Julian Assange: "I'm Slowly Dying Here".

In other words, you want to put journalism itself on trial. What a stunning disregard for the rule of law and of civilized norms.

 

Or any crime, for that matter.

 

No. He turned himself in. This suggested him worth the government's trust despite his access to funds and an international cadre of prospects for fleeing the jurisdiction. So they trusted him and he bolted. It is not evil to divorce a man who promises not to cheat on you, acts as though he will not cheat on you and then betrays that trust. That is on the philandering husband not the wife.

 

Basically everything you just said is wrong.

Assange was never charged with anything by Swedish authorities. And the investigation into Assange by Swedish authorities is over because it was entirely baseless.

The real reason Assange is being slowly tortured and killed by the UK government is because his journalism exposed US war crimes in Iraq, among other things.

As for all the rumors and innuendo about Assange's behavior in the embassy, that is nothing more than irrelevant smears meant to distract from the far more important issue of press freedoms. Because this isn't about Assange's personality or his personal hygiene, it's about the Trump administration trying to criminalize journalism.

 

So Assange is guilty until proven innocent, instead of the other way around.

It's frightening how easily some people will dispense with basic principles of law and justice when it comes to Assange.

 

The only nutters I see are the people who support imprisoning, torturing, and slowly killing a journalist because they don't like his journalism.

 

Let's start with press freedoms and go from there.

 

There were no charges, so there was nothing to trump or not trump up. The question is whether or not the investigation into Assange was warranted, which it obviously wasn't.

 

Well, since there were never any actual charges, and the investigation into Assange was ultimately dropped, it seems entirely reasonable to characterize the process as lacking sufficient evidence or basis.

 

Well he certainly seems to be extremely mentally unstable, has great difficulty talking or concentrating on things. He apparently keep slurring his speech and people don't know what, if any drugs he is on. The trial will now be 3 or 4 weeks rather than the 3 - 5 days they were going to try and rush it through and I think will concentrate on the fact that it is illegal to extradite someone from the UK on political reasons as well as the fact that the US was secretly filming his meetings with his lawyers while he was in the Embassy. This is against the law and is considered to tarnish the possibility of him having a fair trial so much that charges should be dropped.

 

Tell me about the First Amendment.

 

Clearly, you do not understand how the presumption of innocence works. Or, more likely, you simply do not care.

Irrelevant smears meant to distract from the real issue.

Assange didn't hack anything. All he did was receive and publish information from a government source.

You're basically trying to argue that the US government gets to decide who is and is not a "real" journalist, which would defeat the entire purpose of the first amendment.

You obviously have no idea WTF you're talking about. The first amendment affords everyone the exact same rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It protects an activity, not membership in a group.

There is no doubt among informed and honest people that Wikileaks is protected by the first amendment. The Obama administration looked for ways to prosecute Wikileaks but concluded they could not do so without endangering the first amendment. Only the Trump administration has the audacity to attack the first amendment this brazenly. And you are cheer-leading this assault, by the Trump administration, on press freedoms for no other reason than your personal hatred of Assange.

 

Sure.

It protects freedom of the press, which necessarily extends to receiving and publishing leaks.

What else would you like to know about it?

 

That's how a presumption of innocence is supposed to work. Allegations must be demonstrated before they are to be believed.

 

Says the guy who hysterically promoted "Russian collusion" for months only to watch it collapse into nothing after the Mueller report.

 

How ironic.

 

Does it make any difference to you that Assange was never actually charged with a crime?

 

So how did that whole "Russian collusion" thing work out for you? Is Trump in jail yet? Maybe check in with CNN to see what you should think.

 

Wikileaks is a publisher and is protected by the first amendment. Why do you hate press freedoms?

 

These people don't care about the truth. They are just shills and hacks who want to see Assange die in prison for exposing and embarrassing them.

 

It's especially revealing that so many of these people deriding Assange are so-called "Liberals".

btthegreat, Andrew Jackson, Durandal, and Nemesis are all well-known Left-leaning Democrat members of this forum.
Bush Lawyer as well has started anti-Trump threads, but I can't seem to find anything out about his exact political affiliation.

I would have expected better from those on the Left, but apparently that is not the case.

 

So.....Assange gets his sorry arse to the US and dukes it out instead of crying 'insane victim' in a Pommie Prison.

 

Why do you hold so much anger at Assange? Is it because he leaked secrets about Hillary during her tenure as Secretary of State, and you blame him for Hillary's loss in the presidential election?

 

Pullitzer Prize-winning journalist, Glenn Greenwald, explains the grave threat to press freedoms presented by the prosecution of Assange:

 

If you haven't realized it by now, it seems obvious many of those on the Left here don't care about press freedoms.

Freedom and principles get thrown out the window, and they only care about their side.

Assange turned against Obama and Hillary, an unforgivable crime in their eyes.