Thread: Assange Evicted from Embassy

^ What a coincidence, eh?

jesus fucking christ, indeed

Originally Posted by lom

^ What a coincidence, eh?

Clearly the Europeans think he's a c u n t as well.

If we lose WikiLeaks, we lose a whole stratum of freedom — Pilger



The US attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a spiteful assault on civil freedoms conducted by an ailing superpower that is struggling to preserve its dominance, UK-based journalist John Pilger told RT.

One should not mistake what is happening to Assange for anything but the persecution of a man, who embarrassed the US by exposing to the public Washington’s brutality in the Middle East, award-winning British journalist John Pilger told RT’s Going Underground program.

“The United States has aroused the ire because what we are in the midst of is the world’s greatest superpower struggling to maintain its dominance. Its information dominance, its technological dominance, its cultural dominance. And WikiLeaks has presented an extreme hurdle to this,” he argued.

If we lose the Assanges – and there aren’t many of them, a handful maybe and certainly no one like him – if we lose the WikiLeaks, then we lose a whole stratum of freedom. We stop questioning.

Assange was arrested by the British authorities on Thursday after Ecuador revoked his political asylum and allowed the police to drag him out of the embassy in London. The US accuses the publisher of conspiring with WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning in her leaking of classified materials related to US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks publications based on the Manning leak, especially the so-called “collateral murder” video, dealt a massive blow to US attempts to cover up the “homicidal nature of its colonial wars,” Pilger said.

“Anybody watching that video really has to read very little else of the WikiLeaks revelations about the nature of the American wars, because there it is. There is some kind of consensual belief – I’m trying to figure for a polite term for ‘brainwashing,’ frankly – that we don’t do these kinds of things, we perpetually benign,” he explained.

On ‘our’ side, these things simply do not happen… They are only done by totalitarian states, the rogue states. In fact clearly the biggest rogue state of all is the United States.

Pilger says the attack on WikiLeaks is emblematic for the current state or journalism in the West, which has betrayed its mandate to be the public’s watchdog for the actions of their governments.

“We’ve handed a whole world of abandonment of basic democracy, which is based on dissent, on challenging, on holding power to account, on revelation, on the embarrassment of power. Not trivial embarrassment, the embarrassment of odd celebrity, but real embarrassment. And WikiLeaks provided that public service of journalism,” he said.

The journalist said Assange was arrested “on a political whim” and his likely prosecution and imprisonment in the US “opens up a whole chapter of diminishing the very principles that came out of the Second World War, upon which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is base. It shows how fragile they are.”

Watch the entire interview.

https://www.rt.com/news/456408-pilge...g-underground/

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

No-one gives a fuck. The blonde rapist and Putin stooge is going down.

"Putin stooge", however, publicized thousands of leaked docs not quite pleasing Putin...

Charging Assange reflects dramatic shift in US approach

WASHINGTON (AP) — The decision to seek the extradition of Julian Assange marked a dramatic new approach to the founder of WikiLeaks by the U.S. government, a shift that was signaled in the early days of the Trump administration.

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department had extensive internal debates about whether to charge Assange amid concerns the case might not hold up in court and would be viewed as an attack on journalism by an administration already taking heat for leak prosecutions.

But senior Trump administration officials seemed to make clear early on that they held a different view, dialing up the rhetoric on the anti-secrecy organization shortly after it made damaging disclosures about the CIA’s cyberespionage tools.

“WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,” former CIA Director Mike Pompeo said in April 2017 in his first public speech as head of the agency.

“Assange and his ilk,” Pompeo said, seek “personal self-aggrandizement through the destruction of Western values.”

A week after the CIA director’s speech, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the arrest of Assange was a priority, part of a broader Justice Department crackdown on leakers.

“We’ve already begun to step up our efforts, and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail,” he said.

Pompeo, now secretary of state, declined Friday to discuss the issue, citing the now-active legal pursuit of Assange following his removal a day earlier by British authorities from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The administration won’t say why they decided now to charge Assange with a single count of computer intrusion conspiracy that dates to 2010. Back then, WikiLeaks is alleged to have helped Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, crack a password that gave her higher-level access to classified computer networks.

Nor will they say whether the Obama administration had the same evidence that forms the basis of the indictment, or whether Assange will face additional counts if he is extradited to the United States.

But a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal and legal matters, traced the genesis of the indictment to what’s known as the “Vault 7 leak” in 2017, when WikiLeaks released thousands of pages of documents revealing details about CIA tools for breaking into targeted computers, cellphones and consumer electronics.

A former CIA software engineer was charged with violating the Espionage Act by providing the information to WikiLeaks and is to go on trial later this year in New York. And the leak was a tipping point in deciding to pursue Assange, the official said.

“Vault 7 was the nail in the coffin, so to speak,” the official said.

It ended years of ambivalence about what to do about Assange, who was hailed by many when WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and U.S. military documents, including many that revealed previously unknown facts about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the detainees held at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Even today, Assange and WikiLeaks have supporters around the world, amid a debate over whether the dissemination of raw, unfiltered documents and data counts as journalism.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst behind the famed leak of the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, called the charging of Assange an “ominous” effort to criminalize a necessary component of journalism.

“The charges are based on facts that were known throughout the Obama administration, which chose not to indict because of the obvious challenge to the First Amendment that would involve,” Ellsberg said in an Associated Press interview.

A former Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions, said there was an extensive debate within the government over the feasibility of charging Assange with the publication of stolen, classified materials.

But prosecutors grew concerned that such a case would not hold up in court. Even though officials did not agree with Assange’s self-characterization as a journalist, the former official said, there was concern that it would be hard to justify charging him with actions that more conventional journalists take.

The former official said the department at the time was more amenable to bringing a case like the one ultimately brought — a narrower prosecution centered on a hacking conspiracy. It focuses on an entirely different violation that may obviate any First Amendment or press freedom concern.

“This is just charging a journalist with conspiracy to hack into computer systems, which is no different than breaking into a building or breaking into a classified safe,” said Mary McCord, a senior Justice Department national security official in the Obama administration. “And that’s not First Amendment protected activity.”

That is a widely held view in government, even among people generally sympathetic to the mission of the media.

“This was deliberate and malicious effort to cause harm to us, to U.S. national security interests, and I think it would be good if there is some accountability at last,” said David Pearce, who was U.S. ambassador to Algeria in 2010 when WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables. “So far there hasn’t been any accountability for Mr. Assange.”

https://apnews.com/3d9c190f66cc4e5b8669bcc0b6c1eff9

stupid Assage should have surrendered himself while Obama was in office,

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

No-one gives a fuck. The blonde rapist and Putin stooge is going down.

Yep, some people do give a fuck,Harold.

Blonde rapist? You really think that? Jesus wept, you're a bright lad.You really think he raped that girl..... FFS

Originally Posted by Little Chuchok

You really think he raped that girl..... FFS

1 condom = 1 fuck, no more condoms = no more fucks

Originally Posted by lom

1 condom = 1 fuck, no more condoms = no more fucks

...empty, rinse, repeat...

And there I was thinking it was calm persuasion with no strings attached; didn't realise he was worth 140x the previous reward record of $30 bn paid for info leading to the slaughter of the Hussein bros. But you mess with powerful politicians at your own risk.

As for the Swede authorities hoping to get in on the act, hands up anyone who thinks he raped those bimbos.

The UK dont want the pr nightmare of extraditing a journalist to a rogue state for the crime of telling the truth, so hoping they can wash their hands of Assange by passing him to Sweden.

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

stupid Assage should have surrendered himself while Obama was in office,

or not had helped elect trump.

Why the stupid POTUS hopeful spend millions on election when such a Assange can do it for free (afterwards lock him up)

Originally Posted by lom

^ What a coincidence, eh?

Indeed.


Strings have been pulled.

Some corupted leaders are to be invaded. Some are to be allied...

Originally Posted by lom

1 condom = 1 fuck, no more condoms = no more fucks

1 night = 1 condom

why remove it when you are done?

Oh dear, he's been leaked.



https://news.sky.com/story/julian-as...amera-11694026

The US making a big mistake. If the UK extradite they to will make a big mistake.

Big mistake for several reasons. Not the least of which is having US journalists locked up when they are abroad doing what journalists do. Exposing the sins and cover ups of government.

Originally Posted by Norton

The US making a big mistake. If the UK extradite they to will make a big mistake.

Big mistake for several reasons. Not the least of which is having US journalists locked up when they are abroad doing what journalists do. Exposing the sins and cover ups of government.

Except he's not a journalist, even though people try and paint him as one.

Otherwise he would not have rebuffed all the anti-Russia material he was offered in the run up to the election.

So fuck him.

Originally Posted by Norton

The US making a big mistake. If the UK extradite they to will make a big mistake.

Big mistake for several reasons. Not the least of which is having US journalists locked up when they are abroad doing what journalists do. Exposing the sins and cover ups of government.

Yep, he's a problem child, was better for all when he was holed up.

He may not be a journalist, but he does have certain characteristics of one.

Originally Posted by Latindancer

He may not be a journalist, but he does have certain characteristics of one.

...like many employed by Fox then...

Australian PM: