So, Julian Assange has been arrested and turned over to the U.S. government on a now-unsealed indictment. Julian Assange is a legend in his own mind who is fundamentally an agent of the Russian government. His participation in the election of the Giant Orange Rage Toddler is just one of the things he did that I detest. His participation on the Russian operation against Hillary Clinton is now incontrovertible. He is a tool.
The thing is, it’s not illegal to be an agent of the Russian government. I’ve read the indictment now, and it’s all nonsense. It accuses him of encouraging Chelsea Manning to hack U.S. government computers, and it claims Assange received an encrypted password hash from Manning (but not that he sent a decrypted password back). Thing is, encouraging someone to give you information is a fundamental part of investigative journalism, if that’s illegal, then investigative journalism as a whole is illegal. Furthermore, Assange is not a U.S. citizen and was not doing this under U.S. jurisdiction. So reading the indictment I was utterly baffled, until suddenly it clicked. This isn’t about Assange. This is about the Mueller Report and criminalizing publication of the entire uncensored report if it ever does leak out.
The one thing Assange is *not* accused of doing is receiving and publishing classified information. That’s because it’s not illegal to receive and publish classified information. It’s only illegal for government employees and contractors to transmit classified information to unauthorized parties. And there is one big reason why Assange could not be indicted for receiving and publishing classified information: New York Times v. United States, 1971. Otherwise known as the “Pentagon Papers” case before the U.S. Supreme Court, where the NYT and Washington Post published the classified Pentagon Papers and the precedent was set — you can’t be prosecuted for publishing classified information. Most recently tested when Judith Miller outed a CIA employee with the result that an entire anti-nuclear-proliferation network was rounded up and executed by various nasty state actors. So if you can’t prosecute a newspaper for publishing classified information, maybe you can make an end-around by prosecuting them for encouraging someone to send them the classified information? If so, then the fact that the New York Times has set up an encrypted network to receive classified information from whistleblowers and encourages whistleblowers to use that network is enough to convict their publisher if they do publish classified information.
In other words, it’s not about Assange. It’s about the New York Times and Washington Post. If Assange can be successfully prosecuted for encouraging people to leak classified information, so can the NYT and Washington Post — and for a certain Giant Orange Rage Toddler, that’s a great reason to do it.
– Badtux the Press Penguin
If only Assange’s interviews turned up some embarrassing things about Shithole… but that won’t happen unless/until it benefits Putin to allow that.
And Putin must have a plan for when Shithole is spent as a puppet. There must be some de-stabilizing news that will hit the fan, at the right time.
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Assange has basically been a prisoner since 2012. The chances of him knowing anything useful at this point is pretty much nil.
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I forgot it was that long.
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[…] Badtux the Snarky Penguin notes that the indictment is not about Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, it’s about Prznint Stupid v. NYTimes and the WaPo. […]
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Gotta say I respect how you separated your contempt for Assange from the validity of the indictment and the potential impact of a successful prosecution. I’d shed no tears if Assange was run over by a bus, but using Assange to undermine freedom of the press is too high a price to pay in order to ‘get’ him.
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I’m disappointed with all the hate I see being spewed at Assange. Not just you and Tux’s characterisation at the top of his post, but especially from Democratic Party-aligned blogsites such as Balloon Juice. (I read BJ for the same reason I read ZeroHedge, even though the latter is 180 degrees opposed in its outlook to the former. By squzzing them, I can see what rabid partisans on both sides of the spectrum are opining. Balloon Juice despises Assange, Bernie Sanders, Glenn Greenwald and anyone else who their writers/commenters think has opposed Hillary Clinton. And they’re supposed to be progressives… Sigh.)
What Assange and Wikileaks did was reveal TRUTH. The “Collateral Murder” video leaked by then-Bradley Manning was enough justification forever to justify Wikileaks in my mind. It showed how horrible the U.S. military’s tactics in Iraq were (as if any more proof was needed after Abu Ghraib). Yeah, Assange helped blort out bullshit from Hillary’s campaign strategy, and it helped Trumpolini. It was still true. Ditto for everything else that WL has exposed. I’m not aware of anything the group has revealed that has been “fake leaks.” (I don’t follow WL extensively, so I can stand to be corrected if my impression is wrong.)
I’m more of a “reveal it all” absolutist than most. After working as a journo in the U.S. for 10 years, it’s weird Down Undahere to be living in a land where the laws are geared to cover up all sorts of stuff. A poor schmoe who worked for the Australian Tax Office is facing a possible 160-year prison sentence for disclosing TRUE info about shonky shakedowns by taxmen, while last week a guy in my state got only SEVEN years for manslaughtering his wife. Kill someone, you’ll be free in the next decade, but expose wrongdoing and you’re crucified. There’s a cultural agreement here that disclosure is not totally good, which disturbs me, having grown up in the land of the First Amendment and New York Times vs. Sullivan. It’s one of those areas where I realise that American attitudes about what’s right and wrong are not universal.
Getting back to Assange, though, it’s dismaying to see how many people ostensibly on the Left are repeating the “he was charged with RAPE!” trope. Nobody mentions that the two women who fingered him (pun intended) willingly knocked boots with Assange. It’s not a case of him dragging them into an alley and forcing them. One got angry (fair enough!) that he slipped off his rubber while he was doing her; the other’s accusation was that they did it once, then he woke her up and did her again when she wanted to sleep. Caddish, yes, but a bit different to forcible rape. And that’s not even getting into whether the women were “honey pots” working on behalf of intelligence agencies. The Left should put out a fuller version of the truth when it comes to Assange.
Even if he’s a geek or kinda creepy and armpit-stinky as a human, a person don’t have to be Jesus to be doing the righteous thing. It’s horrible how the Power of The State is now being unleashed in so many ways to cover up the truth and persecute those who would illuminate it. We are headed for some dark times as humanity. It’s 1939 all over again.
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Sorry, I lost all respect for Assange when he acted as a willing agent for the FSB in insuring that Donald Trump got elected. Regarding the “rape” charges, I always considered them to be honeypot charges, Assange was a horndog and a cad but not a rapist. He had no need to be a rapist, he was a rock star, and had women throwing themselves at him. That doesn’t change the fact that he helped elect Donald Trump by acting as an outlet for material obtained by Russian hacking.
That said, none of that was illegal, and none of it should result in him being extradited to the United States, other than that Britain is America’s poodle and does whatever America wants it to do, of course. America says bark? Britain says “Arf!”.
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You read the post right?
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This is how the government always expands its power: it breaks the rules to do something we otherwise approve of, and then builds on the precedent to do things we don’t. You’re exactly right to be concerned.
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Wikileaks and the FSB no doubt have all the recordings and transcripts they need on corrupt trump, yet released only supposed Clinton ‘dirt’ during the election. Which turned out to be pretty weak sauce when examined.
There is no doubt Assange is either a Putin agent or tool. But that’s not illegal in Australia. Assange is being extradited to the US to send a chilling message to the media, trump’s enemy.
Assange should do the same thing as trump, immigrate or ask for Russian asylum from their BFF Putin. There is no place I’d rather see them end up. Other than hell.
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have to admit I used to like Glenn Trumpwald, but as much as I dislike the American Deep State, I dislike China and Putin more, and his position veers too close to “Destroy the United States even if it means a century of Han rule”.
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“His participation on the Russian operation against Hillary Clinton is now incontrovertible…” Link? I haven’t seen that. Is it in the Mueller report? I haven’t read that, yet, either. I probably won’t.
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