Yes, this is an old thread. But it also seems to be the one most appropriate to post this in, so forgive the necro:
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Moved your post to a new topic as it’s more appropriate.
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The first part of this seems pretty fact driven, but about half way through it seems to go more towards the political side (whether it being true or not), that has nothing to do with the story at hand anymore…
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Yes, they certainly do have an agenda.
Really there is no good resolution for this. Ecuador can’t move him to their country, because the UK will arrest Assange the instant he walks out the door. So they either let him live in the embassy forever or give him up to be thrown in a dark cell forever. Either way Assange will never live free, the only question is whether he lives in a cell or that embassy.
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It’s a shame we can’t get like 30 lookalikes to visit the embassy, book a bunch of taxis/ Uber’s and everyone peg it to a bunch of different air/ferry/train ports/stations, with JA skipping the country on a fake passport…
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With an obligatory fake beard
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Or, you know, Assange could just follow the law and hand himself in at the nearest police station.
And then end up in some obscure off the map prison, superb idea!
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What law? He certainly screwed over the USA, but he is not an American citizen. He may be a Russian GRU agent or asset, possibly unwittingly and possibly not, but that isn’t illegal either. He was wanted for “rape” in Sweden, but that was for sneakily taking off a condom and rawdogging it, not what anyone outside the Nordics would typically call rape, and Sweden let him go once he passed their statute of limitations anyway.
The US wants him and the UK is more than happy to hand him over, but he didn’t violate the law in Australia or the UK so it’s an extradition of a foreign citizen.
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He has a warrant out in the UK for jumping bail.
The UK wants in on the US because there is no good will left for them in the EU.
Well yes, of course. But nobody cares about that, concern is over extradition to the US. Assange is completely screwed. And he probably deserves it.
I don’t think he deserves to be disappeared, like some people here seem to think he will. But he certainly should be held accountable for his actions, just like everyone* else.
(* except for politicians, the military, the police, talking heads on the TV, etc, of course.)
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Oh I don’t think they’d rendition him off to a Cambodian jungle pit or Guantanamo Bay, they’d put him in federal prison, make an example of him.
I have two major concerns with this matter.
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They’d get him on publishing intel with national security implications, which means that we wouldn’t hear anything about why he did it, as that is immaterial in such prosecutions. Same reason why Snowden won’t return.
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Prosecuting a journalist is deeply problematic, as Assange did not, of course, leak the intel himself. Even if he functioned as a GRU agent and got it directly from Fancy Bear/Guccifer 2.0, and he probably did, he just published the stuff.
Well, for any of that to happen, the UK would first have to actually extradite him to the US.
And please don’t call Assange a journalist. Journalists write things. Simply dumping documents is not journalism.
Assange has and always had an agenda. He didn’t like Hillary Clinton (for good reasons), so he worked to prevent her from becoming president. And now he’s in legal trouble and a lot of people don’t like him.
Boo fucking hoo.
Once you start drawing lines as to who is and isn’t a “real” journalist, things can get pretty dicey up in there.
I think “publishes original content” would be a bare minimum, don’t you?
IMO, the minimum qualifications for a journalist to be protected from prosecution should be that he/she publishes newsworthy information, accurate to the best of their knowledge, that is of interest to the public.
Again, I’m not pro-Assange. He’s probably a tool of the Russian government. He certainly has an agenda and is a generally sinister guy. I don’t like lots of people, but I don’t think they should be tossed in dark holes either.
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I personally think journalism should involve analysing and disseminating information. Just telling people “hey, here’s tens of thousands of pages of information, why don’t you sift through all of it and see if you think anything’s interesting” doesn’t make you a journalist.
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I don’t think it makes you a good journalist. Assange is no Laura Poitras or Glenn Greenwald, that’s for sure. But I do think he should be treated as a journalist when it comes to being prosecuted for publishing information.