this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Assange is a bit of a scumbag, but unrelatedly, his efforts for freedom of information should not land him in US torture prisons like many others.
Not a single non US citizen should be extradited to the US. The US has the worst prison system and punishments outside of some really cruel regimes. They also refuse to work with international criminal courts.
Besides I'm pretty sure the guy only committed a crime in Sweden and not the US.
Does he deserve to be in prison for the rest of his life?
How is he full of shit? Care to pick up leaks from wikileaks and point out which ones are bullshit and which ones aren't?
Can you really blame the man for picking sides after all the US has done to him personally over the years?
Yes. Wikileaks is supposed to be a tool of transparency. Not a tool for his political revenge.
How was wikileaks used for revenge? Are you saying that they shouldn't have publish all these leaks concerning USA such as Vault 7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7
There's plenty of stuff about russia on wikileaks too, you can just search for it.
I'm not saying I condone what he did, but I can understand it from his perspective. I'd probably do the same thing if there were a country responsible for ruining my life and health and I had the information to inflict some damage.
I’m not sure what we are debating/discussing. If you’re going to claim you are a bastion of transparency and information for the general public, then no, you can’t weaponize your site and omit politically damaging information about political groups you agree with/are aligned with.
That’s not just revenge against the US. That’s failing to provide the transparency you claim to stand for. He chose to obscure information based on his own whims. How is that not an issue?
Wikileaks had their own leak and it was a very interesting read.
If you care about transparency so much i don' think you would be here trying to belittle someone who spent the past years in jail for the sake of transparency.
What does this have do with the fact he's been jailed for years and is waiting extradition to usa? It literally looks like you are trying to spread dirt on him for no reason other than choosing what story to cover, something most publisher do on daily basis and on a much worst scale.
"Trump totally didn’t offer him a pardon to say Russia had nothing to do with it."
You may have missed the part where he's still in jail and the trump government had a plot to have him assasinated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Later_years_in_the_embassy
@BolexForSoup just to be clear are you saying that journalists with a political or ideological slant should not be afforded the same protections as other journalists?
No, I believe it's pretty clear they're saying journalists who claim total transparency should have total transparency, not obscure some things because they want to. If you claim to want to protect children and then do a bunch of things to hurt children, you lose your standing as a protector of children. The same here. If you claim total transparency and then hide certain things you lose the claim of total transparency.
Especially since he isn't a citizen and shouldn't be subject to US laws.
Unfortunately the whole “isn’t a citizen” thing might work against him. IIRC courts have ruled the Bill of Rights applies to citizens, including freedom of the press.
The whole situation is absurd though.
Oh yeah, US courts justifying their continuous rights abuses of foreign detainees is absurd and should be legitimized by no international judgements.
One more reason to not extradite Assange. Let him sit trial for everything else he's allegedly done in countries with humane criminal justice systems, but do not subject him to either Manning's, or worse, as you say, non-citizen's torture in places like Guantanamo Bay.
Freedom of information? He was pretty selective about which bits he released back in 2016. That guy can rot in prison for all I care.
jfc we can't just let the state imprison journalists without pushback because we don't like the particular journalist
I'd say since the first full year of him living in an embassy ended, we can't be justified to call him a scumbag.
Other than that - his sense of humor in the NetBSD fortune files and other traces in the Internet maybe sucks, but he's a better role model than Snowden (whose life is somehow much easier, which is suspicious really).
Why would he be a better role model than Snowden?