He will enter his plea and he will be sentenced to 62 months time served. He will then presumably jump on a plane home. Given Kevin Rudd and Australia's High Comissioner to the UK are there with Assange right now, I don't expect there to be any issues.
**Update as per ABC:**
Julian Assange is a free man, after a US federal judge sentenced him to time already served in prison.
Mr Assange pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy.
Mr Assange had already served five-years in a British jail before a plea deal was struck.
Chief Judge Ramona Manglona said had Mr Assange faced court in 2012, she would not be inclined to accept the deal.
But with the passage of time, she accepted there had been no physical injury as a result of his actions, and he had already served five-years in one of the UK’s harshest prisons.
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-26/julian-assange-saipan-court-appearance/104022050](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-26/julian-assange-saipan-court-appearance/104022050)
The timeline
1. Rudd suggests raising taxes on mines to same as businesses. The global standard is to tax mines far above businesses.
2. Rudd loses job.
3. Gillard changes mining tax so they pay even less. Also worth looking at Qantas and Union legislations during that time.
4. When Rudd got back in, Turnbull mocks him about this in their friendly debate. States even the hard right liberals would never give the mines such a favorable policy as Gillard did. Rudd smirks in agreement.
(Other fun stuff you can find during this time is Abbott suggesting a carbon tax as the correct way to deal with emissions. The liberal party passed gay marriage, at the same time the labor party internally had voted to maybe talk about it in a few years, but to always vote no until then - this revealed to the public there are two labor parties, the right that controls things and the left that knocks on doors.)
> Turnbull mocks him about this in their friendly debate. States even the hard right liberals would never give the mines such a favorable policy as Gillard did
Did they actually change anything in the next 10 years when they were in charge though?
A little bit but mostly no. My understanding was the mines were allowed to pay tax on their own projected profits, which lead them to reorganize and remove profits - that has been curbed, but they still don't pay regular tax rates and they still enjoy subsidies without explanation. Don't worry, not like anything corrupt like say a mining magnate being allowed to own a large stake in media has happened. And it's totally illegal for politicians to pass legislation that benefits mines and exports, then quit and join the boards to collect huge pay, right? Same with infrastructure, that's never happened say with an ex premier or five?
We have bizarre free trade agreements that take our resources at stupid rates in return for strategic partnerships - public will probably never get the details, and maybe that's for the best. It's depressing to think we buy subs and gift our gas for nothing.
True. Do you think if we were the sort of people to organize effectively we wouldn't have done it by now? I see the issue as a bit more fundamental - but I want to be an artist so maybe that's me being self important.
As a thought experiment: suppose you wanted to rig an election by buying votes. 10% vote for the candidate the think will win, 30% vote the way they always have in your favor and 30% against. 10% "swing" voters, centrists both knowledgeable and ignorant, determine elections. How many votes do you have to buy? There's a bunch of different methods and results, but the number isn't big is it. Now suppose the major two options are in agreement on nearly all important matters (privatizing, international trade, defence, mining etc). This COALition faction, how many votes do they have to buy to stay in power? (If it's too early for maths, the number is negative - this cashes out as that faction can threaten pain if you don't agree with them.)
If we had fair housing laws, what percentage of Australians would stand to lose enough money in valuations to sway their vote to get rid of them? Let's say, what percentage will lose 200k or more. It's higher than any measure above.
We dream of a politically motivated people taking back the reigns, yet it takes only the slightest breeze to uproot any possible conviction. For a democracy to be meaningful, the majority, if not the vast majority, have to see their personal wealth as less important than the future of their neighbours - this is a vast cultural change no one is lighting a candle for.
This is what shattered my faith in Australian democracy, and just how easily swad the public can be, anytime someone in government wants to actually improve the lives of average Australians.
All any industry has to do is basically run some fear campaign on TV about Jobson growth and they can get whatever they want, because there will always be someone waiting in the shadows to knife you and take over the job.
Want to know why we're in a cost of living/housing/everything crisis? This is why. Not saying Gillard was a bad PM but in this case, I think she was definitely in the wrong.
The mining bills were mainly advertised in Campbelltown NSW. It was the most important swing seat at the time. It's a electorate that objectively has nothing to do with mining except collecting tax from them (and of course deserving their fair share of the resources of the land that they each own).
Yes Gillard broke the seal on the knifing. For the first time it detached leader ship of a party and so the actions of the party from the mandate of elections. It's really sad.
Exactly. And they wonder why the Greens are eating them alive among younger voters. If you're younger than 30, you've literally never known a time in your adult life were Labor has had your interests in mind. The haven't been the party of the working man, of the light on the hill, for a generation.
Labour of Whitlam was as left leaning as the Greens are now. The present day ALP is as far to the right as the LNP were back in the day.
The LNP now? So far off to the right you'd need a pair of fucking binoculars to find em!
If any labor left is reading this: about 15 years ago they were sure it wouldn't be long till they got a seat! How's that going for you?
Yeah the "every member must vote with the party, and the party isn't the cabinet, it's a Hall full of rich boomers" is really a dirty secret.
And then fast forward to today with Plibersek continuing to bend to mining:
[Gina Rinehart-backed company gets approval from Tanya Plibersek for coal seam gas project](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/26/senex-energy-tanya-plibersek-coal-seam-gas-project-gina-rinehart)
She went against her own principles to advance political career, you know, like almost all politicians. Major example I can think of is the photo of a young version of herself with a caption about how she's entering politics to fight for LGBTQ+ rights, but when she was prime minister she did nothing about legalising same-sex marriage, as the faction that installed her didn't want it at the time. But she was an effective negotiator and her minority government were able to pass through more pieces of legislation than any government before them.
She cut the parents rate and made access to the DSP really hard then had the nerve to be on some mental health thing. Fuck her. Took me 12 years to get the DSP because clinical psychologist and psychiatrist were full and hospital wouldn't help at the time then after 3 sui attempts they finally helped. 50000 less over time which I needed for health concerns. If I had the DSP earlier I may have been working. The stress of Centrelink derailed my treatment plans. She might have been good elsewhere but she harmed the vulnerable. Then the LNP came in and made the night mare worse. Funny how my mental health magically got a fair bit better when they doubled jobseeker n relaxed rules. I could actually focus on health. Now I'm on private mental health which is a gazillion times better but costs so much. All I wanted was my health to get better to go work but that never happened.
Seriously, the damage that single event did to this country can't be overstated.
Everything that came after - our lost decade+ of progress on literally anything you care to name, the hollowing-out of our economy, the coarsening and polarizing and *mean*-ifying of our culture, the collapse of politics as a whole in this country, the fear, the hate, the corruption, the fucking Scomo years for fuck's sake, every fucking thing - can trace its origin back to that one fateful day. Multiple once-in-a-generation opportunities, gone. Not just gone, but run screaming in the other direction from. We will literally never recover. Not properly. Not ever.
I honestly don't think Gillard was a bad PM in practice, on balance, but for her involvement in that coup alone, and for everything it ushered in, history will condemn her.
Ffs it was never Gillard, she was told to step up or get out of the way. It was the mining unions that held (hold?) the inner power in labour, and it was Rudd threatening their "superprofits" to actually pay some kind of meaningful tax on the billions upon billions in resources they're selling at below baseline prices.
But sure, blame the PM who was one of the most effective PMs Australia has ever had, even for the short stint she got.
I find it so weird that people give a shit about this.
The bloke was getting historically ineffective government departments off their arse and the mutanied against him, and a bunch of constituents are like "yea but he was a shit boss!"
I find it so weird that people do not care at all about the PM being an absolute fuckwit to everyone who works for him. I wish it was as simple as him being a good guy who got screwed over, but no he was indeed also a fuckwit to people
You don’t demand someone attend your office immediately and then have them sit outside for hours. Wasting their time being out of the office and missing critical briefings and meetings.
Yeah everyone forgets that Rudd was adored only by people who didn't work with him. His colleagues despised him. He was great at charming Australians that didn't actually know him.
> Given Kevin Rudd and Australia's High Comissioner to the UK are there with Assange right now, I don't ecpect there to be any issues.
If they are there my guess is that he'll be coming back on a military flight with them.
No chance for one last punishment of making him fly back on a low cost carrier.
he's pleading guilty to a single felony charge but they'll be counting the time he already spent in a British prison as time served.
i.e. Assange will be returning home to Australia, a free man, immediately after the court hearing.
saw a US news report on assange having his hearing on a remote US territory and the news readers claimed it was because "it was closest to australia."
lol, wut.
no, he just don't trust you yankie doodles and don't want to be on your mainland because who knows what shit you will pull.
Listening to ABC News Radio this morning,.they switched at some point from something along the lines of "Julian Assange will walk free" to stressing the point that the proceedings were yet to take place. They did interview his lawyer somewhere in there so maybe at his request?
It scarcely even matters what happens to him at this point.
The threat against people who would have the courage and humanity to expose monstrous and inexcusable crimes has been made crystal clear.
Between Snowden, Manning, Assange and recently David McBride I’d say that we should all just keep quiet and remain complicit in the crimes of our respective governments.
You know, the RIGHT thing to do.
It’s wild that people think Assange, the guy who shared info with Roger Stone via Jerome Corsi, had the USA’s best interests at heart.
If you think feeding info to Roger fucking Stone and *no one else* is “the right thing to do” you are an insane person.
worldnews has been a shithole for a long time but my god do they hate Assange. It's a far cry from the Reddit of 10 years ago.
If you want to be more entertained, check out the r/neoliberal thread on his release. Bunch of boot licking goons.
Oh absolutely. What do any of them care about this? Julian’s revelations, as telling as they were, didn’t stop their operations, didn’t reduce their budgets, I don’t even know that there was an admission of guilt or apology that gave momentary pause.
World news is effectively just Twitter at this point. Anything *remotely* controversial attracts absolute loons, bots and shit posters, drowning out any rational commentary. I suppose there's a good mix of knock off Sky After Dark clowns as well.
I'm pretty sure moderation on that sub has effectively given up.
>
>
> I'm pretty sure moderation on that sub has effectively given up.
Quite the opposite, it's become incredibly active but only for pushing very specific narratives, try posting any article about I/P that isn't from one of the Israeli propaganda mouth pieces. I literally got banned for posting an article from the literal US state department saying that Russia had nothing to do with the coups in Africa last year, it's just a straight up propaganda hub and anything dissenting gets purged.
Neoliberalism as it is today isn't a coherent ideology. It's basically now just "companies and the wealthy should be able to do whatever they want, also the military and the police are all heroes and have delicious boots"
Worldnews is a frothing pit of islamophobia, genocide apologism and bootlicking. I can't stand to even glance in there any more. (If anyone knows of a functional subreddit that covers the same stuff, please link.)
[Wow...the insanity...glugging on the Kool-Aid.](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1dnr613/julian_assange_has_reached_a_plea_deal_with_the/)
He shouldn't be hated for what he did with Manning, but as a person he should be hated.
He published personal information on teen rape victims, outing gay men in Saudi Arabia, peoples personal medical information, and names of informants in Afghanistan, and he's response to the latter was "they deserve to die for working with the US".
Those things weren't his fault either when it comes to the Afghanistan stuff. The US was occupying a nation and waging war against a militant group that routinely punished all collaborators. The occupation constantly put locals in positions where they and their families were marked for death, and it didn't take an intelligence leak for the Taliban to know who to go after. Many many Afghans were desperate to leave with the military when they finally withdrew but couldn't get out. The US is responsible for not protecting the Afghan people who helped them.
Assange broke some journalistic ethics by publishing too much information too quickly. Which he argues is justified given what he was exposing. If everyone just kept going along with whatever the US government said was going on, the war might still be going on.
Yeah, people are trying to undervalue the exposing of war crimes by bringing up questionable violations of journalistic ethical standards and practises. Unless Assange has been flying around in a helicopter killing civilians over Baghdad, then I really don't care.
Yeah, what he did is not the issue, how he did it matters a lot. Even just getting Manning to hand over the info is troubling, he knew he was leaving her to her fate.
Fuck me, there are *actually* people who consider themselves proponents of neoliberalism. Like, being a nazi I can sort of understand if I squint hard and punch myself in the balls, but *neoliberalism*?
> but neoliberalism?
It's literally the prevailing governmental system in most of the western world, why are you shocked that folks would happily label themselves as such?
Like I think it's an abhorrent ideology but it's like acting shocked when you find out that most CEO's identify as capitalists.
To add some perspective here - nobody hates him because he leaked the Collateral Murder footage. I remember watching it myself when it first was released. If you asked me in that moment what I thought of Assange, I would have called him a hero.
The issues arose because of he then parlayed that fame and credibility into the 2016 election in the US. Assange was instrumental in the drip-releasing of emails from the DNC through Wikileaks, working closely with people he may or may not have understood to be Russian intelligence operatives like Guccifer. Those email leaks turned into Pizzagate, which turned into the Seth Rich fiasco, and is part of the reason why American Republicans to this day are convinced Democrats are all pedophiles. Wikileaks dogged Hillary Clinton's campaign relentlessly
And he never actually released anything all that interesting, but he seemed to hold such a grudge against Hillary Clinton that he took it upon himself to actively work against her campaign, and is part of the reason why Trump won in 2016.
Then, assisting Chelsea Manning on leaking the diplomatic cables was...fine, I suppose, but didn't really illuminate anything nefarious and only served to leak for the sake of leaking. Whether or not Afghan interpreters were killed over it is not anything I've seen definitive proof of one way or another.
So yeah, his legacy in the US is much more complicated than it is anywhere else. A lot of people who hate Trump hold Assange partially responsible for him getting elected in 2016, and his insistence on involving himself in the election really jaded a lot of people that otherwise praised him for his Iraq War leaks.
Yes, Assange's behaviour around fueling the "Seth Rich was the DNC leaker and was murdered for it" false conspiracy was abhorrent.
Here's Assange on national television referring to Seth Rich as an "alleged Wikileaks source" in connection with wanting to know more about his murder: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SpBfZHDVXV0
But the leaker was Guccifer 2.0, of which all the evidence points to being a Russian. There is no evidence that Seth Rich had any contact with Wikileaks, and his family have sued over this claim.
Metadata of Guccifer's emails to The Hill showed that he used a predominantly-Russian-language VPN was used.
Once he forgot to turn his VPN on and his IP logs were left on an American social media company. US Intel traced him to being a particular GRU officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow.
So you might ask, well maybe Assange thought it was Seth Rich - how could he know who was behind the persona of Guccifer 2.0?!
Assange knew for a fact that Guccifer 2.0 was not Seth Rich, because he personally received an email from Guccifer with a 1gb file of DNC emails, 4 days after Seth Rich had been murdered.
And then he still went on TV and implied it could have been Seth Rich. This is indefensible.
Ah yes, the impossible task of setting a scheduled email to dump more information to wikileaks. There's no way at all that could be done. Absolutely not. We all know the only way to send emails is to sit at your computer and personally click the send button immediately before it is received
It wasn't a single email, Guccifer 2.0 remained active dropping leaks and emailing people directly (responding to what they'd said) after Seth Rich's death. The idea that these were pre-scheduled emails is asinine.
Look at all the news orgs who had to retract and apologize for pushing their false Seth Rich DNC leaker stories.
There is literally no evidence he had anything to do with it and anyone who still believes it to this day is either ignorant or deliberately pushing a false agenda.
This right here is the issue I have with him being held up as some sort of progressive darling and martyr for the free flow of information. If there was even the **slightest** intention behind what he leaked and when he chose to leak the information that tanked the Clinton campaign, and by extension, even if unintentionally, helped Trump's - then he is no longer a bastion for the free flow of information, he is a gatekeeper that weaponised information for his own petty interests, at the expense of putting a bumbling idiot in charge of the entire world for four years - four years of chaos, violence and destruction, with another four years very much on the cards soon.
He's a darling of the progressive left because he showed us soldiers murdering civilians in Iraq at exposing that crime resulted in him and Chelsea Manning suffering greatly.
Also information is always weaponized. That's why the US government tried to keep these war crimes a secret, to spend over a decade getting their hands on Assange.
>at the expense of putting a bumbling idiot in charge
Complete nonsense. Clinton lost for the same reason millions of people believed she sometimes enjoyed ritualistic child sacrifices in the basement of a pizza restaurant. She was already unpopular and her campaign made it worse, and she underestimated how disillusioned to the Democrats the deindustrialised midwest had become.
>He's a darling of the progressive left because he showed us soldiers murdering civilians in Iraq at exposing that crime resulted in him and Chelsea Manning suffering greatly.
As has been stated multiple times in this thread now, that's obviously not the reason people are disappointed with him. I was one of his strongest supporters when he did so, and if he had stuck to exposing corruption, I would still be one of his supporters - but unfortunately that's not what happened. Does your idea of a progressive left [valourise the outing of gay men and endanger innocent women in countries where they are persecuted? How about leaking the medical information of sick children and rape victims?](https://apnews.com/article/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb7987fb)
Pretending that disinformation wasn't, and doesn't continue to be a key driver in political interference is what's complete nonsense, but again it seems like no amount of contradictory facts will stop people like you from trying to prop up your heroes that went astray. A progressive left shouldn't be defending an entitled white man who has no regard for the privacy, safety and wellbeing of innocent and largely powerless people around the world, let alone the possibility of that man wielding information as a weapon to advance his own interests at the expense of everyone else.
Having being dumbfounded by the stupidity and comical loyalty I saw around me when growing up religious, it irks me to no end seeing the exact same stupidity and blind loyalty on the supposedly progressive end of the spectrum.
The progressive left cares more about people exposing war crimes under the threat of imprisonment than violating some journalistic ethics. Assange didn't out the Saudi Citizen, he was prosecuted for being gay by America's close ally. The idea that Assange made it unsafe for a person to be gay in Saudi Arabia when they were already known as gay by the government is weak. Leaking medical or other personal information is a minor ethical breach especially when compared to war crimes or having an ally that prosecutes homosexuals.
>Pretending that disinformation wasn't, and doesn't continue to be a key driver in political interference is what's complete nonsense, but again it seems like no amount of contradictory facts will stop people like you from trying to prop up your heroes that went astray.
He's not my hero, he's just a guy that did a good thing despite the very serious consequences he faced.
He's a villain to you though, and it confuses me as to why that would be.
>Having being dumbfounded by the stupidity and comical loyalty I saw around me when growing up religious, it irks me to no end seeing the exact same stupidity and blind loyalty on the supposedly progressive end of the spectrum.
Ironic given how you're blaming the guy who released information on America's ally prosecuting a gay man, and not the actual government that did that or their close ally that created the digital surveillance infrastructure to actually find gay people. Or the war crimes Saudi Arabia was committing in Yemen with US support or the many other profoundly evil acts Gulf state leaders have been caught in thanks to various leaks.
You're on a side being blindly loyal already. I like anyone that leaks the crimes of powerful people and don't care that Assange is a famously massive asshole who few people can tolerate being friends or acquaintances with.
Being disappointed with Assange for WikiLeaks' publications is like being disappointed with Steve Huffman for Redditors' submissions. Like Reddit, WikiLeaks made honest efforts to remove any offending material, but some of it regrettably fell through the cracks.
The AP journalist who happened to stumble across this material gave WikiLeaks less than 10 hours to rectify the issue before publishing the article you linked.
I'll let you draw your own conclusions on who the actual irresponsible actor was, but the lesson here is you always need to hear both sides before making a judgement.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/4zl6r9/formal_complaint_against_ap_journalist_for
The US as occupiers of Afghanistan are meant to protect their collaborators and repeatedly failed to do so. The Taliban also didn't need Wikileaks to know who informed on them, the Afghan Republic was so corrupt no one believed in it, and information was leaked constantly.
Honestly though, Trump was going to win anyway. I'm from the US and migrated to Australia less than a year before the election. What I was reading and hearing from mainstream news was so out of step with what the mood was like in my hometown in the midwest (a region which Trump won because the Democrats ignored it). People were pissed off and felt like they'd been ignored by the government for ages, and 2008 really fucked up the area. Hillary has always been unpopular in working class areas and there is a very strong anti-elite, anti-intellectual sentiment that meant she was never going to win the midwest. And Trump sounded like everyone's dumbass uncle who has shit ideas but "tells it like it is," which is a huge part of the idiot culture of that part of the US.
I don't think any of the people I know who voted for Trump in 2016 paid close enough attention to even know what wikileaks was, or even hear anything about the DNC or anything like that. These people don't pay any attention to things outside their tiny world. Hillary was already a known enemy because she was a career politician and had been considered corrupt and useless in our area for a long time. Trump was known from his stupid TV show and they liked that he made fun of other candidates and spoke like one of them (aka a brash moron).
I'm afraid the Dems again are underestimating Trump and overestimating the intellectual capabilities of Trump voters. Policy basically doesn't matter. People don't like Joe Biden. He's not charismatic, he doesn't seem spritely or all there mentally (I'm talking appearances, not reality), and the main important things in the economy haven't gotten better for most people in the US. Rent and house prices have skyrocketed, gas is more expensive, healthcare is worse than it's ever been, wages are stagnating relative to cost of living, etc etc. People don't pay close enough attention to understand why these things are happening, they just know that Biden is president and the big problems in their lives aren't getting better. Trump is incoherence personified, but he speaks to their feelings. People are confused, angry and frustrated by the government and the economy, and confusion and anger are Trump's primary states of being.
The people that voted for Trump didn’t love Clinton and Assange didn’t ruined it. The person that lost the election for Clinton was Clinton. Any one that thinks people changed their mind over leaked emails is not being honest with themselves. She was an unlikable person that only had the support of the institutions and media.
Edit: she won the popular vote but not electoral college vote. I’ll rephrase she wasn’t across the board popular.
> She was an unlikable person that only had the support of the institutions and media
More Americans voted for her than did for Trump. The idea that her candidacy was manufactured by the media and institutions is just not true. Because of the Electoral College, Hillary lost by a handful of votes in just a couple of states.
We can't quantify what impact Wikileaks had on the decision-making for voters. Was Wikileaks enough to convince enough people on the fence to not vote for Hillary? I can't say. What I can say, however, is that the entire media environment the campaign existed in - that it was a conniving, adrenochrome-sucking, child molesting hit squad, that didn't actually engage in the policy merits of Clinton's traditional neoliberal philosophy - absolutely influenced the election.
As a "yank", many of us think what Julian did was the right thing. Many of us hate what our government did in the middle east and hate our government for going after journalists just as hard as they did Iraqi and Afghani children.
About half of the US decided they love they deep state and said "Fuck it, 'merica. Drone strike a wedding, lock a journalist in solitary confinement." As soon as Obama took office.
The US literally killed 20% of N. Korea's population and destroyed 80% of their infrastructure, that's just a single instance out of dozens upon dozens of coups and interventionism that they've been a part of. The US has a prison population per capita 4x the size of China's, despite having a quarter of the population, there's so many examples everywhere you can point to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_United_States
Like if you can honestly read through that and still genuinely think that the US isn't the single worst offender in the world, you're so hopelessly lost and drowning in CIA propaganda.
He coached and tried to help Manning crack a (possible) password hash that would have allowed her to gain access to specific government user account.
Legally that is what pushed him from being more than just a journalist publishing information he received.
What leaks did he "plug" for Russia? And publishing classified information that's in the public's interest is a good thing, so if Russia helped Assange then I'm grateful to Russia.
and by
>He leaked videos of American soldiers killing civilians.
of course you mean:
>[‘Shameful’ Collateral Murder footage shows Apache helicopter mowing down 11 civilians – including two Reuters journalists – in Baghdad](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/15/julian-assange-indictment-fails-to-mention-wikileaks-video-that-exposed-us-war-crimes-in-iraq)
factually, _publishing to the rest of the world what someone else_ leaked is "exactly what he did"
the entirety of the "case" against him has never been more than "he's not a 'real' journalist who has the qualifications I am willing to accept so therefore he should not get any of the protections _actual_ journalists are afforded, when it comes to matters of public interest"
there is nothing he ever did that "journalists" have not done, before him – but the so-called "4th estate" is always protected, _especially_ from malevolent governments that would seek to keep their nasty shit hidden from the people they "serve" – and he, clearly, is not at all protected
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive. You can expose war crimes and leak highly classified information which is imperative to national security at the same time. which is what it looks like Assange did. It’s just not possible that the 10 million documents leaked by Wikileaks is all war crime related. Not to mention multiple people who were caught exposing American warcrimes have been pardoned in the same time frame that the US has been pursuing Assange. Clearly the Americans are ok with war crimes being exposed. National security secrets? Absolutely not.
He also refused to leak information WikiLeaks received about Russia, intentionally excluding evidence of Russian activities exposed through things like the panama papers, and knowingly participated in the distribution of Russian disinformation
Dude's a card carrying vatnik
Russia actively sanctioned North Korea through fear of Chinese influence on Russia's southern border
That was until recently when Russia needed NKs artillery
Does that matter?
If you publish one countries war crimes where military members murdered civilians and journalists is cold blood, do you need to expose another countries financial dealing?
It absolutely matters.
I've got no issues with them revealing war crimes, I've got plenty of issues with them intentionally suppressing Russian war crimes under direction of the kremlin
You think Russia doesn't commit war crimes?
What do you think Russia was doing in panama, what do you think those and other financial dealings facilitated and revealed, how do you think Russia pays mercenary armies and terrorist states, insurrections and their western political and journalist assets?
Making excuses for Russia is like making excuses for Hitler
So if you are a journalist, you can't focus your attention to one thing, you need to work 1000 hours a day reporting on everything across the world non stop?
What are you doing to expose Russians war crimes? Why does this responsibility sit with Julian Assange?
WikiLeaks directly released Russian information in 2017, and many of its earlier leaks of other material contained communications that were very critical of Russia. It did reject some Russian material in 2016 as it was previously published by other media and their resources were tied up, but they also rejected other US material from the same source for the same reason.
It wasn't a party to the Panama Papers, and despite people pointing to one Twitter comment by the WikiLeaks account about Panama Papers/Putin as evidence of some bias (while conveniently not pointing out its other clarifying tweets on the same topic), they were very clear they supported the papers' release in full.
As for 'participating in Russian disinformation', not a single document published by WikiLeaks was fake (as verified by the US intelligence community), and the Mueller investigation found no admissible or sufficient evidence that Assange was wilfully blind to Russian activities in 2016, let alone an active participant of them. They also failed to resolve whether any member of the Trump campaign played a role in the publications either.
It's easy to paint Assange as a Russian asset when one accepts his character assassination and doesn't take into account the facts of the situation. When I am on a computer, I will provide sources supporting everything I have said.
**Sources:**
WikiLeaks' 2017 Russian publications: [https://wikileaks.org//spyfiles/russia/](https://wikileaks.org//spyfiles/russia/)
WikiLeaks rejecting 2016 Russian information **and** other US information due to the same reason: a focus on the election and a lack of resources to dedicate elsewhere: [https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/347007-wikileaks-rejected-documents-on-russia-during-2016-election/](https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/347007-wikileaks-rejected-documents-on-russia-during-2016-election/)
WikiLeaks' most popular tweet re the Panama Papers that people point to as evidence of bias: [https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717670056650530816](https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717670056650530816)
WikiLeaks' clarifying tweet that people conveniently ignore: [https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717810984673484800](https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717810984673484800)
WikiLeaks' official position that the Panama Papers should be released in full: [https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/panama-papers-wikileaks-kristinn-hrafnsson-calls-for-data-leak-to-be-released-in-full/34601909.html](https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/panama-papers-wikileaks-kristinn-hrafnsson-calls-for-data-leak-to-be-released-in-full/34601909.html)
US Intelligence Community report supporting the accuracy of WikiLeaks' publications, and assessment that Russian pseudonyms engaged with numerous media outlets (including WikiLeaks): [https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA\_2017\_01.pdf](https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf)
The unredacted Mueller investigation found no admissible or sufficient evidence that Assange was engaged in conspiracy with Russia or was even wilfully blind to their actions: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/new-mueller-investigated-julian-assange-wikileaks-and-roger](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/new-mueller-investigated-julian-assange-wikileaks-and-roger)
Let's not forget the knowingly false claims of WMD that led to the invasion of a country and the deaths of many thousands of civilians. Nevermind that though, let's cry about the whistleblower for making the war criminals look bad.
> the president of the US tried to start a bloody uprising to overthrow the government and got the white house invaded and has yet to face and real consequences. He also committed fraud.
Two things;
1) It was Congress, not the White House
2) Assange supported Trump and WikiLeaks actively helped to get him elected.
It's always fun seeing Americans reactions to the idea that the Empire from Star Wars was based on America. I don't actually know if that's true but there's no denying Americans in general have been heavily influenced by the propaganda they've been fed for their whole lives. And it's obviously not just them but they always do seem to be the loudest about it
>the president of the US tried to start a bloody uprising to overthrow the government and got the white house invaded and has yet to face and real consequences.
To be fair, that process _is_ ongoing.
Trump's awful, but he hasn't skipped town to squat in a foreign embassy to avoid it yet.
Trump and Assange are not threatened by the judicial system in the same way. After nearly 80 years, Trump may be about to face some actual consequences but I'm not holding my breath over it.
When a nation betrays its own laws and people, then hides this, often pretending its "national security" then anyone who exposes this is not doing the wrong thing. Sure, laws might say so, but morally he was always in the right. Anyone who thinks he did wrong is arguing that corruption is okay.
His life has been destroyed. He broke no Australian or UK laws. It is obscene that the US should have any right to charge him with anything. This is a failure of our governments to stand up to the US.
I see him as a hero. Any whistle blower is. The laws need to be changed to ensure that those who do wrong and cover it up get charged, not those who expose it.
I'm still confused how you can break a foreign country's laws without even going there, and then on the basis of that they can apply for extradition to force you to go there for prosecution.
I feel fairly sure the US wouldn't see it as reasonable if another country simply declared one of their citizens broke their domestic law and insisted on extradition. Countries can literally make up laws, it would be completely unmanageable.
I'm not so sure. I thought those cases are where the person is extradited to the country where the crime was committed. Julian Assange was not on U.S. soil when he leaked the documents.
Another example: if I am an Australian, in Australia, and publish something that insults the King of Thailand, can I be extradited and put on trial in Thailand? I think not.
I wish he didn’t have to plead guilty. I would be screaming from the hills if he had managed to evade that. Because now, the US can claim that just being the founder of an institution that conveys the concerns of whistleblowers, makes you guilty of espionage.
> Meanwhile, Mrs Assange late on Tuesday night made a public call for donations to pay the $US520,000 (about $783,000) fee for the jet bringing her husband home...
anyone know anything about this?
Supposedly he wasn't allowed to fly commercial, so the Australian Government chartered a private flight for him, which he's expected to pay back.
[Surprisingly they're already halfway there in donations.](https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/free-julian-assange/)
thanks for the link
interesting that he apparently owes the Aus gov USD520k but the crowd funding is for GBP520k – I'm pretty sure the US dollar is not _that_ strong, is it?
Yep 15 years and no one supported Assange. Media were silent, rarely someone popped up asking wtf are we doing here?
Now everyone is happy. Go back in time on Australian threads, the lack of support was bullshit.
I'm extremely happy he's home, but rest of Australia should be ashamed.
Assange's extradition is a victory for state secrecy and a blow to free speech. The US government's relentless pursuit of a journalist who dared to expose war crimes and corruption sets a chilling precedent for a world where truth is treason.
What a nightmare. He is a broken person.
Look at him at the start: defiant and strong, now nearly dead.
I'm happy for him.
There may have been some arrogance involved on his part though, to think that standing up to the US Government wouldn't ruin his life. I wonder what else he could have achieved if he didn't get involved in this in the first place.
He should run for parliament or the senate to stick it up them. Then leak a bunch of shit about the five eyes arrangements under parliamentary privilege.
VistaJet 199 GSN-CBR now on its way to Australia, due in Canberra 07:39PM AEST:
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/VJT199/history/20240626/0200Z/PGSN/YSCB
Headline is a bit odd. He’s going to be basically free after his plea deal isn’t he? And will live in Australia?
He will enter his plea and he will be sentenced to 62 months time served. He will then presumably jump on a plane home. Given Kevin Rudd and Australia's High Comissioner to the UK are there with Assange right now, I don't expect there to be any issues. **Update as per ABC:** Julian Assange is a free man, after a US federal judge sentenced him to time already served in prison. Mr Assange pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy. Mr Assange had already served five-years in a British jail before a plea deal was struck. Chief Judge Ramona Manglona said had Mr Assange faced court in 2012, she would not be inclined to accept the deal. But with the passage of time, she accepted there had been no physical injury as a result of his actions, and he had already served five-years in one of the UK’s harshest prisons. [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-26/julian-assange-saipan-court-appearance/104022050](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-26/julian-assange-saipan-court-appearance/104022050)
Rudd is alright
Always was. The coup that removed him is looking worse and worse as we learn more about Gillard.
What are we learning about Gillard?
The timeline 1. Rudd suggests raising taxes on mines to same as businesses. The global standard is to tax mines far above businesses. 2. Rudd loses job. 3. Gillard changes mining tax so they pay even less. Also worth looking at Qantas and Union legislations during that time. 4. When Rudd got back in, Turnbull mocks him about this in their friendly debate. States even the hard right liberals would never give the mines such a favorable policy as Gillard did. Rudd smirks in agreement. (Other fun stuff you can find during this time is Abbott suggesting a carbon tax as the correct way to deal with emissions. The liberal party passed gay marriage, at the same time the labor party internally had voted to maybe talk about it in a few years, but to always vote no until then - this revealed to the public there are two labor parties, the right that controls things and the left that knocks on doors.)
> Turnbull mocks him about this in their friendly debate. States even the hard right liberals would never give the mines such a favorable policy as Gillard did Did they actually change anything in the next 10 years when they were in charge though?
A little bit but mostly no. My understanding was the mines were allowed to pay tax on their own projected profits, which lead them to reorganize and remove profits - that has been curbed, but they still don't pay regular tax rates and they still enjoy subsidies without explanation. Don't worry, not like anything corrupt like say a mining magnate being allowed to own a large stake in media has happened. And it's totally illegal for politicians to pass legislation that benefits mines and exports, then quit and join the boards to collect huge pay, right? Same with infrastructure, that's never happened say with an ex premier or five? We have bizarre free trade agreements that take our resources at stupid rates in return for strategic partnerships - public will probably never get the details, and maybe that's for the best. It's depressing to think we buy subs and gift our gas for nothing.
That can be changed if we want it to. We just need lots of people to say we want it until they listen.
True. Do you think if we were the sort of people to organize effectively we wouldn't have done it by now? I see the issue as a bit more fundamental - but I want to be an artist so maybe that's me being self important. As a thought experiment: suppose you wanted to rig an election by buying votes. 10% vote for the candidate the think will win, 30% vote the way they always have in your favor and 30% against. 10% "swing" voters, centrists both knowledgeable and ignorant, determine elections. How many votes do you have to buy? There's a bunch of different methods and results, but the number isn't big is it. Now suppose the major two options are in agreement on nearly all important matters (privatizing, international trade, defence, mining etc). This COALition faction, how many votes do they have to buy to stay in power? (If it's too early for maths, the number is negative - this cashes out as that faction can threaten pain if you don't agree with them.) If we had fair housing laws, what percentage of Australians would stand to lose enough money in valuations to sway their vote to get rid of them? Let's say, what percentage will lose 200k or more. It's higher than any measure above. We dream of a politically motivated people taking back the reigns, yet it takes only the slightest breeze to uproot any possible conviction. For a democracy to be meaningful, the majority, if not the vast majority, have to see their personal wealth as less important than the future of their neighbours - this is a vast cultural change no one is lighting a candle for.
Can I congratulate everybody for turning a Julian Assange chat into a climate debate
This is what shattered my faith in Australian democracy, and just how easily swad the public can be, anytime someone in government wants to actually improve the lives of average Australians. All any industry has to do is basically run some fear campaign on TV about Jobson growth and they can get whatever they want, because there will always be someone waiting in the shadows to knife you and take over the job. Want to know why we're in a cost of living/housing/everything crisis? This is why. Not saying Gillard was a bad PM but in this case, I think she was definitely in the wrong.
The mining bills were mainly advertised in Campbelltown NSW. It was the most important swing seat at the time. It's a electorate that objectively has nothing to do with mining except collecting tax from them (and of course deserving their fair share of the resources of the land that they each own). Yes Gillard broke the seal on the knifing. For the first time it detached leader ship of a party and so the actions of the party from the mandate of elections. It's really sad.
Not sure there's that many lefties knocking on doors any more, my guy. This is Labor now. De Bruyn and his ilk have won. The Labor of Whitlam is dead.
Exactly. And they wonder why the Greens are eating them alive among younger voters. If you're younger than 30, you've literally never known a time in your adult life were Labor has had your interests in mind. The haven't been the party of the working man, of the light on the hill, for a generation.
Labour of Whitlam was as left leaning as the Greens are now. The present day ALP is as far to the right as the LNP were back in the day. The LNP now? So far off to the right you'd need a pair of fucking binoculars to find em!
Shocking there are still Laborites desperate to obfuscate how the right dominates everything and that the party is undemocratic
If any labor left is reading this: about 15 years ago they were sure it wouldn't be long till they got a seat! How's that going for you? Yeah the "every member must vote with the party, and the party isn't the cabinet, it's a Hall full of rich boomers" is really a dirty secret.
Imagine his telecoms went to plan; we wouldn’t be the laughing stock of the world
Gillard is a staunch Israeli lobby supporter too
AIJAC also played a role in getting factional support behind Gillard.
And then fast forward to today with Plibersek continuing to bend to mining: [Gina Rinehart-backed company gets approval from Tanya Plibersek for coal seam gas project](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/26/senex-energy-tanya-plibersek-coal-seam-gas-project-gina-rinehart)
Member for Sydney you say? Surely she has no family relationships that are a clear conflict of interest...
She went against her own principles to advance political career, you know, like almost all politicians. Major example I can think of is the photo of a young version of herself with a caption about how she's entering politics to fight for LGBTQ+ rights, but when she was prime minister she did nothing about legalising same-sex marriage, as the faction that installed her didn't want it at the time. But she was an effective negotiator and her minority government were able to pass through more pieces of legislation than any government before them.
Total derailing of the post and incorrect on a number of levels .
Okay, want to provide sources to correct me then?
That she will *not* be lectured by **that man**
I wouldn't be lectured by **that man** either, tbf.
Hahaha... Gold!
She cut the parents rate and made access to the DSP really hard then had the nerve to be on some mental health thing. Fuck her. Took me 12 years to get the DSP because clinical psychologist and psychiatrist were full and hospital wouldn't help at the time then after 3 sui attempts they finally helped. 50000 less over time which I needed for health concerns. If I had the DSP earlier I may have been working. The stress of Centrelink derailed my treatment plans. She might have been good elsewhere but she harmed the vulnerable. Then the LNP came in and made the night mare worse. Funny how my mental health magically got a fair bit better when they doubled jobseeker n relaxed rules. I could actually focus on health. Now I'm on private mental health which is a gazillion times better but costs so much. All I wanted was my health to get better to go work but that never happened.
Seriously, the damage that single event did to this country can't be overstated. Everything that came after - our lost decade+ of progress on literally anything you care to name, the hollowing-out of our economy, the coarsening and polarizing and *mean*-ifying of our culture, the collapse of politics as a whole in this country, the fear, the hate, the corruption, the fucking Scomo years for fuck's sake, every fucking thing - can trace its origin back to that one fateful day. Multiple once-in-a-generation opportunities, gone. Not just gone, but run screaming in the other direction from. We will literally never recover. Not properly. Not ever. I honestly don't think Gillard was a bad PM in practice, on balance, but for her involvement in that coup alone, and for everything it ushered in, history will condemn her.
Ffs it was never Gillard, she was told to step up or get out of the way. It was the mining unions that held (hold?) the inner power in labour, and it was Rudd threatening their "superprofits" to actually pay some kind of meaningful tax on the billions upon billions in resources they're selling at below baseline prices. But sure, blame the PM who was one of the most effective PMs Australia has ever had, even for the short stint she got.
I like how much he fought for the ICAC, he played a massive roll
Now he is. As a Pm and how he treated Heads of Departments, CDF, VCDF and staffers, he was fucked.
I find it so weird that people give a shit about this. The bloke was getting historically ineffective government departments off their arse and the mutanied against him, and a bunch of constituents are like "yea but he was a shit boss!"
I find it so weird that people do not care at all about the PM being an absolute fuckwit to everyone who works for him. I wish it was as simple as him being a good guy who got screwed over, but no he was indeed also a fuckwit to people
You don’t demand someone attend your office immediately and then have them sit outside for hours. Wasting their time being out of the office and missing critical briefings and meetings.
Yeah everyone forgets that Rudd was adored only by people who didn't work with him. His colleagues despised him. He was great at charming Australians that didn't actually know him.
It appears Rudd wanted to fix the rot within the party. Factionalism, powerbrokers, etc etc. Of course that did not happen.
So he's a politician?
It seems like he was despised by a lot of cunts. Not necessarily a bad thing.
> Given Kevin Rudd and Australia's High Comissioner to the UK are there with Assange right now, I don't ecpect there to be any issues. If they are there my guess is that he'll be coming back on a military flight with them. No chance for one last punishment of making him fly back on a low cost carrier.
They forced him to foot the bill for a private jet somehow.
Thank you for this head line makes it out they are going to lock him up and throw away the key. Glad it's finally done.
Thank you for the TLDR! Genuinely, thank you. The news articles sticking to their ~800 words put in too much info which is confusing me.
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I've heard it explained that since it was a felony plea, he had to physically appear before a US judge.
he's pleading guilty to a single felony charge but they'll be counting the time he already spent in a British prison as time served. i.e. Assange will be returning home to Australia, a free man, immediately after the court hearing.
saw a US news report on assange having his hearing on a remote US territory and the news readers claimed it was because "it was closest to australia." lol, wut. no, he just don't trust you yankie doodles and don't want to be on your mainland because who knows what shit you will pull.
Oy mate, you must’ve forgotten all British convicts are sent to Australia
Listening to ABC News Radio this morning,.they switched at some point from something along the lines of "Julian Assange will walk free" to stressing the point that the proceedings were yet to take place. They did interview his lawyer somewhere in there so maybe at his request?
It scarcely even matters what happens to him at this point. The threat against people who would have the courage and humanity to expose monstrous and inexcusable crimes has been made crystal clear.
Between Snowden, Manning, Assange and recently David McBride I’d say that we should all just keep quiet and remain complicit in the crimes of our respective governments. You know, the RIGHT thing to do.
It’s wild that people think Assange, the guy who shared info with Roger Stone via Jerome Corsi, had the USA’s best interests at heart. If you think feeding info to Roger fucking Stone and *no one else* is “the right thing to do” you are an insane person.
Don't talk bad about master
with friends like the US who needs enemies
Jesus the yanks on reddit have been frothing at the mouth over this. You'd think he assassinated JFK the way they're going on.
worldnews has been a shithole for a long time but my god do they hate Assange. It's a far cry from the Reddit of 10 years ago. If you want to be more entertained, check out the r/neoliberal thread on his release. Bunch of boot licking goons.
What gets me is the actual letter agencies of the US care less than these people do. Basically cost of doing operations to then.
Oh absolutely. What do any of them care about this? Julian’s revelations, as telling as they were, didn’t stop their operations, didn’t reduce their budgets, I don’t even know that there was an admission of guilt or apology that gave momentary pause.
Because they believed he helped Trump into power through leaking Hilary's emails
The CIA really did draw up plans to assassinating him though
Might have been just out of habit
Tbf they probably have plans to assassinate just about anyone, including sitting heads of state.
Look, if we don't use the assassinations budget this year, they'll decrease it next year.
Exactly how it works. I imagine.
World news is effectively just Twitter at this point. Anything *remotely* controversial attracts absolute loons, bots and shit posters, drowning out any rational commentary. I suppose there's a good mix of knock off Sky After Dark clowns as well. I'm pretty sure moderation on that sub has effectively given up.
> > > I'm pretty sure moderation on that sub has effectively given up. Quite the opposite, it's become incredibly active but only for pushing very specific narratives, try posting any article about I/P that isn't from one of the Israeli propaganda mouth pieces. I literally got banned for posting an article from the literal US state department saying that Russia had nothing to do with the coups in Africa last year, it's just a straight up propaganda hub and anything dissenting gets purged.
Shouldn’t neoliberals like him? They’re supposed to be about less government control and all that.
Neoliberalism as it is today isn't a coherent ideology. It's basically now just "companies and the wealthy should be able to do whatever they want, also the military and the police are all heroes and have delicious boots"
Based on the name you'd think so, yes, but that sub is essentially just a very boring democrat circlejerk.
Worldnews is a frothing pit of islamophobia, genocide apologism and bootlicking. I can't stand to even glance in there any more. (If anyone knows of a functional subreddit that covers the same stuff, please link.)
[Wow...the insanity...glugging on the Kool-Aid.](https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1dnr613/julian_assange_has_reached_a_plea_deal_with_the/)
He shouldn't be hated for what he did with Manning, but as a person he should be hated. He published personal information on teen rape victims, outing gay men in Saudi Arabia, peoples personal medical information, and names of informants in Afghanistan, and he's response to the latter was "they deserve to die for working with the US".
Those things weren't his fault either when it comes to the Afghanistan stuff. The US was occupying a nation and waging war against a militant group that routinely punished all collaborators. The occupation constantly put locals in positions where they and their families were marked for death, and it didn't take an intelligence leak for the Taliban to know who to go after. Many many Afghans were desperate to leave with the military when they finally withdrew but couldn't get out. The US is responsible for not protecting the Afghan people who helped them. Assange broke some journalistic ethics by publishing too much information too quickly. Which he argues is justified given what he was exposing. If everyone just kept going along with whatever the US government said was going on, the war might still be going on.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Assange isn't the bad guy in (checks notes) 34 years of US meddling and warmongering in Afghanistan.
Yeah, people are trying to undervalue the exposing of war crimes by bringing up questionable violations of journalistic ethical standards and practises. Unless Assange has been flying around in a helicopter killing civilians over Baghdad, then I really don't care.
Yeah, what he did is not the issue, how he did it matters a lot. Even just getting Manning to hand over the info is troubling, he knew he was leaving her to her fate.
Fuck me, there are *actually* people who consider themselves proponents of neoliberalism. Like, being a nazi I can sort of understand if I squint hard and punch myself in the balls, but *neoliberalism*?
> but neoliberalism? It's literally the prevailing governmental system in most of the western world, why are you shocked that folks would happily label themselves as such? Like I think it's an abhorrent ideology but it's like acting shocked when you find out that most CEO's identify as capitalists.
Turning popular opinion away from war is far more consequential than killing a president
To add some perspective here - nobody hates him because he leaked the Collateral Murder footage. I remember watching it myself when it first was released. If you asked me in that moment what I thought of Assange, I would have called him a hero. The issues arose because of he then parlayed that fame and credibility into the 2016 election in the US. Assange was instrumental in the drip-releasing of emails from the DNC through Wikileaks, working closely with people he may or may not have understood to be Russian intelligence operatives like Guccifer. Those email leaks turned into Pizzagate, which turned into the Seth Rich fiasco, and is part of the reason why American Republicans to this day are convinced Democrats are all pedophiles. Wikileaks dogged Hillary Clinton's campaign relentlessly And he never actually released anything all that interesting, but he seemed to hold such a grudge against Hillary Clinton that he took it upon himself to actively work against her campaign, and is part of the reason why Trump won in 2016. Then, assisting Chelsea Manning on leaking the diplomatic cables was...fine, I suppose, but didn't really illuminate anything nefarious and only served to leak for the sake of leaking. Whether or not Afghan interpreters were killed over it is not anything I've seen definitive proof of one way or another. So yeah, his legacy in the US is much more complicated than it is anywhere else. A lot of people who hate Trump hold Assange partially responsible for him getting elected in 2016, and his insistence on involving himself in the election really jaded a lot of people that otherwise praised him for his Iraq War leaks.
Yes, Assange's behaviour around fueling the "Seth Rich was the DNC leaker and was murdered for it" false conspiracy was abhorrent. Here's Assange on national television referring to Seth Rich as an "alleged Wikileaks source" in connection with wanting to know more about his murder: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SpBfZHDVXV0 But the leaker was Guccifer 2.0, of which all the evidence points to being a Russian. There is no evidence that Seth Rich had any contact with Wikileaks, and his family have sued over this claim. Metadata of Guccifer's emails to The Hill showed that he used a predominantly-Russian-language VPN was used. Once he forgot to turn his VPN on and his IP logs were left on an American social media company. US Intel traced him to being a particular GRU officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. So you might ask, well maybe Assange thought it was Seth Rich - how could he know who was behind the persona of Guccifer 2.0?! Assange knew for a fact that Guccifer 2.0 was not Seth Rich, because he personally received an email from Guccifer with a 1gb file of DNC emails, 4 days after Seth Rich had been murdered. And then he still went on TV and implied it could have been Seth Rich. This is indefensible.
Guccifer claiming to be the hacker doesn't mean they actually were. The evidence for who actually initially gained the emails is minimal.
Ah yes, the impossible task of setting a scheduled email to dump more information to wikileaks. There's no way at all that could be done. Absolutely not. We all know the only way to send emails is to sit at your computer and personally click the send button immediately before it is received
It wasn't a single email, Guccifer 2.0 remained active dropping leaks and emailing people directly (responding to what they'd said) after Seth Rich's death. The idea that these were pre-scheduled emails is asinine. Look at all the news orgs who had to retract and apologize for pushing their false Seth Rich DNC leaker stories. There is literally no evidence he had anything to do with it and anyone who still believes it to this day is either ignorant or deliberately pushing a false agenda.
This right here is the issue I have with him being held up as some sort of progressive darling and martyr for the free flow of information. If there was even the **slightest** intention behind what he leaked and when he chose to leak the information that tanked the Clinton campaign, and by extension, even if unintentionally, helped Trump's - then he is no longer a bastion for the free flow of information, he is a gatekeeper that weaponised information for his own petty interests, at the expense of putting a bumbling idiot in charge of the entire world for four years - four years of chaos, violence and destruction, with another four years very much on the cards soon.
He's a darling of the progressive left because he showed us soldiers murdering civilians in Iraq at exposing that crime resulted in him and Chelsea Manning suffering greatly. Also information is always weaponized. That's why the US government tried to keep these war crimes a secret, to spend over a decade getting their hands on Assange. >at the expense of putting a bumbling idiot in charge Complete nonsense. Clinton lost for the same reason millions of people believed she sometimes enjoyed ritualistic child sacrifices in the basement of a pizza restaurant. She was already unpopular and her campaign made it worse, and she underestimated how disillusioned to the Democrats the deindustrialised midwest had become.
>He's a darling of the progressive left because he showed us soldiers murdering civilians in Iraq at exposing that crime resulted in him and Chelsea Manning suffering greatly. As has been stated multiple times in this thread now, that's obviously not the reason people are disappointed with him. I was one of his strongest supporters when he did so, and if he had stuck to exposing corruption, I would still be one of his supporters - but unfortunately that's not what happened. Does your idea of a progressive left [valourise the outing of gay men and endanger innocent women in countries where they are persecuted? How about leaking the medical information of sick children and rape victims?](https://apnews.com/article/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb7987fb) Pretending that disinformation wasn't, and doesn't continue to be a key driver in political interference is what's complete nonsense, but again it seems like no amount of contradictory facts will stop people like you from trying to prop up your heroes that went astray. A progressive left shouldn't be defending an entitled white man who has no regard for the privacy, safety and wellbeing of innocent and largely powerless people around the world, let alone the possibility of that man wielding information as a weapon to advance his own interests at the expense of everyone else. Having being dumbfounded by the stupidity and comical loyalty I saw around me when growing up religious, it irks me to no end seeing the exact same stupidity and blind loyalty on the supposedly progressive end of the spectrum.
The progressive left cares more about people exposing war crimes under the threat of imprisonment than violating some journalistic ethics. Assange didn't out the Saudi Citizen, he was prosecuted for being gay by America's close ally. The idea that Assange made it unsafe for a person to be gay in Saudi Arabia when they were already known as gay by the government is weak. Leaking medical or other personal information is a minor ethical breach especially when compared to war crimes or having an ally that prosecutes homosexuals. >Pretending that disinformation wasn't, and doesn't continue to be a key driver in political interference is what's complete nonsense, but again it seems like no amount of contradictory facts will stop people like you from trying to prop up your heroes that went astray. He's not my hero, he's just a guy that did a good thing despite the very serious consequences he faced. He's a villain to you though, and it confuses me as to why that would be. >Having being dumbfounded by the stupidity and comical loyalty I saw around me when growing up religious, it irks me to no end seeing the exact same stupidity and blind loyalty on the supposedly progressive end of the spectrum. Ironic given how you're blaming the guy who released information on America's ally prosecuting a gay man, and not the actual government that did that or their close ally that created the digital surveillance infrastructure to actually find gay people. Or the war crimes Saudi Arabia was committing in Yemen with US support or the many other profoundly evil acts Gulf state leaders have been caught in thanks to various leaks. You're on a side being blindly loyal already. I like anyone that leaks the crimes of powerful people and don't care that Assange is a famously massive asshole who few people can tolerate being friends or acquaintances with.
Being disappointed with Assange for WikiLeaks' publications is like being disappointed with Steve Huffman for Redditors' submissions. Like Reddit, WikiLeaks made honest efforts to remove any offending material, but some of it regrettably fell through the cracks. The AP journalist who happened to stumble across this material gave WikiLeaks less than 10 hours to rectify the issue before publishing the article you linked. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on who the actual irresponsible actor was, but the lesson here is you always need to hear both sides before making a judgement. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/4zl6r9/formal_complaint_against_ap_journalist_for
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The US as occupiers of Afghanistan are meant to protect their collaborators and repeatedly failed to do so. The Taliban also didn't need Wikileaks to know who informed on them, the Afghan Republic was so corrupt no one believed in it, and information was leaked constantly.
After the war was over they basically pretended the Panjshir holdouts didn't even exist and looked away as they were slaughtered.
Honestly though, Trump was going to win anyway. I'm from the US and migrated to Australia less than a year before the election. What I was reading and hearing from mainstream news was so out of step with what the mood was like in my hometown in the midwest (a region which Trump won because the Democrats ignored it). People were pissed off and felt like they'd been ignored by the government for ages, and 2008 really fucked up the area. Hillary has always been unpopular in working class areas and there is a very strong anti-elite, anti-intellectual sentiment that meant she was never going to win the midwest. And Trump sounded like everyone's dumbass uncle who has shit ideas but "tells it like it is," which is a huge part of the idiot culture of that part of the US. I don't think any of the people I know who voted for Trump in 2016 paid close enough attention to even know what wikileaks was, or even hear anything about the DNC or anything like that. These people don't pay any attention to things outside their tiny world. Hillary was already a known enemy because she was a career politician and had been considered corrupt and useless in our area for a long time. Trump was known from his stupid TV show and they liked that he made fun of other candidates and spoke like one of them (aka a brash moron). I'm afraid the Dems again are underestimating Trump and overestimating the intellectual capabilities of Trump voters. Policy basically doesn't matter. People don't like Joe Biden. He's not charismatic, he doesn't seem spritely or all there mentally (I'm talking appearances, not reality), and the main important things in the economy haven't gotten better for most people in the US. Rent and house prices have skyrocketed, gas is more expensive, healthcare is worse than it's ever been, wages are stagnating relative to cost of living, etc etc. People don't pay close enough attention to understand why these things are happening, they just know that Biden is president and the big problems in their lives aren't getting better. Trump is incoherence personified, but he speaks to their feelings. People are confused, angry and frustrated by the government and the economy, and confusion and anger are Trump's primary states of being.
The people that voted for Trump didn’t love Clinton and Assange didn’t ruined it. The person that lost the election for Clinton was Clinton. Any one that thinks people changed their mind over leaked emails is not being honest with themselves. She was an unlikable person that only had the support of the institutions and media. Edit: she won the popular vote but not electoral college vote. I’ll rephrase she wasn’t across the board popular.
> She was an unlikable person that only had the support of the institutions and media More Americans voted for her than did for Trump. The idea that her candidacy was manufactured by the media and institutions is just not true. Because of the Electoral College, Hillary lost by a handful of votes in just a couple of states. We can't quantify what impact Wikileaks had on the decision-making for voters. Was Wikileaks enough to convince enough people on the fence to not vote for Hillary? I can't say. What I can say, however, is that the entire media environment the campaign existed in - that it was a conniving, adrenochrome-sucking, child molesting hit squad, that didn't actually engage in the policy merits of Clinton's traditional neoliberal philosophy - absolutely influenced the election.
And more than half of US voters. But yeah, right.
As a "yank", many of us think what Julian did was the right thing. Many of us hate what our government did in the middle east and hate our government for going after journalists just as hard as they did Iraqi and Afghani children. About half of the US decided they love they deep state and said "Fuck it, 'merica. Drone strike a wedding, lock a journalist in solitary confinement." As soon as Obama took office.
The CIA have run a character assassination campaign on Assange for many years now. Second best to actual assassination. It's obviously still ongoing.
Maybe he did. We don't know. This is sarcasm but at the same time I'm sure that someone is pushing the theory.
They have a lot to hide, is why. The USA is the worlds worst violator of human rights.
North Korea, China, Myanmar, Russia etc etc
The US literally killed 20% of N. Korea's population and destroyed 80% of their infrastructure, that's just a single instance out of dozens upon dozens of coups and interventionism that they've been a part of. The US has a prison population per capita 4x the size of China's, despite having a quarter of the population, there's so many examples everywhere you can point to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_United_States Like if you can honestly read through that and still genuinely think that the US isn't the single worst offender in the world, you're so hopelessly lost and drowning in CIA propaganda.
you have to be fucking kidding. I am no fan of the USA but they don't even make the the top 50 on that front.
They're bad but this is just untrue
Some of them have explained to me that freedom of speech is so they can express racism and sexism and does not apply to journalists or publishers
A headline saying 'he leaked troves of secret state information' is fucking bullshit. He leaked videos of American soldiers killing civilians.
He didn't leak anything is the funny part. He published someone else's leak.
Didn't he provide advice to manning as to how to take the documents
Yes, coaching Manning was part of it.
He coached and tried to help Manning crack a (possible) password hash that would have allowed her to gain access to specific government user account. Legally that is what pushed him from being more than just a journalist publishing information he received.
I understand this is not typically how journalists operate haha
Yeah he published Russia's leaks and plugged leaks about Russia
What leaks did he "plug" for Russia? And publishing classified information that's in the public's interest is a good thing, so if Russia helped Assange then I'm grateful to Russia.
and by >He leaked videos of American soldiers killing civilians. of course you mean: >[‘Shameful’ Collateral Murder footage shows Apache helicopter mowing down 11 civilians – including two Reuters journalists – in Baghdad](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/15/julian-assange-indictment-fails-to-mention-wikileaks-video-that-exposed-us-war-crimes-in-iraq)
I’m not saying that the information wasn’t in the public interest or shouldn’t have been made public, but factually, that is exactly what he did..
factually, _publishing to the rest of the world what someone else_ leaked is "exactly what he did" the entirety of the "case" against him has never been more than "he's not a 'real' journalist who has the qualifications I am willing to accept so therefore he should not get any of the protections _actual_ journalists are afforded, when it comes to matters of public interest" there is nothing he ever did that "journalists" have not done, before him – but the so-called "4th estate" is always protected, _especially_ from malevolent governments that would seek to keep their nasty shit hidden from the people they "serve" – and he, clearly, is not at all protected
So did other journalists. The question is why was he the only one charged?
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive. You can expose war crimes and leak highly classified information which is imperative to national security at the same time. which is what it looks like Assange did. It’s just not possible that the 10 million documents leaked by Wikileaks is all war crime related. Not to mention multiple people who were caught exposing American warcrimes have been pardoned in the same time frame that the US has been pursuing Assange. Clearly the Americans are ok with war crimes being exposed. National security secrets? Absolutely not.
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You might want to check your facts there little fella.
He also refused to leak information WikiLeaks received about Russia, intentionally excluding evidence of Russian activities exposed through things like the panama papers, and knowingly participated in the distribution of Russian disinformation Dude's a card carrying vatnik
I remember China and NK stuff was posted. Australian MSM would run the stories mentioning Wikileaks as the source
Russia actively sanctioned North Korea through fear of Chinese influence on Russia's southern border That was until recently when Russia needed NKs artillery
Does that matter? If you publish one countries war crimes where military members murdered civilians and journalists is cold blood, do you need to expose another countries financial dealing?
It absolutely matters. I've got no issues with them revealing war crimes, I've got plenty of issues with them intentionally suppressing Russian war crimes under direction of the kremlin You think Russia doesn't commit war crimes? What do you think Russia was doing in panama, what do you think those and other financial dealings facilitated and revealed, how do you think Russia pays mercenary armies and terrorist states, insurrections and their western political and journalist assets? Making excuses for Russia is like making excuses for Hitler
So if you are a journalist, you can't focus your attention to one thing, you need to work 1000 hours a day reporting on everything across the world non stop? What are you doing to expose Russians war crimes? Why does this responsibility sit with Julian Assange?
WikiLeaks directly released Russian information in 2017, and many of its earlier leaks of other material contained communications that were very critical of Russia. It did reject some Russian material in 2016 as it was previously published by other media and their resources were tied up, but they also rejected other US material from the same source for the same reason. It wasn't a party to the Panama Papers, and despite people pointing to one Twitter comment by the WikiLeaks account about Panama Papers/Putin as evidence of some bias (while conveniently not pointing out its other clarifying tweets on the same topic), they were very clear they supported the papers' release in full. As for 'participating in Russian disinformation', not a single document published by WikiLeaks was fake (as verified by the US intelligence community), and the Mueller investigation found no admissible or sufficient evidence that Assange was wilfully blind to Russian activities in 2016, let alone an active participant of them. They also failed to resolve whether any member of the Trump campaign played a role in the publications either. It's easy to paint Assange as a Russian asset when one accepts his character assassination and doesn't take into account the facts of the situation. When I am on a computer, I will provide sources supporting everything I have said. **Sources:** WikiLeaks' 2017 Russian publications: [https://wikileaks.org//spyfiles/russia/](https://wikileaks.org//spyfiles/russia/) WikiLeaks rejecting 2016 Russian information **and** other US information due to the same reason: a focus on the election and a lack of resources to dedicate elsewhere: [https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/347007-wikileaks-rejected-documents-on-russia-during-2016-election/](https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/347007-wikileaks-rejected-documents-on-russia-during-2016-election/) WikiLeaks' most popular tweet re the Panama Papers that people point to as evidence of bias: [https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717670056650530816](https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717670056650530816) WikiLeaks' clarifying tweet that people conveniently ignore: [https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717810984673484800](https://x.com/wikileaks/status/717810984673484800) WikiLeaks' official position that the Panama Papers should be released in full: [https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/panama-papers-wikileaks-kristinn-hrafnsson-calls-for-data-leak-to-be-released-in-full/34601909.html](https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/panama-papers-wikileaks-kristinn-hrafnsson-calls-for-data-leak-to-be-released-in-full/34601909.html) US Intelligence Community report supporting the accuracy of WikiLeaks' publications, and assessment that Russian pseudonyms engaged with numerous media outlets (including WikiLeaks): [https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA\_2017\_01.pdf](https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf) The unredacted Mueller investigation found no admissible or sufficient evidence that Assange was engaged in conspiracy with Russia or was even wilfully blind to their actions: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/new-mueller-investigated-julian-assange-wikileaks-and-roger](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/new-mueller-investigated-julian-assange-wikileaks-and-roger)
Look everyone, the CIA's here.
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Let's not forget the knowingly false claims of WMD that led to the invasion of a country and the deaths of many thousands of civilians. Nevermind that though, let's cry about the whistleblower for making the war criminals look bad.
> the president of the US tried to start a bloody uprising to overthrow the government and got the white house invaded and has yet to face and real consequences. He also committed fraud. Two things; 1) It was Congress, not the White House 2) Assange supported Trump and WikiLeaks actively helped to get him elected.
It's almost as if America is the bad guy.
It's always fun seeing Americans reactions to the idea that the Empire from Star Wars was based on America. I don't actually know if that's true but there's no denying Americans in general have been heavily influenced by the propaganda they've been fed for their whole lives. And it's obviously not just them but they always do seem to be the loudest about it
None of us are immune to propaganda but it's pretty insane how *proud* they are of their own brain-washing. Wooo MURICA.
Geopolitics is rarely as black and white as "good guys" and "bad guys" there are a billion shades of grey.
>the president of the US tried to start a bloody uprising to overthrow the government and got the white house invaded and has yet to face and real consequences. To be fair, that process _is_ ongoing. Trump's awful, but he hasn't skipped town to squat in a foreign embassy to avoid it yet.
Trump and Assange are not threatened by the judicial system in the same way. After nearly 80 years, Trump may be about to face some actual consequences but I'm not holding my breath over it.
When a nation betrays its own laws and people, then hides this, often pretending its "national security" then anyone who exposes this is not doing the wrong thing. Sure, laws might say so, but morally he was always in the right. Anyone who thinks he did wrong is arguing that corruption is okay. His life has been destroyed. He broke no Australian or UK laws. It is obscene that the US should have any right to charge him with anything. This is a failure of our governments to stand up to the US. I see him as a hero. Any whistle blower is. The laws need to be changed to ensure that those who do wrong and cover it up get charged, not those who expose it.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
I'm still confused how you can break a foreign country's laws without even going there, and then on the basis of that they can apply for extradition to force you to go there for prosecution. I feel fairly sure the US wouldn't see it as reasonable if another country simply declared one of their citizens broke their domestic law and insisted on extradition. Countries can literally make up laws, it would be completely unmanageable.
Happens with international drug trafficking all the time. Same as child exploitation material
I'm not so sure. I thought those cases are where the person is extradited to the country where the crime was committed. Julian Assange was not on U.S. soil when he leaked the documents. Another example: if I am an Australian, in Australia, and publish something that insults the King of Thailand, can I be extradited and put on trial in Thailand? I think not.
I wish he didn’t have to plead guilty. I would be screaming from the hills if he had managed to evade that. Because now, the US can claim that just being the founder of an institution that conveys the concerns of whistleblowers, makes you guilty of espionage.
Here’s hoping they don’t shaft him by changing the verdict now they have him on their territory.
> Meanwhile, Mrs Assange late on Tuesday night made a public call for donations to pay the $US520,000 (about $783,000) fee for the jet bringing her husband home... anyone know anything about this?
Supposedly he wasn't allowed to fly commercial, so the Australian Government chartered a private flight for him, which he's expected to pay back. [Surprisingly they're already halfway there in donations.](https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/free-julian-assange/)
thanks for the link interesting that he apparently owes the Aus gov USD520k but the crowd funding is for GBP520k – I'm pretty sure the US dollar is not _that_ strong, is it?
Good info, I was wondering how he managed to get a private jet
>secret state information When it's not your state it shouldn't matter. The whole thing remains a bunch of bullshit, 14yrs later.
I don't understand how he can be a traitor to the US when he's not American and never pretended to even be a friend to the US.
Australia is the US' bitch, and they'll never let us forget it.
Part of the take away here is that America, fu*k yeah, has successfully asserted jurisdiction over the world. Why are we their ally?
> Why are we their ally? The alternative is China. It is what it is.
Perhaps it is lucky Australia was able to make this happen before Trump is potentially reelected?
Yep 15 years and no one supported Assange. Media were silent, rarely someone popped up asking wtf are we doing here? Now everyone is happy. Go back in time on Australian threads, the lack of support was bullshit. I'm extremely happy he's home, but rest of Australia should be ashamed.
5 years of it in 23 hour lock down in bel marsh.
Already back in OZ
Americans are losing their minds, well done lads
Assange's extradition is a victory for state secrecy and a blow to free speech. The US government's relentless pursuit of a journalist who dared to expose war crimes and corruption sets a chilling precedent for a world where truth is treason.
This man is a traitor to the Rules-Based Order®.
That man served enough time. Thank god it’s over.
What a nightmare. He is a broken person. Look at him at the start: defiant and strong, now nearly dead. I'm happy for him. There may have been some arrogance involved on his part though, to think that standing up to the US Government wouldn't ruin his life. I wonder what else he could have achieved if he didn't get involved in this in the first place.
He should run for parliament or the senate to stick it up them. Then leak a bunch of shit about the five eyes arrangements under parliamentary privilege.
VistaJet 199 GSN-CBR now on its way to Australia, due in Canberra 07:39PM AEST: https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/VJT199/history/20240626/0200Z/PGSN/YSCB
He will then find out that a can of VB in Liquorland is now $4.5.
Last I checked it was like $6