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.
He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Many absolutely are coercion, not sure why you'd think otherwise.
That's exactly what they are.
He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy
They only dropped the case because he hid for so long. He still did it, bro.
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.
Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is
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.