A soaring ego, vile personal habits, and hardly a friend left

[struggle4progress]

By GUY ADAMS FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 17:25 EDT, 11 April 2019
UPDATED: 22:13 EDT, 11 April 2019

... Ranting and dishevelled, with his hands cuffed and straggly beard unwashed, the 47-year-old WikiLeaks founder cut a bizarre and somewhat pathetic figure as he was carried horizontally into a police wagon at around 10am yesterday ...

The high-profile supporters to turn against him range from feminists queasy at his decision to jump bail to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning after two women accused him of rape and sexual assault, to many free speech campaigners for whom he was once a great hero of our age.

The latter group were outraged by the revelation a few years ago that, seemingly due to a combination of egotism and paranoia, Assange was making WikiLeaks employees sign contracts threatening them with a £12million lawsuit if they spoke publicly about his organisation.

Meanwhile, Assange's reputation among liberals of every persuasion was severely dented in 2016, when WikiLeaks played a key role in the murky campaign to destabilise Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US election campaign, publishing emails seemingly obtained from her campaign team by Russian hackers ...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6913485/GUY-ADAMS-downfall-Julian-Assange-soaring-ego-vile-habits-hardly-friend-left.html

[struggle4progress]

1. Assange v. Trump

By Raffi Khatchadourian
6:46 P.M.

... Justifying his asylum, Assange argued that the Swedish government merely wanted him on a pretext—that its real intention all along was to deliver him to the United States for prosecution, or, worse, to allow the C.I.A. to render him to a black site, like an Al Qaeda detainee ... The United States and the United Kingdom have well-oiled joint-extradition machinery. It was working very well this morning.

The conspiracy theory that a Swedish prosecutor was necessary to apprehend Assange can now die ...

... one irony is easy to discern: Assange clearly believed that a Donald J. Trump Presidency would benefit him, and yet it was the Trump Administration that sought to redefine WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service”—an organization that did not belong within the ambit of journalism. Assange, a devoted opponent of what he describes as American imperial power, has welcomed Trump’s degradation of U.S. norms and institutions. Now his fate will be determined by the health of those same institutions. On Thursday morning, while he was being shoved into a police van, he suddenly changed his mind about British sovereignty. “U.K., resist!” he yelled out. “Resist this attempt by the Trump Administration!”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/julian-assange-versus-the-trump-administration

[struggle4progress]

2. A journalist or just a thief?

By David Ignatius
Columnist
April 11 at 8:05 PM

... The indictment focuses on Assange’s alleged attempt to help Manning crack a password and gain special “administrative-level privileges,” an effort that proved unsuccessful. But the underlying “purpose and object of the conspiracy” was “so that WikiLeaks could publicly disseminate the information on its website,” prosecutors said.

Assange’s supporters describe his arrest and proposed extradition to the United States as an attack on press freedom. But there’s some skepticism about that claim, even from several of the country’s most prominent defenders of the First Amendment.

“When you read the indictment, it doesn’t look like anything that turns on whether Assange is or is not a journalist,” said Bruce D. Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in an interview Thursday. “No newsroom lawyer would tell a reporter it’s okay to do what’s alleged in the complaint — to help a source break a password and hack a computer” ...

Lincoln Caplan, a Yale Law scholar who has written widely about journalism, said in an interview that there’s an important distinction between “curating” information, as reporters do, and “dumping” it, as has often been WikiLeaks’ practice ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-julian-assange-a-journalist-or-is-he-just-an-accused-thief/2019/04/11/38afac3c-5c9c-11e9-9625-01d48d50ef75_story.html?utm_term=.21d6bf19e1ee

[struggle4progress]

3. The Russian mysteries remain

By Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes
April 11, 2019

WASHINGTON — In June 2016, five months before the American presidential election, Julian Assange made a bold prediction during a little-noticed interview with a British television show.

“WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead,” he said, just seconds after announcing that the website he founded would soon be publishing a cache of emails related to Hillary Clinton.

He was right. But an indictment unsealed on Thursday charging Mr. Assange with conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer in 2010 makes no mention of the central role that WikiLeaks played in the Russian campaign to undermine Mrs. Clinton’s presidential chances and help elect President Trump. It remains unclear whether the arrest of Mr. Assange will be a key to unlocking any of the lingering mysteries surrounding the Russians, the Trump campaign and the plot to hack an election.

The Justice Department spent years examining whether Mr. Assange was working directly with the Russian government, but legal experts point out that what is known about his activities in 2016 — including publishing stolen emails — is not criminal, and therefore it would be difficult to bring charges against him related to the Russian interference campaign ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/us/politics/wikileaks-clinton-emails-russia-trump.html

Whether or not the Russian mysteries involve crimes, they might bring major pie-in-face for the Trumpists -- which might be a motive for locking him away as an inconvenience

[dalton99a]

10. +1

[area51]

4. When I saw the headline, I thought the article was about Trump. n/t

[struggle4progress]

7. "There's a reason nobody has ever seen Donald and Julian together!"

[smirkymonkey]

8. *snort*

[eppur_se_muova]

9. I almost did too, except for that*"hardly"* a friend bit -- 45 has no friends, and never has.

He only has temporarily useful, disposable tools.

[struggle4progress]

5. Bizarre behaviour before arrest

Phoebe Loomes with AP

... Ecuador Foreign Minister Jose Valencia .. Thursday ... said ... that Assange on occasions hit staff, charged with guaranteeing his wellbeing, and accused embassy officials of being US spies looking to exchange information on WikiLeaks in exchange for debt relief for Ecuador.

Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno repeated allegations that Assange smeared waste on the walls of the embassy building ...

Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo ... said: “During his stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy, during the government of the former president Rafael Correa, they tolerated things like Mr Assange putting faeces on the walls of the embassy and other types of behaviour of this kind that is far removed from the minimum respect a guest should have in a country which has generously welcomed him” ...

Mr Moreno added that Ecuador will “be more careful in giving asylum to people who are really worth it and not miserable hackers whose only goal is to destabilise governments” ...

https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/julian-assanges-bizarre-behaviour-in-embassy-before-arrest/news-story/794496678a02e27a21067a332e5c3e92

[struggle4progress]

6. Overdue for personal accountability

By Editorial Board April 11 at 6:45 PM

AFTER SIX-PLUS years of asylum in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was removed from that diplomatic facility Thursday by British police and jailed for up to 12 months for jumping bail back in August 2012. He may ultimately face courts in the United States or Sweden, as well. If these democracies handle it properly, Mr. Assange’s case could conclude as a victory for the rule of law, not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn.

Contrary to much pro-WikiLeaks propaganda, Mr. Assange had no legitimate fears for his life, either at the hands of CIA assassins or, via extradition, the U.S. death penalty, when he fled to the embassy of what was then an anti-American government. Rather, he was avoiding transfer to Sweden pursuant to a seemingly credible sexual assault charge lodged against him in that country. He then proceeded to abuse the hospitality of his South American hosts, most egregiously by presiding over what an indictment by U.S. special counsel Robert S. Mueller III described as Russian intelligence’s use of WikiLeaks as a front for its interference in the U.S. election. Democratic Party documents stolen by the Russians made their way into the public domain under the WikiLeaks label. Ecuador’s new, more pragmatic president, Lenín Moreno, cited Mr. Assange’s more recent alleged involvement in the release of confidential Vatican documents, along with threats against the government in Quito, as reasons to oust him ...

... unlike real journalists, WikiLeaks dumped material into the public domain without any effort independently to verify its factuality or give named individuals an opportunity to comment. Nor, needless to say, would a real journalist have cooperated with a plot by an authoritarian regime’s intelligence service to harm one U.S. presidential candidate and benefit another ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/julian-assange-is-not-a-free-press-hero-and-he-is-long-overdue-for-personal-accountability/2019/04/11/90f901ba-5c86-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html?utm_term=.71ac5db668e3