> After long research, his team of 120 counterintelligence officers hadn’t been able to find a single person, among the thousands of American agents and secret sources in Afghanistan and Iraq, who could be shown to have died because of the disclosures.
Sounds like the NSA who couldn't point to a single instance of stopping any type of terrorist attack/operation despite collecting anything they could get their hands on.
> Sounds like the NSA who couldn't point to a single instance of stopping any type of terrorist attack/operation despite collecting anything they could get their hands on.
This can’t be true - there are plenty of sources citing foiled plots and we see similar publications from other governments (EU and beyond) citing similar justifications. A quick google yields:
I don't see that as being a solid point because it is pretty challenging to point to an instance of a rare event not happening due to your actions.
The more pressing issue is that the NSA is a group of people. Nobody knows exactly what they are doing, or why, and the only information that comes out is "trust us, we're the good guys". They have a huge budget. Odds are they are massively corrupt and doing stupid things that either do nothing or make America less safe (like mass wire-tapping).
> because it is pretty challenging to point to an instance of a rare event not happening due to your actions.
How is it hard? "Based on our data collection we found that these people were planning X and arrested them" doesn't sound hard... Unless it never happened.
"Sounds like the NSA who couldn't point to a single instance of stopping any type of terrorist attack/operation despite collecting anything they could get their hands on."
This is kind of a misrepresentation of the situation.
Manning leaked mostly diplomatic cables, the contents of which he was unaware of, thereby harming his whistleblower credentials.
The contents were not what we would regard as 'intelligence information' - more aptly described as 'the e-mails of the US diplomatic foreign corps', some of which contained sensitive information'.
That gigabyte of private information was released and there wasn't a single scandal of it shows how tight the operation was, moreover any reading of the cables demonstrates how well the US diplomatic corps were actually doing their jobs.
Far from releasing damning information about Americans, the cables released inside information about Arab leaders and their systematic corruption.
To unearth that amount of private information, to have it combed over by thousands of journalists trying to find a juicy bit, and to come up with very little ... is frankly something Americans can be proud of.
It's ridiculously ironic that Manning, in his attempt to discredit America, ended up doing what US diplomats were unable to do within the constraints of their jobs, which is to speak truth to power about the corruption in the Middle East - which ignited the Arab Spring.
The real world is sausage making and grinding, any skeptical, decontextualized look under any rocks will always yield something to talk about - so in the end, it's really the details and context that really do matter.
The cables did truly pose a serious threat to the security and integrity of individuals in various ways, and obviously it compromised many programs. That there doesn't seem to be any deadly outcomes is wonderful, but it doesn't abnegate Manning from the inappropriate actions he took particularly on the cable leak.
What's far more interesting about this case, is the fact that the press used to be in love with Assange, and now they hate him. I wonder what caused them to turn. Obviously, his close ties to Russia are problematic, but it's hard to see exactly what it is. It's possible that he's just not contemporarily a social advocate in their view: we're now full-on into intersectional issues, matters of state etc. are 'old news' it would seem.
>What's far more interesting about this case, is the fact that the press used to be in love with Assange, and now they hate him. I wonder what caused them to turn.
He published Clinton's emails. After that he was no longer on the same "team" as American journalists.
> That gigabyte of private information was released and there wasn't a single scandal of it shows how tight the operation was, moreover any reading of the cables demonstrates how well the US diplomatic corps were actually doing their jobs.
No, it just shows how subservient to U.S. foreign policy the American press is (they did not undertake any widespread publishing of embarrassing details from the cables), and how uninterested and easily misled the American public is about our government's actions overseas.
> What's far more interesting about this case, is the fact that the press used to be in love with Assange, and now they hate him.
The American press was never that in love with Assange -- the smear jobs and carping about his character started very soon after the Manning leaks, as Cockburn points out. The nail in the coffin was publishing the DNC emails, which despite containing a great deal of newsworthy details and indications of corruption, became a convenient scapegoat for Clinton's loss in the 2016 election and are now viewed almost exclusively in that light. (I think some legitimate criticisms can be lodged against Assange for electioneering in his timing of the leaks, but Clinton did joke about assassinating him and did all she could to put him in prison, so ....)
That's because the CIA and the Department of Defense worked around the clock to prevent that from happening. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wrote in his book, "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence"
> After Manning's arrest, Assange seemed intent on dumping as many classified documents onto the internet as he could, as quickly as he could. In my last few months as USD(I) and my first few months as the fourth DNI in five years, my time and attention were also taken up by the efforts at DOD and CIA to deal with these document dumps. Teams were on standby in both places to sort quickly through whatever was exposed in an effort to find names and identifying details for people in Iraq and Afghanistan who were helping the US war effort, and then try to rescue them before the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents could find and kill them.
Anyone know why we’re treating Julian Assange like the worst criminal that ever existed?
“ Those two shootings were a thousand times repeated, though the reports were rare in admitting that the victims were civilians. More usually, the dead were automatically identified as ‘terrorists’ caught in the act, regardless of evidence to the contrary. ”
Here’s an argument against Leetcode. There are real patterns in our work. That quote is a real pattern in law enforcement. Test for the patterns, not how slick someone is in a contrived scenario.
We seem to be stuck in deja vu world. The same problems over and over, everywhere, with an unwillingness to fix or acknowledge it.
Not many body cams existed for those deaths, huh?
Sad, I’ll erase it from my mind and move on for this evening, as usual.
Don’t stick the guy that showed it to us in jail. Don’t be the emperor that killed the messenger.
Because he revealed evidence of one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years?
4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..
Was WikiLeaks part of exposing Prism as well? Or was that mostly The Guardian?
I remember after 9/11 I grabbed a bunch of books about the Taliban from the library, and my dad said ‘look, the government is going to put you on a list now’, and I naively said ‘No dad, this is America’ (he was an immigrant).
4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people
That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...
>4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars
This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
> one of the worst crimes committed by humanity in the last 100 years?
As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east.
If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin.
For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone ordered the killing of 34 millions of US citizens.
Lucky us the red army is not the red army anymore.
He founded and promoted terrorism in Ukraine, shot down civilian airplanes, bombed refugees camps, used chemical warfare, prohibited by international treaties, on civilians
He also ordered the assassination of a number of journalists
But Snowden is his guest, so he must be a good man...
The feds don't like him because he leaks their secrets. The Republicans don't like him because he makes our military look bad. The Democrats don't like him because he leaked Clinton's emails. There's no longer anyone in America willing to stop his incarceration so he can pester their political rivals.
> Anyone know why we’re treating Julian Assange like the worst criminal that ever existed?
Because the CIA had an explicit goal of destroying his reputation in the media, and getting the most damaging headlines possible run about him in an effort to destroy any meaningful support he may have garnered by exposing war crimes.
For example: he was never once charged with any sexcrime in any country, but you'd never know that from the headlines which almost universally referred to "charges" when there were none.
It's a real shame what the US military intelligence community will do when threatened. Snowden himself explicitly specified, at least twice, that they would have summarily executed Barton Gellman if they thought that he was the single point of failure for the release of the Snowden documents, for example. They operate entirely beyond the reach of oversight or the law.
None of this is an accident. They couldn't lay hands on him for a while, so plan B was a character assassination in the media.
He’s not the worst criminal that ever existed. He’s also not the best whistleblower that ever existed. He’s a guy who helped expose things that were important to know about, who’s also a narcissist and very probably a rapist. He doesn’t deserve to be punished inappropriately for exposing what he exposed, he doesn’t deserve to be exonerated for the actual crimes he committed, and he doesn’t deserve to be treated as a hero for accepting a role as an agent of weaponized information for a global fascist movement. He’s a guy who did one good thing with questionable motives, did at least one bad thing, and is otherwise just a guy.
He was never charged with rape, and neither of the women who were involved in those cases ever accused him of rape. I encourage you to read their own words.
Check out Chomsky's support for Assange [0]. Sadly there's too much going on to bring enough attention to this case.
The sad irony is that none of this thread's discussion or anything else would make any difference. This article is written in "London Review of Books", not even a single news agency is interested in this currently.
It should be no surprise that these people might retire from military and join local state police and enjoy killing similarly less fortunate American citizens
> helicopter pilots exchange banter about the slaughter in the street below: ‘Ha, ha, I hit them,’ one says. ‘Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,’ the other says. They have mistaken the camera held by one of the journalists for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, unlikely though it was that armed insurgents would stand in the open in Baghdad with a US helicopter hovering overhead. They shoot again at the wounded as one of them, probably the Reuters assistant Saeed Chmagh, crawls towards a van that has stopped to rescue them. When the pilots are told over the radio that they have killed a number of Iraqi civilians and wounded two children, one of them says: ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into the battle.’
And these are the scumbags we're supposed to honor, thank, and in the future remember fondly? Memorial and veterans' days should only apply to soldiers who fought in wars against their will (drafted) or had a basis in reality. Last one was WWII. The scumbags who fought in later wars should question their life decisions. Some of them regret it already. Good.
Wasn't there a draft for the Vietnam war? And probably also Korea? One of the issues I can remember there is that less-well-off people couldn't buy themselves out of the draft. This affected minorities especially.
While I don't really like JA, tend not to trust him, and disagree with a lot of his choices, it is unquestionable that he suffered a lot of injustice; while the public turned on him and continues to fall for simplified coverage of all matters involving him. The latest example, I believe, was the report on his life at the embassy and how he received the email archive in 2016.
[1] is the popular CNN version, while a week earlier El Pais reported [2] very differently on the very same material. And that still doesn't address CNN's suspicious depiction and emphasis of the evil hackers (German CCC members) who visited JA.
That reminds me, since the ECHR or CJEU—I don't remember which one—ruled that you can't sentence a person to prison forever, wouldn't it be inhumane to extradite someone when the potential degree of penalty is over 150 years?
> the ECHR or CJEU—I don't remember which one—ruled that you can't sentence a person to prison forever
I believe you are referring to rulings by the ECtHR[1]. In fact it was determined that the situation in the UK was compliant with the Convention because prisoners have the possibility of applying to the Home Secretary for compassionate release. (This mitigates the concern that, for example, someone could end up in prison for 100 years while society changed around them such that the original sentence became seen to be unjust, but the prisoner felt they had no prospect of having their situation changed).
As for how this affects Assange's extradition, it is already the case that the US must promise not to execute him before the UK will hand him over, so they could perhaps also promise to review his sentence after 25 years if he is imprisoned for that long. (For reference, he turns 50 next year).
I 'turned on him' because as I learned more about him I trusted his motives less.
If I thought his motives were pure, I would give him more slack but I think he has nefarious motives based on his indiscriminate releases. 150 years sounds right for a spy at his stature without a state sponsor, good thing we aren't at war or there may be an argument to kill him.
> But today Ellsberg is celebrated as the patron saint of whistleblowers while Assange is locked in a cell in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison for 23 and a half hours a day.
Ellsberg was charged with a bunch of crimes too, which would have resulted in 100+ years of jail time. He's considered a good person now because he defended himself and won. It should also be noted that he very much supports Wikileaks.
It should also be noted a big difference in the cases is that Ellsberg leaked documents he already had legal access to, and was therefore a whistleblower. Assange leaked documents that he had to illegally acquire first (either with help or without, but either way he was in possession of stolen goods). You can't get whistleblower protection for leaking information you didn't have legal access to.
I totally understand why Assange is fighting extradition -- it's highly unlikely he would be treated fairly or get a fair trial. But I doubt he'll ever be broadly considered a hero until he defends himself in court.
> Assange leaked documents that he had to illegally acquire first (either with help or without, but either way he was in possession of stolen goods). You can't get whistleblower protection for leaking information you didn't have legal access to.
Should we charge the journalists who distributed Snowden's leaks as well?
This seems like making a distinction to draw a line between the two, but I am missing the explanation for why this distinction has moral import.
> Should we charge the journalists who distributed Snowden's leaks as well?
We don't need to, we know who their source was (Snowden). If Assange wants to claim he's a journalist, that's fine, but then he either needs to accept the consequences of protecting his sources, or out his sources.
> but I am missing the explanation for why this distinction has moral import.
It's a question of responsibility. When a journalist protects their sources, they accept responsibility for the consequences, and they they chose to reveal their source, they pass on the consequences to their source, but (usually) take a hit to their reputation as a journalist. Assange appears to not want to accept any consequences for his actions, nor pass them on be revealing his sources.
Broadly? I thinks that's a very American centric perspective. About the last system of justice I'd like to find myself at the mercy of outside those in totalitarian countries is the American one.
It has earned itself an awful reputation, in Europe, at least. It's such a shame that countries like the UK appear to be behaving like client states of America.
It has earned itself an awful reputation in America too amongst the people who understand it. Unfortunately, most Americans are too stupid to understand it or too hateful to even try.
I think this is a ridiculous perspective, especially when virtually every European countries is on the inquisitorial system. (See The Trial.)
It is my opinion that the US is probably one of the best countries when it comes to the rights of a defendant ― well, before a guilty verdict.
I ask that you actually take a look at some of the kinds of people who run the federal courts in the United States. See something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXv7anhiIBY. These are serious legitimate people who are working in and trying to improve a highly developed yet highly imperfect legal system (and country).
I don't think that's quite correct, unless it can be proved that they somehow participated in the actual hacking of some target, they do have legal access to the docs, because receiving such is not illegal.
Otherwise, the entire press to whom such things are leaked should be in jail with them.
This is exactly right. The government's case against Assange hinges in large part on alleging that he actively assisted Manning in obtaining the documents that were published.
Last I checked the only protection on classified information was for people that had a clearance at some point. Which is why journalists can generally publish classified information.
> After long research, his team of 120 counterintelligence officers hadn’t been able to find a single person, among the thousands of American agents and secret sources in Afghanistan and Iraq, who could be shown to have died because of the disclosures.
When the Taliban killed someone for doing something that offends them, such as providing education for girls, did they generally leave a message explaining how that particular person came to their attention?
If you don't know why Taliban killed someone, then you can't prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the defendant's actions caused that death and can't convict anyone for that. If there's no evidence for participating in a crime, you can't charge people for that crime.
If Americans allow assange to be hounded without end, it’s extremely dangerous for journalists everywhere in the future. This is a matter of the state being allowed to commit crimes in secret and whether journalists are allowed to report on it without fear of lifelong torture
Edit: Manning was tortured by being denied sleep for years, and trump openly advocates for it. Right now he’s in solitary confinement which is also a form of torture
If Americans allow assange to be hounded without end, it’s extremely dangerous for journalists everywhere in the future.
I'll take that one further: it's extremely dangerous for anyone in the future.
This whole saga has been another example of what happens when the people in power don't get their way: they will abuse existing systems until they do. Or at the very least, until they've made enough of an example of somebody so the next person won't be tempted to do the same.
Readit News
Sounds like the NSA who couldn't point to a single instance of stopping any type of terrorist attack/operation despite collecting anything they could get their hands on.
This can’t be true - there are plenty of sources citing foiled plots and we see similar publications from other governments (EU and beyond) citing similar justifications. A quick google yields:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nsa-director-50-potential-te...
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/nsa-leak-keith-alexan...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/gchq-foiled-terr...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nsa-program-stopped-no-te...
The more pressing issue is that the NSA is a group of people. Nobody knows exactly what they are doing, or why, and the only information that comes out is "trust us, we're the good guys". They have a huge budget. Odds are they are massively corrupt and doing stupid things that either do nothing or make America less safe (like mass wire-tapping).
How is it hard? "Based on our data collection we found that these people were planning X and arrested them" doesn't sound hard... Unless it never happened.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/nsa-chi...
Or of assisting a hacker?
If he's not accused of doing the first, then this is hardly relevant to his case.
This is kind of a misrepresentation of the situation.
Manning leaked mostly diplomatic cables, the contents of which he was unaware of, thereby harming his whistleblower credentials.
The contents were not what we would regard as 'intelligence information' - more aptly described as 'the e-mails of the US diplomatic foreign corps', some of which contained sensitive information'.
That gigabyte of private information was released and there wasn't a single scandal of it shows how tight the operation was, moreover any reading of the cables demonstrates how well the US diplomatic corps were actually doing their jobs.
Far from releasing damning information about Americans, the cables released inside information about Arab leaders and their systematic corruption.
To unearth that amount of private information, to have it combed over by thousands of journalists trying to find a juicy bit, and to come up with very little ... is frankly something Americans can be proud of.
It's ridiculously ironic that Manning, in his attempt to discredit America, ended up doing what US diplomats were unable to do within the constraints of their jobs, which is to speak truth to power about the corruption in the Middle East - which ignited the Arab Spring.
The real world is sausage making and grinding, any skeptical, decontextualized look under any rocks will always yield something to talk about - so in the end, it's really the details and context that really do matter.
The cables did truly pose a serious threat to the security and integrity of individuals in various ways, and obviously it compromised many programs. That there doesn't seem to be any deadly outcomes is wonderful, but it doesn't abnegate Manning from the inappropriate actions he took particularly on the cable leak.
What's far more interesting about this case, is the fact that the press used to be in love with Assange, and now they hate him. I wonder what caused them to turn. Obviously, his close ties to Russia are problematic, but it's hard to see exactly what it is. It's possible that he's just not contemporarily a social advocate in their view: we're now full-on into intersectional issues, matters of state etc. are 'old news' it would seem.
He published Clinton's emails. After that he was no longer on the same "team" as American journalists.
No, it just shows how subservient to U.S. foreign policy the American press is (they did not undertake any widespread publishing of embarrassing details from the cables), and how uninterested and easily misled the American public is about our government's actions overseas.
> What's far more interesting about this case, is the fact that the press used to be in love with Assange, and now they hate him.
The American press was never that in love with Assange -- the smear jobs and carping about his character started very soon after the Manning leaks, as Cockburn points out. The nail in the coffin was publishing the DNC emails, which despite containing a great deal of newsworthy details and indications of corruption, became a convenient scapegoat for Clinton's loss in the 2016 election and are now viewed almost exclusively in that light. (I think some legitimate criticisms can be lodged against Assange for electioneering in his timing of the leaks, but Clinton did joke about assassinating him and did all she could to put him in prison, so ....)
He wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.
> After Manning's arrest, Assange seemed intent on dumping as many classified documents onto the internet as he could, as quickly as he could. In my last few months as USD(I) and my first few months as the fourth DNI in five years, my time and attention were also taken up by the efforts at DOD and CIA to deal with these document dumps. Teams were on standby in both places to sort quickly through whatever was exposed in an effort to find names and identifying details for people in Iraq and Afghanistan who were helping the US war effort, and then try to rescue them before the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents could find and kill them.
Anyone know why we’re treating Julian Assange like the worst criminal that ever existed?
“ Those two shootings were a thousand times repeated, though the reports were rare in admitting that the victims were civilians. More usually, the dead were automatically identified as ‘terrorists’ caught in the act, regardless of evidence to the contrary. ”
Here’s an argument against Leetcode. There are real patterns in our work. That quote is a real pattern in law enforcement. Test for the patterns, not how slick someone is in a contrived scenario.
We seem to be stuck in deja vu world. The same problems over and over, everywhere, with an unwillingness to fix or acknowledge it.
Not many body cams existed for those deaths, huh?
Sad, I’ll erase it from my mind and move on for this evening, as usual.
Don’t stick the guy that showed it to us in jail. Don’t be the emperor that killed the messenger.
Goals, I guess.
4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..
I remember after 9/11 I grabbed a bunch of books about the Taliban from the library, and my dad said ‘look, the government is going to put you on a list now’, and I naively said ‘No dad, this is America’ (he was an immigrant).
Sad stuff, they did put people on a list.
You've mentioned this number a few times, but I can't find a source for it. Can you point me in the right direction?
That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...
This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east.
If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin.
For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone ordered the killing of 34 millions of US citizens.
Lucky us the red army is not the red army anymore.
He founded and promoted terrorism in Ukraine, shot down civilian airplanes, bombed refugees camps, used chemical warfare, prohibited by international treaties, on civilians
He also ordered the assassination of a number of journalists
But Snowden is his guest, so he must be a good man...
Because the CIA had an explicit goal of destroying his reputation in the media, and getting the most damaging headlines possible run about him in an effort to destroy any meaningful support he may have garnered by exposing war crimes.
For example: he was never once charged with any sexcrime in any country, but you'd never know that from the headlines which almost universally referred to "charges" when there were none.
It's a real shame what the US military intelligence community will do when threatened. Snowden himself explicitly specified, at least twice, that they would have summarily executed Barton Gellman if they thought that he was the single point of failure for the release of the Snowden documents, for example. They operate entirely beyond the reach of oversight or the law.
None of this is an accident. They couldn't lay hands on him for a while, so plan B was a character assassination in the media.
What makes you think that? Even if he is though, so what?
> he doesn’t deserve to be exonerated for the actual crimes he committed
Certainly, although I think that the 8 years that he spent in the embassy are more than enough of a punishment for the condom crime.
> and he doesn’t deserve to be treated as a hero for accepting a role as an agent of weaponized information for a global fascist movement
Please explain what you think by this. Are you implying that he should not have leaked the Clinton emails?
> who did one good thing
He leaked more than one "thing".
> did at least one bad thing
Again, are you referring to the Clinton emails?
> questionable motives
Why should his motives matter?
> and is otherwise just a guy
Just like everyone else, including heroes.
The sad irony is that none of this thread's discussion or anything else would make any difference. This article is written in "London Review of Books", not even a single news agency is interested in this currently.
[0] https://youtu.be/gxLa6jtF01g
> helicopter pilots exchange banter about the slaughter in the street below: ‘Ha, ha, I hit them,’ one says. ‘Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,’ the other says. They have mistaken the camera held by one of the journalists for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, unlikely though it was that armed insurgents would stand in the open in Baghdad with a US helicopter hovering overhead. They shoot again at the wounded as one of them, probably the Reuters assistant Saeed Chmagh, crawls towards a van that has stopped to rescue them. When the pilots are told over the radio that they have killed a number of Iraqi civilians and wounded two children, one of them says: ‘Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into the battle.’
[1] is the popular CNN version, while a week earlier El Pais reported [2] very differently on the very same material. And that still doesn't address CNN's suspicious depiction and emphasis of the evil hackers (German CCC members) who visited JA.
That reminds me, since the ECHR or CJEU—I don't remember which one—ruled that you can't sentence a person to prison forever, wouldn't it be inhumane to extradite someone when the potential degree of penalty is over 150 years?
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/assange-embassy-...
[2]: https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/07/09/inenglish/15626...
[3]: https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/07/15/on-cnns-wikileaks-excl...
[4]: https://shadowproof.com/2019/07/15/cnn-twists-ecuador-embass...
I believe you are referring to rulings by the ECtHR[1]. In fact it was determined that the situation in the UK was compliant with the Convention because prisoners have the possibility of applying to the Home Secretary for compassionate release. (This mitigates the concern that, for example, someone could end up in prison for 100 years while society changed around them such that the original sentence became seen to be unjust, but the prisoner felt they had no prospect of having their situation changed).
As for how this affects Assange's extradition, it is already the case that the US must promise not to execute him before the UK will hand him over, so they could perhaps also promise to review his sentence after 25 years if he is imprisoned for that long. (For reference, he turns 50 next year).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_England_a...
If I thought his motives were pure, I would give him more slack but I think he has nefarious motives based on his indiscriminate releases. 150 years sounds right for a spy at his stature without a state sponsor, good thing we aren't at war or there may be an argument to kill him.
Ellsberg was charged with a bunch of crimes too, which would have resulted in 100+ years of jail time. He's considered a good person now because he defended himself and won. It should also be noted that he very much supports Wikileaks.
It should also be noted a big difference in the cases is that Ellsberg leaked documents he already had legal access to, and was therefore a whistleblower. Assange leaked documents that he had to illegally acquire first (either with help or without, but either way he was in possession of stolen goods). You can't get whistleblower protection for leaking information you didn't have legal access to.
I totally understand why Assange is fighting extradition -- it's highly unlikely he would be treated fairly or get a fair trial. But I doubt he'll ever be broadly considered a hero until he defends himself in court.
Should we charge the journalists who distributed Snowden's leaks as well?
This seems like making a distinction to draw a line between the two, but I am missing the explanation for why this distinction has moral import.
We don't need to, we know who their source was (Snowden). If Assange wants to claim he's a journalist, that's fine, but then he either needs to accept the consequences of protecting his sources, or out his sources.
> but I am missing the explanation for why this distinction has moral import.
It's a question of responsibility. When a journalist protects their sources, they accept responsibility for the consequences, and they they chose to reveal their source, they pass on the consequences to their source, but (usually) take a hit to their reputation as a journalist. Assange appears to not want to accept any consequences for his actions, nor pass them on be revealing his sources.
It is my opinion that the US is probably one of the best countries when it comes to the rights of a defendant ― well, before a guilty verdict.
I ask that you actually take a look at some of the kinds of people who run the federal courts in the United States. See something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXv7anhiIBY. These are serious legitimate people who are working in and trying to improve a highly developed yet highly imperfect legal system (and country).
Otherwise, the entire press to whom such things are leaked should be in jail with them.
Last I checked the only protection on classified information was for people that had a clearance at some point. Which is why journalists can generally publish classified information.
When the Taliban killed someone for doing something that offends them, such as providing education for girls, did they generally leave a message explaining how that particular person came to their attention?
Edit: Manning was tortured by being denied sleep for years, and trump openly advocates for it. Right now he’s in solitary confinement which is also a form of torture
I'll take that one further: it's extremely dangerous for anyone in the future.
This whole saga has been another example of what happens when the people in power don't get their way: they will abuse existing systems until they do. Or at the very least, until they've made enough of an example of somebody so the next person won't be tempted to do the same.