Whether the charges are currently filed isn't important; they always can file the charges later.

The U.S. has claimed the right to kidnap people off the street, detain them indefinitely, or kill them as it deems necessary. I'd be very surprised if any of those tactics would be used on Assange, but in that context pressuring/asking another country to deport him to the U.S. to face charges seems within the realm of possibility.

If you were Assange, would you want to gamble life in prison on your odds, whatever they are?

That doesn't make sense because he was walking around freely in Sweden and was not afraid of being extradited before the rape allegations. If the US wanted to, they could have asked any allied or friendly nation to arrest and extradite him many years earlier.

I would if I really stood for what I believed in and wanted to prove that the US government was really as bad as I say it was.

So if I was Assange, yes I would.

Martyrdom... the dumbest way to measure the correctness of one's argument.

You embarrass yourself. Should the people who figured out that asbestos caused cancer have proved it by inhaling asbestos dust on camera, and then contracting cancer?

If you were one of them, would you do that?

Then maybe you're just worried about disappearing, or "killing yourself."

Assange is not currently charged with a crime, but there are a few reasons not to give weight to that.

First, there are claims of a sealed indictment. Second, Dianne Feinstein and other similarly influential people have called for charges. And third, they have reason to delay those charges: laying them now would make extradition harder, as compared to extraditing for a subpoena and then bringing charges.

The result is that he's not charged (which could make things like grounding planes harder) but I don't know anyone who seriously believes he wouldn't be charged if he showed up in the US tomorrow.

Whilst he hasn't yet been charged in the US, it is rumoured that there is a sealed indictment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#U.S._criminal_i...

That may be reason to force the plane to land when over US territories, but not in the EU. It's the EU who is at fault here however, for once again showing it has no balls.

The EU has extradition treaties with the US.

Do extradition treaties cover forcing diplomatic planes to land with no evidence aside from rumor that a person of interest is on the plane?

From what I remember Assanged attempted to get diplomatic license (become a diplomat for, don't know the technical term) from Ecuador but did not. There he can't get in a car and none of that stops the cops from setting up a large traffic jam till said car runs out of gas and assange has to walk. I'm not sure if there is diplomatic immunity for a tow truck.

The image of Assange trapped in an out-of-gas diplomatic car, being towed behind a beat up truck driven by a very amused blue-collar driver on the way to the airport sounds rather like something from a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett novel.

Since these extradition treaties are not public record, all we can go on, is events. So apparently, yes.

No, Snowden is not a U.S. citizen. He has not be charged with a crime in the U.S.

Do you have any support for these assertions? The wikipedia entry for Snowden clearly seems to indicate that he is a US citizen and that he has been charged with crimes in the US.

I think I mixed up Snowden and Assange when I wrote that late last night. Sorry HN.

Snowden should be protected by WPA [1]. Unfortunately, trusting ones' government will follow its' own laws is quite a risk.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_Protection_Act

Sorry, you're way off base here. The WPA only protects Whistleblowers who work within the government reporting system. It's not a get out of jail free card for any action you perform under the auspices of 'blowing the whistle.'

In this case exactly. For Snowden, there is a reason he was hired as a contractor. The government contractors do not have the WPA protection that their fellow government works do.

And that might make sense if the government reporting system worked. The Thomas Drake case shows that it doesn't. Thomas Drake and some other government whistleblowers agree that Snowden did the only thing he could.

So let me get this straight. You contact "The Office of Special Counsel [1]" and they contact the FBI/CIA to take you away to an undisclosed location. You are never seen again. I'm just not buying the effectiveness of the formal procedure unless ones' goal is to die in vain..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_Specia...