Assange Hearing Day 16
craigmurray.org.uk
craigmurray.org.uk
The last sentence is what strikes me the most. Maybe he was being paranoid but if your own family is telling you they are not getting a notification then something is wrong.
They are constantly mucking with what's presented. Not long ago, my feed was pretty well distributed across my few hundred friends. As of maybe a few months ago, it's the same circle of ~20 similar-minded friends. At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight.
The people that engage my posts are always a cohort, with 90% overlap with my feed.
I swear there are also things which boost/nerf exposure based on sentiment analysis.
I'm an infrequent user cause it's kinda addicting (infinite scroll) and also this echo chamber trash.
I found that LinkedIn is great at this, too. I regularly see posts from contacts in my feed that are three weeks old and that I've never seen before.
edit: LinkedIn will also shadowban your posts if they contain words from a blacklist. Just this morning a contact complained about that. He was very happy about being engaged as a speaker and wrote in a post "Das ist schon sehr geil [...]". While "geil" means "horny", especially younger Germans use that word without the sexual connotation but as a replacement for "great". His post reached only a few dozen people instead of hundreds, as normally.
edit: "Das ist schon sehr geil" could be translated as "That's really great indeed"
Most people won’t ever have any real idea of what, or how much, they are being prevented from seeing. You also can’t use these platforms to point out their own censorship. I imagine most people have no real idea that most of their feeds on all the platforms they use are heavily censored, or could be totally censored in an emergency.
This situation is a ticking time bomb. I hope it doesn’t go off this year.
Or few weeks ago, lasted maybe 2 weeks, they've run some experiment/had bug in their over-buggy web page, since literally nothing moved in the feed. I saw the same posts as week ago, nothing new, in same order.
Also, when covid started, the feed just exploded with ad posts, which were rare for me before.
FB is amoral, abhorrent company with consistently crappy buggy product, that I hope will disappear over time. I'm not naive enough to think their replacement will be better.
People don’t spend the whole day scrolling, and Facebook knows this. They know exactly how far down each and every person scrolls.
This means they know exactly how much other content they need to “promote” to totally and effectively censor content they don’t wish people to see.
Algorithmic “timelines” (which aren’t timelines at all) are nothing more than censorship: a remote organization deciding what you’re allowed to read.
Confused players look at each other, “Uh, you mean about the Facebook thing? Why would you do that? We would have been fine just betting a dollar or whatever...”
Then everyone folds and you collect the ante.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Sho...
Who wants to bet there is some extrajudicial (ah, sorry, "secret court") system to force prominent online actors to perform acts of covert censorship, in the name of national security or whatever? This would be an easy logical step from PRISM.
A set of random tosses of a coin (even if the coin is partially biased) is expected to produce a mix of heads and tails outcomes. The random toss here could be human error or undiscovered bugs.
On the other hand, the international order is relatively old. There is no ageism in geopolitics, just ask Henry Kissinger. Established social and political affinities exist, globally. No assumption whatsoever is made regarding an existing, international, and powerful network of individuals and organizations.
Given that such networks exist, and that the stakeholders are indeed powerful individuals and organizations, and further that this case is shining a spotlight on their manipulating social institutions under their control, in a case where an individual is being prosecuted for publishing material detrimental to these powerful interests, no assumption is required to consider the high probability of their use of their power (which is the entire purpose of gaining power, btw) to insure their position, their actions, and their criminal behavior, is kept hidden from the majority.
Occam's Razor.
We haven't had anything like a Marshall Plan or a Berlin Airlift for some time now.
If there was no such evidence, then concluding conspiracy based on what is happening with FB and Twitter would indeed be crazy.
Just seems to me that mostly-secret media interference is a less complex problem to solve than the type of pervasive surveillance that requires installing extra rooms of equipment at numerous telecommunications nodes around the world. And we have confirmation that the latter has happened, at least.
Granted, you would expect to hear rumors eventually, as lots of people would have to be involved and still manage to both keep their mouths shut and hide the activity from everyone else.
Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Abby Martin, Jimmy Door, Mike Prysner, Aaron Mate, Chris Hedges, Ron Placone, Sarah Abdallah, and the Real News Network, along with several Assange supporters and related accounts.
I had to go and turn on explicit notifications for all of them to start seeing content. It's extremely obvious that this is not just one account getting accidentally flagged.
I think there might be something to it too.
/r/conspiracy has seen a takeover by the right wing equivalents over the last year or so, since the banning of /r/t_d
just cover something people don't like or not PC and it raises your chances.
https://www.projectveritas.com/video/hidden-camera-twitter-e...
That's the problem with putting in place censorship. Sometimes it affects people you like.
*/s
It’s more of an authoritarian-libertarian axis issue.
I think in terms of how restrictions on speech are implemented by Facebook/Twitter/YouTube it absolutely seems to be more used against right wing sources.
You could argue, though, that Assange/WikiLeaks isn't very popular with the left due to how they helped torpedo Clinton's campaign.
You can't even mention McInnes' new website censored.tv on Instagram, even in private messages.
I mean if the right-wing feels attacked because their posts get banned so much, maybe they should take a closer look at themselves.
Yeah I'm being facetiously inflammatory there, but c'mon you can make a better argument than that?
Source: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
Those voices are hardly being silenced.
Oh wait, actually it was the same 6 years ago as well.
This starts to be much worst than communistic censorship - in communistic Poland censorship office was obliged to mark places where the "offensive" content was removed. Facebook just erases that what is "offensive".
I hope that this will be the moment when people start to think if it is really so good that communication platforms keep censoring "improper content".
At first majority was happy that some of those they didn't like and didn't like their views were removed. Now people are learning a hard lesson - anyone views might suddenly become offensive and you will be done, gone, forgotten, fired (see what happen to J.K. Rowling or Bari Weiss).
sorry but how is this a new era? George Carlin caused a row with his Seven Dirty Words on national television because you couldn't swear. Everything that is mainstream is basically devoid of edgy or offensive content because advertisers want entertainment and nothing else.
When you wanted out of the mainstream commentary or scathing critiques you always had to go into subcultures, magazines, the arts, standup or whatever else.
Can't the EFF and ACLU team up on this?
Facebook has auto-throttle: if you post too many times within a span, it stops sending notifications about every post to your followers unless they interact with one or more of your posts during that span. This is desired behavior, by 99% of people, because we don't want our newsfeed flooded by that one annoying friend with no life, unless we choose to follow up.
So no, the EFF and ACLU can't team up on this because there's no active censorship, or even passive censorship.
[0] which let's be honest, is what happened when you casually say "auto-throttle"
The Wikipedia excerpt on ADX Florence:
"As of September 2020, there are 356 prisoners. They are confined 23 hours per day in single cells with facilities made of poured concrete to deter self-harm, and 24-hour supervision, carried out intensively with high staff-inmate ratios. Phones are generally banned, and only limited broadcast entertainment is permitted. After three years in maximum confinement, some prisoners may be transferred to a less restrictive prison."
Generally, most Supermax prisoners are housed in solitary confinement because it is not safe for other prisoners to be near them because of their propensity to engage in acts of violence against their fellow inmates. (Note: in many state prisons, solitary is used for punishment; this is not allowed at the federal level.)
Edit: There's also quite a lot of non-violent espionage prisoners that went straight to supermax solitary.
It is the exceptional case that a prisoner remains in Supermax, much less Supermax solitary, for more than a year. And quite honestly, all of those exceptional cases are there for a reason and have earned the punishment.
And note that several espionage sentenced prisoners are there. None of them did anything violent.
They know that he / wikileaks have got more material / dirt on the US though, and that if he were to disappear that material would be unlocked (dead man's switch).
So for now the illusion of due process is maintained.
I don’t see how it is self-consistent to say Sweden would’ve been more dangerous than the UK, when it is the conduct of the UK that led to condemnation by the UN and Amnesty International, and the UK is currently in the process of considering his extradition to the USA.
My own personal belief (which is merely at the level of “well I reckon“), is that he probably did the Sweden crimes, and also that the prosecution only even attempted because he was also a political thorn.
This belief is based partly on the surveys which show that an enormous number of women have been sexually assaulted and also that they don’t generally report this to the police, partly on his behaviour.
It is also partly based on the fact that — as is currently being demonstrated by the very extradition hearing currently occurring — the US is quite capable of extraditing him directly from the UK without going via Sweden.
While the current hearing is a complete farce, at least there's one.
There's precedent in the Swedish court system which has previously denied extradition on espionage charges.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/18/would-sweden-ever-extra...
> But Assange could be more afraid of a snatch-and-grab CIA operation. In 2002, Sweden collaborated with the United States in the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians seeking asylum. That example is often seen as indicative of what even left-wing Scandinavian governments will do when pressured by the United States in such cases.
Also the complainant (who could, with lower implausibility than the prosecutor, be part of such a conspiracy) did attempt to resume the extradition to Sweden as soon as she heard about the USA beginning the process of trying to extradite him from the UK.
That's some really weak logic.
He cooperated fully with the investigation remotely.
He maintains that he has long been informed of the existence of the secret US charges from credible sources.
What compels a person to sacrifice his life for the sake of an investigation where the prosecutor is not even able to bring charges?
He was also targeted in 2016 using an obviously contrived Bahamian pedophelia accusation. Should he have a moral obligation to sacrifice himself for that investigation as well?
> He was also targeted in 2016 using an obviously contrived Bahamian pedophelia accusation. Should he have a moral obligation to sacrifice himself for that investigation as well?
That is for the police to decide, not him.
To say literally anything else is to assume that he must be beyond reproach simply because of who he has upset.
And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
Edit: also, again, Sweden isn’t threatening his life, America is (IMO, even if the government denies it) — and they’re doing that just fine without Swedish help.
No one is saying Assange must be beyond reproach, we are saying let’s be honest about what games the authorities are very clearly playing.
The investigation was then re-opened by a politician subsequently after he released the Afghanistan war logs. iirc.
But if that doesn't bother you maybe the uncontested fact that his _one_ accuser literally wrote a scribe on how to get back at an ex-boyfriend by falsely accusing them of rape might just a little bit.
To say the case was thin is the most massive understatement. If you had published the secrets of the military industrial complex and intended to publish more should any heroes get them to you for publication do you think you'd be at all scared?
>To say literally anything else is to assume that he must be beyond reproach simply because of who he has upset.
That is nonsense. Nobody has said that. Ever. He has consistently said he was available to be questioned a second time via video link up or in person in the uk.
The total unwillingness of the swedes to make a skype call in the circumstances while being completely willing to drop the charges is something that bothers me.
>And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
At no point have you ever been able to "trust the police" This is why we have the rule of law and courts in liberal democracies. It isn't perfect but its vastly better than anything else the human race has devised. We should protect it and keep striving for its ideals. This is the big issue at the center of this story. Assange's rights and yours and mine to the rule of law and equality before really appear to be being infringed based on the power of upsetting the military industrial complex.
That should probably bother us all to some degree.
When I say “trust the police” I mean trust them to decide who to prosecute, not trust them to decide who to convict.
Obviously you need to have the rest of the rule of law going on for any hope of a good outcome.
Rule of law includes not skipping bail to avoid an extradition that was lawfully agreed to by a judge of the nation you’re currently in, and penalties if you try it.
It also means that people don’t get to decide how they are interviewed when they are suspected of a serious crime.
It was a UK judge which decided to do this, remember. Rule of law.
> his _one_ accuser
There were two accusers.
> That is nonsense. Nobody has said that. Ever. He has consistently said he was available to be questioned a second time via video link up or in person in the uk.
Then why do the Swedish allegations get mentioned and dismissed on every single discussion of the case America is making against him for completely different charges?
Nope. Just one. You were lied to. The second woman refused to sign the statement that was presented to her by the police officer. She had been taken to the police officer by the first woman. The police officer was a friend of the first woman. The second woman _refused_ to sign.
If you didn't dig in to get the facts I can totally see how you would believe the constant misinformation that there were two accusers but there were not. One of the women made no accusation.
>Then why do the Swedish allegations get mentioned and dismissed on every single discussion of the case America is making against him for completely different charges?
Becuase this is the hook that is used to smear you as an "Asssange The Rapist Supporter" if you wish to protect your rights which are the same as his.
But going back to Police deciding who to prosecute. The police in sweden decided not to prosecute Assange and that he was free to leave the country. A politican decided something different later.
People /do/ get to decide to legimitately protect their human rights, even, perhaps especially, when they are being infringed through false accusation. Assange always said the US were after him. Remember when he was accused of lying about that to avoid being prosecuted for rape. Now nobody believes the rape accusation and here he is being vindictively pursued just as he said.
It really should bother you if that happened to an actual goddamn nazi thug. The ACLU defend your rights when they're attacked to get at an actual muderous nazi thug. Assange is a publisher and journalist who has exposed war crimes.
Those are your rights.
Out of interest I have tried to google this. I found precisely zero results the back up your claim, even with multiple attempts at rephrasing the query.
I have also found no references to their names, much less their relationships with officers.
> It really should bother you if that happened to an actual goddamn nazi thug. The ACLU defend your rights when they're attacked to get at an actual muderous nazi thug. Assange is a publisher and journalist who has exposed war crimes.
Literally why I started this sub-thread with “It is entirely self-consistent to say both that he should’ve faced his accusers in Sweden and that the American charges look like an outrageous attempt to stifle legitime journalism.”
> Remember when he was accused of lying about that to avoid being prosecuted for rape.
Looked like that then, still looks like it now. Why? The name of the country America is trying to extradite him from — the same country he was in when he said he didn’t want to go to Sweden.
> Now nobody believes the rape accusation
"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events. Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation," says Eva-Marie Persson, Deputy Director of Public Prosecution. — https://www.aklagare.se/en/news-and-press/press-releases/201...
> Rule of law includes not skipping bail
"prosecute" "convict" "skip" "bail" These are all terms which explicitly apply to people who have been charged with a crime. If you believe that he was charged with a crime in sweden, you are mistaken. Otherwise, you are not really discussing Assange here.
“Julian Assange sentenced to 50 weeks for skipping UK bail” - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/01/julian-assange-sen...
Timeline according to Swedish authorities (archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20190502114026/https://www.aklag...
No. Life went on in the USSR, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy. Life goes on in the US and UK, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy (albeit to a lesser degree). You still have to make choices and decide how to live, even when you live in one of the authoritarian regimes that form the majority of the history of human societies.
Is your opinion, with absoultely nothing at stake, somehow more accurate and superior to his, when he has everything to lose? I don't know the answer to which country is worse. But I'll grant him the right to make his best bet when, against his will, he is all in for having published evidence of war crimes.
I don't know Assange at all. I might not like him at all if I did know him personally, I couldn't say. What is clear is the job they've done on him to "other" him and stop people from sticking up for his rights, which are of course their own rights has been utterly superbly done. Everyone sticking up for our rights has to clear their throat about not being "An Assange supporter" to even make obvious, simple and uncontroversial points about the rule of law and equality before it.
That bothers me quite a bit.
I completely agree our personal opinions should not define who we support or oppose in a court of law. Even if he had gone to Sweden, been convicted, been given the maximum sentence for those offences, served that entire sentence, and only then been released: that does not change how guilty he is or isn’t of the new accusations by America.
Likewise in reverse: even if he is completely innocent of every crime is accused of by America, and the American courts exonerate him and proclaim the prosecution to have been brought for purely political reasons, and end up prosecuting and convicting his persecutors instead of him, that does not mean he is incapable of being guilty of the crimes he was accused of by Sweden, and for which the statue of limitations has now expired.
He has to guess which country he will be more at risk in. He can't /know/ any more than you or I can know.
He has the right to make his best guess and potentially be wrong about it because he has everything at stake. If you or I or anyone else thinks he has made the wrong guess. Fine. But acknowledge that he has the right to make the best guess he can and had rather more at stake with that guess than a mere opinion.
What has changed utterly is the formerly bogus claim that he need not worry because the US were not pursuing him. The people who claimed that, of which there were very, very many had nothing at stake and were completely, totally and utterly wrong. I haven't seen anyone acknowledge "Yeah I thought he was making excuses but it turns out he was right when he said the US were after him and I was wrong about that one thing at least."
Easy to say anything at all when there are no consequences to us. We should acknowledge it. Indeed from a different angle we should cherish it and protect it.
Everything up to this sentence, we are on the same page:
> But acknowledge that he has the right to make the best guess he can and had rather more at stake with that guess than a mere opinion.
I would say he has the capacity, not the right. The right stopped the moment his appeals against his extradition to Sweden ended.
I do totally agree that people think differently when their skin is on the line. That’s part of why I’m in the “well I recon” rather than “totes innocent” or “he’s a wrong’un” camp.
At the time, and now, it feels logically incoherent to argue that Sweden is less safe for Assange than a country which has literally just decided to extradite Assange. Doubly so if you want to claim that Assange did not commit the offence and America conspired to fake it, because of the latter was true America could easily have done so with other offences that would have him sent to the USA direct.
America not liking Assange was obvious even back then, but it felt (and still feels) irrelevant to the specific claims in Sweden.
However, I do not think he should be extradited to the US over helping someone who had already decided to leak to do so.
I admit I hadn't realised just how badly the USA wanted to make his life miserable, and the fact that he was clearly right about that has made some of his actions more understandable.
The Sweden accusation was started, because Sweden can send prisoners to the US immediately. The US started this scheme after wikileaks exposed the warcrimes in Iraq.
The Uk kept the arrest on Assange, even after this all was cleared. And are still holding him against all laws.
The conspiracy theories were about the US seeking to extradite Assange using the rape case as pretext. This was dismissed as lunacy because US authorities didn't need the rape case as pretext; they could have simply sought his extradition on the charges they are now seeking to extradite him for. If anything, the rape case would have made extradition more complicated because Sweden is less willingly to extradite to the US than the UK, the UK would have prioritized extradition to Sweden over extradition to the US.
The whole thing is so sad.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05...
It would also serve as a warning against any possible future martyrs who might intend to rely on the law to protect them for doing the right thing by reporting on the ruling classes criminality.
This whole farce also cements the US spot as world police, when an Australian citizen can be disappeared for not following US law when not even in the US, and their UK lap-dog just cowers in the corner begging for more table scraps.
"Nothing to see here, move along citizen. Don't give me a reason to check your permanent record for wrongthink."
https://twitter.com/QuentinDempster/status/12476622512107601...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/am...
https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/our-corru...
Mind you, I've heard claims that if you're getting too much "organic" reach on Facebook they'll de-prioritise you in order to make sure you buy adverts, in the context of completely apolitical small business promotion.
> My own family have not been getting their notifications of my posts on either platform.
Kind of throws the facebook defence against the idea that they should have to pay actual news outlets into a pretty stark relief.
Facebook are just a horrific company that should be heavily regualted with a very heavy hand. We can loosen it some later when we're comfortable. Facebook are unelected - I tend toward libertarian but their power clearly must be curbed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23225080
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/facebook-will-remove-posts-t...
> On Wednesday the trap sprang shut, as Judge Baraitser insisted the witnesses must finish next week, and that no time would be permitted for preparation of closing arguments, which must be heard the immediate following Monday. This brought the closest the defence have come to a protest, with the defence pointing out they have still not addressed the new superseding indictment, and that the judge refused their request for an adjournment before witness hearings started, to give them time to do so.
> Edward Fitzgerald QC for the defence also pointed out that there had been numerous witnesses whose evidence had to be taken into account, and the written closing submissions had to be physically prepared with reference to the transcripts and other supporting evidence from the trial. Baraitser countered that the defence had given her 200 pages of opening argument and she did not see that much more could be needed.
On balance, don’t you think JA has had a fair opportunity - particularly given the sheer amount of court time and media attention he’s had over the last ten years?
We, the UK, don’t decline extraditions on that basis - the prosecution has to be manifestly unjust in the sense of no real case to answer, or the destination has to literally be a banana republic.
Supporters may hate this, but it’s not actually what’s at issue at this point in the legal process.
Yeah, obviously “he’s going down” but not because of bias - he’s simply not exceptional (or motivationally pure) enough to be above the system.
The UK is required by the terms of the treaty to decline extradition on that basis. From the treaty,[1]
> extradition shall not be granted if the competent authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated.
There's no doubt about the political nature of the prosecution, so there's no doubt about what the outcome should be, unless there are extra-legal considerations at play in the decision. We're all watching the answer to the following question be played out in real time: "Will the UK extradite a person for politically motivated prosecution in the US, in flagrant violation of the UK-US extradition treaty?"
1. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
But in any case if the US wants suspects extradited from western countries they should abolish the death sentence and stop torturing prisoners.
Personally I agree with that, but that doesn't impinge on the "politically motivate" crime issue, does it?
> "Fitzgerald [barrister for the defence] stated that all major authorities agreed there were two types of political offence. The pure political offence and the relative political offence. A 'pure' political offence was defined as treason, espionage or sedition. A 'relative' political offence was an act which was normally criminal, like assault or vandalism, conducted with a political motive. Every one of the charges against Assange was a “pure” political offence. All but one were espionage charges, and the computer misuse charge had been compared by the prosecution to breach of the official secrets act to meet the dual criminality test. The overriding accusation that Assange was seeking to harm the political and military interests of the United States was in the very definition of a political offence in all the authorities."
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Vanessa_Baraitser#Political_extr...
Moreover, Assange isn't even an American citizen, so that doesn't work either.
That being said, it is completely ridiculous to extradite an Australian for leaking US State secrets. It should just not be a thing, at all. So yes, leaking state secrets should not be an extraditeable offense. Treason? Maaaaybe.
They are acting like a banana republic and this extradition request should be treated as such.
I believe a case can be made for both.
I wouldn't give her that much credit. She probably got the ruling already written from the US authorities.
Mr Assange can appeal to the High Court if the judgement goes against him, and then further to the Supreme Court, and potentially the European Court of Human Rights. Any of those courts can block his extradition.
It seems too many people dislike the idea of human rights now, especially rights for "criminals".
So I wouldn't be surprised if the ECHR has no standing in the UK by the time Mr Assange could do with its services.
That would be much more humane than dragging this farce out with endless legal purgatory before guaranteed solitary confinement for the rest of his life.
All for sharing proof of systematic illegal murder. It's sickening.
Not even close. The US started a war of aggression and this process is inline with silencing critics. In my opinion the US cannot be a dependable partner anymore. Not for security, not for trade and especially not as a defender of democracy. Maybe it never really was, but the nature of open information exchange certainly makes that more transparent.
That killed hundreds of thousands of people and you think someone who supplied evidence of wrongdoing had too much media time?
Not even that. He published it. That's it.
>the USA meets the required judicial standards”.
But as we all know, the US is special and doesn't have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
In the same as "No timmy, you're not retarded, you're just special"
It's quite the disgrace.
Soon the US will lock this man where he can’t talk with anyone. In a few years this judge will probably be promoted. Everyone is happy.
The judge only has to establish a few things:
A) is it likely that the accused will not face a fair trial (this has to be proven, the burden of proof is on the accused to do this)
B) the accused likely faces the death penalty (it is insufficient if death penalty exists or it is unlikely they will face it)
C) they're being accused of something that is a crime in the UK as well
D) the accusation goes beyond simple doubt (this requires no actual proof, only that there is enough proof to run a court case)
There are time limits to extradition hearings, they're not supposed to replace a proper trial and they are not a proper trial.
A and B would be reasons not to extradite, while C and D would be reasons to extradite.
Generally if A or B are true, then C and D don't matter but if A or B can't be proven then there is very little formality in this kind of hearing.
If they they are (as everyone knows they are), then the UK-US extradition treaty is very clear that the extradition request has to be denied:[1]
> extradition shall not be granted if the competent authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated.
But in order to determine any of these issues, surely the testimony given over the past weeks is relevant. The judge has effectively said that it is irrelevant.
1. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It's factual, informative, (apparently) cites the relevant treaty, and it is not flame-bait. The requirement that the extradition not be politically motivated is an important one that was omitted from the above list.
One could argue that the conclusion that the material the judge considered 'irrelevant' is material relevant to the above is a subjective opinion. Fortunately, DiogenesKynikos linked the treaty so we can evaluate this for ourselves.
You didn't offer a link for your claim; why would you ask for a link to a fact easily findable in the search engine of your choice?
The thing with the pardon is from Assange's lawyer IIRC
That being said, it's still worthwhile and will help build awareness of how this world really works, but it won't get Assange freed.
It would change the public awareness, at least. Force coverage. Start a dialog.
However, my prediction is that there will be no large-scale protest in US about this. All those who are currently LARPing "resistance" against police brutality will just ignore his case. Mark my words.
Please explain how Assange is being treated more unfairly than Breonna Taylor or George Floyd?
Edit: Fixed Typo (treaty/treated)
Nobody cares. If he wanted sympathy from Americans, he should have kept himself out of the last US presidential election. Democrats are going to be hostile to him and Republicans won't care because he's outlived his usefulness to them.
He isn't a journalist, never has been, and it's frankly pathetic that people have decided to retcon the guy into being one. He's a political activist who beclowned himself by aligning with foreign intelligence and they've abandoned him because, again, he isn't useful anymore.
It's very easy to forget the human behind the name in these cases.