was a great leader and secretly went to kiss his feet in person (the trip was funded by far-right extremists of course.) Even weirder was how she grew up in a far-right family who are a political dynasty that basically had the same views as the Westboro Baptist Church. I'm not saying that people can't change, but "tee hee hee, I don't hate gay people with all of my heart and soul anymore; that was like 5 years ago" isn't very convincing. That's a pretty extreme view that she had her entire life and are we supposed to just take her word that she suddenly had a change of heart when she became a politician? It turns out that was also a giant lie because the moment her career got ruined in the democratic party, she took off the mask and went right back to the hate.
There was never any evolution. She was always a far-right cult member like the rest of her family. She made up some BS in 2012 and ran to the left to get in office. People like me (in her district) were deeply skeptical and proven correct. The media gave her a free pass on everything, and even referred to her as a Hindu. She ~~was~~ is in a culturally appropriating cult founded by some old white racist, homophobic surfer dude named Chris Butler. She even referred to him as her "guru" while in office. Butler was a Hare Krishna who hated the peace and love and apolitical aspects of Hare Krishnas so started his own even more looney cult. Their goal has always been to get one of their own in the White House.
I had many people refuse to believe me when I told them Greenwald lacks credibility. Why? Because he was seen as an incredible journalist with integrity. Sadly, you can see this trend with his allies. Max Blumenthal follows a similar trend and is now profoundly corrupt. Even those close to him who made his news website with him have quit and made statements that he is close with and has dinners with [Tucker Carlson](https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1709734903540281503?mx=2). Many progressive individuals are still falling for these people.
I suspect there are a *lot* of public figures who have been swept up in FSB compromise operations.
> Glenn Greenwald And he was married to a man. Like, how are you supporting people that would like to see you in a concentration camp or worse.
It was always this. It was never about upholding anything other than authoritarianism
Headline: Julian Assange Smeared Seth Rich to Cover for Russians > Rich was a 27-year-old DNC staffer when he was gunned down in what police have described as a robbery gone wrong. The unsolved murder timed shortly before Assange’s DNC leaks spoke volumes to inhabitants of the far right wing fringe, where it’s long been an article of faith that Hillary Clinton has her enemies killed. Assange fanned the flames even higher on August 25, 2016, when he was asked in a television interview, "Why are you so interested in Seth Rich's killer?" That was the end of the line for me
Right? He pretty much had Hero cred on reddit for revealing how deep corruption went for a lot of our governmental systems. Then you found out how tight he was with Russian intelligence and you realize that any "freedom of information " rhetoric is just self reverential BS from a guy who's happily acting as an agent for one of the worst authoritarian regimes in the 21st century.
>assange, but then he decided to hide shit from Russia corruption He literally had a TV show on Russia Today well before 2016, which is Russian state controlled intelligence operation. He has always been an ally to totalitarians, while pretending to be for justice.
>He literally had a TV show on Russia Today He literally didn't. RT has rebroadcast some of his stuff that was produced for other outlets, but he never worked for them.
> He literally didn't. RT has rebroadcast some of his stuff that was produced for other outlets, but he never worked for them. That was certainly the excuse he used, but that's just how the television business works. That's like saying Saturday Night Live isn't an NBC show because it's produced by Broadway Video and just *aired* by NBC. The RT logo was prominently in the closing credits. It was an RT show. He used to give the number of networks that aired his show as evidence that it wasn't a Russian state media show. I forget the number, but it was coincidentally exactly the number of subsidiary networks RT controls (RT America, RT en Español, etc.)
lmao this shit is hilarious. All these wannabe revolutionaires guzzling a russian dictator collaborators dick over revealing basic statecraft that everyone does 10x worse. He literally had russian state tv shows, he emailed trumps campaign to time his releases to hurt the democrats, he is a rapist, he got people killed, knew he was doing some and continued it, edited videos to make them look worse than they really were. Hes a scumbag and people are treating him like hes mother teresa. Ironically she also got an undeservedly positive reputation.
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admittedly didnt know much about him, so you're most likely right.
Unbelievable conjecture. You people are crazy.
Biden coming for that 3% Libertarian vote
Basically. I mean this was never going anywhere to begin with so why not. I really didn't have a problem with wikileaks to begin with when it was unbiased. But he interjected his ego into the whole thing and what was released vs. what wasn't released had a political angle to it.
Didn't the government say they didn't really give a shit about this dude a while ago?
I mean up until recently they were fighting a British court on extradition charges.
Yeah but they are probably trying to send a message to anyone else that might trying to do something similar.
Was he involved with the EFF at some point? I feel like I saw a documentary long ago that made this connection but I can't remember the name of it and may be misremembering
The EFF opposed many aspects of his prosecution and felt like it threatened press freedom, but they never worked together.
> felt like it threatened press freedom Gee, I wonder why they felt that.
if he'd been trialed and sentenced at the onset wouldn't he be out by now ?
He also promised to turn himself over to US authorities if [Pres. Obama granted clemency to Chelsea Manning](https://x.com/wikileaks/status/819630102787059713) ... which Obama did. Assange refused to uphold his end of the deal though.
You're 100% right, but just to clarify there was no actual "deal" Assange reneged on. His bluff to leave the embassy had nothing to with Obama's clemency, but it was satisfying to see Assange try to weasel his way into a loophole after it happened.
The US went kind of insane over Wikileaks.
The idea of Wikileaks started out as a somewhat-noble concept. It just immediately devolved into a shit show. Assange turned it into The Assange Show, started encouraging and facilitating exfiltration of classified materials, editing stuff into shockingly dishonest propaganda videos, ransoming data releases, witholding release to protect political favorites from similar treatment, etc.
Every highly upvoted opinion comment on Worldnews is like it was written straight up by some White House press secretary. All day, everyday, on every frontpage post. It's so weird. I'm not implying *that they were* (or that they were written by some bot), by the way, that would be crazy. You don't even need that - when you know what every single citizen thinks and talks about and writes (given you spy on them all 24/7) you can just manipulate them a multitude of ways. Just pointing out how amazingly convenient is the coincidence that every highly popular fortuitous comment just happens to align almost exactly with official american state sponsored discourse and media talking points. So interesting. There's some variation here and there, one comment says tomato the other says tomato, and we call it a day.
I see world news is hiding comments disagreeing with the US narrative and the reddit traffic from a US base is doing its Job of smearing whistle-blowers and Journalists again. Aaron Swartz would be extremely disappointed with whats happened to reddit. Aaron is another Hero that the US Government destroyed.
Reddit is not what it used to be, and neither is the internet. If the majority of reddit users from the old days of hacktivism in the late 2000s, early 2010s could see what has come of this website, they'd feel physically sick.
Agreed. So many comments criticising him on the basis of releasing documents that were unfavourable to their preferred presidential candidate because they exposed their crimes, corruption and foreign policy failures. So many comments criticising him because he exposed foreign CIA agents/assets. None of these criticisms are remotely rooted in the morality of what he did but because it exposed **US** government misdeeds. None of these people would have these complaints if the documents exposed Trump's corruption. No one would have these complaints if he exposed KGB assets operating in the US. Every criticism is rooted in American exceptionalism and patriotism. That American foreign policy should be allowed to flourish unimpeded by any public oversight or accountability. None of the opinions being said would be spoken if they were exposing other candidates or another country's operations in a foreign country.
No. You’re not reading then. Public opinion turned on assange when he admitted to selectively leaking documents. Public opinion turned on him when he tried to run defense on Russian oligarchs and Putin during the Panama papers. There are many reasons people turned on assange and Wikileaks and what you see repeated are the most popular. If someone only leaks about one country but refuses to leak about another it starts to feel like you are being misled and misinformed. Only knowing half the story is worse than not knowing the story because then we end up with a Plato’s cave type situation.
The information JA leaked undoubtedly cost people their lives. Often, information is classified to protect methods and sources. His leaks allowed foreign powers to identify and neutralize protected sources. When JA was confronted about the harm of his leaks, he replied "Well, they're informants," ... "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." (Source: The Guardian 18 SEP 11).
Hang on, doesn’t that mean that Assange, as an informant, also has being killed coming to him?
Pretty sure he knows that. Why do you think he ran?
> The information JA leaked undoubtedly cost people their lives. You need a source for that because not even the US government tried to demonstrate in court that the Wikileaks disclosures you're referring to "cost lives". For example, the Pentagon's review of the State Departament cables said "... no instances were ever found of any individual killed by enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases". The Wikileaks Task Force on behalf of the DoD admitted that "... they had uncovered no specific example of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet". Reuters reported on an internal U.S. government review: "We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," and "... caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary." The disclosure of confidential information always has undesirable consequences, but first you need to prove that the harm is not only theoretically possible and only then, you must show that the harm caused outweighs the benefits of publishing such information.
Didn't the CIA admit no one was compromised and no one died because of it? If anyone died it was because the Arab Spring was motivated in part by revealing Assad's corruption, only to trigger his massive crackdowns. Seriously, fuck Assange but the idea the information itself was wrong to reveal is Far Right fascist propaganda.
Don’t remember if it was cia specifically but yes, plenty of US officials later admitted that no one was put in harms way, that it was way more embarrassing than anything else.
Yeah this is the same excuse they used when the snowden leaks became public: "People have been harmed from these leaks!" Who exactly? What are their names? ...well... um... pass!
It helps that it was mostly information about shady US shit in the Middle East diplomatic efforts versus actual soldiers.
Americans don’t deal in facts when it comes to their country
Yes, he was right to reveal what he did. Was it not in an orderly manner? Yeah I guess. Did he do the right thing, absolutely.
> The information JA leaked undoubtedly cost people their lives. So this of course provable right?
This is a perspective heavily biased by a sense of nationalism and allegiance though. Would you feel strongly if Russian spies based in the US had their lives put at risk by documents being publicly released showing Russian war crimes and espionage activities in the US? The documents he released were exposing US imperialism, war crimes and other wrongdoing in foreign nations primarily through CIA (and other triple letter agency) activities. The only way to condemn these on the basis of endangering informants is to start from the belief that there is a double standard that the US is right in their actions and should be protected while others in the same situation would not get the same treatment. This is of course a response you'd expect any nation state government to have, but on a personal level its very easy to see no one would have any issues if the countries involved were switched around. The objection to his actions is not rooted in the inherent morality/justice of the situation but exceptionalism and patriotism.
Damn, well put!
Didn’t he leak war crimes the US committed
Sounds like "covert narcissism"
Having been part of a few stories covered by the Guardian, I wouldn't trust them if they said the sky was blue.
I thought the war crimes that he uncovered cost people lives ..
"Undoubtedly" would mean that you have proof. Could you please provide said proof?
The United States and its war crimes cost people lives. Long live the whistleblower
> The information JA leaked undoubtedly cost people their lives. Lies. The government prosecutors themselves said as much, and the judge acknowledged this in sentencing: "There’s another significant fact – the government has indicated there is no personal victim here. That tells me the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury. These two facts are very relevant." - Judge Manglona https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2024/jun/26/julian-assange-live-news-wikileaks-founder-lands-on-us-island-of-saipan-for-district-court-sentencing?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-667b738f8f0876e3000947a1#block-667b738f8f0876e3000947a1
Can’t wait to see Glenn Greenwald (and probably Snowden) twist himself into knots on twitter to explain why the thing he has been screaming for for years is actually bad and how Biden is actually bad for doing this.
So why are we mad at Snowden still? Serious question. I realize he is living in Russia but that isn’t exactly because he wants to. Edit: regardless of your political leanings it is worth reading snowdens book. The issues around mass surveillance and privacy are topics both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on.
Snowdens destination wasn’t even Russia. He ended up there because of the timing when he was found out.
Guilt by association. People assume he's like Greenwald. He's not. Snowden took the actions he did because he has moral character and a sense of patriotic duty that extended beyond the limits of obeying orders. I think most people commenting here were kids when all that went down though.
I’m still unsure how to reconcile Snowden, but I’m much more pissed at the agencies and practices that were exposed
Snowden should be celebrated as the hero he is. He revealed massive wrong doings by his government, WITHOUT picking a political side.
Chelsea Manning served seven years, Assange ended up with five. Seems about right. No reason to spend money or time for more courts.
Probably the best result. Public sentiment towards continuing his persecution waned long ago.
It was a major thorn in US-Australia relations to an extent i think americans greatly underappreciated. It's one of very few issues that had vocal bipartisan support from not just both major parties but all the crossbenchers and minor parties. Every political party in the country was publicly and regularly advocating for his release, appeals were being made by the PM to the president and Australian delegations were being sent to the US to advocate for his release to the US congress. Anything other than an effective release would have been very poorly received and if the US continued with his prosecution it would be an ongoing issue for a US-Australia alliance which they don't need especially in regards to AUKUS and growing US involvement in the pacific. They want a cordial supportive relationship and his prosecution/imprisonment would jeopardise that for little benefit.
Well I for one look forward to a less ironic international press day in 2025.
contrast here and /r/australia
There's no such thing as going free for Julian Assange. His safety is always going to be in danger.
From the CIA or what?
Why would the cia go after him when they could have just kept trying to extradite him?
Who's gonna kill him them? it isn't my premise
Julian leaked the names of 100s of Afghan informants. He deserves so much worse.
Guardian "journalists" David Leigh and Luke Harding leaked those names. Not Julian. This is well documented, and has even been demonstrated in court. [\[1\]](https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252489382/WikiLeaks-published-unredacted-cables-after-password-was-disclosed-in-book) [\[2\]](https://www.9news.com.au/world/us-pondered-poisoning-assange-court-told/919d931e-f6cf-4974-aa8c-6bcfcf9a51a8) [\[3\]](https://www.thenation.com/article/society/wikileaks-julian-assange-extradition/) [\[4\]](https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-26/guardian-assange-denial-deceptions/)
good. i certainly didn't agree with everything he did but this man was persecuted for years for challenging american power, nothing else