The author is clearly against the extradition of Julian Assange, and the piece comes across as very much written in that context.
To be clear: I'm not offering an opinion either way on the rights and wrongs of that, but the piece itself comes down very much on one side of the fence.
The Assange case seems relevant and topical. And regardless, what side of the fence would you expect somebody writing an article about press freedom and censorship to be on? To support extraditing to the US somebody who has never lived or worked there, after it was revealed US officials literally planned to kidnap and/or assassinate him? [1]. And only for the charge of revealing war crimes (apart from some trumped up “hacking” charges that the key witness now admitted lying about? [2]).
I really do think somebody would have to be either hopelessly, desperately naive or deliberately lying to themselves to believe Assange could receive a fair trial in the US, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that the US has any kind of jurisdiction over him.
> And only for the charge of revealing war crimes (apart from some trumped up “hacking” charges that the key witness now admitted lying about? [2]).
I've read the allegations. If the allegations are true, he's guilty of hacking. It does not seem to be a case of the law being perverted past its intent. I'm sure the extradition and prosecution is politically motivated, but the problem with doing something that's squarely, dead-to-rights illegal that also happens to piss off the government is that they are within their rights to put you away for doing it.
It'd be one thing if his supporters accepted the dead-to-rights-guilty part, and were making the claim that it was something akin to civil disobedience - illegal, but in service to a higher cause. Unfortunately, most of them are instead bending over backwards to argue that he can't actually guilty of anything. It's not very convincing.
Probably because the most noteworthy accomplishment of that higher cause seems to be 'spending the next decade being a shill for the Kremlin' and 'helping Trump win 2016'. Sorry, but not sorry - I can't say I have an iota of sympathy for the architects of either.
> I've read the allegations. If the allegations are true, he's guilty of hacking.
This is kind of interesting. To me, it seems convenient to the point of being totally unbelievable that the person who leaked evidence of US war crimes, who the US has been hounding for a decade now, is also dead-to-rights guilty of a charge that justifies the extradition they've been gunning for the whole time.
Not being particularly engaged in the case, or the guy, it seems that this must be obvious to everyone.
What's weird about it is that using a spurious charge as a form of harassment for a political dissident is a really big no-no for a liberal democracy. And that's exactly what this appears to be.
I honestly expected some check or balance to step in at some point and point out that, no matter what you think about this guy, manipulating the legal system in such a blatant manner to produce a predetermined result is corrosive to legitimacy on every scale.
You don't believe, and in fact nobody believes, that the exclusive reason for charging Assange with the hacking charges is that he's a hacker. It's obvious to everybody that he is being charged because of legitimate political speech, and this was just what they felt they could 'get him for'. Whether or not he is guilty, that means that the legal system is being used for political ends.
What's wild to me is that so many people are OK with this. Politically motivated prosecution is not normal in a democracy.
I'm sorry, being put on trial is a violation of your human rights?
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Everyone else has to deal with the consequences of their actions, but when the same rules are applied to Assange, it is somehow a cruel and unusual outrage, and he is a saint that we've already determined could have done no wrong.
Journalists with sources that leak classified information are not unusual and they almost never go to jail for it or get hounded for it to this extent.
If the same rules were, as you say, being applied to Assange, he would have been freed a long time ago.
Hard to see where you're coming from. Trials aren't the only stage at which accused people can be released.
He's not indicted for broadcasting classified information, he's indicted for hacking. For helping get access to classified information.
It's the difference between a journalist spending a week in the jungle with a group of partisans, and a journalist spending a week in the jungle shooting guns at convoys and blowing up rail lines with a group of partisans. The former's a journalist, the latter's a guerrilla.
If the allegations are correct, Assange is closer to the latter. If they aren't, he's closer to the former. Right now, he's doing his best to make sure we'll never know, because the latter carries serious consequences.
Wrong. Counts 9 to 17 of his indictment are for "Disclosure of Nation Defense Information". He IS indicted for broadcasting classified information.
There is also 1 count of "Conspiracy to Commit Computer Intrusion" which is minor compared to the 17 other indictments. It related to him trying to crack offline a password hash to let Manning log in as a different user. Which is assisting someone who does the actual collection of information.
The remaining indictments are for "Conspiracy to Receive" NDI or for obtaining it.
In other words he was embedded with the partisans and when asked to pass a box of ammo, did so. The hacking count can lead to 5 years in prison with possible parole. It's a tortured interpretation to suggest he hacked/blew up rail lines.
The rest, the REAL reason to pursue someone internationally for a decade for extraterritorial acts is for his journalistic function. To make an example. Otherwise this case would have been dropped.
Have you watched Collateral Murder? To see that and think justice would be served by burying it would be like watching The Running Man and rooting for the game show host. Again, hard to understand where you're coming from.
> being put on trial is a violation of your human rights?
Oh, certainly not. A fair trial, however, is probably impossible.
However, what I usually comment on is that there is a large enough corpus of evidence to indicate that he's being tortured.
Regardless of everything else I believe about the case: his human rights are certainly being suspended for now; if I ever talk about that then people are quick to point out that he assisted in the rise to power of Trump; as if that invalidates his human rights.
Regardless of what you believe (IE: I'm not happy about Trump either) you shouldn't be so quick to repeal peoples rights, and that's what people are doing, and that's what I'm commenting on.
I could go on-and-on about how he was hounded and character assassinated, but you wouldn't believe me because thats the very nature of character assassination.
I would like him to stand trial, but I suspect it cannot be a fair trial. Sham trials are very common, I wouldn't consider them to be an indicator that your human rights are not being eroded.
So, is the entirety of the US legal system illegitimate, or just the particular parts that will affect your hero?
Are you throwing the whole concept of trials out with the bathwater, or is Assange just special, and the rules don't apply to him?
The US legal system has problems, in terms of which cases it chooses not to pursue, and in terms of the deficiencies of public defenders, and long sentences. But these are problems that affect ~everyone else going through it a lot more than they will affect this golden boy.
I guess the thing that weirds me out about this is not that 'special rules' are applying: if you look at history, they often do. Rather, it's just such a mistake. We're moving in a multipolar world where the US's preeminence is absolutely and explicitly dependent on its position in a 'rules based global order', as the leader of a set of democracies that champion the rule of law. We're also living through an unprecedented era of domestic disillusionment about the rule of law, its enforcement, fairness, and consistency. The US needs its allies more than ever, but it's also leaning on them to do things (rendition, extradition) that are both domestically unpopular and broadly inconsistent with their laws.
I think when historians look back at this era, from the second gulf war on, they'll see it as an era where the US essentially squandered an amazing soft-power position by ridiculously clumsy, arrogant, and petty behavior. And it's being enabled by group think. It's obvious from an outside perspective that all this kind of thing does is undermines the US at home and abroad, and gives ammunition to the Chinese or Russian state line that basically the US are a bunch of hypocrites, and the rules based global order is a sham, or gives ammunition to the left and right of american domestic politics to say that DC is a swamp, for literally no strategic gain. I mean, who really cares about Assange? I certainly don't. I do care about the ability of journalists to do their work without fear of persecution, and even if people don't care about that, they should care about the raw strategic incompetence of what the US is trying to do here.
> It'd be one thing if his supporters accepted the dead-to-rights-guilty part, and were making the claim that it was something akin to civil disobedience - illegal, but in service to a higher cause. Unfortunately, most of them are instead bending over backwards to argue that he can't actually guilty of anything. It's not very convincing.
I don't think it's going out of its way to hide the fact that it's an opinion piece. I wanted to highlight to someone unfamiliar with the case and issues (however few that may be around these parts), that it is an opinion piece. It makes assertions through a lens of a bias to one side of the case. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Using the word "bias" isn't intended by me here as a slight - we're all biased to a greater or lesser degree about everything. But a casual reader should be aware of it without having to e.g. navigate to a separate "about" page :)
Perhaps your highlighting an obvious fact is itself evidence that you do in fact have an opinion and did share it while saying otherwise, possibly unconsciously.
To be clear: I'm not offering an opinion either way on the rights and wrongs of that, but the piece itself comes down very much on one side of the fence.