Responsibility has to be pretty defuse, right? You can at least begin with all the presidents in office since he was prosecuted, until N-1 since presumably the Nth just released him.
Diffusion of responsibility is definitely a defense in these cases, but the system should recognize this shortcoming and assign accountability (at least in an ideal world).
Although I'm willing to bet that the true actors here weren't necessarily presidents (even though they would ultimately be accountable like you say). Would be interesting to see who demanded what and when.
It's not to lionize Assange, but these are almost crimes against humanity, they stole peoples tax dollars and then built a surveillance state used against the citizens. When that was revealed they then used the same tools to destroy a single human being for the purposes of creating a decade long chilling effect for anyone who might consider doing the same.
There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level. When the information was released the public never clamored for it to be investigated and for people to be hunted down and jailed for releasing it. It was entirely a captured administrative state claiming for itself rights it demonstrably never had, such as claiming a foreign national committed treason, or that he could be viewed as an "enemy combatant."
To have gone along with this willingly deserves the same scrutiny we gave German officers at the end of WWII.
> There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level.
I would argue there should, no exception. Not even WWII. While keeping in mind that the responsibility was so gigantic to begin with, that even diffusing it might end up putting most participants in jail, some of them for a long time.
A lot of Assange supporters are going to feel weird about giving Biden credit for his release, especially since Biden was part of the administration that initially decided to pursue Assange.
Also because he was forced into pleading guilty for doing journalism. A great crime has been committed against Assange and I understand why he would do this. I would never ask him to spend another day in a small Ecuadorian embassy room with no living facilities or in a medieval torture cell in England... He has suffered more for the free people of the world than we have a right to ask for but this is not a just outcome.
He wasn't "doing journalism". WikiLeaks just posted a completely unevaluated firehose of data fed to it by whomever, which is why they were such an easy asset for Russian intelligence.
I agree they have no idea about journalism. I remember they had put a big pile of emails sent to some government agency in Turkey. It was all some people complaining about daily things, reporting issues in their cities etc (emails were not anonymized of course), They just dumped them and claimed they were exposing the corrupt government.
I'm not exactly disagreeing because it is a factual view. But there are some knotty issues that go a lot deeper.
1) The US was doing a lot of things wrong. Going off the 2011 cables [0] they were spying on various people they weren't meant to be, there were one or two things that look war crimes to me but who knows technically and a few gems like "Der Spiegel reported that one of the cables showed that the US had placed pressure on Germany not to pursue the 13 suspected CIA agents involved in the 2003 abduction of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen".
2) It wasn't obvious in that leak that the US was doing anything counter the interests of the US. But Assange isn't a US citizen and wasn't in the US at the time, so that isn't a reasonable standard to hold him to.
3) Even internally to the US though there is a reasonable argument that he was helpful. If US citizens don't have easy access to this sort of information, how are they supposed to effectively exercise democratic control on the government? People are going out and doing terrible things in their name which, arguably, are counterproductive and they would probably not want done. Accountability requires sunlight and they can't debate whether there is enough sunlight without people like Assange.
4) It turns out that the US does have a huge probably-illegal certainly-ill-advised spying program that was being sniffed out by leakers. The response to Assange seems likely to be part of a campaign to keep material information on such topics like that out of the public sphere.
I'm struggling to figure out how wikileaks works as a russian intelligence asset in a way that somehow doesn't apply more aptly and openly to western media as a whole. Hell our entire elections are built around directly and indirectly paying media to run content ("ads").
There is no genuine concern here over some deep vulnerability our society has to russians or anyone because of wikileaks. Assange (nor snowden) caused any material harm remotely proportional to the blowback they've received since. This is about punishment for circumventing state-level controls and embarrassing the state. To think that Trump would somehow be more lenient on either is unthinkable—he's part of the same class of people that Clinton is that is most sensitive to the health of systems Assange threatens.
Oh, but it does, and that's also a problem. Key Western media, for instance the NYT, are seriously compromised due to being poster children for what's called 'MICE' (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego): if the NYT, like all newspapers, is going broke in the age of the Internet, it's got all of that as vulnerabilities, especially Ego as it sees itself as the bulwark of truth, yet it can't pay its bills.
Enter Russian oligarchs, just like they bought up London, and then control the oligarchs by force when you can't simply direct them by shared ideology, and you've got pretty much the most powerful propaganda outlet you could possibly have, until you exploit it so heavily that you burn its former reputation to the ground. Which you do, because you yourself care nothing for its well-being: it's a tool for your political aims in fighting NATO and furthering your empire.
Sure, it applies to western media as a whole, from the bottom to the top.
If WWIII had stayed entirely in the infosphere, and Russia had not invaded Ukraine and tried to make good on their preparations, nobody would ever have known WWIII had been waged in the infosphere. That's how well it had been going. It ran aground when physical countries had to be annexed.
This is misinformation. Their policy was never to publish anything they could not verify, and the "asset for Russian intelligence" was only ever a DNC and US intelligence smear to discredit Wikileaks.
It's not just "DNC and US intelligence." Wikileaks tried to influence the 2017 election in France among other examples. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks. This partially backfired when the dump of e-mails they published was found to contain russian-language messages.
That Wikileaks systematically favors the russian government, and never does anything contrary to the interests of the russian government, strongly suggests they are an asset of russia.
Tell me and be honest: is that link to a politically-motivated, unproven allegation that will be believable only to those who want to believe, because the "evidence" will be a rabbit warren of innuendo, emotionalism, question begging, circular citations, and talking head pundits assuring us all that they have seen the evidence and "it's extremely credible"? Because that's all the anti-Assange people have so far.
Exposing corruption mainly in the anglosphere is not some systematic error if that is what you do best and where most of tge organisation live and know people.
You could claim Wikileaks is a Thai or South African asset too on those preconditions.
To quote the article: "“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement Monday evening."
My recollection is that the Obama administration was split on this, with DoJ officials enthusiastic but Obama purportedly being concerned about the political implications for journalism. The charges were only filed in 2018/2019 under the Trump administration, which presumably did not have major concerns about journalism. Am I wrong in this?
The DOJ and the Obama administration were in agreement that you would have had to prosecute the papers and journalists who had previously run stories on the Bush era leaks revealed through Wikikeaks as well.
I'm trying to work this out myself. Julian's wiki page has
> He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012[10] on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States.[11]
It seems to me like the Trump administration simply mainted the status quo of what came before them. One theory could be the timing of the charges was more aligned with Ecuador changing PM/kicking Assange out of the embassy. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/14/lenin-moreno-julian-assan...
Without starting the whole "is publishing documents received from an enemy of the state seditious," debate, I didn't think there was supposed to be a jail term on taking sides in politics. :-)
The Biden administration doesn't have a terrible track record with a bunch of things (bringing back net neutrality for instance) they just have a really bad marketing department.
I don’t know if Biden had anything to do with this, but he has some good old school democrat instincts. The problem is that he’s surrounded by globalists and progressives who can’t loudly promote the good things he did, like tariffs, getting out of Afghanistan, initially maintaining tight border restrictions, etc.
I mean, even if Biden has something to do with this plea deal, his staffers won’t promote it because they think Assange is a kremlin puppet who conspired to help Trump get elected.
Biden is a potted plant. I saw him at a small campaign event in Iowa five years ago, where all the candidates delivered a speech. He made it through the speech okay (like his SOTU) but they accidentally started playing the transition music early and he completely derailed. He started saying random things like “support the troops.” He was not there anymore in the moment.
Voters backed Biden in the primary because he was a throwback to an earlier version of the party. But the Elizabeth Warren bots ended up running the administration anyway.
Or: nothing really interesting happened here at all, the USAO figured they were 2-3 years out from wrapping up a trial on these charges, that the only toothy charges they had for Assange were conspiracy charges for which Assange's active participation was weak, and so the sentencing guidelines would likely have left him at "time served", which is not a good use of the prosecution's time.
But, I mean, sure, maybe Biden directed DOJ about an open case, and AG Garland just rolled with it, because he sure seems like the type.
I’m just responding to the person giving Biden credit above. I don’t know what happened. But the DOJ is under the executive, so why wouldn’t Biden be able to direct the DOJ about the case? Even if to say “I don’t want my administration prosecuting whistleblowers?”
In the sense that the US letting up on the poor man is a surprise, yes. But without having polled the pro-Assange crowd it doesn't seem like a special surprise that it was Biden. He's been the name on impressive things before, like ending the Afghanistan war (which at the time had been a political humiliation for the US longer than Assange had).
Supporting transparency and good journalism isn't a partisan issue, and there are going to be good people in any administration. Plus Assange wasn't annoying presidents, he was going after people in the deep state.
They're forcing Assange to 'confess' to a crime in the US, where he has never been and which creates enormous problems. It should be remembered how severe what the US was doing at the time. They got some people handed over to them here in Sweden, who they agreed to not torture, and then started already at the airport. They had torture facilities in Poland, where people almost certainly died, etcetera.
What Assange did was legal and what the many activities the US was engaging in to obtain people abroad etc., illegal. He has no duty to the US, because he is not a US citizen or permanent resident.
Consequently even this is not a friendly act from Biden. It ends Assange's imprisonment, but it is a use of threats in order to obtain something from him, namely his 'confession'.
Although I'm willing to bet that the true actors here weren't necessarily presidents (even though they would ultimately be accountable like you say). Would be interesting to see who demanded what and when.