Julian Assange - Where Will This Finish?

[SirRumpole]

Glad he's out and didn't die in jail.

Don't really know where he is coming from though. A mixture of a journalist and a self promoting egotist perhaps? Maybe that's a tautology though.

 

[mullokintyre]

Have you been following this story ?

Cross-party politicians push for Assange’s freedom

Sarah Ferguson presents Australia's premier daily current affairs program, delivering agenda-setting public affairs journalism and interviews that hold the powerful to account. Plus political analysis from Laura Tingle.

www.abc.net.au

Australian politicians support vote calling on UK and US to free Julian Assange

Read the latest news headlines and in-depth analysis from an independent and trusted source. Check the latest news on business, sports, weather, and more.

www.abc.net.au

Australian PM Anthony Albanese supports vote calling on UK and US to free Julian Assange

Albanese and cabinet ministers among those to back parliamentary motion introduced by independent Andrew Wilkie

www.theguardian.com

Unfortunately, these players only came on board at the very end.
These same players abandoned him at the very beginning.
In this article, it explains how the Australian Government refused to intervene in the original extradition case.
This Abc Article refutes claims by the then prime minister, Julia Gillard, that he had been receiving consular assistance when he said no one from the gov had visited him.
Andrew Wilkie also outlines why he believes the feds abandoned Assange.
And lest anyone think I am being party political, it was the coalition's George Brandis as Attorney General who first left Assange for dead.
Scomo said "Assange should face the music".
The US must have extracted something from someone to get out of this mess, but of course unless someone like Assange leaks it, we will never knoqw what that quid pro quo might be.
Mick

 

[Knobby22]

Unfortunately, these players only came on board at the very end.
These same players abandoned him at the very beginning.
In this article, it explains how the Australian Government refused to intervene in the original extradition case.
This Abc Article refutes claims by the then prime minister, Julia Gillard, that he had been receiving consular assistance when he said no one from the gov had visited him.
Andrew Wilkie also outlines why he believes the feds abandoned Assange.
And lest anyone think I am being party political, it was the coalition's George Brandis as Attorney General who first left Assange for dead.
Scomo said "Assange should face the music".
The US must have extracted something from someone to get out of this mess, but of course unless someone like Assange leaks it, we will never knoqw what that quid pro quo might be.
Mick

The USA got him to agree he was a Spy.
Also, my memory was that certain sections of the press were very rabid.

 

[basilio]

Unfortunately, these players only came on board at the very end.
These same players abandoned him at the very beginning.
In this article, it explains how the Australian Government refused to intervene in the original extradition case.
This Abc Article refutes claims by the then prime minister, Julia Gillard, that he had been receiving consular assistance when he said no one from the gov had visited him.
Andrew Wilkie also outlines why he believes the feds abandoned Assange.
And lest anyone think I am being party political, it was the coalition's George Brandis as Attorney General who first left Assange for dead.
Scomo said "Assange should face the music".
The US must have extracted something from someone to get out of this mess, but of course unless someone like Assange leaks it, we will never knoqw what that quid pro quo might be.
Mick

It was more nuanced wasn't it ?

Quite right that early on Assange was left out to dry. As far as I can see it was Andrew Wilkie who as a parliamentarian stood up for Assange some 4 years ago when really the mainstream parties had gone quiet.

As far as I can see the strong cross party diplomatic pressure to get Julian out of the UK came together in the last 2 years. I think it is unfair to say they jumped on board at the very end. I suggest the reasons why the US finally decided to come to a plea bargain solution was the quite unusual situation of a strong cross party delegation coming to the States to press the case.

Anyway, hopefully, this all finishes soon in a good way.

 

[IFocus]

For the US is was becoming a freedom of speech issue ignored by Trump under who the charges were laid.

Getting Assange to plead guilty to spying sorts out the freedom of speech issue hence the deal lots of other stuff also in the background.

 

[farmerge]

It was more nuanced wasn't it ?

Quite right that early on Assange was left out to dry. As far as I can see it was Andrew Wilkie who as a parliamentarian stood up for Assange some 4 years ago when really the mainstream parties had gone quiet.

As far as I can see the strong cross party diplomatic pressure to get Julian out of the UK came together in the last 2 years. I think it is unfair to say they jumped on board at the very end. I suggest the reasons why the US finally decided to come to a plea bargain solution was the quite unusual situation of a strong cross party delegation coming to the States to press the case.

Anyway, hopefully, this all finishes soon in a good way.

@basilio and hopefully this sorry saga will die a death and no be heard of it and Assange.

 

[SirRumpole]

@basilio and hopefully this sorry saga will die a death and no be heard of it and Assange.

Not much chance of that im afraid.

There will be a lot of money floating around for interviews, tell all books etc that will keep him in the public eye for years.

 

[mullokintyre]

The really staggering part of all this is that the war crimes that were outed by Manning and Assange have gone completely unpunished.
Glossed over, forgotten, pushed into the background, deemed as "misinformation" etc etc.
The Yanks have determined that enough time has passed since those crimes that people have moved on.
Suits their modus operandi quite well.
Mick

 

[basilio]

The really staggering part of all this is that the war crimes that were outed by Manning and Assange have gone completely unpunished.
Glossed over, forgotten, pushed into the background, deemed as "misinformation" etc etc.
The Yanks have determined that enough time has passed since those crimes that people have moved on.
Suits their modus operandi quite well.
Mick

Absolutely nailed it. The most powerful part of Julian Assange work was exposing the war crimes committed in Iraq by the US. The video of the helicopters pilots murdering civilians including 2 Reuters journalists was horrific. Far too horrific for the US to pretend it was ok.

Julian Assange spoke truth to power.

Seven years in an embassy, five years in prison, now Julian Assange looks set to come home

Julian Assange has left the United Kingdom and will plead guilty to espionage. The deal marks a new chapter in a long-running saga that saw a Townsville kid take on the United States Department of Justice.

www.abc.net.au

 

[SirRumpole]

Absolutely nailed it. The most powerful part of Julian Assange work was exposing the war crimes committed in Iraq by the US. The video of the helicopters pilots murdering civilians including 2 Reuters journalists was horrific. Far too horrific for the US to pretend it was ok.

Julian Assange spoke truth to power.

Seven years in an embassy, five years in prison, now Julian Assange looks set to come home

Julian Assange has left the United Kingdom and will plead guilty to espionage. The deal marks a new chapter in a long-running saga that saw a Townsville kid take on the United States Department of Justice.

www.abc.net.au

I wonder if a certain Australian multi media personality and former soldier will ever be charged with war crimes as was determined in a civil case?

 

[mullokintyre]

I wonder if a certain Australian multi media personality and former soldier will ever be charged with war crimes as was determined in a civil case?

Going to need far better evidence than what was provided in the civil case.
From the Brereton Inquiry tabled in Parliament

While the Afghanistan Inquiry did not make final conclusions on whether a criminal or disciplinary offence had been committed by a specific person, it was able to make findings that credible information existed which, if substantiated, could lead to criminal convictions (pp. 146–157). This reflects that it functioned as a fact finding inquiry into the broader issue (see Part 4, Division 4A of the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Regulation 2016) rather than as a criminal court, which has the task of making a finding of fact in relation to specific criminal charges brought against a named individual. Importantly, in performing its tasks it operates under different rules of evidence, providing different levels of protection to witnesses and the accused. As the report states: ‘the purpose was to inform options for further action … it is the beginning of a process’ (p. 27).

Note the wording here. "credible", "could".
If there was a possibility of laying actual charges, it would have been done.
Unfortunately, we may never actually see the real meat in the Brereton report as parts were redacted for the public release.
I doubt that charges will ever be laid, as due to the chain of command principal, some of the leaders of the armed forces would need to be held accountable.
And that will never happen, to many OAM's and military pensions at stake.
Mick

 

[mullokintyre]

Coalition Finance Spokesperson is n expert on intelligence matters now.
No mention of the the lives lost in the various US military ops.
Hypocrite.
Mick

 

[basilio]

Good story in the ABC from another person who was imprisoned on trumped up terrorism charges.
Interesting note how President Obama refused to press charges against Julian Assange becasue if he did he would have to press similar charges against US media sources which also published the Wiki leaks stories.

Assange's journey home will be much longer than his flight back to Australia. I know from first-hand experience

Julian Assange may finally be out, but his case has undeniably had a serious chilling effect on public interest journalism, and sends a terrifying message to any sources sitting on evidence of abuses by the government and its agencies.

www.abc.net.au

 

[Dona Ferentes]

JACK THE INSIDER

Let’s not forget Julian Assange’s big ‘Russia problem’​

Julian Assange is a free man, having set foot on home soil for the first time in almost two decades. One suspects he will be feted as a truth seeker and hero of free speech. The reality is somewhat different, with Assange’s whistleblowing, such as it is, deeply mired in anti-US sentiment.

Canberrans might chance across Assange over the next day or so. One might catch a glimpse of him sidling into the linen press for old time’s sake or settling into a walk-in-robe, possibly with a cat. Careful, folks.

He’s not house trained. Assange, that is. The cat uses the litter box.
Assange’s release from a courthouse was a victory for quiet diplomacy. Regardless of what people think of him, the WikiLeaks founder had spent too much time in prison. Indicted under the Trump administration, he was facing a life sentence for a raft of espionage charges. His plea deal puts an end to 14 years of legal strife although the fact remains that Assange’s fixations on transparency in government have been largely limited to exposure of US government excesses and outrages while maintaining a softly, softly approach on some of the world’s worst autocracies.

In 2010, the Stockholm District Court ordered his arrest for rape, unlawful coercion and three counts of sexual molestation. European arrest warrants were issued. In 2012, the UK Supreme Court found that Assange should be extradited to Sweden but Assange fled to the Ecuadorean embassy and remained there for almost eight years before he wore out his welcome and was dispatched to Belmarsh Prison.
During his period in the embassy, Assange brooded that the Kremlin was a “bulwark against Western imperialism”. A year before Russia’s brutal and illegal annexation of Crimea, Assange blamed the US for heightened tensions in the region, accusing the Americans of “trying to draw Ukraine into the Western orbit, to pluck it out of Russia’s sphere of influence”. After the annexation of Crimea, he said Washington and its intelligence allies had “annexed the whole world” through global surveillance.

In 2016, WikiLeaks published material that revealed the US had bugged discussions between UN officials and European allies, including private climate-control talks between then chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. The revelation came with a view that the recordings had been lifted from the US National Security Agency by another so-called whistleblower, Edward Snowden. Journalists given direct access to all of Snowden’s stolen material would later confirm the bugging of Merkel and Ban Ki-moon was not part of it.

So who was the source of that information? If it wasn’t Snowden then either there was another source of leaks from within the NSA or, more likely, the provenance of the material was Russian intelligence services.
In 2017, then CIA director Mike Pompeo launched a blistering attack on Assange and WikiLeaks. “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is … a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our intelligence community determined that Russian military intelligence – the GRU – had used WikiLeaks to release data of US victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.” This in turn led to some tit-for-tat nonsense that the CIA considered killing Assange. There is no reliable source of information and the general view within the CIA was that Assange was not worth the trouble.

But one regime does murder its political opponents. In February, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed while serving a 19-year prison sentence in a Russian prison near the village of Kharp in the Russian Arctic. Assange’s wife, Stella could see parallels. “Julian is a political prisoner and his life is at risk. What happened to Navalny can happen to Julian,” she told reporters outside court where a large crowd was demanding Assange’s release.

Four months later, the obvious difference between the two men is that Assange is alive and free to do as he pleases in Australia, courtesy of the US, while Navalny was almost certainly murdered in one of Russia’s most awful prisons.

WikiLeaks under Assange had published the Syria File, detailing outrageous human rights abuses by the Assad regime that contained not a word of criticism for Syria’s key ally, Russia. When the time came for Assange to direct his attention to the Russian Federation, he did refer to Putin’s Russia as “a Mafia state”.

Meanwhile, during the FIFA World Cup in Russia, Putin rushed to the defence of Assange. “What is he persecuted for? For sexual crimes?” Putin said. “Nobody believes that, you do not believe that either. He is being persecuted for spreading the information he received from (the) US military regarding the actions of the USA in the Middle East, including Iraq.”
Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Assange has been banged up in Belmarsh Prison. We don’t know if he continues to believe that the US is to blame for Russian aggression.

It is almost certainly true that Assange has, as Pompeo declared, been circulating Russian intelligence to embarrass the West, and the US in particular. Most of Assange’s colleagues, current and former, maintain that Assange would not do so directly as he would not trust the Russian FSB. A hacking group under the aegis of the FSB, however, is no great stretch of the imagination.

The prevailing view is that Assange is more Putin’s useful idiot than stooge, motivated not by lofty ideals of government accountability and transparency but by evening up old scores and settling personal vendettas.

 

[IFocus]

 

[The Triangle]

JACK THE INSIDER

Let’s not forget Julian Assange’s big ‘Russia problem’​

Julian Assange is a free man, having set foot on home soil for the first time in almost two decades. One suspects he will be feted as a truth seeker and hero of free speech. The reality is somewhat different, with Assange’s whistleblowing, such as it is, deeply mired in anti-US sentiment.

Canberrans might chance across Assange over the next day or so. One might catch a glimpse of him sidling into the linen press for old time’s sake or settling into a walk-in-robe, possibly with a cat. Careful, folks.

He’s not house trained. Assange, that is. The cat uses the litter box.
Assange’s release from a courthouse was a victory for quiet diplomacy. Regardless of what people think of him, the WikiLeaks founder had spent too much time in prison. Indicted under the Trump administration, he was facing a life sentence for a raft of espionage charges. His plea deal puts an end to 14 years of legal strife although the fact remains that Assange’s fixations on transparency in government have been largely limited to exposure of US government excesses and outrages while maintaining a softly, softly approach on some of the world’s worst autocracies.

In 2010, the Stockholm District Court ordered his arrest for rape, unlawful coercion and three counts of sexual molestation. European arrest warrants were issued. In 2012, the UK Supreme Court found that Assange should be extradited to Sweden but Assange fled to the Ecuadorean embassy and remained there for almost eight years before he wore out his welcome and was dispatched to Belmarsh Prison.
During his period in the embassy, Assange brooded that the Kremlin was a “bulwark against Western imperialism”. A year before Russia’s brutal and illegal annexation of Crimea, Assange blamed the US for heightened tensions in the region, accusing the Americans of “trying to draw Ukraine into the Western orbit, to pluck it out of Russia’s sphere of influence”. After the annexation of Crimea, he said Washington and its intelligence allies had “annexed the whole world” through global surveillance.

In 2016, WikiLeaks published material that revealed the US had bugged discussions between UN officials and European allies, including private climate-control talks between then chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. The revelation came with a view that the recordings had been lifted from the US National Security Agency by another so-called whistleblower, Edward Snowden. Journalists given direct access to all of Snowden’s stolen material would later confirm the bugging of Merkel and Ban Ki-moon was not part of it.

So who was the source of that information? If it wasn’t Snowden then either there was another source of leaks from within the NSA or, more likely, the provenance of the material was Russian intelligence services.
In 2017, then CIA director Mike Pompeo launched a blistering attack on Assange and WikiLeaks. “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is … a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our intelligence community determined that Russian military intelligence – the GRU – had used WikiLeaks to release data of US victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.” This in turn led to some tit-for-tat nonsense that the CIA considered killing Assange. There is no reliable source of information and the general view within the CIA was that Assange was not worth the trouble.

But one regime does murder its political opponents. In February, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed while serving a 19-year prison sentence in a Russian prison near the village of Kharp in the Russian Arctic. Assange’s wife, Stella could see parallels. “Julian is a political prisoner and his life is at risk. What happened to Navalny can happen to Julian,” she told reporters outside court where a large crowd was demanding Assange’s release.

Four months later, the obvious difference between the two men is that Assange is alive and free to do as he pleases in Australia, courtesy of the US, while Navalny was almost certainly murdered in one of Russia’s most awful prisons.

WikiLeaks under Assange had published the Syria File, detailing outrageous human rights abuses by the Assad regime that contained not a word of criticism for Syria’s key ally, Russia. When the time came for Assange to direct his attention to the Russian Federation, he did refer to Putin’s Russia as “a Mafia state”.

Meanwhile, during the FIFA World Cup in Russia, Putin rushed to the defence of Assange. “What is he persecuted for? For sexual crimes?” Putin said. “Nobody believes that, you do not believe that either. He is being persecuted for spreading the information he received from (the) US military regarding the actions of the USA in the Middle East, including Iraq.”
Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Assange has been banged up in Belmarsh Prison. We don’t know if he continues to believe that the US is to blame for Russian aggression.

It is almost certainly true that Assange has, as Pompeo declared, been circulating Russian intelligence to embarrass the West, and the US in particular. Most of Assange’s colleagues, current and former, maintain that Assange would not do so directly as he would not trust the Russian FSB. A hacking group under the aegis of the FSB, however, is no great stretch of the imagination.

The prevailing view is that Assange is more Putin’s useful idiot than stooge, motivated not by lofty ideals of government accountability and transparency but by evening up old scores and settling personal vendettas.

Wouldn't be the media if they didn't put a Russian spin on this. I guess this is supposed to be clickbait for "intelligent people" Assange + Russia + CIA in an article. Different to Trump + Taylor Swift + Abortion for "dumb people"

We all know Russia is f-ed and Putin in a nutjob who kills all those who stand against him - why waste time criticizing Russia and Putin? The goal of these leakers has never been to destabilize the west or work as Russian or Chinese assets (that's the role of the Woke squads and Hollywood) it's been to point out that we here in the west actually have evil governments and evil corrupt and paid off leaders who have zero interest in the betterment of the people they govern.

People like David Mcbride and Assange have been left to rot by our Australian government while illegal immigrants are released on our streets to commit whatever crimes they want. Always remember, In Australia - if you act in any way against the government your life is over.

 

[moXJO]

Assange also got a bunch of informants killed from memory. He isn't clean in this, no one was. He did his time in self imposed incarceration. 10 years was enough. He needs to look over his shoulder forever though.

 

[IFocus]

Assange also got a bunch of informants killed from memory. He isn't clean in this, no one was. He did his time in self imposed incarceration. 10 years was enough. He needs to look over his shoulder forever though.

Nope the US JD stated clearly in the court that they had no information that anyone was harmed by the release of the wiki leaks documents.

You have been conned again by the extreme right wing deep state.

 

[moXJO]

Nope the US JD stated clearly in the court that they had no information that anyone was harmed by the release of the wiki leaks documents.

You have been conned again by the extreme right wing deep state.

That was the last time I looked into it. Probably 14 years ago or whatever it was. Here's what I remember:

"Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it,' he said, according to The Guardian.

I also remember that Afghan assets got pinged on the ground.

I remember Assange when he was with a hacker group and he was an absolute flog. He will try and martyr himself off this incident. Maybe he has changed. To me he was an egomaniac.

 

[moXJO]

Is Assange really Trump’s second cousin or is it just the world's worst conspiracy theory?