I thought he was like one of the most important whistleblowers of our time exposing war crimes and shit. Some of you don’t wanna see him live another day, why is that?
I thought he was like one of the most important whistleblowers of our time exposing war crimes and shit. Some of you don’t wanna see him live another day, why is that?
From what I can tell, he started out as someone who just exposed a lot of dirty laundry. As the USA came after him more and more, he turned towards embracing more and more Russian influences.
I don’t believe all the shit they tried to use to get him out of the embassy and extradited to the USA. The rape allegations that appeared and disappeared randomly were too suspicious for my liking, and clearly the Swedish courts didn’t care much or they would’ve proposed a solution that wouldn’t see him extradited (i.e. video conference based court sessions).
I find it quite logical to “switch sides” if you’ve leaked information about a government that probably wants him dead. However, he did play a role in Russian disinformation campaigns, knowingly or unknowingly, and that’s Not So Great.
I think more than anything, Assange proved that regular people in the military are terrible. It’s easy to root for Snowden because “elitist government bad and scary” is easy to accept. Manning saw her comrades commit heinous crimes and decided to come clean, which I’m sure a lot of people in the military may have thought about. Assange, however, affected geopolitics in a way that went beyond merely protecting people, and could be classified as attacking the USA as a country. Revealing the internal communication between diplomats and the government did very little to expose crimes against humanity, and just made it harder to believe the things American representatives say. Revealing (partial) information about hidden operatives also wasn’t great, because now Americans were in danger because of him.
As a non-American, I don’t have any trouble with most of the information he revealed. However, I can understand why proud Americans would dislike him more than Snowden or Manning.
One of the things I struggle to understand (maybe I should read more about it) is how US law has jurisdiction to stifle speech outside of US territories.
Like if Romania declared Borat a state secret, would every pirate on that swarm with a seed ratio above 0.00 be subject to extradition?
It doesn’t. All the USA can do is politely ask another country to take action. The other country can say “no, fuck you” (i.e. if they would ask Russia), or they can say something like “sure, but then we get to ask you to give us the criminals we’re looking for too”. In decent democracies there’s usually a judge that will rule if extradition is legal or not (for instance, countries without the death penalty will often hesitate to extradite to the USA when the criminals are likely to be sentenced to death), and in this case a judge ruled that extradition is allowed.
If Romania declared Borat a state secret, and an American judge would say “fair play to you”, then Romanian nationals living in the USA may find themselves extradited.
The USA wouldn’t do anything in that case. The problem for Assange is that he committed treason, breaking American laws, and being physically present in a country with an extradition treaty. If he had fled to Russia, like Snowden did, the American government would never have gotten their hands on him.
The US (and Canada, where I live) has an extradition treaty with Romania.
The US treaty does mention that
But I haven’t read it in detail so that may or may not be relevant (the past I quoted is referring to a particular part of the treaty).
My understand is that typically the threshold for extradition is mutual criminality which I suppose is my answer to how US law applies itself outside US territories (because leaking state secrets is a crime in most countries). So I withdraw my inquiry.
If Romania declared Borat a state secret pirates could perhaps be extradited.
But also note that I don’t think Assange can be charged with treason, because he isn’t American.
Oh, you’re right, Assange isn’t American. I keep confusing him with the other whistle blowers. It can’t be treason, though I’m sure there’s some kind of “attack by a private person against the state” law.
I’m pretty sure the USA can ask for extradition if someone’s behaviour damaged Americans in some way. Hackers ransomwaring American companies and sometimes movie pirates get extradited to the USA, regardless of citizenship.
People claim “people were put at risk” but two things stand out.
I think the answer to both is negative so its just that letter of law applies to the mighty. This time once again has proved it
It’s unlikely that no one died over the leaks. That alone doesn’t make leaking right or wrong though.
Obviously everyone involved responded quickly and got their at-risk people to safety. And even if spies got killed, I doubt the CIA would admit that their spies got caught.
As for indirect deaths (consequences of operations being scrapped, plans being altered, troops being redirected): it’s hard to tell. Maybe lives were saved, maybe lives were lost, it’s impossible to say.
So far, nobody seems to have been prosecuted yet. The case against Assange is still in progress, but a judgement in the case will follow soon enough.
If anyone should be facing a firing squad for putting people at risk, it would be Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney long before Assange. There are verifiable deaths from those leaks, yet nothing even close to justice has been visited on either of those traitors.
And now I think you’re part of the disinformation campaign. Although people have accused him of leaking information that compromised it an operatives, there should not have been any documents that he leaked that contain such information, which means other people were misclassifying data, and yet we have no evidence that any of them were ever pursued with prosecution. So then the whole claim looks a lot like a big lie.
And if the above argument is too shallow, we could look a little more deeply and ask who the agents are that add to be pulled out of their posts, and also whether foreign governments already knew that those people were agents, on account of the information being available from sources that were not top secret, that had presumably been compromised by some of the other major world spy agencies.
I don’t see how leaking diplomatic cables could be seen as attacking the United States as a country. Certainly it could be seen as undercutting the State Department, because it revealed how anti-democratic the State Department actually is.
he had a show on RT… that was literally it…
You are replying to every opinion in here that isn’t gargling his pasty white balls. You sound like a cultist tbh.
Yes, literally a show on Russian state TV. He got a paycheck from the Russian government. I mean, is it that hard to grasp that this little fact makes the “he’s a russian asset” accusations at least understandable? And I am not saying he is one. I am not that informed about him and Wikileaks to have a strong opinion.
RT is not the russian government…
so everything else you have to say is pointless propaganda
claiming he’s definitely a russian asset because he had a tv show is like saying everyone that’s been on ABC is an american asset…
it’s worse than just stupid
RT is literally state controlled. It has no independence. It operates in literally the same offices as RIA Novosti.
You are out of your mind if you are trying to claim they are anything other than state TV by any meaningful definition.
they were state funded but not controlled back then, they’ve been slowly adding on censorship laws… not every human in russia is this super evil, red-scare, diabolical agent plotting against your freedom…
they were, very recently, much freer and more democratic… putin has slowly been turning it back into a dictatorship
see also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union
How much of their funding came from the state? 100%? That’s 100% control.
cool how they played all those advertisements for freeee…
cool how NBC is 100% controlled by their advertisers…
cool how funding =/= control
You’re too used to people making attacks. That’s not what I was trying to do. I was asking questions. I don’t know how much of RTs funding comes from the state, and I don’t even know if they run commercials.
I don’t know how RT is funded, and I’ve never watched it.
i’d say %60 advertisers, %39 shareholders, %1 workers and journalistic integrity
You’re full of it. From the time they were founded, they operated in the same building as RIA Novosti. RT didn’t exist until AFTER the various independent journalists and their associations were ALREADY being rounded up and cast out of Russian society.
They are now and have always been state-controlled. Stop apologizing for dictatorships.
oh look, another stupid troll
RT was founded in 2005.
By 2008 they were parroting clearly-bullshit Russian talking points about Georgia in the 2008 war.
World Tomorrow aired in 2012.
You. Are. Full. Of. It.
-Alexander Lebedev
Even Russian Oligarchs are laughing at how obvious it is.
uh huh… so after he’s already arrested and detained inside the ecuadorian embassy, he takes an opportunity to have a webcam interview show distributed on rt…
after he’s already internationally famous and has a shitload of money… he’s “paid employee of rt” and that discredits everything he did for years before and after that…
you sound a lot like a paid government employee
(p.s. rt was a lot freer then and had some pretty good journalism about topics other than russia… but go ahead and keep repeating yourself like an idiot)
Yeah, I think it’s too much to say he was a Russian asset because he was hired to interview people for RT. He may just as well just have been used by the network to score some quick views by having him show up. And it’s not like he could make his talk show in many western countries where he would be extradited the moment he crossed the border.
He gained a Russian bias in terms of what documents he published.
“A show on a dictatorial regime’s state TV” doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence either.
RT had a lot of independance, and putin’s dictatorial control hadn’t completely solidified yet.
if you couldn’t imagine them taking an opportunity to be broadcast all across the globe, then you’re very miopic.
it was an assange interview show… he interviewed people… it was a good show
aaaand, you’re repeating the same rumor over and over.
no, they didn’t show any bias in what they published. straight up lies
Russian press freedom has been under attack since way before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. RT 10 years ago is not RT today, but it’s still not exactly an independent news source.
His willingness to publish documents incriminating some governments (famously the American government, of course) and not others shows a bias.
I’m not saying he’s an agent working for the Kremlin, but I do think he shows bias. And honestly, I can’t really blame him after the way the West treated him.
you definitely get it with RT having changed in the last decade…
but on Bill Maher he said A: they only publish things they can verify, and B: russia would not be shy about just assassinating him, so unfortunately they’re very hesitant to piss them off.
i need to find that clip and just reply with that…