Assange Agrees to US Prison If Obama Pardons Chelsea Manning (theverge.com)

"If Obama grants Manning clemency, Assange will agree to U.S. prison in exchange -- despite its clear unlawfulness," Wikileaks announced on Twitter Thursday. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Verge: WikiLeaks' statement was released one day before a Swedish appeals court decided to maintain a warrant for Assange's arrest over a 2010 rape charge. Assange has said that extradition to Sweden would lead to his eventual extradition to the US, where he could face charges related to WikiLeaks' publication of secret government documents... Assange has been living in political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012...

Chelsea Manning, a former US Army private, was convicted in 2013 for providing a trove of documents and videos to WikiLeaks, and is currently serving a 35-year sentence at the US Disciplinary Barracks in Leavenworth, Kansas. She was hospitalized after a reported suicide attempt in July, and this month went on a hunger strike to seek treatment for her gender dysphoria. Manning ended her hunger strike this week after the military agreed to allow her to have gender reassignment surgery. She still faces indefinite solitary confinement due to administrative charges related to her suicide attempt.
The tweet also included a link to a letter from Assange's attorney, Barry Pollack, calling on the Justice Department to be more transparent about its investigation into WikiLeaks -- and citing the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information. "Director Comey made it clear his conclusion was based on the necessity of proving criminal intent [and] noted that responsible prosecutors consider the context of a person's actions... Criminal prosecution is appropriate only when a person...was intending to aid enemies of the United States or was attempting to obstruct justice."

Comments

Never

[tsa]

Assange knows that will never happen. Obama has trouble even treating Manning like a normal human being.

Re:Never

[Anonymous Coward]

Your second paragraph is trivially wrong - you don't deny people medical care just because they're in locked up. Whatever your political opinion on gender identity disorder and associated therapy+surgery, the medical opinion is what matters.

As for your first/third paragraphs -

1. It would be tactically nearly impossible for an individual to leak information about unconstitutional activity without also dropping information about legal activity.

2. Who released this information to the public?

3. "Traitor" is a label thrown about by mindless patriots, dredging up old memories of McCarthyism and the Cold War. America hasn't been put in danger because a private contractor revealed some information about how America spies on others, private and public - information that ten thousand private contractors before Snowden have had access to and undoubtedly tossed into the wrong hands.

On the contrary, to have a chance of putting America in danger, you'd have to clandestinely help other countries do precisely what America was doing to others, IOW you would spy on America on behalf of another country. If you were also an American citizen, you might then be a traitor.

Re:Never

[Anonymous Coward]

Lesson learned. Don't leak shit if you aren't rich and have friends in his places.

Re:Never

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Loyalty to country / oath = precisely not ignoring illegal actions.

2. Doesn't really matter what her initial motivation was - she could have done it because she was a dirty racist who didn't like the President's color, for all I care.

2. Give evidence that she did it "deliberately, willfully to hurt [her] nation" please.

She didn't seriously injure her country or try to destabilise it or encourage war against it. She did not cooperate with a foreign nation. She was acquitted of "aiding the enemy". To stick the "traitor" label on her is ridiculous.

(Also, to stubbornly stick with "him" suggests you're not really interested in facts and are emtionally clouded.)

Re:Never

[William Baric]

I will agree to traitors to their government, but "traitors to their country" is debatable.

Re:Never

[ClickOnThis]

No, traitor isn't thrown around by "mindless idiots." It's a very good word to describe someone who betrays oaths and their country. Manning did both, and did so deliberately, willfully to hurt his nation, not to "expose injustices" or any such bullshit, but out of petty revenge.

Treason, under the U.S. constitution, can only be committed during a time of war.

The last time the U.S. Congress declared war was June 5, 1942. Authorizations of military force (not to trivialize them) do not rise to the level of a declaration of war.

Therefore, Chelsea Manning, no matter what else you think of her, and no matter how deserving she is of punishment for leaking sensitive information, did not commit treason. Ditto for Edward Snowden.

Re:Never

[dwillden]

The Rosenbergs were executed for Treason. We were not in a state of declared war with the Soviet Union whom they committed their act of treason on behalf of. Your argument has no basis in reality.

Posting AC to preserve Moderations.

What exactly is he asking for?

[kamapuaa]

He is a fugitive from raping two women in Sweden, volunteering to go to jail in the US as long as the US lets go of someone who was in the military and admits releasing lots of military secrets?

Is this offer serious? To me it comes off as laughably weird. Why not volunteer to go to French jail if they pardon Carlos the Jackal?

This quote says it all for me

[JustNiz]

"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."
Patrick Henry, American colonial revolutionary

Re:You Mispelled "Bradley Manning"

[BarbaraHudson]

A Leavenworth judge disagrees with you. Her legal name has been Chelsea Elizabeth Manning since 2014. Do try to keep up. Does it bother you that much that someone else can take control of their life? This sort of thing has been going on since the early 20th century. Time to get over it, don't you think? Or did you think this was the Flat Earth Society Discussion Group / Luddite Support Forum?

He's just showboating

[Sycraft-fu]

He's trying to get himself attention, and succeeding it would seem as here's a story on it.

Assange has acted rather oddly throughout this whole thing, at least if you take his rhetoric at face value. He happily went to Sweden and spent time there until these allegation came up, at which time he went to the UK. He then claimed that the reason was that the charges were BS and Sweden would just hand him over to the US because they were after him as soon as he went back. That of course makes one questions:

1) Why would he go to Sweden in the first place, if he knew it was a country that would hand him over to the US extra judicially?

2) Why would he flee to the UK and feel safe there, a country with such a special relationship with the US it is literally called the "special relationship"?

He then fought the extradition to Sweden in the UK courts and lost. They were ruling just on the validity of the extradition request, not on the validity of the charge behind it. He then fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, claiming that he'd be handed over to the US if he went to Sweden.

So there we are today. Now near as I know, the US has not sought his arrest. While they don't like him, it doesn't look like he's broken US law. Publishing classified US information isn't a crime if you weren't the one who had access to it. So a guy who has a security clearance and gets information and gives it to a paper, he's breaking the law. However the paper that then publishes it is not.

Now maybe he really does know something most don't, but it seems more likely this is just him trying to get in the news. He knows this is an empty offer since the US wouldn't agree to it as they don't have a valid charge to bring against him. This is all between him and Sweden and now him and the UK (even if Sweden dropped the charges, he still broke UK law be fleeing his bail). The US isn't involved.

Re:Today vs Yesterday

[bmo]

>Manning isn't disappeared

Just because we know where he is doesn't mean he's not disappeared. When you are put into solitary confinement with no contact with the outside world with no day-night cycle (they keep the lights on all the time) you have been thrown in a hole to be forgotten about.

BTW, long term solitary confinement is torture. Not all torture is physical.

And no, he's not in "protective custody" to prevent other inmates harming him. You can request and get out of protective custody (which is a form of solitary confinement) and people often do to take their chances in general population because pc is so awful.

>Snowden can't be pardoned because he hasn't been convicted.

You don't need to be convicted to get a pardon. Ford pardoned Nixon before any conviction happened. Your argument is invalid.

>The US doesn't want Assange evidenced by the fact that Greenwald is free

Greenwald is an old-school journalist and thus protected in the court of public opinion as well as by precedent. Assange isn't. Assange has been bad-mouthed enough that the general public doesn't give a shit about him and probably thinks he "deserves whatever happens to him." Going after Greenwald is a non-starter. Going after Assange will get someone promoted.

>Contrary to popular belief the US Foreign Intelligence services are not required to work within the Constitution or Bill of Rights

US foreign intelligence isn't supposed to spy on US citizens. That's a violation of my rights as a citizen. Fuck you for defending this.

How do those boots taste?

--
BMO

Re:Does the US even want him?

[AHuxley]

AC nobody expects a secret US grand jury investigation.
"EPIC Partially Prevails in FOIA Case, Wikileaks Investigation Ongoing"
https://epic.org/foia/doj/wiki...
US government still hunting WikiLeaks as Obama targets whistleblowers (6 March 2015)
https://www.theguardian.com/me...
more at http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj...
"The FBI's "still active and ongoing" probe of WikiLeaks" (March 06, 2015)
http://www.courthousenews.com/...
from https://epic.org/foia/doj/wiki...
i.e. "... the Department of Justice and FBI’s multi-subject investigation into the unauthorised disclosure of classified information published on WikiLeaks, which is “still active and ongoing” and remains in the investigative stage."

Re:OMG! No one was talking about Assange for five

[Joce640k]

...a 2010 rape charge

a) He hasn't been charged with anything
b) It isn't "rape" he's wanted for questioning over.

Re:OMG! No one was talking about Assange for five

[BarbaraHudson]

Sweden doesn't charge you unless you are present to defend yourself.

Why can't idiots learn that?

And they've been given ample opportunity to question him before deciding whether or not lay charges, which they should be doing as part of their investigation, but aren't, because this is politically motivated.