
Assange Hearing Day 9 - k1m
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-9/
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jka
The witness quotes a couple of statements by a former warden of ADX Colorado.
In case anyone's interested in finding a source for at least one of those, it
appears in a New York Times article:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-
americas-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/inside-americas-
toughest-federal-prison.html)

(caution: contains some fairly unpleasant reading)

Edit / clarification: only one of the two quotes appears in the NYT article.

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abdullahkhalids
Is there anyone who has changed their mind in either direction on Julian
Assange's actions, guilt, or how different governments are acting, after
reading, over the last few years, any of these posts or comments therein?

~~~
pjc50
Sympathy I may have had for him evaporated over the years with the response to
the rape allegations and the way Wikileaks ended up on the pro-Trump side of
the floor.

It's Chelsea Manning who I have far more sympathy for. Somehow she's not
promoted so much by Assange supporters, despite being the insider responsible
for the leak and already having served in prison for it.

The Iraq war remains a moral disaster, and things have not improved on that
front.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Chelsea Manning still needed Wikileaks to help bring out the truth, the rape
allegations were just that, a total smear it seems, and not rooted in fact.

Regardless of his political leanings, he's an important journalist who ought
to be celebrated for revealing some very uncomfortable facts.

~~~
pjc50
The rape allegations have never seen a court and should not be dismissed as a
smear. Given how these things usually pan out, Cosby and Weinstein passim, I
believe they are more likely true than not.

~~~
laurent92
Weinstein was accused of 98 events and condemned for 2 of them. So you could
say that even for Weinstein, 96% were more false or unsustained.

There _is_ a debate on whether going to a « coke and prostitutes party in
exchange for a role in a movie » is an act of consent or such naivety that it
is unbelievable, but the immense majority were consenting adults who did take
the role in the movie in exchange. But blaming it entirely on men shifts the
focus of the major problem here: the number of women who want to become
actresses and who are willing to compete on sexuality because they believe
it’s their only asset. In other words: We haven’t succeeded as a civilization
in giving women self-confidence in doing a job of science or talent, and they
keep falling back on offering what they are, not what they do.

That would solve the problem in a much wider way than giving the power to
women to crucify any man around them, because that makes a large percentage of
men weary of working with women, and multiplies the problem of female
employment. Just saying.

~~~
pjc50
> giving the power to women to crucify any man around them

This is a gross mischaracterisation of how difficult it is to get rape
convictions.

> We haven’t succeeded as a civilization in giving women self-confidence in
> doing a job of science or talent, and they keep falling back on offering
> what they are, not what they do.

This is a gross mischaracterisation of the pressure is applied to women to do
these things.

~~~
dempseye
> This is a gross mischaracterisation of how difficult it is to get rape
> convictions.

A conviction is not necessary to severely negatively affect someone's life.

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scoot_718
I don't believe this blog post paints an unbiased picture.

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contingencies
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24478259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24478259)
was flagged, which was by a respected journalist with an interest in the case.
The Wikipedia article keeps getting reverted. It's really extremely hard to
find or curate decent information on politically partisan subjects these days.
Maybe a good area for a (positive) OSINT startup.

~~~
rmu09
OSINT is a contradictio in adiecto. Like a round square.

~~~
contingencies
If INT is taken as per military tradition. If INT is taken as "obtaining
actionable knowledge from a mass of otherwise unorganized information" then it
makes sense.

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martin-t
A couple observations (as someone who who doesn't really follow Assange but
stumbled upon this article):

\- In the UK, publishing the transcript of a public hearing is a crime - "NB
this is not a precise transcript. It would be illegal for me to publish a
transcript (of a “public” court hearing; fascinating but true)." \- IMO
something is deeply broken with this, needs to be changed and potentially
people who created this system need to be punished (for taking steps to
undermine democracy).

\- Publishing evidence of (war) crimes (this is what Assange did, right?)
somehow appears to be a crime. What happened to failure to report a crime?
Shouldn't instead people not publishing this be punished?

\- A video call is too high tech for the UK government; also moving to a
different courtroom where it would work is impossible because they'd have to
carry over too much paper. They do everything on paper - linking to some other
piece of paper means making a physical copy - "Are you saying that I should
have repeated his affidavits and all the other evidence in my statements? My
statements would have been thousands of pages long." \- Hello, we have the
internet and hyperlinks, can we pls use them? To me this feels like the courts
are designed as a DoS attack on people's attention.

\- Some US prisons are designed as death penalty without having to go through
the legal trouble of saying it out loud - "Suicides in jail are increasing by
18% a year."

\- Assange seems like a political prisoner - "Eric Lewis than gave testimony
on the change of policy towards prosecuting Assange from the Trump
administration." \- Why does a president have this power? What happened to the
3 branches of government? Maybe this is a US thing, seems very broken.

\- It's not even a public process, except in name - "Public access continues
to be restricted and major NGOs, including Amnesty, PEN and Reporters Without
Borders, continue to be excluded both physically and from watching online." \-
Why is everything not recorded and at least transcript posted online by
default?

~~~
LatteLazy
> \- Publishing evidence of (war) crimes (this is what Assange did, right?)
> somehow appears to be a crime. What happened to failure to report a crime?
> Shouldn't instead people not publishing this be punished?

His "crime" was that he conspired to use a computer without permission. The
fact he used it for a noble purpose doesn't get him out of extradition
apparently. The fact that no one has been prosecuted for the much bigger crime
that he exposed just adds perversity.

~~~
jules-jules
There are afaik 18 charges in the indictment. The above is just one of them.

~~~
LatteLazy
You are correct! I thought they'd dropped those charges and just have 18
counts of Computers.

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stunt
It's disappointing that publishing about war-crimes is a bigger deal than
doing it for governments. Why even governments have this right in first place?
It's fundamentally wrong.

