Prepare thyself for the Holy Martyrdom of Julian Assange.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

You know that is going to be pushed 24-7 by the trolls and their suckers on social media, and by compromised fallen journalists like Glenn Greenwald.

[stonecutter357]

1. LOCK HIM UP!

[Laf.La.Dem.]

2. Trump will thank him for his help!

Trump: 'I love WikiLeaks’

[Amishman]

64. Could be much worse than that

I have a nightmare scenario where he is brought to the US and charged, and paired up with a Trump friendly judge and prosecutor. The trial becomes Assange's stage to rip into Trump's opponents. The discovery process abused to draw out and selectively expose whatever Trump wants relating to the Russia investigation. friendly prosecutor makes sure nothing harmful is exposed and a not guilty verdict is assured.

[octoberlib]

3. Eric Holder declined to seek

prosecution of Assange over worries about First Amendment issues and how this would affect the press going forward. I worry about this and making a martyr out of Assange. I think he’s been working with Russia but they need evidence of this and it doesn’t look like that’s the reason why they wanted to extradite him. Can’t stand Assange but we also need to be smart about this.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

6. I'd say there's no reason to cower any more.

Except the Madman will get involved and pardon him or interfere in his prosecution, so the point is moo.

[octoberlib]

8. Just saw on Twitter that the Australian

Consul wants access to Assange. This could get interesting.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

15. My best guess is that the DOJ--under orders--will punt his extradition.

And let the Brits or Australians have him.

[progressoid]

18. The Brits already have him

They have the ball at this point.

[Perseus]

24. That may be the best case scenario

If his brought here it will be with the intention to hide all the interactions with the buffoon's campaign, Roger Stone and the Russians, I rather he stay, and even better if Australia takes him.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

25. A friend of Assange said today that UK agreed to not extradite to countries w death penalty. . . nt

[okaawhatever]

30. Assange lost his First Amendment protections the second he helped Manning hack the password to the

classified DoD computer. Journalists only have 1A protection if they don't commit a crime to get the information. Someone can slip an envelope under your door with Trump's tax returns and you can print them, even if they were acquired illegally, but the second you help them get the documents you no longer get a 1A exemption. That is what Assange did. He aided Manning by helping her hack the password on the DoD computer. He's a co-conspirator, not a journalist.

I also think that additional info came to light during the Mueller investigation,

[lunatica]

32. Just for the record, Manning is a her.

[okaawhatever]

34. TY Corrected. nt

[MFM008]

58. You are correct

Thats what hes being charged with,
Not the dissemination but the hacking.
No sympathy.

[jberryhill]

4. Well, golly, what happened to all his supporters/promoters here?

As I recall, he has quite the DU following along with Manning, Mensch, and other crusaders for all that is good and right.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

5. They all suddenly got sick at the same time around June 2016.

And haven't managed to get well enough to get back to a computer since then.

[jberryhill]

7. Oh, I thought they were all out on the May 1 "Occupy General Strike"

[Scurrilous]

9. They're off somewhere...

...chewing at their restraints.

[Takket]

14. +1!!!!

[Zorro]

23. Most skedaddled to JPR

[okaawhatever]

31. A whole bunch of them were trolls. I don't think most understand how many sleeper trolls are out

there. They post normal stuff every now and then, and when they get the call they go full on troll.

[lunatica]

33. Not only that. They follow certain DUers

and they don’t just post their trolling responses. They alert on them if they can find something even close to breaking a rule.

[okaawhatever]

35. Doesn't surprise me a bit. A couple of years ago I caught some Russian trolls on this site. They

basically claimed they weren't trolls, that they were just pro-Russian. That individual had over 100k posts. One thing I caught all of them doing was upvoting and commenting on anything to do with guns. Pro-gun, anti-gun didn't matter. Their intent was to keep that in the national conversation. They probably do the same thing with abortion on rw sites. Keep everyone's minds on those two issues and off things like Russia hacking the 2016 election.

[Hekate]

36. Fascinating -- 100,000 DU posts? Busy busy busy...

Are you allowed to say who?

[okaawhatever]

43. I can't remember his name. I remember he lived in the UK, London I think. But that was like 2 yrs

ago. I quit coming because of the trolls. There were several others, too. Another guy claimed to be US Military, but he slipped up and made a mistake almost no one would notice, but I did. I think he was Russian military because he knew a lot about the military. He was one of the ones who had several names and would upvote all the gun posts, regardless of content.

[Hekate]

45. Someone recently linked to a post from the summer before the 2016 election...

I said it was gut-churning to revisit, or something like that, but in fact it gave me such a flashback of fury and despair. All those alleged Democrats fighting to see who could say the worst things possible about Hillary Clinton. I got out of the link fast, but I remember thinking most of the posters in that awful 2016 thread are not even here anymore, and I didn't even recognize a lot of them.

I hate trolls. They exist to destroy. What kind of soulless existence is that?

[jberryhill]

62. The one who was doing all that "upvoting" of posts

You know, the way they upvote posts on DU.

[lunatica]

37. And now that we know that some trolls get paid

it makes a lot of sense to be a long time member in places like DU.

I’ve also noticed a pattern when our side gets some really demoralizing news where they come in to deliberately stir up the disappointment and discontent and anger aimed at the Democrats losing and the Republicans winning. It usually takes them about a day to come in force to trash our representatives in the guise of pretending disappointment.

And don’t forget the ‘concern’ or the ‘righteously angry’ trolls.

[okaawhatever]

44. Yes, and one of the other things I noticed is pushing us too far to the left, making it seem like

far left views were moderate. Assange being a good example.

[Hekate]

46. My gods yes. The entire Snowden, Manning, Greenwald, Assange episode is a case in point...

They were all glorified as saints and heroes, and the lengths some people went to bring their detractors low via alerts and opprobrium was ridiculous. I was accused of a species of homophobia for abbreviating Glen Greenwald as GG in my title line -- because, well, GiGi is a girl's name. (It's also 14 characters versus 2 characters in a header)

But anyway, those four bozos were sanctified as First Amendment heroes, and the fight went on. I wonder where their admirers have gone?

[Hugin]

65. It was so bad...

At one point I had GG's name and several other key words on auto-ignore.

This is something I rarely do, but, it was too much.

[okaawhatever]

68. I'm guessing their admirers were working in Brazil getting Bolsanaro elected. nt

[superpatriotman]

10. Meet the new head of DHS

Surely deserves a cabinet-level position in this criminal administration

[Tommy_Carcetti]

11. DUzy!

[2naSalit]

16. Seconded!

[dalton99a]

12. Personally approved by Big Daddy Vladimir

[greatauntoftriplets]

27. lmao!

[Meowmee]

52. 😹nt

[dewsgirl]

13. Twitter has been on it all week "Free Assange" I've seen tons of tweets about

how the US is going to torture him, put him in Guantanamo bay, blah blah blah. Yet these same people/bots call Reality Winner a traitor, etc. for warning us about what Russia was actually doing in 2016.

[sinkingfeeling]

17. Barr's DOJ won't prosecute him and IQ45 will put him in a

Cabinet position.

[marble falls]

19. There is more of a whimper than a bang going on here. He's on a slow but narrowing spiral ...

down.

He should have gotten this over with years ago.

[MineralMan]

20. I doubt he will be extradited to the US.

Trump wouldn't want that to happen.

[Coventina]

21. Just heard Greewald on NPR moaning about it.

When the interviewer asked him for sources, Greenwald told him to Google the topic.

[octoberlib]

38. Greenwald's over on Twitter

retweeting Pizzagate conspiracy theorist and white nationalist Jack Posobiec complaining about how Assange is being persecuted.

[maryellen99]

22. It's already happening on Daily Kos nt

[DirtEdonE]

26. Let's see - "trump's" "justice" dept. will try him and convict him

Of crimes that have nothing to do with election 2016 and then he'll be sentenced to life in prison or death and that loose end will be tied up all in a bow for trump by trump.

[SidDithers]

28. ...

Sid

[bloom]

29. Article comparing Assange to Trump

I thought this article had some interesting insights. Makes it seem all the more likely that the rape accusations are true.

"Look at so many of Julian’s offhand remarks; you don’t have to be Dr. Freud to see a power and victim complex. One minute he’s Jesus; the next minute he’s saying, “I want you to be my chief of staff,” positioning himself as the president. Every other day, he’s something of that sort. Were he an executive in a company, he would’ve been fired for a combination of mania and ineffective leadership very early.

As would Trump, by this point. They share this too. They’re both embarrassingly mono-mined leaders with such a gigantic chasm where their empathy should be. The idea that each of these men are not only leaders but see themselves as being sui generis, one-off leaders of mankind, is absolutely flabbergasting self-delusion. They can’t speak to people. The idea of weakness obsesses them. Again and again, they fail to lead...

And that’s what I really wanted to investigate when I set out to write this book. I find them right-wing. Their freedom is a slightly crazed form of freedom where anything is allowed, anything should be free. Nothing should be ordered. Those instincts led you to a place of an involuted chaos, of anarchy, where the monster ends up being in charge. They think it’s freedom; I don’t. I just think it’s preparation for totalitarianism...."

https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/6/6/15729360/julian-assange-andrew-ohagan-secret-life

[octoberlib]

40. Way before Hillary decided to run in 2016

Anonymous posted multiple tweets about Assange, saying he was a right wing Libertarian fascist who was only interested in helping other fascists.

[Recursion]

50. Notice how Assange kept trying to downplay the Panama Papers

That's certainly telling

[Buzz cook]

41. Arrested for revealing war crimes.

If the arrest was for aiding Russian attempts to undermine the US elections along with the Trump campaign, there wouldn't be a problem.

What Assange is charged with is the release of the Chelsea Manning documents which included video of American troops gunning down unarmed civilians. That was journalism and many here on DU applauded Wikileaks for doing so.

Just because we now hate Assange for helping Trump is no reason to support his arrest for exercising his first amendment rights.

Manning received a pardon for her part in revealing government secrets (being a whistle blower) to now go after Assange for publishing those secrets along with other news agencies is absurd.

[Denzil_DC]

42. Assange doesn't have any "first amendment rights".

He's not an American citizen.

Most Western democracies do pay lip service to "freedom of speech" and "whistleblowing", though.

Nevertheless, I also regret that the extradition request, as far as we know at the moment, focuses on this, arguably the more defensible among things that Wikileaks has done while Assange has been running it.

What accounts have revealed that Assange did while involved with Manning crossed the boundary of journalism where Assange conspired with Manning to attempt to hack (whether they were successful or not) into the US government's systems in pursuit of more revelations. His cavalier attitude to the safety of people in other countries compromised as a result of Wikileaks' revelations also has nothing to do with journalistic ethics.

It's an uneasy balance, and one investigative journalists with proper training are very aware of and wary of, not least in case precisely such a case as this risks peeling away at the freedoms of the press. Assange has no such scruples and no such training.

[ismnotwasm]

47. Assange is a pig

He didn’t protect his sources and his information was spotty. Also he’s a pervy asshole

[Recursion]

49. He revealed no war crimes

He mostly released a bunch of Foreign Service Officers' candid assessments of other governments, which unfortunately included the names of some dissidents who quickly wound up in jail or dead once that was made public.

[Buzz cook]

66. Here

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-army-iraq-attack

A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today.

[Recursion]

69. Nope. You should watch the video sometime

They were armed men out after curfew. Even Colbert (no hawk) called out Assange on that.

[Buzz cook]

70. No arms.

A camera carried by a news photographer "may" or was claimed to have been mistaken for a weapon. Watching the video the man is carrying what appears to be a shoulder bag.

The man carrying the camera has been identify as a cameraman for Reuters.

There is a claim by the helicopter crew that one of the men was firing a weapon. There is no evidence in the video of that happening.

When a van appears and two men attempt to put a wounded man in the van, the helicopters shot the van and the men trying to load the wounded man.

Two wounded children are found in the van by US ground troops. After initially being sent to a US hospital, they are diverted on the way and handed over to Iraqi police.

Point one it is/was not illegal for an Iraqi to carry a gun.

Point two there is no indication I've found that a curfew was in effect when Noor-Eldeen was killed. Googling Noor-Eldeen and "Curfew" brings up articles in which Noor-Eldeen is the photographer.
https://truthout.org/articles/iraq-war-vet-we-were-told-to-just-shoot-people-and-the-officers-would-take-care-of-us/

“We changed the ROE more often than we changed our underwear,” Kokesh said, “At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark.”

Even if we forgive as gross error the original shooting, the killing of men coming to the aid of wounded people is a war crime in itself. The Killing of an unarmed wounded man is a war crime.

I watched this video when it came out with horror. I watched it now with disgust that war crimes are being elided on DU.

[uponit7771]

67. This is false on its face

[Recursion]

48. I bet the dumbass thought he would be safe if Trump won

At least there's some schadenfreude to be had there.

[JonLP24]

51. Obama DOJ refused to prosecute Assange and now Trump is doing this

In a way where he can't be prosecuted over Russia based on rule of specialty.

Everything you need to know about Julian Assange.

Can Julian Assange be charged with additional offences once he has been extradited to the United States?
Normal practice is that anyone extradited can only be prosecuted in the country that sought them for the offences specified on the extradition indictment. That restriction is known as the rule of specialty.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/11/everything-you-need-to-know-about-julian-assange


I don't agree with everything Greenwald says especially when he brings up Russia but just because someone disagrees with me doesn't make them a troll.

However, I personally don't support the Trump DOJ decision to prosecute him over 2010. If they want to bring charges over Russia go for it but you can't add charges for an extradition or they have to do so quickly.

[Denzil_DC]

53. Not true about the rule of specialty (and I'm surprised the Guardian article didn't mention this).

The UK could waive it and allow further charges to be laid.

Various sources cover this, but for convenience, Emptywheel (and her commenters) goes into the ins and outs here: https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/04/11/the-assange-indictment-and-the-rule-of-specialty/

The Obama administration was wary of First Amendment rights and the risk of having to also prosecute the media that published the 2010 revelations.

In this current case, the charge is narrowly framed as the alleged conspiracy with Manning to carry out hacking to get at more information and/or cover their tracks.

[JonLP24]

54. I'm surprised Rachel Maddow's federal prosecutor guest didn't mention this

He said the exceptions weren't even worth mentioning like assaulting a corrections guard.

Obama's DOJ reviewed the same casework there isn't anything new regarding this case and they came away feeling this would set a bad precedent.

[Denzil_DC]

55. Yes, as I said above, the Obama administration was very wary, and rightly so.

But restricting the charge to conspiracy to hack is one way of dealing with this.

I'd expect the whole extradition issue to be feverishly argued in quite probably various layers of courts over a considerable period, and I'd be surprised if Assange's lawyers (Doughty Chambers - big names in UK and international law) didn't raise the prospect of further charges being added and seek to challenge extradition on those grounds. This isn't the first computer hacking case that's involved UK-US extradition by any means, and not all have ended up in extradition going ahead (Gary McKinnon, for instance).

As things stand, the DoJ says Assange faces a maximum of five years' imprisonment.

People keep talking about the death penalty and claiming the UK won't extradite to a country that has the death penalty. That's also not true. It won't extradite for offences that carry the death penalty. Big difference.

[empedocles]

57. empty wheel - must reading

[empedocles]

56. Rachel a doubter. Rachel's ex-prosecutor guest was pretty sure the feds had vetted

the 1st Amendment issue which would not interfere much with criminal activity.

[jberryhill]

59. Yep.

[Mr Tibbs]

61. I predict Trump will pardon him

[shanny]

63. Two ways to read that "martyrdom" thing.

One is the govt is overplaying its hand. As I understand it, there will be a single charge.