Re Poitras turning on Assange: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/23/risk-a-sad-comedown-...

I had forgotten that she and Appelbaum had been lovers. Bringing him into the mix destroys the film's objectivity.

What is this supposed to convince me of? I am now more convinced that Assange is guilty if this is the way his defenders talk.

This reads like a guy trying to defend a rapist. Does he seriously not understand why people get touchy on the subject of sexual assault when he calls it political correctness? This is not simple unorthodoxy as alleged in your link but a serious crime.

It's​ also hilarious that he is compared to Gandhi at the end.

I've read many articles about what went down in Sweden. I've seen no claims that he forced either woman to have sex. He didn't seduce them. They wanted to have sex with him, and bragged to their friends.

And they remained friendly with him afterward. Until they learned that he'd had sex with both of them. That's when it got crazy. Also, one of them was concerned that a condom had broken, and wanted him tested for STDs. That's initially why she filed a police report.

After that, it was mostly driven by the prosecutor. It's not impossible that the US government played a role in that. But the women were initially Wikileaks supporters, and weren't likely part of a plot to entrap him.

I googled and found: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/17/julian-assange...

If this is as reported, I am not a lawyer but it sounds like he committed a crime, and he is most certainly a major asshole, among other things pushing the boundaries of what constitutes consent, then making the other party feel uncomfortable in their own home.

Then he blames the consequences on a global conspiracy. Probably part of the abuser personality, to evict himself from blame.

I was thinking, western intelligence has done a lot of sketchy things, usually in the form of coups, more recently with "enhanced interrogation" or eavesdropping... But I am not aware of any other case where people claim they falsely accused somebody of rape. Doesn't fit the profile.

Thanks, I hadn't seen that article. He does sound horrible. And yet, I wonder why those women took so long to decide that they'd been raped. I have read that it's not uncommon. And I suppose that, being Wikileaks supporters, they didn't want to make a scene.

So yes, he does seem like a major asshole.

It's a documentary. Criticism of it should be based on facts, not some assertion that the director is an emotional slut.

It's no longer a documentary. It's a personal attack. It's not that Poitras is "an emotional slut". It's that she has an agenda, which is very different from the one that she professed when starting the project. She should have killed the project. And it may well turn out that she violated her working agreement with Wikileaks.

That is actually a pretty good point and not one that was obvious to someone who follows this topic and these are big figures in it (behind Greenwald, Snowden, Assange, etc.)

I thought that was the whole idea? Let them curate and release the relevent information?

I guess. But many are pissed off about how little's been released. And about how much it's been monetized.

Edit: OK, "profited from".

How much has it been monetized? How do we know only a small amount of it was released?

I should have said "profited from". I mean, The Intercept was built on them. Greenwald and crew have probably earned millions of dollars from them.

The US government claims that he took millions of documents. We haven't seen more than thousands, I think. And I've read claims that only a small percentage has been released.

the USG claim has been aggressively disputed by GG et al

Cryptome was keeping a tally of what has been released. The problem is the total size of the trove is not known publicly. But yes, it would be a very tiny percentage.

https://cryptome.org/2013/11/snowden-tally.htm

Thanks. That accounting has been updated through 18 November 2016. It seems like at most 1% has been released.