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Also because he was forced into pleading guilty for doing journalism. A great crime has been committed against Assange and I understand why he would do this. I

Also because he was forced into pleading guilty for doing journalism. A great crime has been committed against Assange and I understand why he would do this. I would never ask him to spend another day in a small Ecuadorian embassy room with no living facilities or in a medieval torture cell in England... He has suffered more for the free people of the world than we have a right to ask for but this is not a just outcome.

dools 2y ago
He wasn't "doing journalism". WikiLeaks just posted a completely unevaluated firehose of data fed to it by whomever, which is why they were such an easy asset for Russian intelligence.
- rendall 2y ago
  This is misinformation. Their policy was never to publish anything they could not verify, and the "asset for Russian intelligence" was only ever a DNC and US intelligence smear to discredit Wikileaks.
  - af78 2y ago
    It's not just "DNC and US intelligence." Wikileaks tried to influence the 2017 election in France among other examples. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks. This partially backfired when the dump of e-mails they published was found to contain russian-language messages. That Wikileaks systematically favors the russian government, and never does anything contrary to the interests of the russian government, strongly suggests they are an asset of russia.
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      Exposing corruption mainly in the anglosphere is not some systematic error if that is what you do best and where most of tge organisation live and know people. You could claim Wikileaks is a Thai or South African asset too on those preconditions.
    - rendall 2y ago
      Tell me and be honest: is that link to a politically-motivated, unproven allegation that will be believable only to those who want to believe, because the "evidence" will be a rabbit warren of innuendo, emotionalism, question begging, circular citations, and talking head pundits assuring us all that they have seen the evidence and "it's extremely credible"? Because that's all the anti-Assange people have so far.
- vincnetas 2y ago
  Does it not count as whistleblower? You see wrong doing and tell a bout it. "I'we seen bad thigs, this is all i got, lets look at it together."
  - varjag 2y ago
    There were hardly any wrong things uncovered in the cables though. The most shocking part of them is American civil servants are pretty good at prose.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      I'm not exactly disagreeing because it is a factual view. But there are some knotty issues that go a lot deeper. 1) The US was doing a lot of things wrong. Going off the 2011 cables [0] they were spying on various people they weren't meant to be, there were one or two things that look war crimes to me but who knows technically and a few gems like "Der Spiegel reported that one of the cables showed that the US had placed pressure on Germany not to pursue the 13 suspected CIA agents involved in the 2003 abduction of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen". 2) It wasn't obvious in that leak that the US was doing anything counter the interests of the US. But Assange isn't a US citizen and wasn't in the US at the time, so that isn't a reasonable standard to hold him to. 3) Even internally to the US though there is a reasonable argument that he was helpful. If US citizens don't have easy access to this sort of information, how are they supposed to effectively exercise democratic control on the government? People are going out and doing terrible things in their name which, arguably, are counterproductive and they would probably not want done. Accountability requires sunlight and they can't debate whether there is enough sunlight without people like Assange. 4) It turns out that the US does have a huge probably-illegal certainly-ill-advised spying program that was being sniffed out by leakers. The response to Assange seems likely to be part of a campaign to keep material information on such topics like that out of the public sphere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak#Contents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...
      - varjag 2y ago
        I could somewhat follow you until (3). Throwing the confidants and allies under the bus for idle public curiosity is absolutely not an acceptable trade-off.
- mda 2y ago
  I agree they have no idea about journalism. I remember they had put a big pile of emails sent to some government agency in Turkey. It was all some people complaining about daily things, reporting issues in their cities etc (emails were not anonymized of course), They just dumped them and claimed they were exposing the corrupt government.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  I'm struggling to figure out how wikileaks works as a russian intelligence asset in a way that somehow doesn't apply more aptly and openly to western media as a whole. Hell our entire elections are built around directly and indirectly paying media to run content ("ads"). There is no genuine concern here over some deep vulnerability our society has to russians or anyone because of wikileaks. Assange (nor snowden) caused any material harm remotely proportional to the blowback they've received since. This is about punishment for circumventing state-level controls and embarrassing the state. To think that Trump would somehow be more lenient on either is unthinkable—he's part of the same class of people that Clinton is that is most sensitive to the health of systems Assange threatens.
  - Applejinx 2y ago
    Oh, but it does, and that's also a problem. Key Western media, for instance the NYT, are seriously compromised due to being poster children for what's called 'MICE' (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego): if the NYT, like all newspapers, is going broke in the age of the Internet, it's got all of that as vulnerabilities, especially Ego as it sees itself as the bulwark of truth, yet it can't pay its bills. Enter Russian oligarchs, just like they bought up London, and then control the oligarchs by force when you can't simply direct them by shared ideology, and you've got pretty much the most powerful propaganda outlet you could possibly have, until you exploit it so heavily that you burn its former reputation to the ground. Which you do, because you yourself care nothing for its well-being: it's a tool for your political aims in fighting NATO and furthering your empire. Sure, it applies to western media as a whole, from the bottom to the top. If WWIII had stayed entirely in the infosphere, and Russia had not invaded Ukraine and tried to make good on their preparations, nobody would ever have known WWIII had been waged in the infosphere. That's how well it had been going. It ran aground when physical countries had to be annexed.

dools 2y ago

He wasn't "doing journalism". WikiLeaks just posted a completely unevaluated firehose of data fed to it by whomever, which is why they were such an easy asset for Russian intelligence.

rendall 2y ago
This is misinformation. Their policy was never to publish anything they could not verify, and the "asset for Russian intelligence" was only ever a DNC and US intelligence smear to discredit Wikileaks.
- af78 2y ago
  It's not just "DNC and US intelligence." Wikileaks tried to influence the 2017 election in France among other examples. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks. This partially backfired when the dump of e-mails they published was found to contain russian-language messages. That Wikileaks systematically favors the russian government, and never does anything contrary to the interests of the russian government, strongly suggests they are an asset of russia.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    Exposing corruption mainly in the anglosphere is not some systematic error if that is what you do best and where most of tge organisation live and know people. You could claim Wikileaks is a Thai or South African asset too on those preconditions.
  - rendall 2y ago
    Tell me and be honest: is that link to a politically-motivated, unproven allegation that will be believable only to those who want to believe, because the "evidence" will be a rabbit warren of innuendo, emotionalism, question begging, circular citations, and talking head pundits assuring us all that they have seen the evidence and "it's extremely credible"? Because that's all the anti-Assange people have so far.
vincnetas 2y ago
Does it not count as whistleblower? You see wrong doing and tell a bout it. "I'we seen bad thigs, this is all i got, lets look at it together."
- varjag 2y ago
  There were hardly any wrong things uncovered in the cables though. The most shocking part of them is American civil servants are pretty good at prose.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    I'm not exactly disagreeing because it is a factual view. But there are some knotty issues that go a lot deeper. 1) The US was doing a lot of things wrong. Going off the 2011 cables [0] they were spying on various people they weren't meant to be, there were one or two things that look war crimes to me but who knows technically and a few gems like "Der Spiegel reported that one of the cables showed that the US had placed pressure on Germany not to pursue the 13 suspected CIA agents involved in the 2003 abduction of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen". 2) It wasn't obvious in that leak that the US was doing anything counter the interests of the US. But Assange isn't a US citizen and wasn't in the US at the time, so that isn't a reasonable standard to hold him to. 3) Even internally to the US though there is a reasonable argument that he was helpful. If US citizens don't have easy access to this sort of information, how are they supposed to effectively exercise democratic control on the government? People are going out and doing terrible things in their name which, arguably, are counterproductive and they would probably not want done. Accountability requires sunlight and they can't debate whether there is enough sunlight without people like Assange. 4) It turns out that the US does have a huge probably-illegal certainly-ill-advised spying program that was being sniffed out by leakers. The response to Assange seems likely to be part of a campaign to keep material information on such topics like that out of the public sphere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak#Contents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...
    - varjag 2y ago
      I could somewhat follow you until (3). Throwing the confidants and allies under the bus for idle public curiosity is absolutely not an acceptable trade-off.
mda 2y ago
I agree they have no idea about journalism. I remember they had put a big pile of emails sent to some government agency in Turkey. It was all some people complaining about daily things, reporting issues in their cities etc (emails were not anonymized of course), They just dumped them and claimed they were exposing the corrupt government.
darby_nine 2y ago
I'm struggling to figure out how wikileaks works as a russian intelligence asset in a way that somehow doesn't apply more aptly and openly to western media as a whole. Hell our entire elections are built around directly and indirectly paying media to run content ("ads"). There is no genuine concern here over some deep vulnerability our society has to russians or anyone because of wikileaks. Assange (nor snowden) caused any material harm remotely proportional to the blowback they've received since. This is about punishment for circumventing state-level controls and embarrassing the state. To think that Trump would somehow be more lenient on either is unthinkable—he's part of the same class of people that Clinton is that is most sensitive to the health of systems Assange threatens.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  Oh, but it does, and that's also a problem. Key Western media, for instance the NYT, are seriously compromised due to being poster children for what's called 'MICE' (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego): if the NYT, like all newspapers, is going broke in the age of the Internet, it's got all of that as vulnerabilities, especially Ego as it sees itself as the bulwark of truth, yet it can't pay its bills. Enter Russian oligarchs, just like they bought up London, and then control the oligarchs by force when you can't simply direct them by shared ideology, and you've got pretty much the most powerful propaganda outlet you could possibly have, until you exploit it so heavily that you burn its former reputation to the ground. Which you do, because you yourself care nothing for its well-being: it's a tool for your political aims in fighting NATO and furthering your empire. Sure, it applies to western media as a whole, from the bottom to the top. If WWIII had stayed entirely in the infosphere, and Russia had not invaded Ukraine and tried to make good on their preparations, nobody would ever have known WWIII had been waged in the infosphere. That's how well it had been going. It ran aground when physical countries had to be annexed.