Ecuador will hand over Julian Assange to the UK

What I&#x27;ve wanted for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, and if Obama would have done it before leaving office, it would have earned him infinite respect:<p>Try them, possibly even find them guilty of something, but also award them with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.<p>What these people have done is probably illegal, but it is unquestionably about the most American, patriotic act you could commit. Speaking out against perceived tyranny with no regard for your own wellbeing, is an incredible act.<p>It makes me profoundly sad how the world (or at least my world, mostly far left, liberal, educated, etc.) has turned so hard against Julian Assange. He&#x27;s a hero in every sense of the word.

This is less a news story than a coat rack Greenwald uses to hang a bunch of loosely-related political arguments he wants to make:<p>* That Ecuador under Moreno is subservient to western powers, this according in part to Correa, who ran the previous Ecuadorian administration, which was widely considered one of the most corrupt in the western hemisphere (I have no idea if Moreno&#x27;s was as well). OK? None of us are equipped to litigate the question of whether Ecuador is well-governed, and I doubt Greenwald is either.<p>* That the UK might (based on no evidence presented in this article) be wrangling to convict Assange under contempt statutes, because, I don&#x27;t know, the UK is super corrupt and out to get Assange.<p>* That the US almost surely plans on prosecuting Assange because, despite the fact that US law makes it pretty difficult to prosecute Assange and despite the fact that it is extremely unlikely the UK or any EU country would extradite him, there are politicians in the US that really don&#x27;t like him. OK? And?<p>The one morsel of &quot;news&quot; in this is the intimation that Moreno is about to revoke Assange&#x27;s asylum. Of course, people paying attention have known this was coming for months. Greenwald has an unnamed source saying the details are being finalized now. Great.<p>The rest of this is basically a very... impassioned... op-ed piece. Infowars does this stuff better, or, at least, more entertainingly.

I&#x27;ve always considered this bit of writing from 2006 to be Assange&#x27;s (and Wikileaks&#x27;) central thesis:<p>----<p>&quot;The non linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance<p>[...]<p>The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive &quot;secrecy tax&quot;) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20071020051936id_&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iq.org:80&#x2F;#Thenonlineareffectsofleaksonunjustsystemsofgovernance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20071020051936id_&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iq.org:...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptome.org&#x2F;0002&#x2F;ja-conspiracies.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptome.org&#x2F;0002&#x2F;ja-conspiracies.pdf</a><p>----<p>I still believe that this will bear out in the long-run, and <i>has</i> already begun to bear out in smaller-scale cases, but it is becoming apparent that in many cases this is like a &quot;the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent&quot; situation, and has really barely begun.<p>As for Assange personally, I still kinda believe in him, though I recognize that is on shakier ground than it may once have been. After 8 uninterrupted years of however an honest and empathetic person might describe his conditions, I would not be surprised, nor would I particularly fault him for losing it a bit, and letting his personal situation (... being fucking <i>personally</i> targeted for destruction by an unfathomably powerful global-scale system of secretive injustice) compromise his personal pretence towards the objective neutrality on which his thesis&#x27;s large-scale fruition is predicated.

Good. His lies about the Catalonia situation were Russia Today-tier of disinformation and fake news. It’s completely normal that an ally of Spain doesn’t want to cooperate with that.

Hopefully he wasn&#x27;t bullshitting with those insurance files. I have been waiting for some quality leak drama for a long long time now.

True about Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Not so true about Assange. And it’s not just the legality. He didn’t simply release documents, he collaborated (as far as it is understood) with another country, to undermine the governments that imposed sanctions on it for the crimes it has (still does) committed.

People seem to be downvoting opinions here and the discussion is all turning so pale it&#x27;s hard to read. Maybe just live with the fact that there will be statements you don&#x27;t agree with and perhaps post a comment explaining why, if the counterpoint has not yet been made.

Why does Greenwald believe that a prominent world leader in a wheelchair attending a conference on people with disabilities is a smokescreen for this Assange business, instead of, you know... _something he actually cares about?_

&gt;highly unlikely that Moreno...will obtain a guarantee that the U.K. not extradite Assange to the U.S.<p>I&#x27;m not remotely convinced that Moreno had any capability to obtain such an assurance. By what mechanism can a foreign agent nullify terms of a treaty between two unrelated states, even if the subject were an ecuadorian national?

Journalists love to argue that journalists should enjoy special first amendment rights, and a central theme of OP is the government prosecuting whistleblowers but not the media companies who publish the info. Even the most Snowden friendly outlets seem to write like that. That seems super weird. The exceptions should be due to public interest, not due to being a newspaper.

Julian Assange is not &quot;effectively imprisoned&quot;. He can leave the Ecuadorian embassy any time he chooses. Ecuador is under no obligation to provide him domicile.

Along with this being tremendously sad due to what I perceive to be a service provided for the privacy conscious people of the world (validation that, yes governments were unjustly spying on people in their own country and abroad), it makes me extra frustrated because what a waste of time and money this whole thing was. From the US, Swedish, UK and Ecuador governments.

I am genuinely surprised by the amount of positive comments here about Assange. It is clear that at a bare minimum he was used as a tool by Putin to sway politics in the US and is it seems likely he was a willing and active participant in that plan. For people who still view Assange positively, do you simply not care about that fact or do you just think the good outweighs the bad?<p>EDIT: This comment is currently sitting at -3 points. I couldn&#x27;t care less about the points, but it shows that at least four people have found problems with this question. Is it too much to ask that you engage in a conversation if you think this question is ridiculous?

<i>last April, Trump’s then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now his Secretary of State, delivered a deranged, rambling, highly threatening broadside against WikiLeaks.</i><p>I watched the video linked and I wouldn&#x27;t describe it as &quot;deranged&quot; or &quot;rambling&quot;. Just because the author disagrees with Pompeo does not make him deranged. When reporters write blatantly political things like this, it really makes me question the fairness of the rest of the article.. what else did they mischaracterize to fit their political views?

The lasting message will be that if, as a private person, you help people reveal State Secrets of the most powerful countries on Earth --especially including evidence of war crimes, illegal spying, and assorted abuses of power-- you will be hounded and end up a forced recluse, tortured prisoner, and dead. The widening use of drones is likely to provide evil politicians with the shortcut they generally desire.<p>Could Assange have organized Wikileaks and gotten such impact as he did while remaining safely anonymous? he must have known he was going to make countless enemies in seats of extraordinary power.<p>[added] My own lesson from this thread is that Assange is amazingly <i>polarizing</i> in this forum, and there is more bile here than I have ever witnessed in HN (almost half of the comments are greyed out at the moment). Much of it seems driven by political inclination rather than reasoned discussion, driven by the substrate of the government abuses of power he set out to disrupt.

Its time to send that Russian asset to prison.

I will believe it when I see it.

Good. It&#x27;s quite clear that WikiLeaks is in cahoots with the Russians after the DNC hack, and their collusion with the Trump campaign to try to show their &quot;impartiality&quot; is despicable. I used to have some respect for WikiLeaks, but they are just Russian pawns. Snowden I respect, but not Assange.

Holy shit. Why can one do?

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;joshtpm&#x2F;status&#x2F;1020727843897118723" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;joshtpm&#x2F;status&#x2F;1020727843897118723</a><p>&gt; <i>Interesting to see Greenwald’s continued toadying for Julian Assange here. 2&#x2F; There are several layers of irony here. Before getting to those let me say that I think it would be a big mistake for the US to try to prosecute him, mainly for precedent and 1st am reasons. But also because we have no interest in validating his martyr complex. 3&#x2F; As for the ironies, Assange didn’t seem ‘asylum’ over a threat of US prosecution. He was there to be evade prosecution for rape. The bogeyman of us prosecution was always there to provide a veneer of principle to the more mundane aim of not answering rape charges. 4&#x2F; Sweden eventually gave up on that case because they couldn’t get access to Assange. So big picture Assange already one. He leveraged his political celebrity into a get out of jail free card for rape. The other irony is that at that time, Assange hadn’t done anything the 5&#x2F; US could charge him with. It was only from his Ecuador refuge that he began actively conspiring against the US and U.K. governments, becoming some sort of tool for the Russian security services. Glenn has another story. But it was clear in 2016 and 2017 ... 6&#x2F; that while Ecuador was willing to grant him refuge (albeit from rape prosecution) they did not want him using it to plot against other governments which Ecuador obviously wants to maintain some level of good relations with 7&#x2F; As I said, it would be very ill advised for the US to try to extradite or prosecute Assange (at least on the basis of any currently known or suspected evidence). But it would be ironic because only the Trump admin (or rather its appointees) wld even try. 8&#x2F; And Assange of course did everything in his power to get Trump elected and help the white nationalities and racist xenophobe groups who were and are his biggest supporters. 9&#x2F; It’s never been clear to me whether Assange was always who he turned out to be or was simply a data anarchist radical who went down a racist&#x2F;authoritarian rabbit hole because of the series of events which unfolded after Wikileaks was formed. 10&#x2F; My hunch was always the former. But it barely matters.</i>

His disinformation campaign has done incredible damage to democracies around the world, despite his great ideas and systems.

Anyone want to start a gofundme to smuggle assange out of ecuador? I bet there numerous other south american countries that would take him in.

Lenin was an appropriate name for this man.

To a lot of people Assange is a hero, and I&#x27;ll grant that I liked a lot of the early actions of Wikileak under him.<p>But to me, he is first and foremost someone that ran from a sexual assault investigation and has spent the years since that trying to evade justice. I have no regard left for the man after doing that.<p>Some will argue that he would not have gotten a fair hearing in Sweden, and that they would have extradite him to the USA. My impression of the Swedish legal system, does not line up with that. So I have to respectfully disagree with those that think that.