> he's guilt of publishing video showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians

Another view is that he published evidence of alleged American war crimes. Then he published a bunch of other stuff of zero public interest, but damaging to innocent people (e.g. medical records of gay Saudis, rape victims, et cetera [1]).

The former should be clearly held as being First Amendment protected. The latter is reasonably questionable. The merit of the former does not automatically absolve the harms of the latter.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/new-report-highl...

> Another view is that he published evidence of alleged American war crimes. Then he published a bunch of other stuff of zero public interest, but damaging to innocent people (e.g. medical records of gay Saudis, rape victims, et cetera [1]).

That's not what he's extradited for.

Strictly speaking, he's been indicted for his part in assisting Chelsea Manning US diplomatic cables leak and not for exposing either the war crimes or gay Saudis.

"The 17 counts were tacked on to a single count accusing Assange of conspiring with Manning to crack a Department of Defense password." [1]

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-founder-julia...

Exactly. If people actually read the initial and subsequent indictments against Assange they'd realise he was actively encouraging and assisting Chelsea Manning to attempt to further compromise DoD databases beyond Chelsea's level of access. This included Assange providing instructions to Chelsea on how to obtain an administrator password hash from said DoD DB server which Chelsea then provided to Assange who attempted to brute force the hash. I don't really consider that journalism; at best Assange is a co-conspirator.

Yeah. It's not a binary where you've done the right or the wrong thing. If they enumerated every disclosure, they could find him not guilty on some of them and guilty on others. And that's how it should work, no?

Basically as I've read it the charge isn't about the disclosures themselves but Assange's assistance in cracking a password to get to the documents.

Very well put. It's not just the war crimes committed (or indirectly caused) by the US, it's the major financial crime of the war spending and the crime of falsifying intelligence information to sell the war.

Assange helped shed light on all of it, and one would think that after such a humiliating series of revelations the US would find it harder to sell the public on new wars and new enemies. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

I'm not in the slightest surprised. Assange pissed off a lot of high level political/power figures in the US by exposing them.

Remember in 2016 when Clinton was accused of getting leaked debate questions? Personally I expected that to be the end of her run. At the very least for everyone to say "wow, she actually did that. A candidate should never be able to do that". Instead, assange was the bad guy. People who believed it were nutjobs. Bernie and trump were the "real" bad guys. No accountability - they just misdirected and anyone in Clinton's camp or even the anti trump camp said "well so?"

So im not surprised now that people are being led to this propaganda like sheep. Our populace has disgraced any sense of intelligence it may have had. We really cant look at our average citizen and think anything positive about their critical thinking.

Edit: Downvote if you can't provide any logical counter to what I've said. Nothing up there is untrue, but there are a lot of butt hurt Clinton fans still lingering I'll say.

What war crimes did Assange expose?

Your question was perfectly reasonable and should not have been downvoted.

That said I'd recommend a quick keyword search on "assange" + "collateral damage" (which was the name of a polished version of the video he helped leak).

this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

Physically sickening.

[Voice 1] Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.

[Voice 2] That's right.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&has_verified=1&t...

"Battle" my ass.

The only reason those targets were engaged is because they were thought to be combatants. Do you think the gunner/pilot are happy about it? It's collateral damage in a warzone and horrible but it's not murder or a warcrime.

> Do you think the gunner/pilot are happy about it?

Maybe you haven't seen the whole video -- they were laughing about it during and afterwards, and then blamed the people they just killed for "bringing their kids to a battle" (ignoring the that US was invading the country, so really the US had brought the "battle" to them).

In addition, the reporter's deaths were covered up by the government instead of being honest to Reuters and the reporter's families -- saying they were collateral deaths. In addition, the war logs showed evidence of civilian death and friendly-fire figures being intentionally manipulated by the US government (as well as many other things such as blatant examples of corruption).

> It's also worth remembering that he disseminated information on the behalf of the Russian state in an effort to get Trump elected.

Not sure why you believe that any more than you would believe the claims that Saddam had WMDs.

Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian intelligence hacker group that hacked the Democratic National Committee emails and delivered to Assange and Wikileaks to publicly release. [1] Wikileaks then dropped the emails in parcels - behavior they had never done before - in order to manipulate news headlines leading up to the 2016 federal elections. [2]

This is confirmed by numerous, independent security firms, such as CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Fireeye's Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and others - making it not the same as the WMDs in Iraq smokescreen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guccifer_2.0 [2] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wikileaks-hillary-clint...

I am bit confused, did the hackers falsify/forge anything? Or did they reveal some accurate information about the candidate(s)? If the latter, then what's the problem? Didn't they make American voters more informed? Would this be somehow different (e.g. less evil) had the same thing been done by American journalists?

GP claimed that Wikileaks and Russian promotion of the Trump campaign was on par with the WMD intelligent in Iraq - i.e. the Russian involvement is just a "smokescreen" - which it is not.

It’s not true that WikiLeaks never slowly released information before. That was entirely consistent with how they had been doing things.

No, it wasn't. Read the cited article if you disagree. Assange and wikileaks also reached out to the Trump campaign to coordinate the email leaks.

None of this definitively means it was done 'on behalf of', nor 'for the benefit of'. 'to the benefit of', perhaps, but an unwitting puppet is not necessarily an accomplice.

Per the Mueller Report, Assange attempted to coordinate the leaks with the Trump campaign.

Well, he picked the wrong allies.

Assange working with Russians is a conclusion reached by all US intelligence agencies. Saddam having WMDs was only the conclusion of a stovepiped intelligence team that reported directly to Dick Cheney and created by him (the office of special plans).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepiping

'with' and 'for' are two quite different words. which was it?

Both. He had a show on state-sponsored Russian Television.

> war crimes and killing journalists.

and yet, the saudi's are our allies and noone cares when prince so-and-so donates to XYZPQ election via some proxy organization..

i have no doubt russia attempted to influence the election.

the question is: which government really doesnt, and why is russia singled out here?

with a follow up of:

how is foreign policy really decided?

and what happens in the land of entrenched beurocrats and technocrats and their allies when someone is elected who threatens a major shift in FP?

He published evidence of political corruption. It's a good thing he did it too so that US voters could make a fully informed decision about the candidates.

He published altered and forged documents alleging corruption, where said documents were provided by the Russian intelligence agencies for the sole purpose of influencing the US presidential election.

And Assange, knowing this, attempted to coordinate the release of these falsified documents with the Trump administration. While also prohibiting Wikileaks from publishing any negative documents about Trump.

There is no evidence that those emails were falsified or forged. Even the participants didn't dispute their validity.

The story is that Hillary was colluding with the DNC and the mainstream media, not that someone you don't like let everyone know about it.

>It's also worth remembering that he disseminated information on the behalf of the Russian state in an effort to get Trump elected.

And how can you define this as espionage ? Publishing thins you don't like or even publishing false accusations is not espionage.

Published factual information that was damaging to a political candidate because it exposed their wrongdoing.

I believe the findings of the Mueller report, that Trump did not collude with the Russians to sway the election. I'm rather relieved about it. The possibility of Russia hacking our elections was a very serious matter and I'm glad the case is closed. Still, I'm very very distressed about Trump being President. At least the Russians aren't involved. Now, regarding war crimes and killing journalists, Soviet Russia had a long history of that. It's very disturbing the US is going down that path.

The Mueller investigation did not find evidence of collusion, but that is not the same as evidence of no collusion. There was plenty of evidence that Wikileaks and the Russian State were influencing the election in favor of Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-blames-putin...

I don't disagree but how much influence did they have? The biggest culprits for swaying the election is none other than the US media by giving Trump billions of dollars worth of free election coverage for profits. They knew the negative coverage was energizing his base but they did it anyone because money. Blaming the US media however is as useless as blaming Wikileaks or Russia. At some point we need to admit we have our own self inflicted problems and quit blaming everyone else for them. Trump is a symptom we have been going down the wrong path for a very long time. I'm not optimistic about the US ever being introspective about its actions but it's the only way forward. The problem is US, not somebody else.

"What about the US Media" is whataboutism - a deflection. Russian intelligence hacked U.S. political parties and used the illegally obtained information to influence the election for one candidate. The case is not closed as you say because the political party that benefitted from the foreign influence is blocking legislation to fix the problem.

Trump not colliding with the Russians doesn't mean the Russians were not involved in the election. It just means he did not work with them. They could (and probably did) worked on their own because it's their own best interest to see Trump elected.

Where has it been stated that Assange is being extradited for publishing the 'Collateral Murder' video? So far the only charges I've seen were for his assistance to Manning in cracking a password for an entirely different leak.[1] I suppose one could argue that charges are a pretext, but the diplomatic cable leak was by far more damaging to US interests than the leaked video so that doesn't really make any sense. The only reason I can think of to argue that this is really about 'Collateral Murder' is that it makes the US Government look worse to some people. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, but I haven't seen it.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-founder-julia...

> he's guilt of publishing video showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians.

I am not aware that Mr. Assange ever published anything 'showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians,' although I have read allegations in the press that he published video of people being killed collareally to lawful military action. Collateral damage is not murder. Yes, innocents get killed in armed conflict. The frequency needs to be minimised, of course.

International law forbids intentionally attacking civilians or attacking an otherwise-legitimate military target when civilian casualties are clearly excessive in relation to the military advantage; it doesn't forbid belligerents from taking a course of action which will result in unintentional civilian casualties.

I am neither a lawyer nor a targeteer, though, so I could have gotten some of the wording or details wrong, but I believe the general principle is true.

This right here.

Murder is the unlawful killing of another human. Unintended civilian casualties or collateral damage in war are a tragedy but they are not murder and are almost never a war crime.