A few brave enough to speak out for Assange

In a few more months Jeremy Corbyn's opinion here would matter a great deal.
Maybe that's why Assange's prosecution is getting rushed through now.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said the UK government should not extradite Julian Assange to the US, where he faces a computer hacking charge.

The Wikileaks co-founder was arrested for a separate charge at Ecuador's London embassy on Thursday, where he had been granted asylum since 2012.

Mr Corbyn said Assange should not be extradited "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan".
...Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that "this is all about Wikileaks and all of that embarrassing information about the activities of the American military and security services that was made public".

Tulsi is the only presidential candidate brave enough.

I hate to link to Tucker, but he sometimes tells the truth.

On the other side are these examples:

Independent:

The most fierce defenders of Assange come from two seemingly disparate ends of the ideological spectrum.

First are the fans of Donald Trump, who understand that the leaks of Hillary Clinton’s emails were a political neutron bomb that exploded under her campaign in the closing weeks, the ultimate oppo drop.

Joining them are the American Bernie Bros and the Glenn Greenwald demographic of America-can-do-no-good types who look at anything that weakens US influence in the world as a net positive. American political ideology is no longer a line, but a horseshoe, with the extremes looping toward one another in an asymptotic curve of edge-case crazy.

Economist:

Others think it a long-overdue reckoning with justice for a man who had unleashed information anarchy upon the West, culminating in the destabilisation of American democracy.

Atlantic:

In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feminists and bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam Hussein plucked straight from his spider hole.
...
According to Interior Minister María Paula Romo, this evidently exceeded redecorating the embassy with excrement—alas, we still don’t know whether it was Assange’s or someone else’s—refusing to bathe, and welcoming all manner of international riffraff to visit him. It also involved interfering in the “internal political matters in Ecuador,” as Romo told reporters in Quito. Assange and his organization, WikiLeaks, Romo said, have maintained ties to two Russian hackers living in Ecuador who worked with one of the country’s former foreign ministers, Ricardo Patiño, to destabilize the Moreno administration.

We don’t yet know whether Romo’s allegation is true (Patiño denied it) or simply a pretext for booting a nuisance from state property. But Assange’s ties to Russian hackers and Russian intelligence organs are now beyond dispute.

Update: This might be the ultimate irony.

David Allen Green, a contributing editor to the Financial Times on law and policy, who has written extensively about Assange’s failed legal battle against extradition to Sweden, suggested on Friday that if Sweden does renew its extradition request, it could make Assange’s extradition to the United States less likely.

Any request from Sweden, on behalf of a complainant who says that she has been waiting nine years for justice to be served, would probably be granted priority by an English court over the more recent request from the U.S., which wants Assange to stand trial for allegedly trying (and apparently failing) to help Manning crack a password to access classified documents.

If U.S. prosecutors tried to seek extradition following any legal proceedings in Sweden, Green observed, that could require the consent of courts in both Sweden and England, and could be challenged by Assange’s lawyers before the European Court of Human Rights. “Therefore any decision to extradite Assange onward to the United States would be subject to legal challenges in both Sweden and England, as well as at Strasbourg,” where the European Court of Human Rights sits.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Centaurea

pretty much seals the deal for me. The people controlling the media and the government don't give a shit about how Assange treated his cat.

It's like listening to them talk about how people in Venezuela eat out of dumpsters. I *know* they don't give a shit when people go hungry.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

lotlizard's picture

The self-styled “quality media” (the vain, self-flattering term the German MSM use to refer to themselves) is, on the other hand, picking up and regurgitating as gospel truth every d—ed lie from the usual suspects (US and Atlanticist stenographers for the MIC / Deep State).

If that’s the way it’s going to be now, I say more power to the truth tellers. If that means more power to the RW populists at this point in time, so be it.

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gulfgal98's picture

@lotlizard the corporate "left" has ceded their historical position as being the arbiters what is moral in our society. And in some cases, the left is now being outflanked by the traditional conservative right.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

but it ain't Julian Assange.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Mark from Queens's picture

which has a trove of clips of supporters and pundits espousing about him, the moment and his contribution to the world.

Check it out here, Unity4J

Some examples:

I just subscribed.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut

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