Though O'Hagan is sympathetic in many ways he doesn't sugarcoat anything, and I came away with the impression that Assange is the author of a great deal of his own woes. (Among other things, much of the account involves Assange lying pretty incessantly, even to his closest allies about petty dramas, so I now find it hard to take anything he's said at face value.)

[0] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n05/andrew-o-hagan/ghost...

----

Edit to add: there's a quoted exchange in the account, which now springs to mind every time I hear about Assange.

> There are few subjects on which Julian would be reluctant to take what you might call a paternalistic position, but over Snowden, whom he’s never met but has chatted with and feels largely responsible for, he expressed a kind of irritable admiration. "Just how good is he?" I asked.

> "He’s number nine," he said.

> "In the world? Among computer hackers? And where are you?"

> "I’m number three."

But, I think this is kind of hard to swallow at this point. I know you respond to someone else comment, and not directly to the story. But in this light i think it is not time to discuss if Assange lied at some point. The man deserves a fair trial, and some nobel prizes for the good stuff he did. Before Wikileaks we were some tin-foil hat /r/conspiracy readers. And now "deep state" a term you find in the MSM. Big progress necessary on the way to fix this mess, yet Assange's life got destroyed in the process.

That doesn't mean that there hasn't been a coordinated campaign of character attack and punishment for revealing uncomfortable truths against him. Nor does it mean that he is deserving of what has happened

Wow, he has a high opinion of himself! That's just terrible. Horrible. Only the humble and the meek are worthy of support when they're persecuted.

My uncle is a general in the Air Force, all three of my grandfathers fought in WW2 (my Dad's biological father was killed by a drunk driver when he was 7), etc etc. I have pictures of my grandfather standing under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with the tank squad he commanded.

Wikileaks helped change my mind quite a bit. Among the many things they published, there was one video that really stood out: POV camera from a apache as the pilot releases a missile into a group of civilians that included a number of journalists. Things like this couldn't be ignored, because of Wikileaks record. You couldn't start off down a path of rationalizing, etc. They made you face up to the ground-level reality.

I still support and appreciate the people who serve in our armed forces, but thanks to Wikileaks I have a much more nuanced,skeptical, and (I believe) more appropriate view.

The news media has consciously hidden and censored the ground level reality of war since Vietnam, where they made the mistake of showing families the graphic ground level realities of war in color while they ate TV dinners in their living rooms. This created what was perhaps the greatest anti war sentiment in US history -- it was not sustainable. Meanwhile Hollywood perpetually pushed out war and action movies glorifying violence while also censoring the disgusting reality of it.

To see the people responsible for getting that out - something that should never have been kept secret - imprisoned and hunted across the world has only confirmed those views.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airst...

Reading the Wikipedia entry seems to indicate the Apache’s has reason to believe they were hostile forces. Indeed, some of the men with the journalists had weapons and were in the same spot as harassing fire had come from earlier.

I didn’t think it was some great revelation about the US military.

Then firing on the dad who stopped his car to try to help the civilians injured by our strike, killing him and injuring his kids? Yeah, I had no idea that medical assistance was no longer considered protected in war.

Being in the company of armed men who aren’t friendly forces while US forces are under fire in close proximity seems like a bad idea as well t wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume you are hostile forces.

And as for the ambulance - “The van had no visible markings to suggest it was an ambulance or a protected vehicle”

I'd be curious how close the proximity was. What I've read indicated that somewhere in that region, and somewhere earlier in the day, they had been under fire. If US forces were under fire in that area recently, it seems like it'd make sense for the journalists to bring security with them.

> “The van had no visible markings to suggest it was an ambulance or a protected vehicle”

Sure, but you can see that all they were doing was collecting the injured.

From the Wikipedia article it seems to state that the armed men were in an area where shooting had come from before and were in the path of oncoming soldiers.

And in terms of loading injured people, the enemy does pick up their own injured. My understanding is unless you’re clearly marked as medical personnel, you’ll be regarded as hostile.

Can clearly see where the concern comes from, but at least my own perspective is that it’s not that unusual in war.

It made even one involved soldier to speak out: https://www.wired.com/2011/04/ethan-mccord/

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-tech-assange...

[1] https://www.snopes.com/2019/02/01/snopes-fb-partnership-ends...

For example:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-hel...

They also said "like him or not". Not everyone likes the outcome of his leaks. Many do. Many like some, but not others. Regardless, he's had a major impact on politics based on very true information Wikileaks has made available to the public.

If the Ashley Madison password leakers were helping expose corruption in the government, I'm sure some would view them as folk heroes too.

Like when Wikileaks was perpetuating the nonsense Seth Rich conspiracy as cover.

If they mean no retractions, they can just say no retractions.

‘Faultless record’ is a deliberate overgeneralization to make it sound like WikiLeaks is more reputable than it actually is.

Consider that Donald Trump has an equally ‘faultless record’ based on this criterion , and yet many people consider this to be sociopathic behavior,

‘No retractions’ is not a measure of journalistic quality or integrity, and certainly not an indicator of faultlessness. Indeed willingness to retract is usually considered a good thing.

And yes, the poster is trying to have people accept heir framing of of faultless which is why they are meeting resistance.

This is not an equation. It is a conversation.

Say I put up a website that every day posted a story about a Jewish person who had been convicted of a financial crime. Say I promoted this site and built up a fan base. If every story was 100% true, nothing but real convictions.

Would you say this is an honest, faultless website?

If we saw that this number was appreciably higher than 2%, then we could immediately draw the conclusion that the justice system in this country is biased against Jews, right?

(This would be just like we do in the case of blacks when it comes to "more dangerous" crimes like assault, armed robbery, rape, and murder.)

As for the subtext of your message, you seem to be doubtful that the justice system is biased black people. I have no doubt you are a smart person, so it baffles me why on a post about how complex issues need a broad and nuanced understanding you'd take this simple-minded sarcastic swipe.

You appear to think that the social justice issue was determined simply based on the fact the black people are incarcerated at a higher rate than the general population, and political correctness demands that it be attributed to judicial bias. There is a lot of research supporting this bias; it isn't just a PC justification.

See what the west here does to stop rather similar practices of which Assange happens to be at the receiving end? Very little. We let him die, and I include myself into "we". This is just abhorrent. And it seems we dont even know what to point our anger to, the US govt? The UK? The fucking-were-so-enlightended Swedish govt? Any (western) govt that fails to stand up for him?

To stay in xmas spirit: Assange is the modern day Jesus of reporting dying for our freedom and our right te be informed of our sick and twisted govts.

I'm angry now.

Psychological projection can be contagious, when used with blame: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intense-emotions-and...

There wouldn’t be. It’s an embassy. The met aren’t daft enough to do anything other than watch the front door.

https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/09/25/inenglish/1569384196_65...

> After the installation of new video cameras at the beginning of December 2017, Morales requested that his technicians install an external streaming access point in the same area so that all of the recordings could be accessed instantly by the United States. To do this, he requested three channels for access: “one for Ecuador, another for us and another for X,” according to mails sent at the time to his colleagues. When one of the technicians asked to contact “the Americans” to explain the way that they should access some of the spying systems installed in the embassy, Morales would always be evasive with his answers.

> Morales ordered his workers to install microphones in the embassy’s fire extinguishers and also in the women’s bathroom, where Assange’s lawyers, including the Spaniard Aitor Martínez and his closest collaborators, would meet for fear of being spied on.

How about this bullshit Steve Jobs AIDS diagnosis?

https://file.wikileaks.org/file/steve-jobs-hiv/steve-jobs-hi...

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_purported_HIV_medical_...

Wikileaks explicitly noted:

> Due to the contradictory dates, possible evidence of forgery, strong motivations for fabrication, and few motivations for a legitimate revelation, the images should not be taken at face value.

Using Wayback machine, I can confirm that this text was associated with these images from the first moment that they were published on Wikileaks.

Also, HIV isn't AIDS and you should keep that in mind.

This is blatant antisemitism.

https://imgur.com/a/1z3APkC

It’s hard to verify he deleted it because his Twitter account has been deactivated. Just found it interesting because I think his original tweet was accurate but it was strange that he backtracked.

Sorry they are nothing more than a propaganda machine of Russia at this point.

They went political in the last election choosing to keep GOP documents silenced and release the DNC data.

I have no issue if Wikileaks wasn’t playing political games. But they are.....

Please, no conspiracy theories.

Refusing to ever retract anything either means they're literally perfect. Fuck the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, Al Jareeza and every other news organisation that has ever existed.

Or they refuse to retract ever, despite sometimes making mistakes.

We - informed internet users, not just journalists - should be very worried about his treatment and try to act to support him and Wikileaks. If you can't act yourself, do consider donating:

https://defend.wikileaks.org/donate/

(there might be other relevant avenues of donating, this is one of them)

There's a Norwegian conservative newspaper who (somehow) got access to all the cable gate documents [1], and benefited tremendously on it - but now won't speak up about how Julian Assange is being treated.

(Sorry about the norwegian news article)

[1] https://finansavisen.no/nyheter/politikk/2010/12/aftenposten...

Speaking truth to power is something the corporate-owned fourth estate no longer engages in, and instead discards civil discourse and individuals with integrity because reality is inconvenient compared to fanning the flames with phony-outrage clickbait, replacing it with corporate-led fascism and intolerance masquerading as liberalism. Here are just some of the heroes of freedom:

- Phil Donahue (completely gave up a promising career)

- Jesse Ventura

- Cenk Uyghur *

- Chris Hedges

- Julian Assange

- Chelsea Manning

- Aaron Schwartz

- John Kiriakou *

- Daniel Ellsberg *

- Gary Webb

- Robert Parry *

- Max Blumenthal *

- Aaron Maté *

- Lee Camp *

- Jeremy Scahill *

- Glenn Greenwald *

* The few, lucky ones

Mueller did not present evidence of Assange having acted on behalf of the Russian government; so I'm not sure what you mean.

Also, let's suppose Assange is a "Russian agent" (which he isn't). Ok, so what? A lot of journalists are state agents: BBC, RT, France 24 etc. You could say it is underhanded for him not to have declared his being a Russian agent (which, again, he isn't); fair enough. That doesn't legitimize his persecution, effective torture, extradition to the US etc. - in the slightest.

What makes you so sure of this?