Innocent until proven guilty.
But in the meantime: medicated into oblivion so he can't adequately defend himself.
"Concern for his mental health" is just an excuse for "medically lobotomized".
But in the meantime: medicated into oblivion so he can't adequately defend himself.
"Concern for his mental health" is just an excuse for "medically lobotomized".
And for that to hold, you have to let him be tried. Justice isn't automatic.
But people (maybe not you) seem far too quick to start muddying up the due process. It seems that if he is found guilty, nobody will accept that.
From here, it seems perfectly plausible that he actively helped Manning leak. If the US have evidence to that end, they have a case. Can we just let that case be heard and stop assuming that every actor here is a Bond villain?
It depends what they find him guilty of and what the sentence is. It is unacceptable to have someone on trial for openly telling the truth about what a foreign country is doing.
He went into the Ecuadorian embassy saying that the Swedish case against him was basically trumped up and that he was going to be extradited to the United States. His justification for staying in the embassy on the basis that he would be extradited to the US if he walked out. His excuses were dismissed by critics as unconvincing. He is now out of the embassy and, surprisingly, appears to be going through an extradition process to the US.
The US is reaching out and nabbing him on the flimsiest of pretexts; more a process crime than doing anything material. Australians in Europe cannot be reasonably held subject to US laws related to classified documents. And how materially he helped Manning is a very open question. Maybe the US government is going to have something convincing but the odds are great it is some word game that they are going to try and nail him with.
> Can we just let that case be heard and stop assuming that every actor here is a Bond villain?
If the US government is going to treat Assange the way they treat other non-US-citizens they don't like then by the time the case is heard it will be too late.
Allegedly actively assisting a US military member to a) crack other military passwords, and b) work with them on covering said attempts is a mere "flimsy pretext, [not] material"?
From memory he didn't even succeed on the password front. The 'crime' here is an incidental non-issue compared to why the US has been hounding him.
Wait, elsewhere, and repeatedly, it's been noted just how intelligent Assange is, and (hence) how out of character the disheveled, slow person who appeared in court is. And I have zero doubt - he has repeatedly showed in interviews that for whatever potential personality flaws he may have, or personal opinion of him, he is, indeed, very well educated, intelligent, and smart.
So this? Fails the smell test. Fails the reasonable person test.
Someone as intelligent that - you believe it is "doubt[ful]" that he would be aware that aiding an active US military personnel in cracking passwords for accounts on classified systems, and encouraging them to use/try other credentials for covering tracks on the access of classified documents and their removal from external systems... it's doubtful that he would realize that that was possibly going to be viewed as a serious crime by the US?
I don't buy _that_ for a moment - throughout those chat logs there is multiple references to covering tracks, to covering bases on how to act, react, what to say or do when questioned, etc. - that is not someone who is blissfully unaware of the crime which they are (allegedly) committing, or aiding and abetting.
I doubt very much that the 'rational approach' of giving oneself up to the very people whose crimes you've been revealing is going to be a productive way to continue the effort of revealing crimes against humanity.
We have? Where?
Lets come back to this in a few months when there will be evidence of Assanges' torture by the UK on behalf of its masters in the USA, presented to the relevant authorities.
Remember this: Medicating people with psychotropic drugs designed to radically alter their minds, against their will, is a crime against humanity.
Maybe Big G's in on it too.
https://classconscious.org/2019/06/29/protest-at-twitter-hq-...
There is a media block (the UK can do that quite simply) on any reporting about Assange's health and conditions in Bellmarsh:
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Media-Block-on-Assange-s-T...
There is a definite campaign to torture/brainwash Assange while he is in Bellmarsh, as discovered by a UN investigator:
The rest is unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
All you have to do, is pay attention. Julian even predicted it would happen to him personally and warned us.
Look at the David Shayler case, for example. He was in the Bellmarsh brainwashing pipeline before Assange, and the same thing is happening to Julian.
All I've seen is a man dodging the law, over and over and over again, exploiting means and influence that most people could only dream of, while those friends point out the toll this self-inflicted purgatory is having on him as another form of "this isn't fair!" excuse.
It's all tosh. Negotiate your extradition, get to court, get this sorted. The time he takes to get there is all on him.
There probably weren't any CIA plants involved and the US is unlikely to execute him.
They wouldn't need to medicate him so that he can't defend himself.
This was a case management hearing. He wasn't ever going to get an opportunity to defend himself as that's not what it's for. He's not even required to attend.
> in this case note that I would entirely agree that the use of such medication would interfere with his "ability to understand"