Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

[gipper]

It is my belief that human nature will not allow it to happen.

Essentially you believe in a myth, a superstition as the author explains.

The fundamental nature of government is force. Allowing others to force you to do their will. It’s a myth of authority. It’s irrational. How can you think a small group of authorities (really criminals) can be virtuous and can effectively govern the people? Irrational!

 

[bendog]

They want to put the embarrassment of the illegal war in Iraq. Which was the only crime committed.

Yeah, but I'm not sure Assange really cared about the abuse of power so much as he cared about anyone, besides maybe him, having power.

As for W's leading us into catastrophe in Iraq .... what W did was say to his advisors "give me a legal excuse to occupy and nationbuild in Iraq to create a middle east arab democracy." And they failed.

 

[Harpy Eagle]

Essentially you believe in a myth, a superstition as the author explains.

If you think human nature is a superstition, then I guess you are correct.

The fundamental nature of government is force.

I do not agree it is the fundamental nature of government, but it a part of government.

A family is a type of government. Rules and guidelines are an essential part of raising a family.

Allowing others to force you to do their will. It’s a myth of authority.

At times force is required with a family when raising children. Would you agree?

How can you think a small group of authorities (really criminals) can be virtuous and can effectively govern the people? Irrational!

It is up to the people governed to make sure they are. Sadly, human nature, again kicks in and unless we are under duress most just do not give a crap.

If you have a group of 100 people living together, there has to be rules and such. And there has to be an enforcement mechanism for said rules or they are meaningless.

Your views on not needing any such thing is divorced from the reality that are humans and our nature.

 

[eagle7-31]

So, after all the drama...an ending to the story. While I don't condone his actions, I firmly believe that he has suffered enough. If Manning is free...Assange should be, as well. After all, between prison for 5 years and being holed up in an embassy for 7 years, Assange has done a fair amount of time.

Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

The WikiLeaks founder has been held in a prison outside London for the last five years and fought extradition to the United States. He is expected to return to Australia.

www.nbcnews.com

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge this week as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to go free after spending five years in a British prison, according to court documents.

Assange was charged by criminal information — which typically signifies a plea deal — with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, the court documents say. A letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie to U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona of the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands said that Assange would appear in court at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday (or, 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday) to plead guilty and said that DOJ expects Assange will return to Australia, his country of citizenship, after the proceedings.

Not entirely sure what all that was about other than the fact Assange threw a political monkey wrench at both candidates in 2016 but the Hildebeast in particular which why the demrats hate him.

 

[ColonelAngus]

Political move by Biden because his poll numbers suck and he does not want Trump to get any of the information Assange is sitting on….especially regarding SETH RICH.

BIDEN ADMIN COULD HAVE DONE THIS 3 1/2 Years ago.

FJB. SHOVE YOUR POLITICS UP YOUR ASS.

 

[GLASNOST]

.... While I don't condone his actions, I firmly believe that he has suffered enough.

What is it exactly he's done that you don't "condone"?

 

[GLASNOST]

BIDEN ADMIN COULD HAVE DONE THIS 3 1/2 Years ago.

Yes. It's strange that he's doing it now. Some day we're going to find out what happened but probably not in my lifetime.

 

[Nobody911]

So, after all the drama...an ending to the story. While I don't condone his actions, I firmly believe that he has suffered enough. If Manning is free...Assange should be, as well. After all, between prison for 5 years and being holed up in an embassy for 7 years, Assange has done a fair amount of time.

Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

The WikiLeaks founder has been held in a prison outside London for the last five years and fought extradition to the United States. He is expected to return to Australia.

www.nbcnews.com

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge this week as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to go free after spending five years in a British prison, according to court documents.

Assange was charged by criminal information — which typically signifies a plea deal — with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, the court documents say. A letter from Justice Department official Matthew McKenzie to U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona of the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands said that Assange would appear in court at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday (or, 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday) to plead guilty and said that DOJ expects Assange will return to Australia, his country of citizenship, after the proceedings.

==>The world actually enjoys these Pentagon's action-drama series. Me too. lol.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, played a significant role in the release of classified documents by Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, including the video known as "Collateral Murder," which showed a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed several civilians, including journalists.

Assange and WikiLeaks were responsible for publishing the video and other leaked documents, bringing attention to government actions and sparking debates about transparency and accountability.

Assange's involvement in the dissemination of the Pentagon video and other classified information led to legal challenges and controversies surrounding whistleblowing and freedom of the press.

While Assange did not directly decrypt the video himself, WikiLeaks and Assange were instrumental in making the video public and drawing attention to the issue of government transparency.

Assange's role in publishing the Pentagon video and other leaked documents has had far-reaching implications for journalism, national security, and government transparency.

Talking about transparency with Pentagon? What a joke! Lol.

Source :

1. July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike - Wikipedia

2. Baghdad 2007-07-12 airstrike videos - Wikimedia Commons

 

[ColonelAngus]

Assange and Snowden are heros.

Uncovering and exposing government corruption is the HEIGHT OF JOURNALISM!

It is one of the central tenets of the First Amendment and of the press.

Assange exposed DNC corruption….fucking over Bernie Sanders, getting debate questions from CNN. Seth Rick. Ouch.

Snowden exposed how the Fed is tracking everything that everyone does. Data tracking. You and what you do is stored in case they need to dig up some shit on you.

 

[GLASNOST]

Assange and Snowden are heros.

Do you know what would make me extremely happy is if Tucker Carlson would conduct a 2-hour long interview with Assange and Snowden together in a Moscow café! And even their wives!

 

[ColonelAngus]

I give Biden zero credit for this POLITICAL move.

1) Biden’s numbers are tanking, this is a hail Mary.
2) Biden wants to prevent Trump was being involved with Assange at all…because Trump will uncover ACTIONABLE crimes from the State.

 

[ColonelAngus]

Win for JOURNALISTS!

LOSS FOR THE DEEP STATE AND ITS MOUTHPIECES.

 

[ColonelAngus]

Those unhappy that Assange is free are really showing their asses as COMMUNISTS.

ANYONE WHO EXPOSES GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION IS A HERO.

 

[pknopp]

Political move by Biden because his poll numbers suck and he does not want Trump to get any of the information Assange is sitting on….especially regarding SETH RICH.

Because he couldn't have done that his four years?

 

[Grumblenuts]

Free as a Bird — by Mr. Fish
The dark machinery of empire, whose mendacity and savagery Julian Assange exposed to the world, spent 14 years trying to destroy him. They cut him off from his funding, canceling his bank accounts and credit cards. They invented bogus charges of sexual assault to get him extradited to Sweden, where he would then be shipped to the U.S.

They trapped him in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for seven years after he was given political asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship by refusing him safe passage to Heathrow Airport. They orchestrated a change of government in Ecuador that saw him stripped of his asylum, harassed and humiliated by a pliant embassy staff. They contracted the Spanish security firm UC global in the embassy to record all his conversations, including those with his attorneys.

The CIA discussed kidnapping or assassinating him. They arranged for London’s Metropolitan Police to raid the embassy – sovereign territory of Ecuador – and seize him. They held him for five years in the high security HM Prison Belmarsh, often in solitary confinement.

And all the while they carried out a judicial farce in the British courts where due process was ignored so an Australian citizen, whose publication was not based in the U.S. and who, like all journalists, received documents from whistleblowers, could be charged under the Espionage Act.

They tried over and over and over to destroy him. They failed. But Julian was not released because the courts defended the rule of law and exonerated a man who had not committed a crime. He was not released because the Biden White House and the intelligence community have a conscience. He was not released because the news organizations that published his revelations and then threw him under the bus, carrying out a vicious smear campaign, pressured the U.S. government.

He was released — granted a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department, according to court documents — in spite of these institutions. He was released because day after day, week after week, year after year, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe mobilized to decry the imprisonment of the most important journalist of our generation. Without this mobilization, Julian would not be free.

Mass protests do not always work. The genocide in Gaza continues to exact its gruesome toll on Palestinians. Mumia Abu-Jamal is still locked up in a Pennsylvania prison. The fossil fuel industry ravages the planet. But it is the most potent weapon we have to defend ourselves from tyranny.

This sustained pressure — during a London hearing in 2020, to my delight, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Old Bailey court overseeing Julian’s case, complained about the noise protestors were making in the street outside — shines a continuous light on injustice and exposes the amorality of the ruling class. This is why spaces in the British courts were so limited and blurry eyed activists lined up outside as early as 4 a.m. to secure a seat for journalists they respected, my spot secured by Franco Manzi, a retired policeman.

These people are unsung and often unknown. But they are heroes. They move mountains. They surrounded parliament. They stood in the pouring rain outside the courts. They were dogged and steadfast. They made their collective voices heard. They saved Julian. And as this dreadful saga ends, and Julian and his family I hope, find peace and healing in Australia, we must honor them. They shamed the politicians in Australia to stand up for Julian, an Australian citizen, and finally Britain and the U.S. to give up. I do not say to do the right thing. This was a surrender. We should be proud of it.

I met Julian when I accompanied his attorney, Michael Ratner, to meetings in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Michael, one of the great civil rights attorneys of our era, stressed that popular protest was a vital component in every case he brought against the state. Without it, the state could carry out its persecution of dissidents, disregard for the law and crimes in darkness.

People like Michael, along with Janet Robinson, Stella Assange, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristenn Hrafnsson, Nils Melzer, Craig Murray, Roger Waters, Ai WeiWei, John Pilger and Julian’s father John Shipton and brother Gabriel, were instrumental in the fight. But they could not have done it alone.

We desperately need mass movements. The climate crisis is accelerating. The world, with the exception of Yemen, stands passive watching a live streamed genocide. The senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion has turned everything from human beings to the natural world into commodities that are exploited until exhaustion or collapse. The decimation of civil liberties has shackled us, as Julian warned, to an interconnected security and surveillance apparatus that stretches across the globe.

The ruling global class has shown its hand. It intends, in the global north, to build climate fortresses and in the global south to use its industrial weapons to lock out and slaughter the desperate the way it is slaughtering the Palestinians.

State surveillance is far more intrusive than that employed by past totalitarian regimes. Critics and dissidents are easily marginalized or silenced on digital platforms. This totalitarian structure — the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it “inverted totalitarianism” — is being imposed by degrees. Julian warned us. As the power structure feels threatened by a restive population that repudiates its corruption, amassing of obscene levels of wealth, endless wars, ineptitude and mounting repression, the fangs it exposed to Julian will be exposed to us.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because our emails, phone conversations, web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, because we are the most photographed and followed population in human history, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This constant surveillance and personal data waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

The object of all totalitarian systems is to inculcate a climate of fear to paralyze a captive population. Citizens seek security in the structures that oppress them. Imprisonment, torture and murder are saved for unmanageable renegades such as Julian. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. The population is immobilized by trauma. The courts, along with legislative bodies, legalize state crimes. We saw all this in the persecution of Julian. It is an ominous harbinger of the future.

The corporate state must be destroyed if we are to restore our open society and save our planet. Its security apparatus must be dismantled. The mandarins who manage corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt media, must be driven from the temples of power.

Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up — which is what the corporate state is counting on — will see us enslaved and the earth’s ecosystem become inhospitable to human habitation. Let us take a lesson from the courageous men and women who took to the streets for 14 years to save Julian. They showed us how it is done.

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[Deadstick]

Not entirely sure what all that was about other than the fact Assange threw a political monkey wrench at both candidates in 2016 but the Hildebeast in particular which why the demrats hate him.

Assange was not about petty party politics that some people seem to think the World revolves around, he exposed law breaking and wrongdoing including war crimes by the State, he published information given to him, the Guardian newspaper did the same but the establishment never went after them, what happened to Assange was a disgrace among many by the same people, and for the most part the so called MSM were silent, in fact by their silence they are part of the problem, they have become cheerleaders for the establishment, they have become propagandists masquerading as Journalists, Assange is a real Journalist like John Pilger was.

 

[GLASNOST]

(1) Assange was not about petty party politics that (2) some people seem to think the World revolves around ...

Precisely, on both points.

 

[Billiejeens]

It seems as if the removal of the DNC emails of Wikileaks was part of the secret deal that Assange made.

The corrupt nature of the current DOJ literally has no bounds.

 

[GLASNOST]

It seems as if the removal of the DNC emails of Wikileaks was part of the secret deal that Assange made.
.....

Back up, please. Quotes? Links? Sources?

 

[Billiejeens]

Back up, please. Quotes? Links? Sources?

Go to Wiki and see for yourself