An interesting analysis by our old friend, Steve McIntyre. (Thread)
1/ charge against Assange is violation of 18 USC 1030a. Indictment was filed on March 6, 2018 for incident on March 7, 2010, barely meeting 8-year statute of limitations. Despite clemency, Manning appealed her 1030a conviction. Issues seem relevant to charge vs Assange.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) April 13, 2019
Via The Last Refuge, who has a bucketload of other content to sink your teeth into.
You mean Bradley Manning, right. The guy who now looks like a girl but is genetically still a man.
Yes. He looks b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l.
They all do.
That’s right. A woman is just a mentally confused man with his dick cut off. And that’s not at all insulting to women? Where have all the insanely bitchy women’s libbers gone? They seem to have lost their course when women were given full legal rights.
You can be genetically female or male, not ‘genetically a man’. If Manning’s undergone the physical transformation then transwoman absolutely applies.
If you believe Manning is a woman, then I have some prime tropical real estate on Enceladus to sell you.
Good Twitter thread by McIntyre.
He hones right in on the key problem the US has in this case: proving Assange “hacked” the SIPRNET which, as far as I can tell, he did not. He engaged in good old-fashioned espionage: he simply got Manning (who had all the access necessary to SIPRNET as a US Army MI operator) to download classified files from the system to a disc and pass them to him. During this, Assange was completely outside the writ of US espionage law (had he been on US territory he could have been easily nabbed, but he was not).
Countries generally don’t extradite people for breaking foreign espionage laws. That’s because every country breaks foreign espionage laws. If Assange can be extradited for obtaining US secrets illegally, then, for example, a good part of the CIA or NSA (or CSEC or GCHQ or MI6) could be extradited to other countries for the same offence.
So the US is pegging its hopes on the UK accepting a more nebulous computer-hacking charge. As McIntyre notes, this will be interesting.
Again, if Assange had simply accepted extradition to Sweden in the first place, he might have done a short spell in a cushy minimum-security Swedish prison and now be a free man.
“cushy minimum-security Swedish prison and now be a free man.”
Considering his crime was having consensual sex without a condom, I suspect he would have likely walked away from the charges. Assange considered it likely that extradition to Sweden was just a step in extradition to the US. The damn fool considered the UK to have a superior justice system. He would have been right 100 years ago before the Borg and their allies took over the UK. Now it is turning into a Muslim theocracy. I am hoping Australia is supporting their citizen.
If the UK can extradite Assange, will they extradite Christopher Steel and other MI5 and MI6 operatives to the US to face Trump’s Justice Department for trying to overthrow the 2016 US election?
Don’t hold your breath on that.
Spies are regarded as the same as *diplomats by the governments they serve.
*fact is, all embassies are staffed by spies, therefore diplomats = spies
As I said in the earlier thread, Assange is a sniveling coward. If you are going to poke the big dog, at least have the balls to face him when you wake him up.
I used to have some respect for Assange but that has waned over time. He is like a child that never grew up, thinking he can throw sticks from a tree at the lions below and then crying for his mother when one of the lions decides to scale the tree to take a big bite out of him. And when mommy doesn’t show he climbs higher up the tree and sits there all day crying and wetting his pants.
In the end he has proven to be just another run-of-the-mill anarchist. He couldn’t even carry himself like a man when they arrested him last week.