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Julian Assange Launches Legal Challenge Against Trump Administration (theguardian.com)

SonicSpike shares a report from The Guardian: Julian Assange, the fugitive WikiLeaks founder whose diplomatic sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy appears increasingly precarious, is launching a legal challenge against the Trump administration. Lawyers for the Australian activist have filed an urgent application to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) aimed at forcing the hand of U.S. prosecutors, requiring them to "unseal" any secret charges against him. The legal move is an attempt to prevent Assange's extradition to the U.S. at a time that a new Ecuadorian government has been making his stay in the central London apartment increasingly inhospitable.

The 1,172-page submission by Assange's lawyers calls on the U.S. to unseal any secret charges against him and urges Ecuador to cease its "espionage activities" against him. Baltasar Garzon, the prominent Spanish judge who has pursued dictators, terrorists and drug barons, is the international coordinator of Assange's legal team. He has said the case involves "the right to access and impart information freely" that has been put in "jeopardy." The Trump administration is refusing to reveal details of charges against Assange despite the fact that sources in the U.S. Department of Justice have confirmed to the media that they exist under seal. The application alleges that U.S. prosecutors have begun approaching people in the U.S., Germany and Iceland and pressed them to testify against Assange in return for immunity from prosecution. Those approached, it is said, include people associated with WikiLeaks' joint publications with other media about U.S. diplomacy, Guantanamo Bay and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

16 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Don't worry, Julian by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Everyone on Slashdot has assured me repeatedly over the years that neither the UK nor Sweden has any intention of ever extraditing him to the U.S.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Don't worry, Julian by geekpowa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That was before interfering with US election process was on the table. Maybe if Assange stuck with the original remit of providing a whistleblower safehaven instead of whatever the fuck he has been doing lately with Roger Stone et al, and limited himself to consensual sexual activity, he wouldn't be in self-imposed prison for 6+ years.

    2. Re:Don't worry, Julian by rtb61 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, right. What this is really all about, the US government wants to declare it globally illegal to report the criminal activities of the US government in the rest of the world. So you as citizen witness the criminal activity of a foriegn power, the US government, in your country or in an country where you are at the time, if you report the crime to the authorities of that country, the US want to charge you with the crime of espionage, seriously. You see a CIA agent kill someone, report it and the US government wants to prosecute you and probably kill you in detention, you committed a crime against the US state by reporting the crimes of the US state, when they are the foreign power. A real shite stain, on freedom, democracy and justice, full blow fascism and a populace too cowardly to put a stop to it, even when they are publicly attacked, imagine men allowing the government to fondle their genitals in front of those, well, women's children, they ain't men no more, when they allow that to happen, an emasculated populace, sheeple, trained to be sheared.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  2. Revenge against Hillary by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That was before interfering with US election process was on the table.

    And before that, Hillary asked her staff for ways to kill him - and was taken serious enough that a couple of aides took it at face value and researched ways to do it.

    So your statement could be expanded as:

    That was before tanking Hillary's election because she threatened to kill him.

    But of course he did that, and now America wants revenge.

    And all of this, originally, over making public the "collateral murder" videos (and a bunch of other stuff). America talks big about whistleblowers, but when it comes right down to it, our government is just as petty and vindictive as any dictatorship.

    1. Re:Revenge against Hillary by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      America talks big about whistleblowers, but when it comes right down to it, our government is just as petty and vindictive as any dictatorship.

      I once heard a lawyer who put it best (and I'm heavily paraphrasing here): "Nobody ever thanks a whistleblower. At best they might have a movie made about them or have someone praise them in an op-ed. But even then, long after all the positive press has stopped, they've still lost their job and been permanently black-balled in their field. And there will always be people who will resent and hate them for what they did. They'll always be looking over their shoulders, looking for work in a world where no one wants to hire them, and probably wishing they had just kept their mouth shut. And that's the best case scenario. Worst case, they end up dead or in prison."

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    2. Re:Revenge against Hillary by Mr.+Dollar+Ton · · Score: 3, Informative

      Just like those Swedish women.

      The Swedish women asked for only one thing - that he's not prosecuted for rape. The first Swedish prosecutor, who decided the case on the actual merits let him go.

      Then the CIA stepped in, and the wishes of the Swedish women and justice were not a concern anymore.

    3. Re: Revenge against Hillary by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 3, Informative

      So people with XY chromosomes, but have a vagina because of Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome are what?

      Maybe you should grow the fuck up and realize not everything falls into neat the fairy tale categories that you learned in your first or second year of school.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
  3. Re:Think he can kick Ecuador out of their embassy? by currently_awake · · Score: 5, Informative

    How many of the suspects locked in Guantanamo Bay have even been charged? Keeping suspects in jail till they die of old age isn't legal in the USA. The US government has proved they are willing (and able) to lock people up without trial and throw away the key. Also notice they intend to try them under military law, even though they claim none of them are soldiers, and they claim juristiction over crimes committed in foreign countries.

  4. That's the definition of whistle-blowing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The covert passing of non-public information about misdeeds (whether legal or illegal, unethical, or just plain embarrassing) to a publishing party for widespread dissemination is exactly what WikiLeaks was founded for, the support of whistle-blowing. It plays a very important part in preserving freedom and democracy, as without it unethical governments descend into tyranny behind closed doors.

    The fact that you don't like this just shows the intolerance that you have for freedom and ethics in government. Snowden demonstrated the importance of whistle-blowing, to immense world-wide acclaim. He legitimized it in the public eye, so trying to paint the role of WikiLeaks as something different to whistle-blowing is attempting to sweep back the tide. It's too late for that, the horse has found freedom and the barn door is wide open.

  5. Re:Wikileaks are a russian front by johnsie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're missing the bigger picture. The Russians are not left or right. Their goal is instability in the US. That means making partisan differences worse. Getting the people to vote for governments that cannot function. Divide and conquer is the name of the game. In that respect they will 'support' any side if they know they can use it to stir up trouble. They want Americans to turn on each other.

  6. Re:play with the big boys... by ph1ll · · Score: 3, Informative

    "That he actively colluded with Russia to screw with US election [has] been pretty well documented."

    Has it? Where?

    I mean there are lots of people expressing their opinion or those of "anonymous sources". But that's not the same thing as being well documented.

    Nowhere near.

    --
    --- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
  7. Re:Zerohedge = Daniel Ivandjiiski by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are many, many problems with Zerohedge, but the fact that they are Bulgarian isn't one of them.

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  8. Re:How things change by Freischutz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When he was leaking things that made Bush look bad you loved Julian Assange so hard that Benedict Cumberbatch played him in the movie.

    And when he was leaking things that made Bush look bad the right wing hated Julian Assange so hard they had smoke coming out of their collective ears, now they love him because he fixed an election for Trump. People love and hate things based on whether these thing further or hinder their cause which shouldn't surprise anybody.

  9. Re:Gender vs sex by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

    *normal* people are either of two sex

    Around 1.8% of people are born with some intersex characteristics. It's more common than red hair. By your standard people with red hair are abnormal.

    the unfortunate plain truth

    Is that there is no biological standard for male and female in humans. The International Olympic Committee has been trying to come up with one for a century, and has basically given up. Genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, all kinds of stuff. Wikipedia has an article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    In the end they just decided to categorize people by their testosterone levels because testosterone is what affects performance. Not by sex, even though they call it men's and women's. It's more like performance categories in motor racing.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  10. Re:Gender vs sex by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Around 1.8% of people are born with some intersex characteristics. It's more common than red hair. By your standard people with red hair are abnormal.

    People with red hair are abnormal by definition. The problem comes when we assign negativity to abnormality, which every person who clamors against the correct use of the word "abnormal" (including yourself) is contributing to, simply by acting as if the word should have a stigma.

    the unfortunate plain truth

    Is that there is no biological standard for male and female in humans.

    You can look at what is most common, and say that anything outside this is abnormal, without considering it a problem to be corrected. The idea that everyone should be normal is toxic.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  11. Re:How things change by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Go ahead, blame those dirty foreigners. It's sooo easy to throw it off on someone else. It feels magnificent to retroactively, automatically define your values as the most important ones and those of others as inconsequential and selfish. Make no mistake: Trump's presidential win was the fault of the Democratic Party. They chose a demonstrably corrupt, very rich, connected insider candidate over one - Bernie Sanders - shown by polling to have a better edge over all Republican candidates. It was a spectacular failure of the Clinton machine to consider the impoverished, postindustrial Midwest as a given despite decades of policy neglect. Hillary Clinton herself underestimated just how very unlikeable a person she is. Trump wasn't the best candidate but that's just how little people like Clinton and fear her Beltway aura. Leftists melted down across the Internet, exposing their biases and breathtakingly narrow comprehension of the universes inhabited by others.

    By the way, everything Wikileaks has leaked has been true. 100% truthfulness record. Unlike, for example, the US mainstream media which deliberately vilified a bunch of schoolkids, violating their own "journalist ethics" and accepted standards and practices with glee. Assange just did what he's done his whole life: try to do as much damage to America as possible. Ironically spreading dissent by saying the election was fixed is playing right into Russia's hands. The election was legitimate, the outcome was legitimate. If ye claim otherwise you're literally furthering Putin's cause. At least get paid if you're going to do that...working for free is a sucker's job.

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    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!