No.

Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.

His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.

>Assange didn't commit a crime

Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.

Yes, that he was forced to do so by the Brits in order to be release is what I referred to, so of course it is coercion.

He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.

Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.

My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.

The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.

Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.

So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.

>we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there

This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.

No, it does not.

There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.

Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.

This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.

There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.

Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.

So imagine a censored random variable.

Let's say that D is a random variable representing whether a certain person in one of these black sites is dead due to mistreatment. It's not so simple that D=0 if the guy lives, D=1 otherwise, D is a continuous variable, a damage level.

You can't sample from D ~ P(D) because people aren't releasing such information; and we know this, because when El-Masri sued the US he was prevented from doing so by means of the State Secrets doctrine and it was argued that whether he had been tortured and by whom was a state secret. Consequently what we actually have samples of is P(D|released) and I think P(D|released)=P(D|innocent,recognized as innocent,slightly lucky). So if we have D ~ P(D|released) where it turns out that we have observed a realization of that with D = 0.17, do you think there are only a few outcomes where D=0, when taking into account that E[D|innocent,recognized as innocent] should be much larger than E[D], and when taking into account that P(released) is really small, something like 10^-4 or 10^-3?

>So imagine a censored random variable... D is a continuous variable, a damage level.

This is not a real thing, it's just something you made up. You can see this obviously if you transfer this to another domain. For example, if I get a paper cut at work do you think that means I'm partially dead? Do you think that singular example of a paper cut means "we can be fairly sure" that "a bunch" of my coworkers have died from paper cuts?

Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.

It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.

A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.

There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.

It turns out though, that this doesn't matter. There's actually a list of people who are known to have been tortured to death in these places on Wikipedia.

Still, I think there's a point to this statistical reasoning: Assange could have made it at the time, and been correct, and thus we have a strong argument for his duty to act under Icelandic law.

> And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion

Many absolutely are coercion, not sure why you'd think otherwise.

I guess "we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works." The guy living in exile seems like a silly place to start that conversation rather than the millions of Americans currently in prison for agreeing to plea deals.

We should because the time between being acused and when a case is actually tried is undeniably a factor in why plea deals are taken. When the alternative to taking a plea deal is potentially spending months in jail until one's case goes to trail is accepting a plea deal which comes with a definite and possibly shorter sentence than the waiting period for a trial itself it isn't surprising that people would simply accept the plea deal

> pretend that plea deals are coercion

That's exactly what they are.

We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges

He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy

You mean the rape charges that were dropped? Incredible that people still tout this obvious psyop.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50473792

"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events. "Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation."

They only dropped the case because he hid for so long. He still did it, bro.

He likely did do what he was accused of, with two well-meaning (and now presumably former) fans of his (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...), though it's his right to argue against that. It does not seem like a "honeypot" trap, these were genuine supporters.

The trouble, though, was that the Swedish prosecutors had absolutely no way to process this alleged crime except to take him into their custody. They couldn't even begin to investigate without first locking him up and making him their possession, free to transfer to the US at any time. They chose not to make any exceptions or diplomatic guarantees.

I don't think it was ever going to be the case that if he surrendered himself to Sweden, they'd merely prosecute him for his alleged sexual crimes and if found guilty he'd be fined or jailed for that alone and eventually released. It seemed much more likely that the moment Sweden got him, he'd be immediately extradicted to the USA, Sweden would get a nice pat on the head from the USA for furthering their geopolitical hegemony, and the Swedish crime would never be looked at again. Maybe Sweden might change their process and interview him as soon as he was in a US prison instead, just to rub salt into the wound. You never know.

Once his Equadorian political asylum was removed, we saw it happen; the UK police immediately arrested for breach of bail conditions... and because the US wanted him.

Even the diplomatically brokered solution had him plea guilty to breaching the US's laws. The US simply had to have him and make an example of him.

> Assange didn't commit a crime

Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is

He'd served his time for that.

didn't commit a crime - or - committed a crime and served his time

one is true and one is false

Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.

Just like Snowden, Manning would have been treated as a whistleblower if he had only leaked illegal or possibly illegal things the government did. Instead, he dumped a full archive of secret diplomatic cables. That's not as bad as Snowden, who deliberately leaked Chinese targets to China in hopes of getting asylum in Hong Kong.

Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?

Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?

Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?

Which crimes had Manning exposed? There has to be a list somewhere.

Two of my former colleagues (both Reuters journalists) were murdered by U.S. soldiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=zYTxuW2vmzk

Then all the civilians that took care of their bodies were also killed, including children.

Then the Department of Defense then denied existing video coverage of the event (personal comm., Tom Glocer, J.D., former CEO and attorney, Reuters).

-> So homicide, mult. war crimes and lying.

I'll be eternally grateful to Manning and Assange for letting the truth come to light, and to all whistleblowers driven by their conscience and idealism.

But the most disturbing thing about this all is the dirty laughter of that helicopter crew. Seeing that video makes one ashamed to belong to the human species.

That was not a part of the cables released by Manning.

The "Collateral Murder" video of the unlawful killing of journalists was part of the archive that Wikileaks published that's been attributed to Chelsea Manning. All available evidence supports this was part of the material. Chelsea's leak was the contents of the shared drive, not just diplomatic cables.

The release of the diplomatic cables themselves gravely harmed U.S. interests and is alleged to have led to the deaths of CIA collaborators.

Again, Snowden leaked a single extant program that was potentially illegal. All he had to do was blow the whistle on that program and the other possibly program that had already been shut down, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he told China what systems the US had compromised and additionally claimed the US was doing a bunch of illegal things that his documents did not support, causing hysteria and helping Trumpism.

The thing that makes illegal programs almost impossible to hide are the reforms after the Church Committee, including SSCI oversight and whistleblower procedures and protections.

Your transphobia hardly makes you look unbiased, shill

It was an honest mistake, and I apologize for it to Chelsea if she is reading this. In my mind, I remembered her gender at the time she leaked the documents, which had nothing to do with whether she should be considered a whistleblower. She herself has said she should not be considered one.

I will admit to shilling for literacy and common sense. You got me there.

No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.

My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.

And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.

Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.

We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.

we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other

>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity

In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.

Crimes? What a strong word.

Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.

Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"

If a person does an illegal thing, that cancels out the illegal things other people did.

Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing

Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?

In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:

* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]

* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.

* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.

* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.

* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.

This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...

Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.