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‘Assange’s extradition has exposed the hollowness of liberal-elite platitudes about press freedom.’
Who is this ‘liberal-elite’? Has anyone ever met any of them? It seems to me to be yet another nebulous term that you can’t argue with because it has no meaning.
True richard
It’s a clear red line on these things. Either information is classified or not. Breach the rules and accept consequences
What it did expose of course is that there is no sinister deep state and other such crank driven Bollicks. 99 .999999999% of this stuff is extremely mundane. What did these leaks expose? **** all
So why are they classified. Simple. Your own personal information is classified on the net because although it’s a slim chance of abuse there can be consequences and it’s just the same with this stuff
What Assange and his rentacrank supporters were expecting and hoping for was details of the mmnutes of the meeting of the lizards to empower the deep state to rob all
Families of the first born to be sacrificed by Jews who are conspiring to keep trump/corbyn out of their destined powerWhat they got was “ can someone fix the photocopier and who left that mess in trap one?”
“What they got was ‘can someone fix the photocopier and who left that mess in trap one?'”
And if that is true, it begs an obvious question: why does the American government want him extradited on crimes of espionage so they can lock him up for 175 years?
Although I expect he will have an “accident” in prison before he has served more than one year.
Simple. You do not break the law when it can have serious consequences
You think drink driving should be exempt if no one gets killed?
What law has he broken?
You said yourself in your first post that you did not agree with the extradition.
That’s for the judiciary to decide isn’t it? I don’t know the details of the proposed espionage charges and does anyone else?
Classified information has been published in the us before without prosecution im sure. Pentagon papers?
But is throwing on the net a million or whatever documents which clearly haven’t been checked, “publishing”? I bet that’s the crux of this and frankly I don’t think it is publishing unless it’s been at least examined once.
I have no sympathy for what was very reckless behavior
And if the first line is true, how many other countries allow that ? Not the uk I suspect. Russia?
Will the British political and legal establishment finally discover a backbone this week? Or once again prove itself America’s poodle?
I expect it is “no offers” with the bookmakers.
https://unherd.com/2024/02/why-even-julian-assanges-critics-should-defend-him/
It’s a very good point about the Navalny situation. One minute we’re pointing the finger at Russia saying ‘we’re better than that’, next minute we’re stitching up Assange.
Of course the US is also perfectly fine with its citizens causing people’s deaths in car accidents, claiming diplomatic immunity and fleeing the country.
JA is the Messiah for conspiracy theorists.
He could probably be tried for Treason in many countries,
Value Is EverythingJulian Assange walks free.
A good day for anyone who believes in the freedom of the press.
A bad day for the corrupt American political establishment which has finally had to give up its blatant, politically motivated prosecution *. And for its pathetic little British lap dog, which kept a man in prison for five years without being charged with any crime here.
* OK, I know he is pleading “guilty” to one charge but that is just to allow the American government to save face.
Couldn’t disagree with you more Cork All Star.
Interesting piece in The Telegraph today by Hamish De Bretton-Gordon:
“I for one will not be celebrating Julian Assange’s plea deal. Assange is no hero to me and to many other veterans in this country, and the US, who fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere to protect our democracy. He is but a Left-wing dupe who damaged our national security and that of our allies, putting lives at risk.
Some call him a ‘journalist’. I beg to differ. Journalism requires judgement. Assange’s Wikileaks just just dumped all of the leaked disclosures on the internet, without judging whether they would be harmful and apparently without exercising any judgment over what was being released. Journalists have a ‘responsibility’ to not just get to the truth but also not to expose details which could put people in harm’s way, and information which might affect the security of my country.
Assange claims his actions were journalistic endeavours to uphold democracy, but – as such – they are the complete converse. The information he disclosed only helped our enemies: the Taliban, ISIS and no doubt the Russians.
Like most Afghan veterans, I have left too many friends in the fields and mountains of Afghanistan to shed even the slightest tear for his years hiding behind doors and bars. If he was the hero some would have believed, he would have had his day in court; instead he chose and sought every manoeuvre to avoid justice – not the actions of a brave man, and I’ve seen enough of them to judge.
When wanted by the Swedish Government on a rape charge, he ran and hid in the Ecuadorian Embassy for years, and Keir Starmer, to his credit, pursued those charges and tried to get him extradited to Sweden to face the courts. But all along Assange believed if he left the sanctity and security of the UK, he might have to face US justice, which is not so and forgiving as we are when US soldiers and the security of the nation has been handed on a plate to its enemies.
It is great we live in a country where freedom fighters and ‘stop-everything’ and ‘save-everything’ protesters have carte blanche to do what they like, completely oblivious to the views and the rights of the silent majority. But it is actually their freedoms that they scream about which are really damaging. The law is there for a reason to protect the masses from criminals and despots who would do us harm, and Assange and his revelations have certainly done that.
I’d like to take Mr Assange through the streets of Sangin in Helmand province Afghanistan in 2011 and show him the evil his revelations helped to perpetuate. Similarly in Syria in 2014, where the CIA was hamstrung and in Mosul with the Peshmerga in Northern Iraq trying to subdue the most evil of our foes, Islamic State. Did he ever stop, for one moment, to think what the effect of his ‘journalistic’ actions would have on those of us on the frontline? I can assure him, it’s hard enough fighting these terror groups without one hand tied behind your back and them knowing about your tactics.
I shed no tears for the years Assange has hidden from justice; I shed loads of tears for the brave men and women of the British Armed Forces that never came home from Iraq and Afghanistan. People like him make our life so much more difficult, but they still want us to keep them safe in their beds at night. If he has any decency, he will reflect on this, and apologise to the grieving families. Lest we forget in all this hullabaloo, he is pleading guilty to a charge which he has squirmed out of for the last 14 years.
Lest we forget, yes, though this morning I am thinking about those who did not come home.”
Courtesy of The Telegraph
What a load of rubbish. The editor of the “Daily Telegraph” should be embarrassed for publishing such tripe.
The disaster of Afghanistan was all Julian Assange’s fault. Pitiful stuff.
The central charge against Mr Assange is he endangered lives. There is no evidence to support this assertion. I refer to the previous linked articles.
I can sort of understand why the corrupt political Establishments in America and Britain would want to get Assange. What is less forgivable is how few journalists have spoken out in his defence. The clearest sign of how bought up and compromised most of the press is nowadays.
An honourable exception is Peter Hitchens. No matter what anyone makes of his own politics, I think it can be agreed that he is someone of personal integrity. This is what he had to say about the Assange case.
It should be noted he is on record as saying he does not like Assange personally (neither do I, for that matter). But there are cases where principle is more important than personal animosity.
The article was written when there was still a chance Assange could be extradited but the points still stand:
“Even a self-respecting poodle would object to the way we are currently behaving towards the USA. We are on the brink of allowing the American government to reach into this country and seize a man who has broken no British law. Once they have hold of him, there is every chance that he will be buried alive in some federal dungeon, quite possibly until he dies.
We would not allow Russia, or Saudi Arabia, or Turkey to behave like this. And quite right too. There is every reason to believe that if the circumstances were reversed, the Americans would laugh in our faces and refuse to hand over such a person.
The man involved is the Australian journalist Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks organisation is hated by the USA because he embarrassed them, and who has languished in Belmarsh maximum security prison ever since being arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019.
As I asked in The Mail on Sunday nearly four years ago: ‘Do we really want the hand of a foreign power to be able to reach into our national territory at will and pluck out anyone it wants to punish? Are we still even an independent country if we allow this?’
You will have heard many bad things about Mr Assange. I had too, but – while I disagree with him politically about most things – I found when I inquired that he has in fact been the victim of many smears which do not stand up to examination.
Ignore claims that he carelessly endangered the lives of Americans when he released material provided by the US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In the words of my distinguished and far from Leftist colleague Andrew Neil, who, like me, opposes Mr Assange’s extradition, the material revealed: ‘War crimes covered up. Torture. Brutality. The rendition and incarceration of suspects without due process. The corruption of inquiries trying to hold it to account. The bribery of foreign officials to look the other way when America did bad things.’
In short, Julian Assange published scandalous facts which proper journalists in a free society are entitled – and in fact obliged – to disclose, for the benefit of that society.
But Julian Assange took great care to edit the material to prevent individuals being endangered, and no evidence has ever been produced that any such harm resulted.
Interestingly, Chelsea Manning was pardoned by President Barack Obama. His administration also decided not to proceed with charges against Mr Assange. But they were then revived by President Donald Trump. This is the clearest possible evidence that the prosecution is openly political, not criminal.
As the text of the US-UK extradition treaty states, using the American spelling of ‘offence’, in a document bearing the Royal Coat of Arms: (Article 4, clause 1): ‘Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense.’
It is quite astonishing that the British courts and more than one home Secretary have been persuaded by lawyers to pretend that this is not such an offence. The law under which Mr Assange is being pursued is the notorious US Espionage Act, once used against the heroic Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. These documents showed that the administration of Lyndon Johnson had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about the Vietnam War (which later turned out to be a futile disaster).
The Nixon White House responded by ordering a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in the hope of finding material that could be used to smear him. Partly thanks to this grotesque behaviour, a courageous judge dismissed the charges.
Ellsberg himself strongly sided with Julian Assange until his death in June last year, seeing a close parallel between the two cases. Interestingly, Mr Assange’s supporters allege that he too has been subjected to CIA surveillance. In the light of what undoubtedly happened to Mr Ellsberg, this is far from impossible to believe.
But next week there is at least an even chance that the British legal system will rule against Mr Assange and so meekly hand him over to the US government. He is seeking leave to appeal against Home Office and judicial rulings that his extradition must go ahead. If his case fails, he may find himself on a fast track to an American maximum security prison.
US officials have argued that America’s First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech there, does not apply to Mr Assange. Mike Pompeo, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said on April 13, 2017, of Mr Assange and his WikiLeaks colleagues: ‘They have pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice. They may have believed that, but they are wrong.’
This is itself admission that this case is truly about free speech. And of course it is. If the extradition goes ahead, no non-American journalist, who receives confidential information about US government activities from a whistleblower, will ever again be safe from being marched off in handcuffs to the USA.
It is important for the honour of this country that this does not happen. The significance of the case reaches far beyond the person of Mr Assange, his courageous and indomitable wife Stella and his small children – who have endured years of tension and misery while they await the outcome of this affair.
For me, it is a question of whether this is a proper sovereign country governed by its own laws, or a servile satellite, bearing the same relation to Washington DC as the Warsaw Pact states once bore to Moscow. But that is not all. I live and work in the capital of the country which more or less invented liberty. We still have in London one of the biggest concentrations of independent media in the world, newspapers with long histories of opposition to government and critical scrutiny of the courts and of foreign policy.
During the Iraq and Vietnam wars – and during many creepy prosecutions of honourable people wrongly prosecuted for revealing inconvenient facts about the state and its actions – our capital has always been full of loud and concentrated protest. But as the day of decision approaches on the Assange case, the media silence is so total that you could hear a mouse sneeze.
There are exceptions. In a fine article in Prospect Magazine, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger wonders if too many in British public life have been seduced by the supposed glamour of our security and spy services. He writes: ‘I will never forget a distinguished editor, at the height of the Edward Snowden revelations, writing: “If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest … who am I to disbelieve them?” In other words, trust the state. If they say “jump”, your role is to ask “how high?”’
Well done, Alan. But where are the rest of you? Right-wing patriot, wishy-washy liberal or Left-wing radical, we all have an interest in saving Julian Assange. And we have days in which to act. I’d love to hear about this from some of the most powerful voices in British journalism, such as Charles Moore, Danny Finkelstein, Janice Turner and Matthew Parris. It is never too late to join a just cause.”
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