As is all the garbage in the OP.

I think the fact that he's free at all (well, not behind actual bars) is pretty amazing.

She has quite the agenda.

based on the Swedish rape charges, there is nothing to counter them. He needs to go back to Sweden and defend himself, like any man accused of rape.

They then get conveniently ignored again and again.

Like you are doing in your post.

But he doesn't want to submit himself to Swedish justice.

Are you one of the people who think it isn't rape under the circumstances described? That it isn't rape if he didn't use the condom that had been agreed upon, and forced himself on a sleeping woman?

what the investigation would actually conclude, or what the final outcome would be if any charges were actually filed. What the record does show, I think, is that Assange is a megalomaniac, not at all above histrionic game-playing -- and that the standard story, told about the Swedish case by some of his supporters (and his lawyers) in recent years, is a big steaming smelly load

So...you are doing "opposition research" from where?

Many of the rest of us follow him from other places....so we would have differing views, I think.

by the carload

Anybody familiar with the history of American realpolitick can understand why there might be a certain amount of international schadenfreude associated with the Wikileaks cable releases. It's always fun to see the-powers-that-be smecked in the schnozz. But that, in itself, doesn't prove anything: it doesn't prove that the cable releases were important whistle-blowing or a brave step towards openness

When the cables first came out, and people starting oohing-and-aahing that "We wouldn't have known about this except for Wikileaks," I did a few little experiments, randomly grabbing a dozen supposedly "new" stories from the Wikileaks cable coverage and searching for what I could have learned about the stories just from available news coverage BEFORE Wikileaks -- and in all the cases I examined, I could have gotten plenty of information from pre-existing web news reports, and I expect much of the info would have been better than the reports from the embassies

There's also the fact that careful principled selection of information matters. A good reporter doesn't just grab a lot of documents to dump on you: some effort is required to understand what is being shown, and how it ties into contexts simply not revealed by the documents themselves. Such editorial work is even more important when there are serious human rights issues and people's life and liberty might be at stake. There's no reason to think Wikileaks has ever had the expertise, the humility, or the patience necessary to engage in the process of evaluating the information and trying to make a coherent story from the leaks. This is partly because Wikileaks actually has no coherent philosophy and analysis: it works from the anarchistic-libertarian stance that everybody should be able to know everything. That may sound attractive in the abstract, until one begins to realize that it is sometimes adult to ask: who exactly is wanting to know what, and why do they want to know it?

Quote from you about this:

"When the cables first came out, and people starting oohing-and-aahing that "We wouldn't have known about this except for Wikileaks," I did a few little experiments, randomly grabbing a dozen supposedly "new" stories from the Wikileaks cable coverage and searching for what I could have learned about the stories just from available news coverage BEFORE Wikileaks -- and in all the cases I examined, I could have gotten plenty of information from pre-existing web news reports, and I expect much of the info would have been better than the reports from the embassies

There's also the fact that careful principled selection of information matters. A good reporter doesn't just grab a lot of documents to dump on you: some effort is required to understand what is being shown, and how it ties into contexts simply not revealed by the documents themselves. Such editorial work is even more important when there are serious human rights issues and people's life and liberty might be at stake. There's no reason to think Wikileaks has ever had the expertise, the humility, or the patience necessary to engage in the process of evaluating the information and trying to make a coherent story from the leaks. This is partly because Wikileaks actually has no coherent philosophy and analysis:"

—By David Kushner
Tue Apr. 6, 2010 12:21 PM PDT

... When I contacted the impressive figures listed on its advisory board, some didn't know they were mentioned on the site or had little idea how they got there. Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, a former representative of the Dalai Lama, recalls getting a cryptic email from WikiLeaks a few years ago, but says he never agreed to be an advisor. Noam Chomsky is listed as a volunteer administrator of the WikiLeaks Facebook group. This is news to him. "I know nothing about it," he says ...

WikiLeaks' stance that all leaks are good leaks and its disregard for the established protocols for verifying them also alarms some journalists. The site suffers from "a distorted sense of transparency," according to Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "They're giving you everything they've got, but when journalists go through process of granting someone confidentiality, when they do it well, they determine that source has good information and that the source is somehow deserving of confidentiality." Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, thinks WikiLeaks' approach gives fresh ammunition to those who seek to pressure journalists to cough up the names of their unnamed sources. She forbids her staff from using the site as a source ...

Assange's efforts have undeniably had an impact, but whether that impact has been entirely positive is debatable. Not long after Assange claims he was targeted in Kenya, WikiLeaks published a report from the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights linking the national police to the torture and death of 500 young men suspected of opposition activity. The Kenyan government had buried the report, but after WikiLeaks published it, the Sunday Times of London picked up the story, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Execution called for Kenya's attorney general and police commissioner to be fired.

WikiLeaks paid a price for its coup. Two Kenyan human rights activists were assassinated in broad daylight—the result, Assange says, of their links to the leaking of the report. The problem, he says, was not that WikiLeaks failed to protect their identities but that they "weren't acting in an anonymous way." Assange might be accused of a similar disregard for security—after all, he'd traveled to Nairobi after WikiLeaks' first big Kenyan leak. Nevertheless, Assange says there's been a concerted campaign to silence him and his collaborators, vaguely citing an "ambush" of a colleague last year. (He's since described it as an encounter with a "'James Bond' character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere 'we think it would be in your interest to…'&quot ...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/04/wikileaks-julian-assange-iraq-video?page=1

Just dumping a shitload of stuff without knowing what you're doing isn't a favor to anybody. And as the Kenyan case suggests, it might get people killed

and while others accuse you of "an agenda", I suggest they find a mirror.

i mean, that is comedy gold!! is that from a movie, or did you just make that up? regardless, positively brilliant! i really must write that one down to use in future. thanks!

You know, like they do in the movies.


I wish him well, and hope his health improves.

You should try living in a small building and never getting to go outside for a month before you make cracks about "living without a gym."

Oh, and add in wondering if you're going to get handed over to the US and wind up like Bradley Manning.

Or are we just supposed to think: "Assange BAD!" because "we say so!" I'd like to hear more than an acronym.



so what is it?

and you should try living with a badly broken leg for 11 months and Complex Regional Pain syndrome. That's what I live with every day. And I try and find some intellectual, spiritual and psychological benefits to it instead of letting it crush me. I can't go out for walks. OK. That's the way it is. I'll find something else.

I don't feel sorry for Assange. I don't believe he raped those women but he made choices. We all get to live with our choices and if something bad happens to us that isn't a matter of choice, then we have to choose how to work with that- or not.

It sounds as though your problems are something you have to live with -- in which case you're to be commended for your patience.

But Assange is in a situation where he's hanging on Ecuador's willingness to make a decision -- and his mother is trying to speed up the process a bit by appealing to the Ecuadorian people over Ecuadorian television.

So is that self-pity -- or is it just a shrewd political move?

Start where you, are to quote Pema Chodron.

And there's something a touch yucky about claiming her son is suffering and that includes doing it for political purposes- and if it is for political purposes, I'm not sure it's particularly effective. Those in the know, know exactly where Mr. Assange is currently living- in a mansion on Hans Place or Hans Road; I forget which. In any case, in a mansion in Knightsbridge, a stone's throw from Harrod's. And I'll bet almost anything there's a gym on the premises and some sort of garden or terrace.

In any case, he did make choices. He gets to live with the consequences.

He has risked his life to bring truth to the public.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
Wikileaks
Maria Bustillos

... WikiLeaks is no longer in possession of the secure submission platform built by a programmer identified in the book only as "the architect." Both Domscheit-Berg and the architect broke with Assange in September 2010 along with at least four other staffers. When he departed the architect apparently packed up his intellectual property and took it with him ...

... Assange was apparently annoyed whenever Domscheit-Berg was described as a "founder" of WikiLeaks. Given that Domscheit-Berg busted tail like one, quit his day job and used the severance money to buy servers for the project and dedicated every waking moment to the organization starting from before even the Julius Baer revelations of 2008, you'd think that Assange would have been happy to call him a founder. But no. Domscheit-Berg's version of events is here quite credible, for Assange's public pronouncements have often bordered on the megalomaniacal. In private, they bounded right over that border ...

... Assange, according to Domscheit-Berg, eventually demanded absolute control over every aspect of WikiLeaks operations, from financial management to publicity and even to deciding what revenge to take against journalists who wrote unsympathetically about him or the project. He became an ever-looser cannon ...

Then, because all you do is always for the greater good, such lies as you choose to tell are spotless, too. As it happens, Assange's old hacker name, "Mendax", means "liar" in Latin.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikileakss-insecure-future-with-an-interview-with-daniel-domscheit-berg

He has been shown to be incredibly mendacious.

I've seen all your links. You apparently think you have something to show or tell me that I'm not already aware of.

and which therefore could not possibly have been an attempt to show or tell you anything?

But it would not surprise me if Domscheit-Berg were shown to be incredibly mendacious. The link I provided immediately prior gives some indications of the lies he admits telling. As he tells it, he and Assange have both done a lot of lying. That is, I think, consistent with the cumulative evidence that Assange is a manipulative megalomaniac with very little regard for the truth or for others

being a QUOTE YOU: "Assange is a manipulative megalomaniac with very little regard for the truth or for others."

What's your REAL BEEF with him? It can't be TRUTH..because he was releasing Diplomatic Cables to the MSM to parse through before they decided what to release!

or deal with the fact that people, other than those you've deigned to address, will call you out on your bullshit.

her book exposing the depths of official corruption in Kenya, It's Our Turn To Eat, was pirated and posted on WikiLeaks in its entirety ... From email distribution lists she could see that the pirated version was being emailed among Kenyans at home and abroad. "I was beside myself because I thought my entire African market is vanishing," says Wrong. "I wrote to WikiLeaks and said, please, you're going to damage your own cause because if people like me can't make any money from royalties then publishers are not going to commission people writing about corruption in Africa ... He was enormously pompous, saying that in the interests of raising public awareness of the issues involved I had a duty to allow it to be pirated. He said: 'This book may have been your baby, but it is now Kenya's son.' That really stuck in my mind because it was so arrogant," she says ... WikiLeaks does apparently expect others to respect its claims to ownership. It has placed a copyright symbol at the beginning of its film about the Iraq shootings ...'
Who watches WikiLeaks?
This week a classified video of a US air crew killing unarmed Iraqis was seen by millions on the internet. But for some, the whistleblowing website itself needs closer scrutiny
Chris McGreal in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 April 2010 16.28 EDT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/10/wikileaks-collateral-murder-video-iraq

All it proves is that Domsciet-Berg is a liar.

All it proves is that Domscheit-Berg is a liar.

He blames Assange for not putting them together in a "Narrative." Now you say he "risked the lives of Amrican Allies to make a name for himself" ....and yet you provide no links as to the "deaths or risks" that were caused because Assange released the Leaks to MSM for them to Parse!

So...perhaps the blame for whatever you say (without links to prove the danger) belongs in the laps of the Media who were parsing these tapes to decide what they would publish. Surely you won't blame the NYT's (Judith Miller) for being given info that they decided to release or the Guardian or others when Assange did give them the Info.

Do you see how hypocritical this is? Blame one person who "gets off" *Judith Miller, etc...then blame the next when they "follow some rules to the MSM?

Give me one death caused by Assange that has been verified by his WikiLeaks release?

people connected to those already harmed by the leaks -- in danger.

But people's lives were put at risk, just as Valerie Plame's associates were put at risk when Cheney leaked her identity.

has been a member of DU since 2002, six years before you joined.

I think their motives are almost invariably complex. I don't live in a fairy tale world of bromides and cliches. Never have. Saw too much too young I guess.

after being thrown out of a plane or helicopter? Things would be a lot worst for Assange in other times or places.

That said, what did he expect on his path?

on RT.

They have been fascinating to watch since we get none of that here in the USA on MSM.

It would be very sad to lose his voice and his inspiration of what he hoped to do "good" in the world as he saw it. And, how he sees "communication" and bringing the WORLD together with a MEDIA that is allowed to show THE PEOPLE...views from all sides...and respect they might have the intelligence to make their OWN opinions.

We don't have that in US today.

It's not a good way to live (though when I was that way I was OK with it, I realized that it was detrimental to my health).

but, since "Stolen election of 2000" many have forced themselves to live that way...thinking they were working for "a cause."

To take away one's freedom is to do disastrous things to them...if they believe they are fighting for a cause they believe is more important than themselves.

I'm presuming much in this ....because this probably isn't anything about YOU and your experience...but there are others of us who understand where "OUTRAGE" takes over our lives and we feel we must do something about what we see going on.

If we trash those of us on our planet who see Peril facing...and confront it...then what are we let with down the road. Compromising Principles eats away at somes souls. And, those are the very voices that keep Civilization Alive... Imho...for what it's worth. Around this place, these days...it's worth SHIT! But, whatever. If we don't speak out...our very reason for being dies...whether it's popular that we exist or not.

(anagram) Too Many Secrets!

I have no doubt he's suffering extreme psychological stress.

elsewhere. Pressure.

I mean, the horrors!

you know, the countries that control the world, to stifle and punish dissent.

1) Step one, get some rinky dink little country to make some trumped up criminal case
against someone who has shone some light on said rinky dink country's criminal activity.

2) Step 2 said rinky dink country asks G8 country to extradite person to face
charges where a second G8 country can ask for said person to be extradited
there.

Thus we have Assange extradited to Sweden who will hand him off to the US

And Paul Watson, under house arrest on an extradition request from Cost Rica,
which has been a CIA base since forever, Japan asks Costa Rica to extradite him
to Japan and Costa Rica says A OK big brother.

Bear in mind these are just charges an spurious ones at that. Neither Assange
nor Watson have been convicted of anything.

In Watson's case the charges were dropped twenty years ago and then
reopened by the new US friendly Costa Rican government !!!

Nothing at all suspicious about that !!

I'm not quite sure how the courts would even begin to make a judgement on this.

Only two people will ever know if the conversation about protection ever happened.

Also this "First, he's set up by a Swedish woman who forces him to sex with him while she's unconscious!" is really less then accurate in the telling. They were sleeping naked together after being intimate and he initiated sex with her before she was fully awake. He didn't come upon her unconscious body and raped her as your sentence portrays.

I think the whole thing is a mess, the line is so fine in the charges, that we will probably never know what happened.

I do think he needs to go to Sweden and answer the charges, but I also understand why he might feel he wouldn't be getting a fair trial.

(if the investigation led to prosecution) whether Assange would win or lose the case

The fact is that the Swedish authorities began proceedings against him and that he fled the country while the authorities were negotiating with his lawyer to schedule an interview

He had come to Sweden, where some of his servers were located, in the hopes of moving there, and had even submitted a residency application

But when his sexual activities resulted in women asking the authorities whether there would be any way to force him to get an AIDS test for nonconsensual (because unprotected) sex, he skipped over to England and initially confessed charmingly to his own sexual chauvinism and complained of Sweden's "revolutionary feminists"

His story changed with time: eventually it became a dark tale of Sweden's medieval dungeons, Sweden's thralldom to American overlords, the likelihood that extradition to Sweden was a mere cover for extradition to the US, and the intent of the CIA to hustle him into Guantanamo for torture or execution

None of these claims comports with the facts, and in fact he argued none of the claims in the UK courts, because he would have been laughed to scorn if he had. The Swedish courts are as well-insulated from political interference as any Western courts, the barriers being built into the Swedish constitution. Groundless prosecution is a crime in Sweden, and the victims of crimes in Sweden have some rights towards the prosecution of their own cases. The European treaties governing successive extraditions would require the UK to sign off on an extradition from Sweden to the US, and Assange in that case would have recourse to courts in both Sweden and the UK appealing it, so that sending Assange to the US from Sweden would be even harder than simply sending him to the US from the UK -- in addition to which we should add, that the UK was much more closely connected to the Bush-era rendition program and "war on terror" than Sweden ever was

By skipping bail and fleeing to the embassy, Assange also distracted attention from the fact that he had failed to file any appeal of the UK court decision with the European court in Strasbourg. Why did he skip that appeal? The natural guess is that he really had nothing to offer there

the prize should go to whoever shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. Manning's contribution to "fraternity between nations" seems to be nil; what he seems to have done appears rather analogous to widespread petty vandalism; and his work towards "the abolition or reduction of standing armies" is limited to getting himself removed, from a country we were already leaving, and thence getting himself thrown into the brig.

Of course, Manning's nomination for the Peace Prize is the work of Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Birgitta Jónsdóttir has recently been outraged that the US government sought access to her Twitter account:

... Before my Twitter case, in which the US Department of Justice has demanded that the social media site hands over personal information about my account which it deems necessary to its investigation of WikiLeaks, I didn't think much about what rights I would be signing off when accepting user agreement in my computer. The text is usually lengthy, in a legal language that most people don't understand. Very few people read the user agreements, and very few understand their legal implications if someone in the real world would try to use one against them ...
How the US Justice Department legally hacked my Twitter account
Few realise that foreign governments gain the right to our personal data when we sign up to social media. This must end
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 November 2011 13.34 EST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/11/us-justice-department-legally-hacked-twitter

Now I generally support privacy rights, but there's a certain irony to Jónsdóttir's complaint: she was an active Wikileaks volunteer, who helped to produce the Collateral Murder video. And neither do I actually have any real objection to the release of the Collateral Murder material. But it seems to be part and parcel of a huge 750 000 page leak of documents, some sensitive, allegedly by Manning through Wikileaks. If Jónsdóttir believes other people's documents should freely available, on transparency grounds, then perhaps everybody else should be able to see her documents, too: after all, she is a member of the Icelandic parliament, and surely people would like to know if she's part of a gigantic espionage ring

In any case, since Birgitta Jónsdóttir seems to be connected to Manning's releases, her nomination of him for the Nobel Peace Prize lacks objectivity -- and on those grounds alone, we can expect that nomination to land in the circular file

...for your statement "who forces him to sex with him while she's unconscious". I have never, n.e.v.e.r. seen such an allegation in regard to this case.

With all due respect to your research and your viewpoint, you do realize that many of the leaks exposed, or at least shed a little more light on, patriarchal abuses(ie US involvement in child sex-slavery in Afghanistan) around the world? These abuses are on a far greater scale than one alleged case against a single member of a whistle-blowing organization. I am not saying that makes it right, I just wish the results of the wikileaks scandal would have been more dialogue about these international issues. Instead the media and public is really focused on Assange and everything else seems to have been, not just forgotten, but not even ever been part of public discourse.