The trial of Julian Assange

[chveik]

John fucking Biden. I knew he was up to no good

[bgmnts]

Haha get fucked Biden you decrepit cunt.

[BlodwynPig]

Yet...many on here were celebrating his rise. No one would have believed, in the early years of the 2020s that Joseph Cunt Biden was being lauded greatly and without due diligence by intelligences lesser than a Starmerite and yet as destroyed by narcissism as populist centrists

[Bence Fekete]

RecalibrationError 404: New symptom same as last symptom

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

https://twitter.com/StellaMoris1/status/1390342760176181251?s=19

This is quite spectacular just how emphatically the BBC get their arse handed to them here.

The BBC apparently edited this bit of the interview out when they eventually broadcast it.

[Pinball]

The West has had no moral authority since Gitmo and all that extra-judicial jazz. A shame because it might have helped against the dictators now plaguing many countries. Assange is a recent example of our hypocrisy, so well said that dictator. An excellent bit of whataboutery that the crap BBC journo couldn't bat back. I really miss the Dimbleby-class journos, replaced by this light-weight, easily bullied junk. Maybe she'll make a claim for bullying in the workplace? Bless.

[BlodwynPig]

Azerbaijan is a bright, beautiful, smart democracy. Perhaps you meant England?

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

You need to be a dictator carrying a bit of threat before these highly trained female UK/US journalists will dial down their pointlessly antagonistic harshness which produces more heat than light. Just as in other walks of life some women have responded to the patriachy by thinking the way to beat it is to do an even more emphatic impression of it. Unhelpful to their industry and the wider cause having harridans like Kay Burley thinking - and claiming - they are representing the true power and value of women. Disgusting people who drive their professions into the gutter.

Interesting to see what level of power is confronted before Western journalists start showing deference. Blair is fawned over like a demigod, who brings up his total avarice and corruption?

[Bence Fekete]

Inevitably

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59608641

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited from the UK to the US, the High Court has ruled.

The US won its appeal against a January UK court ruling that he could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health.

Judges were reassured by US promises to reduce the risk of suicide. His fiancee said they intended to appeal.

Another designer verdict to wash bloody hands and bury escape hatches. I hope journalism dies. Truly. They deserve it.

[Butchers Blind]

See ya Assange mate

[chveik]

so fucking depressing. and of course nobody gives a shit, they have their culture wars to fight

[Buelligan]

Imagine, just for a lovely second, what it'd be like to be our other selves, living in that universe where Jesus Chrorbyn won in 2017.  Imagine.

The best possible response to this, IMO, is for every potential teetering whistle-blower to blow their shit right now, all around the world, everyone LEAK.  Do it for the children.

[Buelligan]

Julian Assange could soon be extradited to the U.S. and faces 175 years in prison.

He's accused of "espionage" for receiving and publishing leaked military documents.

We explain why the accusations are baseless and the precedent for journalism is so dangerous.

#FreeAssange

https://twitter.com/BTnewsroom/status/1469688691895734275

[DrumsAndWires]

Bravo people.

The rape claims are pure shitshow. He's agreed multiple times to a trial in Sweden if they promise not to extradite. If the authorities actually, genuinely gave a rat's arse about the women then they could've easily made that their #1 priority and nobody would or could've complained.

What would you do? Say he was guilty of actual rape. Wouldn't you want to see him charged and convicted of that rather than this clearly bogus US indictment which we all know is just an excuse to supress whistleblowing? Because watch it all mysteriously go away once extradicted. There's zero justice for rape or sexual assault victims here without a conviction for the crime itself. 

EXACTLY, I wish more people would realise this?

[chveik]

i think back in the day it was my first realisation that a lot of self-proclaimed 'leftists' were actually full of shit or very gullible. being firmly in the free assange camp was the only way that some justice could be done in the rape cases. turns out they just don't give a shit about a man being tortured because he dared to disclose imperialist crimes. and don't get me started on the Clinton emails and russiagate, what a load of bollocks that was.

[beanheadmcginty]

Every time I see the word "Assange" I picture Sean Lock saying and acting out "Just let me Assange the vegetables" as if it is a French cookery method.

[Captain Z]

What does it sound like Sean?

[Bence Fekete]

Whoever just deaded Epstein has so much power it's ridiculous to contemplate. I doubt that cabal sleeps well knowing JA was out there on his kamikaze mission. So how is that not a good a thing? Where do you draw the line and say 'yeah go on then expose the corruption of concentrated power if you like, sounds great, but only if you do the ones we'll point at over there thanks'?

I still think many people have (perhaps) innocently stumbled into this story through the prism of the propaganda shitstorm and have thus yet to shed those hastily assembled judgements most anti-wikileaks/JA rhetoric boils down to. They didn't protect their sources (they did). They got Trump into power (if you like, it's at least partially true, but if you hadn't realised Assange was going to turn on camp rancid as soon as he had the position and data it's because your corrupt news outlet of choice consciously and/or negligently kept it from you):

On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhoea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers."

[Buelligan]

No one can blame Assange for Trump, that's asinine, one might as well blame Trump's mother for it. 

[MojoJojo]

Bravo people.

The rape claims are pure shitshow. He's agreed multiple times to a trial in Sweden if they promise not to extradite. If the authorities actually, genuinely gave a rat's arse about the women then they could've easily made that their #1 priority and nobody would or could've complained.

No one ever really seems to think though how this would work. The Swedish legal system promises not to extradite him. Oh no they break their word - what's Assange going to do, take them to court? He wa asking fro something impossible.

The whole "The rape charges were fabricated so that he could be extradited to the US" is rubbsih idea that doesn't make any sense:
1) The UK is a lot friendlier to the US than Sweden is, and there is no reason to think Sweden is more likely to extradite than the UK.
2) Indeed, as current events show, extraditing from the UK was doable.
3) The extradition treaty between the UK and Sweden explicitly forbids Sweden from extraditing someone to a third country without approval of the UK courts. They'd effectively have to get both the Swedish and the UK courts to extradite him.

It's good he supported the whistle blowing, and it's shit he's getting extradited, but that doesn't mean Assange isn't a cunt. He used wiki leaks to make himself a celebrity.

[Buelligan]

Should maybe being a cunt and possibly wanting celebrity qualify you for waterboarding, lifetime solitary or a trip to Epstein world?

What's being done to Assange is what would be done if the mafia ruled the world via the Establishment.  We all know it's bent as fuck.

[Bence Fekete]

No one ever really seems to think though how this would work. The Swedish legal system promises not to extradite him. Oh no they break their word - what's Assange going to do, take them to court? He wa asking fro something impossible.

So then he can't win under your terms.

And everything that's happened is exactly evidence that extradition was the real reason for those charges to begin with. In the time it's taken for those charges to die they first painstakingly built up this bogus case that he was a monster. And when that failed they reorganised the charges to a more technical level which picked up more traction (EDIT: actually the fake witness was from the rejig - this whole trial was intentionally confusing). The goal posts have moved 100 times whereas you're basing your judgement on the initial play, which is obviously a ruse and irrelevant to whether he should be punished for publishing warcrimes

[chveik]

The Swedish legal system promises not to extradite him. Oh no they break their word - what's Assange going to do, take them to court? He wa asking fro something impossible.

yuck

[MojoJojo]

So then he can't win under your terms.

The extradition treaty already had a provisio meaning he couldn't be extradited from Sweden with the UK agreeing to it - and that would actually have some weight behind it as it would piss off a lot of countries and make it a lot harder for Sweden to extradite anyone. He was asking for a meaningless promise on top of that to avoid facing charges.

[/quote]
And everything that's happened is exactly evidence that extradition was the real reason for those charges to begin with. In the time it's taken for those charges to die they first painstakingly built up this bogus case that he was a monster. And when that failed they reorganised the charges to a more technical level which picked up more traction (EDIT: actually the fake witness was from the rejig - this whole trial was intentionally confusing). The goal posts have moved 100 times whereas you're basing your judgement on the initial play, which is obviously a ruse and irrelevant to whether he should be punished for publishing warcrimes
[/quote]

The only reason those charges have taken so long to die is because he locked himself in an embassy. I'm really struggling to see how his current extradition has in anyway been enabled by the SA allegations?

[Bence Fekete]

It's been enabled by the relentless grinding down of public opinion. Think back to before he sought asylum when he was still seen as somewhat of the egomanic anti cleb nerdhero. <3 by some, mostly on the left, and loathed by others (coincidentally, lots of people who were on the side of Shock 'n Awe).

Some people thought he was more than a tad cunty back then. He is a blunt personality spectrumish and somewhat difficult type who took risks, often with easily imagined consequences for people in delicate situations. But that was the whole point of wikileaks. It was civilization truth serum and it stung like fuck. Nobody was really sure how long they were going to let him get away with all that. But they did let him get away with it, didn't they? why?

The truth is they probably could've levelled these charges, or an equivalent, a decade ago. Maybe they would've won? who knows. But they had nothing that didn't sound, at the time, like: let's just destroy the bastard asap. The Iraqi snuff clips were still in the air. Lots of people seemed broadly supportive of the wikileaks cause (including, if memory serves, a fair amount of the UK press) all mostly grateful for the clicks and the lurid nature of what was being revealed: a.k.a. we're psychopaths

To run the risk of a freedom of information trial in that atmosphere was too big of a gamble even for them. They needed a bigger net.

Somehow society has convinced you/us to believe that the man who was the physical avatar for all that, the world's #1 intelligence target, who was complaining about being extradited and then is, spookily enough, subsequently extradited, wasn't telling you he knew exactly what was going to happen?

It's a mangled diagram in a chapter of a grubby CIA manual somewhere titled 'how to isolate and trap a target into custody'.

[vanilla.coffee]

I'm sure I read somewhere, possibly from Mr Julian himself that he has kill switches should anything happen to him.

[Buelligan]

I'm afraid I just can't get past the bit where they use your taxes to murder innocent kids and mentioning it is WRONG.  It doesn't really come into it what his choice of wallpaper's like or what knife he uses for butter.   Not on that question.  No.

And I honestly believe the sex-crime angle should stand or fall on its own merits.  If it really needs sorting (and that's the big serious thing), then present the evidence and try the case. 

Saying you have to have your mitts on the man before justice can be done - in this scenario - cuts no mustard, in the truth and caring about truth stakes, whatsofuckingever.

[evilcommiedictator]

Even though he's a creepy sex pest who has probably done his time for being a creepy sex pest, it helps to actually read the timeline of events if you're going to claim somehow that Swedish prosecutors weren't doing America's bidding at that time, and the UK is just jailing him on behalf of the US

[MojoJojo]

Saying you have to have your mitts on the man before justice can be done - in this scenario - cuts no mustard, in the truth and caring about truth stakes, whatsofuckingever.

Are you suggesting he should have been tried in absentia?

[Buelligan]

Yeah.  Or the Swedes should've interviewed him in the UK or the Ecuadorian Embassy (from memory, I believe one of their sticking points was they required him to surrender himself to them before they could interview him).

If all of this suffering and time and expense is really about making sure a sex criminal got their just comeuppance - apart from devoting similar resources to all sex crime - they should have put justice for the victim at the top of the agenda, been as flexible as possible about resolving the matter.  But we all fucking know it was never about justice.

Wayne Couzens is 48.