2y ago

Australian lawmakers head to US to lobby against efforts to extradite WikiLeaks founder Assange

apnews.com

17 comments

Wow, it only took Australia a decade to come for their boy.
- I think he lost golden child status a long while back. I mean he's still one of ours but I'd lock him up for 175 years just for his role in the 2016 election. Fuck head.
  
  Quoting from https://lemmy.ml/comment/3470836 (@JoeBidet@lemmy.ml):
  Wait.
  1/ publishing evidence of the Clinton campaign actively undermining Sanders who was then the natural candidate of the Democrats according to their internal polls (including by using antisemitic slur) + actively boosting Trump campaign because “it’s the only one we can beat” is “throwing the US presidential election to the Republicans”? How this genuine, authenticated information of public interest, published in the New York Times and WaPo is throwing the US elections more than the facts that were being reported?
  2/ “worked with Russian intelligence” is absolute nonsense. What is your source on that? The Muller report says the opposite. If anything it is possible (but not proven) that the source may have been from within Russian intel, but a) Assange mentioned several times -way before that episode- that the entire architecture of WL made it impossible for them to actually know their sources, and we have all reasons to believe that (as it would be the smartest thing to do) b) if any journalist gets documents that are authentic and of public interest, regardless of the source, their duty is to publish it. If a Russian intelligence source had provided fake, doctored or otherwise altered material, and they would have been published as such, it would have been a real scandal. In the facts we are still talking of ground-breaking journalism.
  I still can’t figure that some people cannot realize that Hillary Clinton did all she could to actually lose this election on her own (this and a fundamentally fucked up electoral system), and are actually finding scapegoats like Assange to avoid looking at this reality in the eyes…
Here's hoping Australia can get Biden to listen to reason. Just because Wikileaks, as the messenger, embarrassed the US gov't doesn't mean Assange was wrong. As in many cases America was by doing stupid shit in the first place.
#FreeAssange
- This must mean every newspaper is also the bad guy in Skyfall. What is the difference between the NYT doing this and Assange? And why should the consequences be different?
  For a country that is ready to shoot their neighbour for the 1st amendment, it seems you only want that for yourselves.
  
  Who's Assange's handler?
Biden is not going to do anything Obama didn't do
- So he's gonna drop the charges?
  Because Obama admin made the choice explicitly not to charge Assange because of the risk to press freedoms. You even had the general counsel from New York Times arguing this for the last several years. If you charge Assange with these "crimes," you're opening the door for other publishers of the same information to be charged. New York Times, Washington Post, everybody.
  Trump admin was the one who changed their minds and decided to nail Assange to the wall with the hacking claim. (Big surprise, loyalty is a one way street with Trump.)
  Look, Obama legalized and formalized the worst excesses of the Bush administration, but this is one thing he did right. If we're gonna say Biden is gonna follow Obama's lead, that means the charges will be dropped.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — A group of Australian lawmakers said Tuesday they would travel to Washington this month to lobby the United States to abandon its efforts to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Their trip is timed to draw attention to the issue ahead of a planned visit to the White House in late October by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
In May, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva denounced the lack of concerted efforts to free Assange.
Before he was incarcerated, Assange took asylum for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations.
They will also meet with organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
American prosecutors allege Assange helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk.
The original article contains 415 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

17 comments