I was planning to suggest submitting the link as its own "story" but apparently it already was, two weeks ago.[0]
Going through the link requires putting aside that reaction. I missed the link posted two weeks ago, and I am so glad you commented.
It’s really chilling and takes time to fully process.
Ex-president Rafael Correa decries the fact that Assange, who had been granted Ecuadorian citizenship in addition to his political asylum, was dragged out of a sovereign embassy by UK police. He notes that an IMF deal occurred somewhat concurrently with the surrender of Assange.
Current president Lenin Moreno claims Assange wouldn't clean up after his cat and smeared poop on the walls of the embassy. Moreno ejected Assange shortly after blaming WikiLeaks for the publication of photos and messages hacked from the Moreno family's smartphones.
> A constitutional democracy would probably investigate Chelsea Manning for violating official secrecy because she passed the video along to Assange. But it certainly wouldn’t go after Assange, because he published the video in the public interest, consistent with the practices of classic investigative journalism.
An investigative journalist wouldn't suggest to their source that they cover their trails and implicate innocent third parties in the egressing of confidential data[1], assist their source with cracking passwords, passively and actively ("I'm working on it, no luck yet"), or in the event that Assange was doing neither, just leading Manning on, would not lie to their sources while again, still encouraging them to break the law.
[1] by trying to crack someone else's password to use to get access to the same documents you're effectively _setting that person up_ as a patsy.
An investigative journalist should absolutely try to help their source stay safe from danger.
>by trying to crack someone else's password to use to get access to the same documents you're effectively _setting that person up_ as a patsy
The account they were attempting to access was a generic windows admin account tied to nobody. A perfect patsy.
I'm not sure "commit more federal crimes" is "staying safe from danger"
> The account they were attempting to access was a generic windows admin account tied to nobody. A perfect patsy.
This I did not know. My above point still stands, but at least no innocent third parties are being also dragged into things, absolutely.
If your options are "commit more victimless federal crimes" or "allow the army to punish you" it is.
We should all just blame the Russians, right? Please, in all cases where media organizations were implicated in spreading falsehoods, this is completely mundane.
The article you linked seems to contradict you. It says a woman accused him of surreptitiously removing a condom while having sex, which would count as rape in my jurisdiction.
The article also recounts testimony of him waking up a woman by penetrating her which would also count as rape in my jurisdiction.
Also, in this supposed grand conspiracy to frame Assange, two crime detectives were dumb enough to leave their marks in emails available to the public, due to Offentlighetsprincipen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_... It makes zero sense.
>Also, in this supposed grand conspiracy to frame Assange, two crime detectives were dumb enough to leave their marks in emails available to the public
The conspiracy was to get Assange into US custody, not frame him of a crime, and that conspiracy has been proven to he true. The allegations didn't need to be flawlessly done.
Actually, she supposedly accused him of intentionally breaking it, but also said that she didn't notice until later, which casts doubt on the "intentionally" part.
Considering what happened to Assange after that, the first thing that comes to mind is the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Say for example I visit your house, and you notice many hours after I leave that a favorite ornament of yours is broken. How will you determine whether I broke it intentionally or not? If you watch me break it, you could make a reasonable judgement. If you only notice later, it's much harder. I don't understand what is controversial about this idea.
Assange and a woman have consensual sex. He wants to have sex without a condom, she insist he wears one. Eventually he agrees, and they have sex and then fall asleep in the bed. The next morning she wakes up by him penetrating her. She asks "are you wearing anything?" to which he replies "you". Her main reason she wanted him to wear a condom was fear of STDs, so she thinks there's no point in stopping now since the eventual damage is already done, so they continue. He comes inside her.
When she later asks the police if there's a way of forcing Assange to take an HIV test the police decides that what she's describing constitutes rape, and starts an investigation.
The whole problem is that she gave her consent under the strict condition that he'd wear a condom. When he started having unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping, he didn't have her consent. Call that what you want.
[0] https://www.magasinetparagraf.se/wp-content/uploads/content/...
Edit: OK, I see that that's mentioned later in the article. But the part about rewriting the statement isn't completely truthful either: > "Now the supervisor of the policewoman who had conducted the questioning wrote her an email telling her to rewrite the statement from S. W."
What the mail actually says is that there are two hearings, but only one formal one, and they want the second one included too. The supervisor writes: "Make a new hearing. Paste the text in that and assign the hearing to the case. Sign the hearing."
It's called "stealthing", apparently, and it looks like it could be an offence under UK law as he only had "conditional consent": https://www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/insights/blogs/criminal-law...
Don't underestimate how closely tied many European countries are to the United States. Swedish security forces snatched two asylum seekers (that we know of) off the streets in Stockholm in 2001, and handed them over to the CIA. They were immediately flown to Egypt, where they were tortured. All this was done in violation of both Swedish and international law.
Melzer has said in interviews that countries like Sweden have strong legal protections, up until the point at which they consider their own security interests to be at stake. At that point, you can expect all sorts of violations of procedure and law, dirty tricks, etc.
Finally, using Chromium, I was able to translate some pages and I guess they are a legit news organization, though quite young. Their first publication was in January 2018. From reading the wikipedia, it seems they operate a bit like lwn, in that direct links will give you the articles, but you don't get access to all of the direct links unless you're a subscriber.
I don't have any problem believing that Assange did have sex with a sleeping woman without a condom, it fits what I've perceived as his personality. And him locking himself in the embassy after having exhausted his legal means in the UK was his own doing. But that's all about one person, the war crimes are part of a system that doesn't care about him.
This whole mess is candy for conspiracy theorists. Remember that Wikileaks fanned the flames in the middle of Pizza gate: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5c8u9l/we_are_the_wik...
The article discusses the exact things you're saying it conceals.
> The interviewee claims to speak fluent Swedish, so there's no way he'd miss it accidentally.
Before accusing the interviewee of dishonesty, perhaps you can read the parts of the article where the interviewee discusses the very things you're saying he omitted. Did you just miss these parts of the article accidentally, or did you intentionally misrepresent the article?
I repeated the commenter's own words back to them, showing the irony that they (the commenter) were the one who omitted information, in a way that is very difficult to explain if they had read the article. I think that's legitimate.
> in a way that is very difficult to explain if they had read the article
It's easy to explain: people remember completely different things in the articles they read, based on their pre-existing feelings and assumptions—just like we see very different things in the world in general. When your feelings and assumptions aren't the same, it's too easy to jump to conclusions about other people, especially online, where we have so little information to go on, and inevitably make up stories about each other to fill in the blanks. (Not talking about you personally—we all do this.) Because these effects lead to stuck, repetitive, and ultimately nasty discussion, the site guidelines try to mitigate them, and commenters here need to follow those.
My working hypothesis is that the commenter probably only skimmed the article, if that. But the really unforgivable part is that that incorrect comment was then voted to the top of the thread. It looks like a lot of people are voting before reading the article.
I'll keep within your guidelines, but my intention was just to point out the irony of the commenter falsely accusing the interviewee of doing something that the commenter themselves was doing.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2011/2849.html
Just one bit from your linked article: “But in the morning, according to the revised statement, the woman woke up because he tried to penetrate her without a condom.”. I'm sorry, Assange tried to penetrate a woman who was asleep?! That's not right
Though the authenticity of this claim is dubious, the correct response would be to send him to Sweden for trial. That is not what is likely happening, he is being targeted for his political actions.
And thanks for the interview link.
For HN, the only cause more motivating than functional programming seems to be accusing women of lying. With, in this case, often the gall to claim that this would somehow "protect real victims".
What I did mean (and I take this straight from the article) is that at least one of these women explicitely refused to sign a statement speaking of rape, because that was not what she came to report, or what she thought happened. She texted as much to a friend, too. Yet the police not only went ahead with an investigation based on a statement that the only witness had refused to sign, but they also altered said statement afterwards to re-open the case when the first statement was disregarded as a credible account of what happened, yet not an account of a crime. So I'm explicitly not saying that this first woman lied. She said the truth, told her story, and in her story, there was no rape. A prosecutor in Stockholm agreed with her, as did Assange. So this is the word of the police, against the prosecution, the defendant, and the purported victim and only witness. Hence my phrasing of "a woman did NOT make a rape allegation". I hope that clears that up.
And note the singular in that sentence up there. The second woman is different of course, and at least she clearly stated a rape allegation. I'm not the one to pass judgement on that. But the people who are, and who have seen the evidence, seem to not be convinced. Further, at the point where the second allegation even enters the picture, the case had already completely derailed, so if or if not the breaking of the condom was intentional, and if or if not such a condom could credibly hold no DNA whatsoever is pretty moot at that point.
The smear campaign continues to be successful even in people who consciously know it was all lies.
The human psyche is pretty "amazing".
Not everything bad ever said about Assange is a lie.
It is for sure an issue for people that are trying to work with him. It is understandable that people bring it up when conversation revolve around him. But it is completely irrelevant when we are talking about his contributions to journalism being censored.
Wikileaks has always been as neutral as reasonably possible, given that it consists of human journalists and their human sources, not emotionless impartial machines. They have an excellent accuracy rate. The only thing that changed is that their honest reporting became embarrassing to wealthy and powerful people closely associated with the Democratic party. The DNC leadership loved Wikileaks' reporting on governmental malfeasance prior to late 2008. What changed in late 2008 was not Wikileaks' demonstrated neutrality towards reporting on governmental malfeasance, but the color of the lawn signs of the victorious president.
I suspect there's also some deep resentment from the traditional J-school cohort, who have spent over a decade being embarrassed by outsider Assange and his colleagues. Wikileaks has consistently make them look like obedient stenographers to the powerful, not principled journalists willing to speak truth to power. Wikileaks has publicly exposed many in the media as being too afraid to break real stories for fear of government legal pressure and a reduction in corporate advertising dollars. Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing don't advertise their military hardware on the cable news networks because they're trying to sell cruise missiles and fighter jets to the folks at home. They do it to hold something over the cable news networks' execs' heads when embarrassing stories might come to light.
Combine the collective resentment of the leadership of both major American political parties and their connected donors, the national security apparatus, the military-industrial complex, and every mainstream journalist who's getting scooped by an Australian ex-black-hat and his friends who (gasp!) never even attended Columbia, and we end up with a vicious and unfounded anti-wikileaks narrative festering within the politically-acceptable conversation today.
I had no idea that was happening. Sounds like American television is getting pretty wacky.
i mean, we all remember collateral murder and the amount of stuff leaked re: gwb and the iraq war.
"Tell a lie enough times and people will believe it".
Sadly, that's still true. Even in people who consciously know that it was all lies. That's the human mind for ya.
After the Hillary email leaks, Democratic Party rhetoric turned against Assange. Many in the party hold him culpable for Trump's election.
I don't know if he was favoring one party or the other (as some Democrats purport), or if he was a Russian mouthpiece, or if he was just leaking the information that came to him unbeknownst to the state actors at play.
He lost a lot of the goodwill he built, and that put him in a very dangerous spot.
(I have not much doubt that one could find a similar cesspool on the RNC side.)
The effect of the leaks would have been rather minor if all involved would have just issued a mea culpa and fired the head of the DNC outright. Instead, it felt like they just told us all to suck it up.
First declare him a "rapist". But that didn't cut it.
So they made him a "Trumpist". And many people still believe it up to this day.
So emails and conversations that show the Trump campaign and family communicating with Assange over leaks and timings were ... what ... smear?
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...
* https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/563996442...
* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-campaign...
> On Oct. 3, WikiLeaks, writing a day before it was set to announce the release of hacked Democratic emails, wrote to Trump Jr.: "Hiya. It'd be great if you guys could comment on /push this story."
Yeah. Can't imagine why he might be considered a "Trumpist"...
The whole Russia deal and him taking sides is something many can not ignore.
He projected himself as an Anarchist once. The independence in persona. This independence was what brought him trust. He lost all that. He did not lose that because the USA wanted to see him in jail. Snowden is still a respectable person for example.
They can't deny the terrible acts perpetrated by the US, so they try to reclaim some moral superiority by accepting and repeating the completely unsubstantiated (and in some cases, ridiculous) smears against Assange.
> The problem for the propaganda system targeting Assange is that Melzer is not just someone blogging on the internet; he is the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. In addition, he is a professor of international law at the University of Glasgow and holds the Human Rights Chair at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights in Switzerland, where he has been teaching since 2009, including as the Swiss Chair of International Humanitarian Law (2011–2013). Melzer even speaks fluent Swedish. In other words, it is hard to imagine anyone better qualified to comment on the Assange case.
- https://www.medialens.org/2020/burned-at-the-stake-the-un-sp...
He’s much further left than any US democrats.
2. Even if what you said was provably true (which, to stress, it is not. Go read the article I linked) then none of what you listed would justify stripping him of his fundamental rights like access to a lawyer, protection from cruel and unusual punishment, etc.
3. You totally fail to mention the rest of the context like... oh I don't know... that he published documents that clearly and without a doubt documented war crimes and others crimes that had wilfully been covered up.
It tries hard to make it sound like he does not have access to a lawyer, but what it actually seems to say is that he is not able to bring documents to his cell from the lawyer that he does have access to.
I am sure I have read other more direct accusations, but unfortunately I am not finding the sources at the moment.
I still think these articles are more than enough to cast some pretty strong doubts over the claims of his defences, and I think nobody who has read them should be quite so eager to run to his defence.
Any Trump or Russia connections do not make the Manning leaks a crime.
He has done massive damage by allowing his organisation to be used to promote the oppression and cruelty of the Trump regime, and he has throughly poisoned the waters for anyone else wanting to leak information.
What's that got to do with anything? How about just upholding the rule of law? Justice isn't supposed to be a popularity contest.
Though I don't agree with this statement, that is not a crime and not what he is being charged with.
>He has done massive damage by allowing his organisation to be used to promote the oppression and cruelty of the Trump regime, and he has throughly poisoned the waters for anyone else wanting to leak information
I agree, seeing Assange get tortured for 8 years probably has caused people to become less willing to publish leaks. I don't see how you can blame the person undergoing such treatment for trying to escape it.
I am not interested in what is legal, I am interested in what is moral.
> I agree, seeing Assange get tortured for 8 years
Assange tortured himself for 8 years. He was free to walk out the door every hour of every day of those eight years.
That link white washes Assange to an incredible level. Snowden was a hero, Assange is a Putin lackey who got caught.
What I think is a shame is that you are accusing these two women of being part of a smear campaign and/or a secret conspiracy to frame Assange when there is exactly zero evidence for that theory. We don't know what happened in those bedrooms - it's word against word. But the words of two people generally weighs heavier than the word of one. Especially when this one refused to be questioned by the police.
EDIT: It's fine if you downvote my comment or flag it. It's still true.
Those women appear to be an unwilling part of the smear campaign, it is not a shame to call attention to this fact. The records provide ample evidence for this theory, such as their direct statements, the ordered rewrite of their complaints, and the media reporting statements the day before they were made.
Even if they have legitimate complaints against Assange, theiy are being used as part of a smear campaign.
>The two women's stories are out in the open while Assange instead opted to flee the country and has not commented on the allegations.
People that flee the country don't typically wait until they are denied a visa, and then check in with the authorities immediately before leaving the country. Assange has repeatedly opted to comment on the allegations, he just wants assurance they wouldn't send him to the US. Sweden refused to let him.
It certainly isn't evidence of any kind.
"Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed?"
Because in Sweden, the suspect is first interviewed, and then charges are filed, and Assange himself has chosen to not make himself available for interview?
That is not a great way to establish credibility, and the tone he says this stuff in is entirely that of someone who is pushing an agenda with little regard for truth.
*Except for the appearing at the police station and giving an interview with a policeman, then spending three weeks scheduling multiple meetings that the prosecution deferred, getting written permission to leave the country, agreeing to return if assurances would be made that he would not he sent to the US, offering to conduct the interview in the UK or over video link as allowed by Swedish law.
Besides, why would they organize such a grand conspiracy case only to drop the investigation shortly after a US ally obtained custody of Assange?
"Now the supervisor of the policewoman who had conducted the questioning wrote her an email telling her to rewrite the statement from S. W."
and then provides physical evidence of that.
Also, you have to offer me some evidence that Swedish authorities can easily fabricate evidence and witness testimony and that it happens all the time. Not that I know how it is relevant since the witness testimonies in Assange's case are clearly not fabricated.
Here's the interview: https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikilea...
tl;dr:
Assange was right about everything that has been made falsifiable: secret indictment, spying on his lawyers, extradition to the US, no fair trial, the whole lot. He's showing every mental and physical sign of being tortured. He needs help, and he's being denied the very rights that western society purports to uphold.
EDIT: and that is leaving aside the whole dimension of Sweden, the UK, Equador, and of course the US making (even more of) a precedent out of him. What this means for the free press, and the relationship between freedom (of expression, of information, and in this case of truth, really) vs national "security" (in this case, the national security to not be held accountable for shooting down civilians) should send shivers down everyone's spines.
EDIT 2 To the people downvoting: care to express which part of the above exactly you disagree with? Do you think it's factually incorrect? How about correcting it then? Do you think it's inappropriate? Why so? Off topic?