How much extra we gotta donate for KRUDD cockaroaching along n being important?
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Assange !!
- Thread starter Tigaman
- Start date
Well looks like it’s paid off.
Apparently one of PRE’s donated $753,000 in bitcoin to pay for Assange, Rudd and co’s flight.
Another $734,000 that was crowd funded originally for his flights will go to Assange’s “recovery and wellbeing” in other words, into his pocket.
Maybe he will donate it to a worthy cause. War Veterans Well-being Centre. The RSL or maybe a *smile* cause to his mate Donald Trump’s campaign funds. For a Presidential Pardon
I’m going to transfer my money in my bank account. Just in case Mr Assange is reading this and hacks everyone’s accounts.
You’ve been warned
Honestly Baloo Assange was the Prince of Hackers before he started Wikileaks. He was in the Dark Web up to his eyeballs in it. Now instead of using his obvious erudite talent to assist his Government & Allies he choose a path to assist His Government enemies. To smart for his own good. For all the wokes no doubt you are one he is a Jesus Christ who is going to lead us out of our misery & lead us into a Communistic or Islamic lifestyle. I all so assume you endorse the other side does not commit atrocities & are squeaky clean. Baloo have you served in the Australian Defence Force ?.
One thing he got very wrong. Wokes don't believe in Jesus Christ ....
Once again so many have missed the point. Julian Assange is undoubtedly flawed but the issue has always been about what his incarceration meant as a principle.
What would be said about him if someone leaked files from Iran and they were published on Wikileaks and Iran charged an Australian citizen under their espionage act ?
Dont forget the work Assange did against Hilary Clinton to get his mate Donald Trump elected.
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The release of Julian Assange may well send a chill through the corridors of the Biden White House in the run up to the 2024 election as it recalls how the whistle-blower’s leak of Russia-supplied documents fatally undermined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.
The WikiLeaks founder published embarrassing emails from Democratic Party organisations and the Clinton campaign chair, John Podesta, which had been stolen by hackers working for Russia’s GRU military intelligence.
Donald Trump, Clinton’s Republican opponent, even claimed to know in advance about WikiLeaks’ publication of the hacked documents, according to the subsequent Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Assange release a bold move for Biden after leaks helped Trump win in 2016
Democrats haven't forgotten how WikiLeaks fatally undermined Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential bid
inews.co.uk
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Bit of a quandary for the Assange-ophiles. Who love him, make excuses for everything he does including sex crimes.
How they reconcile him getting back into bed with his mate Trump and help him to become POTUS again will be funny to watch.
Assange will be hoping Donny pardons him.
https://www.reuters.com/article/wor...ia-helped-leak-democrats-email-idUSKBN20D2A1/
What a pair, scumbags together again
That could change by the day.
Which incarceration was that for? Originally for skipping bail for alleged sex crimes in Sweden.
Then indicted for computer intrusion (hacking) publishing secrets etc etc.
Read up on some the things he got up to whilst in the Ecuador Embassy. Ungrateful POS.
Indictment and arrest of Julian Assange - Wikipedia
What if he leaked files from Australia? Would you expect him to go free or be arrested?
What is the difference between being a “whistleblower” where he named names and put people at risk for doing their jobs, where material was published and the US enemies had access to them.
And a Robert Hansen, Chelsea Manning , or a Kim Philby/Burgess/Blunt of the Cambridge Five.
They leaked secrets for ideological purposes.
The same as Assange, except he went public. “Freedom of the press” what a load of bollocks.
There’s a rumour he’s going to change his name to Donald Assange or Julian Trump.
Well he’s going to be doing fairly well.
Apparently he’s going to collect the $734,000 or so that was crowd funded to repay the Australian taxpayers for his chartered jet.
Some kind soul paid for the plane in bitcoin. The funds raised will now be pocketed by Julian for “his recovery and wellbeing”
He’ll be able to buy a couple of professional apple Mac’s and get to work for Trump again.
Bollocks WilloThat could change by the day.
Which incarceration was that for? Originally for skipping bail for alleged sex crimes in Sweden.
Then indicted for computer intrusion (hacking) publishing secrets etc etc.
Read up on some the things he got up to whilst in the Ecuador Embassy. Ungrateful POS.
Indictment and arrest of Julian Assange - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
What if he leaked files from Australia? Would you expect him to go free or be arrested?
What is the difference between being a “whistleblower” where he named names and put people at risk for doing their jobs, where material was published and the US enemies had access to them.
And a Robert Hansen, Chelsea Manning , or a Kim Philby/Burgess/Blunt of the Cambridge Five.
They leaked secrets for ideological purposes.
The same as Assange, except he went public. “Freedom of the press” what a load of bollocks.
There’s a rumour he’s going to change his name to Donald Assange or Julian Trump.
All of those people were either charged or would have been charged with espionage against the country of their citizenship. Chelsea Manning was and was jailed for 3 years or so
If Julian Assange has committed a crime against Australia then I would expect him to be charged with that crime, like any other Australian.
No, it’s fact.
So Manning is jailed, but the platform she used, the publisher, she used, the editor she used, the man who groomed her and worked closely with her. Is innocent. He’s a whistleblower. Freedom of the press.
How many of the released Wikileaks had information regarding Australia in them? How many Australian personnel were named?
How do you know he hasn’t? How do you know what other information he has?
Governments the world over have made compromises. Look at this for instance. Pleads guilty to one charge of espionage and released
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Julian P. Assange, 52, the founder of WikiLeaks, pleaded guilty today to conspiring with Chelsea Manning, at that time a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, to unlawfully obtain and disclose classified documents relating to the national defense. After obtaining classified national defense information from Manning, and aware of the harm that dissemination of such national defense information would cause, Assange disclosed this information on WikiLeaks.
The guilty plea concludes a criminal matter that dates back to March 2018, when Assange was first indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia. There, and in superseding indictments, Assange was charged with conspiring with Manning, then a “Top Secret” U.S. security clearance holder, to further Manning’s unlawful acquisition and transmission of bulk classified information, including Manning’s use of a government computer to illegally download hundreds of thousands of classified documents and transmit them without authorization to WikiLeaks.
www.justice.gov
The guilty plea concludes a criminal matter that dates back to March 2018, when Assange was first indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia. There, and in superseding indictments, Assange was charged with conspiring with Manning, then a “Top Secret” U.S. security clearance holder, to further Manning’s unlawful acquisition and transmission of bulk classified information, including Manning’s use of a government computer to illegally download hundreds of thousands of classified documents and transmit them without authorization to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks Founder Pleads Guilty and Is Sentenced for Conspiring to Obtain and Disclose Classified National Defense Information
Julian P. Assange, 52, the founder of WikiLeaks, pleaded guilty today to conspiring with Chelsea Manning, at that time a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, to unlawfully obtain and disclose classified documents relating to the national defense. After obtaining classified national defense...
The Australian Labor Party’s record in the Assange case
Oscar Grenfell@Oscar_Grenfell
The sudden release of Julian Assange and his return to Australia last week have been greeted with warmth and enthusiasm by ordinary people, who have long viewed the WikiLeaks founder as a courageous journalist persecuted for exposing war crimes.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange waves after landing at RAAF air base Fairbairn in Canberra, Australia, Wednesday, June 26 2024 [AP Photo/Rick Rycroft]
The response of the Australian ruling elite, on the other hand, has been a nervous one. Liberal Party figures have slandered Assange as a “felon” and a risk to “national security,” together with media commentators closely aligned with the US state. One such, Peter Hartcher, warned in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning that “With Assange comes a campaign, a movement and a cult.”
The Labor government has sought to balance between the two reactions. On the one hand, its leaders have claimed substantial credit for the plea deal and travel arrangements that resulted in Assange’s freedom. On the other hand, they too have expressed their commitment to “national security” and their hostility to WikiLeaks’ disclosures and have kept an arms length.
Several articles in the Labor-aligned press have encouraged the government to avoid further mention of the matter. One, referring to Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, said that “The PM would be wise to take the win and move on. In political terms, Assange could be sticky fly paper.”
As Assange was touching down in Australia on Tuesday evening, Albanese gave a press conference presenting his government as having played a key role in Assange’s liberation. It was confirmation, Albanese stated, of the correctness of his approach of “quiet diplomacy.” “We don’t shout, we’re not in a contest of machismo, what we do is we get things done,” he stated.
In a phone call, Assange reportedly thanked Albanese. His supporters, including wife Stella Assange and lawyer Jennifer Robinson did the same, with both noting that the Labor government’s calls for the case to be “brought to a close” beginning after its election in May 2022 had marked a shift.
Several points should be made. Labor’s conditional statements, combined with limited representations to the Biden administration could only represent a shift because all previous administrations, including past Labor governments, abandoned Assange and aided his persecution.
Labor only made a shift under the impact of mass pressure, resulting from a sustained campaign by supporters of Assange’s freedom. A Herald poll in May last year, for instance, indicated that 79 percent of Australians wanted Assange to be freed, while another placed the figure even higher.
Then there is the question of what exactly Labor’s representations consisted of and how frequently they were made. A detailed article in the Herald, outlining the behind-the-scenes developments leading up to the plea deal, reported five specific instances on which Labor ministers had raised the issue with their US counterparts over a period spanning more than two years. That is not exactly the “unflagging campaign” that some have touted.
The same Herald article noted that “At no point, say those aware of the talks, did the Australian government say how the case should be resolved.” That is, the matter was left up to the US government, which was seeking Assange’s extradition so that it could prosecute him for exposing war crimes and imprison him for life, in what was clearly a monstrous witch hunt.
What Labor was actually angling for was indicated on several occasions. Departmental briefing notes for Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus in June 2022, i.e., a month after Labor came to office, referred only to the possibility of a “prison swap” involving Assange. That would have meant accepting his extradition to the US and prosecution on the Espionage Act charges.
Over the following months and years, Labor leaders would repeat deliberately vague talking points, “enough is enough” and “this matter must be brought to a close.” Labor MPs declared that their options to intervene were limited, describing the frame-up proceedings against Assange as a “legal process” that had to be “respected.”
In an interview last November, Albanese publicly acknowledged that he had not asked President Joe Biden to drop the prosecution of Assange. Albanese made a tortured argument about respecting the “separation of powers,” fraudulently presenting the US pursuit of Assange as a bona fide legal case exclusively involving the Department of Justice, when in reality it was clearly a political persecution.
Labor’s decision to accept the “legal process” and its refusal to call for the charges to be dropped helped to create the conditions where Assange could only be freed through a plea deal. An Australian Broadcasting Corporation article this morning noted that the “pressure” of Labor’s representations over Assange “wasn’t necessarily just on the US. It was likely also placed on Assange and his legal teams.”
Last year, Albanese publicly stated that a resolution would require “compromises” on both sides, while other Labor figures openly called for Assange to plead guilty. That meant that the government accepted the precedent that the US was seeking to set through its prosecution of a journalist for exposing war crimes.
Labor was undoubtedly intensely fearful that the successful extradition of Assange to the US would inflame mass anger. But, its ambiguous line and failure to forthrightly demand Assange’s unconditional freedom at any point meant that the decision was in the hands of the US government.
Ultimately, it is clear that the plea deal, which represented a major backdown by the US and a victory for Assange, was the result of two intersecting factors: fears in the US state that Assange’s extradition would intensify a political crisis there and internationally, and a recognition that the frame-up legal case would never stand up in court.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Department of Justice lawyers working on the case were increasingly convinced that it would be lost. They made panicked representations to the leadership of Justice in April for a plea deal to be finalised.
The fears were intensified by the decision of the UK High Court in May to allow Assange to appeal extradition. Those court hearings, which were scheduled for July, would have been the first time in years that the substantive issues in the case, including its assault on press freedom and innumerable US violations of the law, would have been heard in an open court.
The Labor government chartered a private jet for Assange to travel to Saipan, where the plea deal was signed off on by a US court, and on to Australia. In a decision which has provoked considerable anger, it refused to foot the bill, leaving the Assange camp with the task of crowdfunding the $A782,190.
Labor’s role in the persecution of Assange
Whatever one's assessment of Labor’s role over the past two years, its record over the fourteen-year US pursuit of Assange is a rotten one.In 2010, WikiLeaks published the documents for which Assange would be charged, exposing massive war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American imperialism’s daily diplomatic conspiracies and black operations on a global scale.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton shakes hands with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Washington, D.C., on March 8, 2011
Labor was in office at the time. Its Prime Minister Julia Gillard denounced the WikiLeaks’ publications as “grossly irresponsible” and declared: “It’s clear that the theft of those documents is an illegal act.”
Labor’s then Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who, as ambassador to the US, accompanied Assange to Saipan and back to Australia, asked the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to investigate whether criminal charges could be laid against Assange, i.e., the Labor government prefigured the later US prosecution. The AFP was compelled to note that Assange had not violated any Australian laws.
Gillard nevertheless threatened to seize Assange’s passport and pledged to assist the US campaign against him. This was under conditions where senior US politicians, including then vice-president and current President Joe Biden were denouncing Assange as a “high-tech terrorist,” while others, including Hillary Clinton, were suggesting that he be assassinated.
WikiLeaks reportedly had concerns at the time that if Assange returned to Australia, Labor would either prosecute him or hand him over to the American authorities.
Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and other current Labor leaders were also prominent in the Gillard administration. They thus bear a central responsibility for all of the persecution he has suffered over more than a decade.
More…….
The Australian Labor Party’s record in the Assange case
The Australian government's involvement in the plea deal arrangements was the result of mass popular pressure. It followed years of Labor actively assisting the persecution of Assange.
www.wsws.org
Good on you Albo and Wong. True heroes with two faces.
Ever been locked up in a maximum security prison, only getting one hour of outdoors time a day, Octa?
