We're talking about an organization that has published primary sources exposing corruption for years -- and in all that time, no one has ever claimed that what was published was false. Not once. There is not a single situation where I would prefer to be lied to rather than be told the truth, nor is there ever a situation where I would prefer being fed a narrative that caters to my beliefs rather than a truth that offends them. "Weaponizing the truth" is what muckrackers and whistleblowers have done since the invention of the newspaper. Ellsberg makes no bones about having an agenda to stop the war in Vietnam when he published the Pentagon Papers. Sy Hersh sure as hell had an agenda for publishing the My Lai story, or the US bombing of Cambodia, or the Abu Ghraib one. And that IF Stone, what a b*stard! How dare he write a book exposing the corruption in the WW2-era arms industry, or the FBI trying to make sure people who "mixed with negros" or "had too many Jewish friends" didn't get jobs in those factories. What an un-American enemy of the people! I don't see how preferring to side with the world's most powerful people who have been exposed for abusing their power rather than the people who exposed is anything less than moral cowardice.
There's no credible evidence for that either. No one should be asked to believe anything without evidence unless they want to join a religion.
You're wrong: "The FBI and Robert Mueller’s investigators discovered when and how specific Russian military officers logged into a control panel on a leased machine in Arizona. They found that the GRU officers secretly surveiled an empoyee of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee all day in real time, including spying on “her individual banking information and other personal topics.” They showed that “Guccifer 2.0,” the supposed lone hacker behind the DNC hack, was in fact managed by a specific GRU unit, and even reconstructed the internet searches made within that unit while a GRU officer with shoddy English skills was drafting the first post as Guccifer 2.0." https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/17/dnc-server-hack-russia-trump-2016-219017
This is absurd. She needs to read the actual indictment before she spews verbal diarrhea. The charge against him has NOTHING to do with the First Amendment. He violated a statute that is 35 years old when he helped try to hacking into the Pentagon’s computer. Most Americans would agree that an non-America (really anyone) should be punished for attempting to break into the Pentagon’s classified materials. He is lucky he is only looking at 5 years for this charge. He politically and selectively released information. He did what he did because he knew Hilary wanted him dead. He gleefully acted as a pawn. He isn’t a whistle blower.
The indictment is very narrowly tailored on purpose to avoid First Amendment issues. The indictment is a slam dunk unless the court rules some of the evidence inadmissible. The Prosecutor intentionally chose a charge that be easily proven on purpose. It only carries jail time of 5 years. What is scary for Assange is that the US government can charge him with other crimes at a later date.
G-2 claimed they hacked the server and they were indicted in 2018 by Robert Muller for it and identified as groups working for the Russian government. Further, numerous private cyber specialist company reached the same conclusion. The documents (some of them) released by G-2 were manipulated. The US government was able to track down the street in Russia were the operation took place. Assange, being the self serving manipulative person he is, conveniently comes out and says there is no reason to believe Russia hacked the DNC email server.
Here's a disappointing twist on that possibility: "Under doctrine of specialty, recognized by the Supreme Court over a century ago in U.S. v. Rauscher, an extradited fugitive is subject to prosecution only for those offenses for which he or she was surrendered." https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116704236526555136.html
As I said before, having a political motivation doesn't make his efforts at transparency any different form any other whilstleblower. Or any other journalist. It would however take a long time to count the stories that have been retracted in the last three years in the US and UK press from unconfirmed leaks from "a senior government official" rushed out without so much as critical glance. Wikileaks, by comparison, is singular in both its accuracy and exposure of malfeasance. Again, I have to ask: Do you prefer the liar that jerks you off or the ******* that tells you the truth? The argument that Assange was "colluding" with his source being somehow different than what any other journalist does was refuted then, in 2010. Assange telling her to use a Linux CD to get the password was a detail of her trial. In 2011. They certainly tried to go after him, but in 2013 the Obama DOJ came to the conclusion that they couldn't because he did the same thing the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post do: pressing a source for more information and safeguarding their anonymity. Likewise, if "colluding" with Wikileaks over confidential information is then the charge then what is this, if not collusion? Also, according to the indictment, “it was part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning used a special folder on a cloud drop box of WikiLeaks to transmit classified records containing information related to the national defense of the United States.” Which by that they mean SecureDrop, the software that's used by nearly every news organization in the world to submit anonymous leaks -- which by reading the indictment one gets the impression that activity is being criminalized or at least it's authors strongly think it should be. What changed is Pompeo, who in 2017, decided that Obama's crackdown on free speech was too meek and he wasn't going to allow Wikileaks "the latitude to use free speech values against us" and "To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for" because Pompeo apparently believes the long tradition of publishing classified documents in the public interest is not free speech. And so Pompeo first sent Manafort, then Pence to Ecuador, then after guaranteeing a $4.2 billion loan, Moreno played ball, inventing conditions for his asylum after blaming Assange for his own corruption scandal, which wikileaks tweeted about, but were not the ones who published it and most people in Ecuador know it's all bullshit. But hey, the truth is whatever you want it to be if you repeat a thing often enough and accuse anyone that doesn't agree with you of being a traitor... Australia, who does what they are told, has made nary a peep about their citizen even though there is good reason to believe Assange could face torture. Meanwhile, Assange's lawyers had been working to appeal the arrest warrant in the UK, but his request was harshly denied by a judge (who has a huge conflict of interest considering who she is married to) who alarmed human rights organizations the world over, including the UN , when she claimed he was in perfectly good health, was in no danger of being sent to America, and that despite legal precedence to the contrary, that he would be denied using his years in the embassy as time served. Legal scholars were apparently hard at work as well in the US to try to go where no lawyer in Obama's DOJ has gone before to make this work, where they described the use of Jabber and cloud-based file drops between a publisher and his source as "a conspiracy." So yes, there is a serious implication for First Amendment rights. This circus aims to criminalize what is normal behavior for most news organizations. It also questions how safe the world is for any refugee, when one's legal status can be changed on a whim if the United States offers a government enough money.
Manning alrea To answer your first question, I don’t like either. As to the indictment, the statute that he is being charged under is very narrow and specific and the decision to charge him under that statute was calculated and for a purpose. Specifically, it doesn’t not involve any crime concerning the publishing or leaking of information. The indictment and the crime he is charged with is very specific and unless the Judge bars some of the evidence, he will rightly be convicted of. Why should he get any credit towards his sentence for hiding in the embassy? If he is tortured by the US government, then that is a completely separate issue that would need to be addressed. You can worry that he will be charged with future indictments (possible) and those may well involve the First Amendment but the current indictment does not. I am not a defender of Donald Trump. I knew from the beginning, right after 9-11 that civil liberties would never be the same. People will agree to almost anything when they are afraid. However, in this case and with this indictment that just isn’t the case. I spent 5 years working as an assistant USSA and wrote hundreds of indictments and saw indictments that were over reaching or politically motivated. This indictment is not like that, for no other reason than they don’t want a First Amendment issue before the USSC. I have no doubt that Trump is doing this for political reasons. If nothing else he wants to put to rest any idea he is a Russian stooge.
There are several ways around it (although I am quite sick of this Administration needing exceptions and twisting of laws). The problem is that once precedence is set, it is hard to walk it back.
for the other half of this equation, manning, she's clearly being tortured having been left in solitary the past month. and under contempt of court, which is the weakest rickety medieval power a judge-prosecutor tandem can claim. basically circumventing having to officially charge someone and just leave them in a punishment purgatory indefinitely until they can squeeze what they want out of them
