I am kinda straddling the fence on this indictment after hearing and reading some other more knowledgeable people on the subject. I don't have any sympathy for Assange but I am wary of the precident this sets for cutie a rest of journalists. I have to admit the charges are flimsy.
Of course another issue is what gives the US the right to extradite an Austrailian citizen living in Europe for the most part , to the United States. By this standard Russia or China or any other country would be able to indict and try to extradite any American (whether called a journalist or intelligence agency or whatever) who encourages the release of any information it considers top secret. It really does not help for America to be so dismissive of international law and claim force makes right.
Ummm, we have an extradition treaty with Great Britain in which they promised to send over people wanted for crimes in the US, and we would send wanted perps they request. We don't have agreements like that with Russia or China, though they may choose to extradite if they wanted. Otherwise, we'd have had Snowden a long time ago. Too bad for Assange he didn't manage to physically get over the Russian border. There's nothing legally controversial so far as I know about requesting extradition of a foreign national who committed crimes against us. Let's say this wasn't a speech thing -- a foreigner hacks into Chase Bank and steals a billion dollars. We should say, 'whelp, nothing we can do, he's a foreigner in a foreign country!'? What I think is incredible is how interested some are in preserving the first amendment rights of someone who is neither a citizen nor living in the United States. Why give him the vaunted status of whistleblower when he is in no way part of our body politic?
It's also not lost on me that much of what is known about the long arm of US law...is because it was published by Wikileaks. Another odd thing is, all of this is coming about because of the Trump administration. As much as the previous administration was not exactly a stalwart defender of press freedoms or civil liberties, or any fan of Wikileaks, they declined to pursue Assange for publishing classified material, because doing so would mean that all the journalists and news organizations that also published classified material (notably WaPo, NYTimes, Guardian) would be guilty of the same crimes.
Of course, this is the stickey wicket, or potentially troublesome part. At what point does a whistleblower/investigative journalist engage in "treason"? It's probably subjective, or debatable in court, but I would say two things: a) the government lost whatever moral high ground it might have had when it started spying on all of us; and b) remember that the Founding Fathers were considered "traitors" by their government prior to 1781.
Looks more like Ted Kaczynski ... which yea, I can see why you are elevated him into founding father status...
A couple of years ago tallanvor indicated he looked like a child molester and should be murdered on sight. Since he owes no allegiance to the United States, it is impossible for him to commit treason against the United States. It would be like charging Putin with "treason".
He weaponized the transparency. If Vladimir Putin gets on TV tomorrow and lays out in detail how he and Trump conspired together to use hacking to win the 2016 election and how Trump promised him he'd ease sanctions over that Ukraine thing in return -- is he a whistleblower? Sure, I'm happy to have proof of the high crimes I suspect our president is guilty of, but I know the only reason Putin would tell us would be to create even more chaos here and gain advantage over us. So in toto, I'm not real happy about it and in fact I'd want to inflict more damage on Putin and Russia (even while impeaching our president) to punish him for telling us. What good is transparency if transparency is being leveraged by our enemies to hurt us? I'm not interested in that kind of transparency.
i haven't been coming to this forum or lived in the states for many years. please elaborate on what was hacked, the voting machines?
ok thx. but weren't those leaked by seth rich not hacked and if they were authentic then what's the problem
No. There is no credible evidence that Seth Rich leaked the private correspondences. A monikier named Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC email servers and currently US intelligence believes the Russians were behind it. I guess it's up to you whom to believe. Intelligence agencies aren't always known to be truthful but the same could be said to a stronger degree for right wing blog sites and social media sites.
i only thought it was the seth rich guy b/c assange insinuated that himself (i think it was in an interview after his death). but let's say the russians were indeed behind a hack, i still can't connect the dots that it was hacking the election if the material was true and authentic
