This means in practice that USA is allowed "legally" to kill this guy, no question asked. It's just atrocity that US thinks they can use their internal laws all over the globe, like it's de facto international law..

The day Assange is extradited/killed i'll turn to enemy of the state. It ends any support of a nation that thinks it can do whatever it wants and starts my active resistance to bring down that government.. And i'm western white middle class pacifist but there's only so much crap i will take.

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Dead man walking.

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I'd love to tell Assange to just do it, hand himself over, get extradited, and trigger a huge campaign to have him released; thus bettering society in the long run; etc.

However, I have a funny feeling not enough people would turn out, and the media wouldn't play it up enough; and eventually he'd be left to rot in a cell, all but forgotten; and we'd just be worse off.

The United States is a Failed State.

The media would play it up, all right, but from the wrong side. The CBC and BBC, the two most strongly independent outlets of mainstream media have both already done clear hit pieces on Assange, wildly out of character. Strong Independent media like TYT and HuffPost would get dragged through the mud. If you think Tea Party v. OWS was a nation divided, that was nothing.

And the issue is too complex for the average Joe Lunchpail to understand, so it's going to be won, as usual, by bluster. And all the mainstream media together can produce more bluster than all the independent media, and there's not a hope in hell that any but a small portion of independent media outlets will withstand the pressure and put any effort into taking up Assange's case.

Like @Hybrid said, dead man walking.>> ^L0cky:

I'd love to tell Assange to just do it, hand himself over, get extradited, and trigger a huge campaign to have him released; thus bettering society in the long run; etc.
However, I have a funny feeling not enough people would turn out, and the media wouldn't play it up enough; and eventually he'd be left to rot in a cell, all but forgotten; and we'd just be worse off.

I have this feeling like this is going to define America going forward more than 9/11. It won't be one of the things taught in history books, but historians of the future will be able to trace enormous shifts back to this Assange case.

We all know why Americans wouldn't care if they caught him and/or killed him: because they don't. Jokes aside about the selfish nature of Americans, it goes way beyond living in a bubble of self content. It's change. Who likes change? No one. You can apply this same line of thought to almost any large group of people, be it countries, religions, etc. People think they want to know everything. They don't. If they knew everything they'd be accountable. Could you imagine the responses you'd get if you held every single United States citizen accountable (for which they are) for the economy crash? It's far easier to blame someone else and easier still to blame the government.

Blind allegiance to an unknown cause is the biggest plight of any civilized society. It's s joke you hear a lot around election time: "Why do we only get 2-3 candidates to pick from for the leader of our country, but we get 50 to pick from for Miss America." If elections were more about issues and ideas and less about money and promises, the world would be a much better place. Instead of having a lawyer run things and having the world's smartest people being advisers it should be the other way around. It won't however, because the smart people don't want the job. It's kind of a catch 22. We want smart people in power, but the smartest don't want it.

It all comes back to this case. It's easier to just get rid of a problem by shooting it than to talk it out. I say give Assange his own tv show, radio show whatever. Why? Obviously the guy isn't afraid of talking. Then again, that kind of bold disregard also comes with the usual disregard for most things, like his "other" issues of douchebaggery.

People always laugh when I say there is at most only 5-10% of this world that should be allowed to make crucial decisions because they would be unbiased and objective, but they never want to be in that group.

Obama gonna send a drone and hellfire his ass?



sweet

Yes,he's a dead man walking. Martyrdom for freedom of the press will be his fate,and he knows it.

If that were me...I'd release EVERYTHING onto the net. Every dirty secret,every stain of guilt they have on our government and the Banks and Corporations that rule us. If you have only one weapon,use it over and over.The greater majority won't know nor care,being hypnotized by the parade of nonsense that our Media forcefeeds us,but pockets of people will harvest it,keep it safe,and use it even when that drone comes saling into his window.

I pity him,but I thank him.

If this second-rate Bond villain leaked plans for a suitcase nuke, would you libs still support him?

There's a lesson here about leaking a nation's secrets to its very real enemies.

Hellfire enema: well-deserved.

Probably not. Like someone somewhere said, he's white and Western. If he were brown and named Julan al-Asanji, they'd make drone soup out of him and forget about him by lunchtime.>> ^lantern53:

Obama gonna send a drone and hellfire his ass?

sweet

If the US justice department wanted Assange, why wouldn't they just request extradition from the UK? Do they need to let the Swedish sex crimes investigation play out first?

... I thought pretty much every man woman and child in the whole country was an "Enemy of the State" a long long time ago ... It had something to do with money.

>> ^Stu:

We all know why Americans wouldn't care if they caught him and/or killed him: because they don't. Jokes aside about the selfish nature of Americans, it goes way beyond living in a bubble of self content. It's change. Who likes change? No one. You can apply this same line of thought to almost any large group of people, be it countries, religions, etc. People think they want to know everything. They don't. If they knew everything they'd be accountable. Could you imagine the responses you'd get if you held every single United States citizen accountable (for which they are) for the economy crash? It's far easier to blame someone else and easier still to blame the government.
Blind allegiance to an unknown cause is the biggest plight of any civilized society. It's s joke you hear a lot around election time: "Why do we only get 2-3 candidates to pick from for the leader of our country, but we get 50 to pick from for Miss America." If elections were more about issues and ideas and less about money and promises, the world would be a much better place. Instead of having a lawyer run things and having the world's smartest people being advisers it should be the other way around. It won't however, because the smart people don't want the job. It's kind of a catch 22. We want smart people in power, but the smartest don't want it.
It all comes back to this case. It's easier to just get rid of a problem by shooting it than to talk it out. I say give Assange his own tv show, radio show whatever. Why? Obviously the guy isn't afraid of talking. Then again, that kind of bold disregard also comes with the usual disregard for most things, like his "other" issues of douchebaggery.
People always laugh when I say there is at most only 5-10% of this world that should be allowed to make crucial decisions because they would be unbiased and objective, but they never want to be in that group.


It's not necessarily that they don't want to be in the group, it's that unswervable people who can make decisions without bias are least suited to getting into power. I totally agree with you, but i go one further. There's probably only about 1% of people you'd ever meet that you could trust to act entirely fairly and honestly in every possibly situation.

Politicians are surrounded every day by opportunites to skim a little off the top, make life a little easier for you and your loved ones, how many people do you know that could resist that whilst working tirelessly for others? That should be a requirement for leadership. The term is public servant.

Good grief someone having a logical non rabidly anti-US thought? You'll be lynched. Of course they dont want him, why go through all that hassle and bad PR this long after the damage is done. He wants to give the impression that the US is desparate to get their hands on him so he can keep his little rapist butt out of prison. Plenty of dumb asses like those who posted bail for the self styled 'freedom fighter' willing to swallow everything he says, and of course theyll be screwed over as well. Just sit back and enjoy the Assange one man show as he gets increasingly desparate for attention.

As for this 'news', an analyst showing interest and sympathy in wikileaks soon after an analyst leaks massive amounts of secret data to said site, and the military reacts with suspicion. Wow, shocking.

>> ^entr0py:

If the US justice department wanted Assange, why wouldn't they just request extradition from the UK? Do they need to let the Swedish sex crimes investigation play out first?

It's insanity as Cenk rightly says. This just confirms that the case has nothing to do with the case in Sweden, but only exists because of wikileaks.

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>> ^messenger:

Probably not. Like someone somewhere said, he's white and Western. If he were brown and named Julan al-Asanji, they'd make drone soup out of him and forget about him by lunchtime.>> ^lantern53:
Obama gonna send a drone and hellfire his ass?
sweet



I think this is very simplistic thinking. Even as a white "Westerner", if he was behind terrorist attacks and suicide bombings (as are some of the brown "Asanji"'s drone-souped), hiding in the mountains or, worse, behind human shields in some village, I don't think the US would treat him much differently. It's not so much that he's white, but that it's harder to pin him as a criminal. Thus the need for all this "enemy of the state" propaganda. The US gvt doesn't like it's international authority being undermined by irrefutable facts, but it's not like Assange killed anyone, or financed/trained people who did, and they know it.

I guess that's two places where you and I differ. I don't think the facts of the event matter one bit, AND I think the only thing that does count is how much Obama (or any PotUS) believes the average American could get behind killing someone based on their emotional reaction (read, how white does he look/sound). He's not a criminal in any way as far as US law is concerned. He is a threat to the establishment, and the establishment will move as a whole to do their worst. They can throw him in a pit forever, and might get away with torturing him, but I don't think the white Republican southerners will accept his being killed so easily. I think it's "simplistic" to think any of this has to do with an interest in following or even appearing to follow the law, as much as it has to do with manufacturing and then satisfying a sense of justice among the people.>> ^hpqp:

>> ^messenger:
Probably not. Like someone somewhere said, he's white and Western. If he were brown and named Julan al-Asanji, they'd make drone soup out of him and forget about him by lunchtime.

I think this is very simplistic thinking. Even as a white "Westerner", if he was behind terrorist attacks and suicide bombings (as are some of the brown "Asanji"'s drone-souped), hiding in the mountains or, worse, behind human shields in some village, I don't think the US would treat him much differently. It's not so much that he's white, but that it's harder to pin him as a criminal. Thus the need for all this "enemy of the state" propaganda. The US gvt doesn't like it's international authority being undermined by irrefutable facts, but it's not like Assange killed anyone, or financed/trained people who did, and they know it.