There doesn't need to be formal charges (from the USA). The UK court is not allowed to extradite someone if he/she will be forced to stand trial for something which is not a crime in the UK, and that includes any "hidden" charges. This is so a country can't use one crime as an excuse to get someone extradited, and then charge them with another crime once they got the person on their soil.
There's no guarantee the British court will be covinced, of course.
A war is an armed conflict between states. A "war on terrorists" is not a war in the sense of the Geneva convention, since a group of terrorists are not a state.
The paragraph you cite merely specifies that an armed conflict does not need to be formally declared, or recognised as a "war" by the states involved, in order to count as a war. But it still needs to be an armed conflict between states.
The US doesn't need to send him to Gitmo. All they need to do is try him under the Espionage Act and send him to a Federal prison.
Actually, they can't. Contrary to what many Americans believe, US federal law does not apply internationally. An act needs to be criminal *in the country where it is perpetrated* to be punishable. Since publishing US military secrets is not illegal in Australia, Assange hasn't commited any crime.
Extradition treaties do not make US law applicable to other countries - it merely allows an individual to be tried in the USA for an act *which is also criminal in the country where it was perpatrated*. For example, if someone commits fraud against an American company while in Australia, Australia may allow him to be tried in the USA, since fraud is criminal in both the USA and Australia.
If you think about it, it would be ludicrous to hold foreign citizens liable for actions which are legal in their own countries. It would be like prosecuting a citizen for visiting a casino in a US state where gambling is legal, just because it's illegal in other US states.
If the US government ever gets their hands on Assange, I hope they will have the sense not to let him disappear into a black hole with the diplomatic repercussions it would entail, but I'm not entirely sure. Some of the actions of the US government boggle me.
And of course, let's not forget... the extradition is to Sweden, not to the US. I don't see why Sweden is any more likely to turn him over to the US than the UK would. The Gitmo argument is a bogeyman argument once-removed. And to me, that's just hyperbole, not to mention ridiculous.
As a Swedish citizen, I can vouch that our politicians are more spineless and used to bending backwards than the UK's. For example, the Cablegate documents revealed that US diplomats more or less gave the Swedish government a checklist with the changes they wanted to make to Swedish copyright law, and described the Swedish government as "very cooperative".
As you can guess, I'm glad that Assange and the other people at Wikileaks made us realise how much influence the US government has on our supposedly sovereign country.
The reason for Gitmo is that we are effectively capturing enemy combatants that we cannot properly give Geneva Convention protections to because they do not fight in uniform
Actually, combatants are only required to wear some sort of identification, like an arm patch, while engaging in combat or moving to or from the battlefield. They are not required to make themselves easily identifiable while at their base or in their own homes. When US troops swoop in and apprehend them outside of the battlefield, they have the same rights to protection under the Geneva convention as regular troops.
The talk about "enemy combatants" captured "on the battlefield" is just a way to try to confuse the terms. Politicians and military in the US are trying to define entire countries as "battlefields" to step around the Geneva convention, and define everyone from terrorists to common dissenters as "enemy combatants" to avoid having to give them a fair trial. And unfortunately, many citizens don't know enough to see through the desinformation. (I'm not taking a stab at Americans here; it's just as bad here in Europe.)
The reason that terrorists apprehended on US soil are given a fair trial is simply that US civil law applies to those situations, so the government has no choice. If Assange is handed over to US agents by the Swedish government, they may take him anywhere they like, without passing over US soil. It's already happened once, with two Egyptian asylum seekers who were handed over to CIA agents by the Swedish government and promptly taken to Saudi Arabia and likely tortured - despite Swedish law requiring the government to obtain guarantees of their safety before deporting asylum seekers.
Actually, there is a way to deal with precisely this situation. Various acts of terrorism are defined under international law, so the terrorists can and should be treated as criminals, not prisoners of war. See, for example, the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings.
I believe there are wholly different reasons the US military wants to keep suspected terrorists without trial: 1. The military wants to extract information from them through means not allowed elsewhere, like torture. 2. If the suspects were lawfully prosecuted, the military would need to put the evidence on the table, and that would risk revealing the sources of their intelligence. 3. If the suspects were lawfully prosecuted, some of the people the military believes are dangerous may go free, either because of insufficient evidence, or because they haven't commited an actual crime yet.
There will never be a "winner" until they win because you can't really defeat a religion without wiping out all the adherents. If you can afford to take the really long view they are winning and are going to win in the end. It might take 200 years but they will eventually just out-populate the infidels.
How did you go from "defeat terrorism" to "defeat Islam"? It sounds like you believe all Muslims are terrorists.
In reality, only a small subset of Muslims support terrorism, and since terrorism isn't genetic, you don't need to kill them off - you can make sure their numbers decrease through propaganda, by modernising and democratising muslim countries, and by not providing breeding grounds for terrorists, like Iraq and Afghanistan after the invasions.
How do you think the Brits finally managed to curb terrorism on Northern Ireland? By killing off all Catholics?
Also remember that Islamic terrorism is not just about religion. A large part of the reason for the animosity towards the West is its long history of meddling in the Middle East.
I'd like to see a source for that. It sounds a little unikely prisoners would be tortured with one hand and served gourmet food with the other.
Also, why do you believe the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? There are plenty of other reasons for the military to keep someone there, including terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and believing someone will commit future acts of terrorism.
Also, it's not just a problem of gathering evidence; some of the people held in Guantanamo Bay may be dangerous, but still not guilty in a legal sense even if we had perfect knowledge of all their actions. For example, indirectly supporting a terrorist organisation is not a crime, but it may be dangerous enough that the military feels the need to detain them. Attempting to commit terorrist crimes in the future, without actually having taken any steps towards it, is not a crime either.
However, I maintain that letting the state arbitrarily imprison people without trial is far more dangerous than the terrorists themselves. So far, the "war on terrorism" has claimed far more non-US citizens lives than the terrorists themselves have managed to kill - and as a non-US citizen, I'm a little concerned about that.
(and out of Supreme Court, which has passed enough AntiConstitutional judgments that it really should be shutdown, as it is no longer upholding the US Constitution, but instead it is acting as an arm of the ideological party in power, and I really do not see difference between Republicans and Democrats in this regard, only Libertarians like Ron Paul can be relied upon.)
You could do that, and if they chose to go to a EU country, it would be obliged to grant them asylum if they faced death, torture or persecution in their country of origin.
Of course, there would be severe diplomatic repercussions to you for offloading your problem on others in this way.
More likely it's what has been publicly stated since Bush was President - we can't find any place to release those guys to.
1. Then Obama shouldn't have promised to close Guantanamo Bay in the first place. If the problem of where to send the prisoners was publicly stated since President Bush, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to Obama. 2. No, "being captured in a quasi-war" is not in and of itself justification for being granted asylum - but facing death, torture or persecution if sent back to one's home country is. Once you chose to pick up and detain the prisoners, their security became your responsibility. If that means you have to accept them into your own country, then that's the price you have to pay for picking up and detaining them. It's a simple matter of cause and effect.
And it's sure as sunrise that the EU nations that are offended as all hell about Guantanamo don't want any of the inmates.
No, now when they're already in a rich country which is not only more than capable of taking care of them, but also created this mess to begin with, it's very unlikely a EU country would accept a transfer. But if one of the prisoners faced torture, persecution or the death penalty in their home country, and appeared in a EU country, the EU country would be obliged by international treaties to grant them asylum, *even if they were criminals*.
So the "offended EU countries" are not asking any more of the USA than they would do themselves. In fact, we are already helping you clean up your mess, by accepting a large number of people fleeing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and who would never have appeared at our doorsteps if you hadn't invaded those countries.
If it was truly a war, the international laws on war, like the Geneva convention, would apply. Some US politicians are fond of calling it "the war on terrorism", but they conveniently forget that it's a "war" as soon as they are asked to follow the rules of war.
Everyone knows that they are probably nasty characters, but there is no legal justification to hold them.
Everyone knows that *some* of them are likely nasty characters.
It's unlikely that *all* of them are guilty of something, since military and government officials make mistakes all the time (and sometimes are simply corrupted).
A large number of people in the USA, including politicians and military, believe it's justified to kidnap or assasinate Australian citizen Julian Assange just because they believe what he's doing is hurting the USA. What if a large number of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are in the same situation: They haven't actually done anything illegal or used violence against anyone, but some government official thinks it's better for the country to keep them there?
I think this line alone is a commentary on both the hyperbole used by his lawyers and the sad state of the US reputation in Europe.
Actually, leading political figures in the USA are seriously advocating assassinating Assange. Sending him to an illegal prison would be a step up from that.
Sweden has already on a previous occasion handed over asylum seekers to CIA agents without being able to guarantee their safety, resulting in them being taken to Saudi Arabia for probable torture.
The VPN provider doesn't need to log which IP addresses are masqueraded as which, or can let a number of users share the same IP address, much like a NAT router. At least that's the case here in Sweden, where the laws for Internet providers do not apply for VPN providers.
It does cause a substantial drop in speed, though, at least if you have a fast connection to begin with (I have 100 Mbit/s).
I think that's pretty bad advice. Sure, there are bad lawyers who don't do much for their clients, but even those will help you avoid pitfalls which are hard to spot for the layman.
Slashdot Mirror
Both parties are "Wrong". Haven't you heard of "voting for the lesser of two evils"? :)
There doesn't need to be formal charges (from the USA). The UK court is not allowed to extradite someone if he/she will be forced to stand trial for something which is not a crime in the UK, and that includes any "hidden" charges. This is so a country can't use one crime as an excuse to get someone extradited, and then charge them with another crime once they got the person on their soil.
There's no guarantee the British court will be covinced, of course.
Well, the defence only needs to show there's a real risk that Assange will be extradited to the USA, not prove that it is likely.
I know you're a troll, but that was actually pretty funny :)
A war is an armed conflict between states. A "war on terrorists" is not a war in the sense of the Geneva convention, since a group of terrorists are not a state.
The paragraph you cite merely specifies that an armed conflict does not need to be formally declared, or recognised as a "war" by the states involved, in order to count as a war. But it still needs to be an armed conflict between states.
So, what? You think every journalist who publishes a classified government document with embarassing secrets in it should be thrown in prison?
Because that would be the consequence.
It amazes me how even the people who are defending Assange seem to miss the little fact that he's an Australian citizen acting outside the US.
People! US law does not apply to Australia or the rest of the world outside the US!
That the US government needs to be compared to oppresive regimes like Egypt, Yemen, or Pakistan to come out favourably, should tell you something...
The US doesn't need to send him to Gitmo. All they need to do is try him under the Espionage Act and send him to a Federal prison.
Actually, they can't. Contrary to what many Americans believe, US federal law does not apply internationally. An act needs to be criminal *in the country where it is perpetrated* to be punishable. Since publishing US military secrets is not illegal in Australia, Assange hasn't commited any crime.
Extradition treaties do not make US law applicable to other countries - it merely allows an individual to be tried in the USA for an act *which is also criminal in the country where it was perpatrated*. For example, if someone commits fraud against an American company while in Australia, Australia may allow him to be tried in the USA, since fraud is criminal in both the USA and Australia.
If you think about it, it would be ludicrous to hold foreign citizens liable for actions which are legal in their own countries. It would be like prosecuting a citizen for visiting a casino in a US state where gambling is legal, just because it's illegal in other US states.
If the US government ever gets their hands on Assange, I hope they will have the sense not to let him disappear into a black hole with the diplomatic repercussions it would entail, but I'm not entirely sure. Some of the actions of the US government boggle me.
And of course, let's not forget... the extradition is to Sweden, not to the US. I don't see why Sweden is any more likely to turn him over to the US than the UK would. The Gitmo argument is a bogeyman argument once-removed. And to me, that's just hyperbole, not to mention ridiculous.
As a Swedish citizen, I can vouch that our politicians are more spineless and used to bending backwards than the UK's. For example, the Cablegate documents revealed that US diplomats more or less gave the Swedish government a checklist with the changes they wanted to make to Swedish copyright law, and described the Swedish government as "very cooperative".
As you can guess, I'm glad that Assange and the other people at Wikileaks made us realise how much influence the US government has on our supposedly sovereign country.
The reason for Gitmo is that we are effectively capturing enemy combatants that we cannot properly give Geneva Convention protections to because they do not fight in uniform
Actually, combatants are only required to wear some sort of identification, like an arm patch, while engaging in combat or moving to or from the battlefield. They are not required to make themselves easily identifiable while at their base or in their own homes. When US troops swoop in and apprehend them outside of the battlefield, they have the same rights to protection under the Geneva convention as regular troops.
The talk about "enemy combatants" captured "on the battlefield" is just a way to try to confuse the terms. Politicians and military in the US are trying to define entire countries as "battlefields" to step around the Geneva convention, and define everyone from terrorists to common dissenters as "enemy combatants" to avoid having to give them a fair trial. And unfortunately, many citizens don't know enough to see through the desinformation. (I'm not taking a stab at Americans here; it's just as bad here in Europe.)
The reason that terrorists apprehended on US soil are given a fair trial is simply that US civil law applies to those situations, so the government has no choice. If Assange is handed over to US agents by the Swedish government, they may take him anywhere they like, without passing over US soil. It's already happened once, with two Egyptian asylum seekers who were handed over to CIA agents by the Swedish government and promptly taken to Saudi Arabia and likely tortured - despite Swedish law requiring the government to obtain guarantees of their safety before deporting asylum seekers.
That's low, Anonymous Coward. You don't need to trust Wikipedia; you only need to check the sources listed at the bottom of the page.
That's low, davev2.0. You could just have checked the references listed on the Wikipedia page and addressed them.
Actually, there is a way to deal with precisely this situation. Various acts of terrorism are defined under international law, so the terrorists can and should be treated as criminals, not prisoners of war. See, for example, the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings.
I believe there are wholly different reasons the US military wants to keep suspected terrorists without trial:
1. The military wants to extract information from them through means not allowed elsewhere, like torture.
2. If the suspects were lawfully prosecuted, the military would need to put the evidence on the table, and that would risk revealing the sources of their intelligence.
3. If the suspects were lawfully prosecuted, some of the people the military believes are dangerous may go free, either because of insufficient evidence, or because they haven't commited an actual crime yet.
There will never be a "winner" until they win because you can't really defeat a religion without wiping out all the adherents. If you can afford to take the really long view they are winning and are going to win in the end. It might take 200 years but they will eventually just out-populate the infidels.
How did you go from "defeat terrorism" to "defeat Islam"? It sounds like you believe all Muslims are terrorists.
In reality, only a small subset of Muslims support terrorism, and since terrorism isn't genetic, you don't need to kill them off - you can make sure their numbers decrease through propaganda, by modernising and democratising muslim countries, and by not providing breeding grounds for terrorists, like Iraq and Afghanistan after the invasions.
How do you think the Brits finally managed to curb terrorism on Northern Ireland? By killing off all Catholics?
Also remember that Islamic terrorism is not just about religion. A large part of the reason for the animosity towards the West is its long history of meddling in the Middle East.
I'd like to see a source for that. It sounds a little unikely prisoners would be tortured with one hand and served gourmet food with the other.
Also, why do you believe the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? There are plenty of other reasons for the military to keep someone there, including terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, and believing someone will commit future acts of terrorism.
Not a bad idea, actually. At least as a temporary solution.
Also, it's not just a problem of gathering evidence; some of the people held in Guantanamo Bay may be dangerous, but still not guilty in a legal sense even if we had perfect knowledge of all their actions. For example, indirectly supporting a terrorist organisation is not a crime, but it may be dangerous enough that the military feels the need to detain them. Attempting to commit terorrist crimes in the future, without actually having taken any steps towards it, is not a crime either.
However, I maintain that letting the state arbitrarily imprison people without trial is far more dangerous than the terrorists themselves. So far, the "war on terrorism" has claimed far more non-US citizens lives than the terrorists themselves have managed to kill - and as a non-US citizen, I'm a little concerned about that.
(and out of Supreme Court, which has passed enough AntiConstitutional judgments that it really should be shutdown, as it is no longer upholding the US Constitution, but instead it is acting as an arm of the ideological party in power, and I really do not see difference between Republicans and Democrats in this regard, only Libertarians like Ron Paul can be relied upon.)
Until he gets in power.
You could do that, and if they chose to go to a EU country, it would be obliged to grant them asylum if they faced death, torture or persecution in their country of origin.
Of course, there would be severe diplomatic repercussions to you for offloading your problem on others in this way.
More likely it's what has been publicly stated since Bush was President - we can't find any place to release those guys to.
1. Then Obama shouldn't have promised to close Guantanamo Bay in the first place. If the problem of where to send the prisoners was publicly stated since President Bush, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to Obama.
2. No, "being captured in a quasi-war" is not in and of itself justification for being granted asylum - but facing death, torture or persecution if sent back to one's home country is. Once you chose to pick up and detain the prisoners, their security became your responsibility. If that means you have to accept them into your own country, then that's the price you have to pay for picking up and detaining them. It's a simple matter of cause and effect.
And it's sure as sunrise that the EU nations that are offended as all hell about Guantanamo don't want any of the inmates.
No, now when they're already in a rich country which is not only more than capable of taking care of them, but also created this mess to begin with, it's very unlikely a EU country would accept a transfer. But if one of the prisoners faced torture, persecution or the death penalty in their home country, and appeared in a EU country, the EU country would be obliged by international treaties to grant them asylum, *even if they were criminals*.
So the "offended EU countries" are not asking any more of the USA than they would do themselves. In fact, we are already helping you clean up your mess, by accepting a large number of people fleeing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and who would never have appeared at our doorsteps if you hadn't invaded those countries.
If it was truly a war, the international laws on war, like the Geneva convention, would apply. Some US politicians are fond of calling it "the war on terrorism", but they conveniently forget that it's a "war" as soon as they are asked to follow the rules of war.
Everyone knows that they are probably nasty characters, but there is no legal justification to hold them.
Everyone knows that *some* of them are likely nasty characters.
It's unlikely that *all* of them are guilty of something, since military and government officials make mistakes all the time (and sometimes are simply corrupted).
A large number of people in the USA, including politicians and military, believe it's justified to kidnap or assasinate Australian citizen Julian Assange just because they believe what he's doing is hurting the USA.
What if a large number of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are in the same situation: They haven't actually done anything illegal or used violence against anyone, but some government official thinks it's better for the country to keep them there?
or even Guantanamo Bay
I think this line alone is a commentary on both the hyperbole used by his lawyers and the sad state of the US reputation in Europe.
Actually, leading political figures in the USA are seriously advocating assassinating Assange. Sending him to an illegal prison would be a step up from that.
Sweden has already on a previous occasion handed over asylum seekers to CIA agents without being able to guarantee their safety, resulting in them being taken to Saudi Arabia for probable torture.
The VPN provider doesn't need to log which IP addresses are masqueraded as which, or can let a number of users share the same IP address, much like a NAT router. At least that's the case here in Sweden, where the laws for Internet providers do not apply for VPN providers.
It does cause a substantial drop in speed, though, at least if you have a fast connection to begin with (I have 100 Mbit/s).
You make it sound like a popularity contest, not a legal procedure where a case is judged on its merits. Unfortunately, I'm not sure you're wrong.
I think that's pretty bad advice. Sure, there are bad lawyers who don't do much for their clients, but even those will help you avoid pitfalls which are hard to spot for the layman.