Police have forcibly removed the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrested him, after the Ecuadorian government withdrew asylum.
Appearing before Westminster magistrates, Assange was found guilty of breaching bail and was told he would face a jail sentence of up to 12 months when he is sentenced at crown court.
The 47-year-old had been taken into police custody for failing to surrender to bail and on a US extradition warrant, after Metropolitan police officers were invited into the Knightsbridge embassy. He had taken refuge there for almost seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation.
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8 responses to “Wickee leeks”
Over on Mumsnet, everyone on the thread is asking if the cat is okay. Completely unconcerned about Assange.
I thoroughly enjoyed the footage of him being carried out.
As a cat owner myself, not cleaning up after Fluffy, especially when you and the cat are guests, should itself be a felony. Maybe even against international law in an embassy.
The footage is quite enjoyable. The cop in the foreground is suppressing laughter the whole time.
Assange holed up in the embassy for seven years, only to be nabbed by the police? Where have I heard this story before? Oh yes, “The Adventures of Superman” Season 6 Episode 4 “The Mysterious Cube” (1958):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0506628/plotsummary
Spoiler alert, Superman foils the plan by visiting the US Naval Observatory to set the atomic clock ahead ten minutes. For your viewing pleasure:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5r8axh
I’m not celebrating this. If it was to face charges in Sweden, sure, but not the US.
This all related to the 2010 leaks which revealed how the US had murdered civilians as part of the “war on terror” and then used “confidentiality” to cover it up.
The crime is basically journalism. And sure one can say he’s not a journalist, but news media has fought many government for many years in order to avoid a licensing requirement for journalism because such a requirement would be open to government abuse.
Governments could just refuse to license their critics in that case, and without some sort of licensing regime there isn’t really a way to seperate “journalist” from “not-journalist”.
Obama himself argued that to press charges against Manning would undermine the first amendment. The charge he is being hit with is simply retaliation for those leaks.
Assange is to my mind a canary on a coal-mine situation – he’s an easy target to go after because he’s a shitty person, but you’re dealing with the Trump administration here.
Trump thinks defrauding people is being smart, there is a hell of a lot going on in the US government right now that we don’t know about, and a lot of it is “confidential” in the same way the war crimes of the Bush era were confidential, keeping the embarrassments secret.
I think he’s prepping to do the same stuff to journalists who expose his really dirty laundry when a leak comes some time in the future. He wants the precedent this sets.
‘Journalism?’ Even Walter Duranty was more plausibly a ‘journalist.’ The Stein-voting samples of my immediate acquaintance are STILL crowing that Russian electoral interference is a myth.
Dave @ 4 – I had no idea Superman could change his molecules! Clearly I haven’t kept up.
Bruce – But what makes Assange a journalist? Even if it is a fuzzy category, there must be some criteria. Just stealing secrets doesn’t make someone a journalist on its own, surely.
What journalistic purpose was served by stealing emails from Podesta and others in the Clinton campaign?
Ophelia
I think with journalism there really isn’t much in the way of criteria. In Assange’s case, what he basically did was prepare news for broadcast, and so far as the Manning leaks go – that’s certainly what those were.
If the situation was that he had gotten ahold of hacked emails from the RNC that showed the primaries were being biased in favour of Trump, I think we’d all instantly see the news value in that.
I think in and of themselves, those emails were newsworthy.
The issue I have with him in the 2016 election was that, so far as I’m aware, if he had gotten similar info on the RNC he’d have kept quiet about it, and I’m not entirely convinced he really knew who his source was.
That may sound exculpatory, but if he didn’t even know who gave him the information how much checking can he have done to make sure it was both complete and true?
That’s I think the point at which what he was doing switched from journalism to propaganda.
That said, that was in 2016, what he did with the 2010 leaks, well that was journalism.