A few months ago in Sweden we had a major news story about a journalist who went under cover as an employee of a political party media department in order to follow a story. They explicitly took the job in order to leak information which their employee contract disallowed. They will, practically guarantied, not get in legal problems for it.
People occasionally talk about this tactic as being a bit of a morally grey zone but under cover journalism with an intention of leaking information (if they get their hands on it) do happen from times to times.
> They explicitly took the job in order to leak information which their employee contract disallowed.
I get the feeling if they'd joined the Swedish military and leaked national secrets, things would not have worked out so nicely for them.
That's what Assange was accused of, not being in the military, but actively conspiring with the leaker to steal the documents rather than merely receiving the leaked documents.
Further, if that reporter claimed to be all "free the secrets!"
...but when handed documents from one another foreign government refuses to publish them
and then it becomes obvious that the leaks were targeting liberal Swedish politicians facing election versus conservative candidates favored by that same one particular other foreign government...
I don't understand why people don't see wikileaks as anything other than a proxy Russian foreign intelligence operation.
If they leak info against our opponents, they are free speech heroes and paladins of truth. If they leak info against our party, they are filthy dirty spies. I don't understand why people can't see it.
Apparently Wikileaks were given documents that had already leaked elsewhere before and refused to publish them because their purpose is novel leaks, not repeating leaks from elsewhere. That has been spun into a narrative that they refused leaks because they are biased, without much evidence.
When there are a lot of disingenuous arguments like this being made to discredit someone that turn out to be unreasonable once you dig a little deeper, like we see with Wikileaks and Assange, it generally is a strong suggestion someone is trying to manipulate people into believing a false narrative.
We knew the US wasn't happy with Assange when he landed in prison.
You know that Russia isn't happy with someone when they end up dead. If the Russian files that Wikileaks published didn't make Russia happy, Assange would be in a box right now, and not headed home.
There is actually some funny history around that, since after the world war 2 there was laws restricting news papers from publishing national secrets. One case was a map that the military official accidentally leak themselves, but which was classified, so when the news papers published an article discussing the leak (including a image of the map) the news paper were charged with leaking national secrets.
The result from the political fallout was creation of one of the four constitutional laws that exist in Sweden, the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act of 1949.
One result of that is that if a military personal were to leak information to the press, the journalist would by law be forbidden to ever disclose who that person was. The journalist can be sent to jail if they just happen to disclose it, and must take active steps to prevent it.
The publisher themselves must have the intention to inform the public. If that is true, then the constitution allows the publisher to ignore any other Swedish law like national secret classification for the act of publishing (explicit right given in the constitution).
Legal professors were discussing the situation back during the initial periods when the leaks occurred that Julian Assange now has plead guilty for. The conclusion was that he can not get charged for disclosing national defense information. The constitution do not allow that. He could be charged for conspiring to steal documents (ie, hacking), if the original whistle blower did not have access to the documents in the first place and had material help from the journalist or if they paid the whistle blower to steal the documents (proportional to that action). Conspiracy charges are quite messy however, and since military personal are under different legal laws than civilians, the consensus was unclear if such conspiracy charges is possible, and what if any punishment is available for the courts.
We argue semantics around incidents like this when it comes down to: people doing bad stuff and trying to hide it.
If anything, these laws are completely broken. People should never be punished for exposing bad actors, period. Imagine if that ever happened. Maybe governments and companies would think twice before acting illegally/immorally.
Governments do not want these incidents to happen because they want to keep doing it in secrecy and they enact laws to make uncovering these schemes illegal. Arguing if that's illegal or not is missing the whole point. It will never be legal in a corrupt society like ours.
He has agreed to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act, it's no longer an argument, he's admitting it in court. He's going to go to a US court in one of our tiny pacific island territories to plead.
He directly participated in stealing a bunch of classified information with Manning.
A guilty plea faced with the choice of continued imprisonment in inhumane conditions or the risk of extradition to a country that might jail him for life or execute him does not end the argument of whether or not he is guilty of anything. It's a coerced plea.
It only ends the argument of whether or not there is still a legal case against him.
> a country that might jail him for life or execute him
I've always found this claim to be extremely shrill — and doubly so now. This is the same country that just agreed to let him plead guilty in exchange for, essentially, time served (~5 years). It's also the same country whose president commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence down to 7 years.
Your basic claim is not an unreasonable one: people plead guilty because they'd rather take the deal than face the possibility of a worse outcome at trial. But what will it take to stop the rhetoric about the U.S. wanting to lock him up and throw away the key?
It's also the same country that agreed to it only after it became clear that there was a real chance they might suffer the embarrassment of not getting an extradition and/or have to deal with a government after the election come the July 4 election that might - despite how I dislike Starmer - be at least somewhat less receptive to US pressure.
> It's also the same country whose president commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence down to 7 years.
The same country who may have a different president come November with a history of calling the Assange case a priority.
Why would anyone feel safe relying on the luck of the draw of the president at any given time to get out of what was an initial utterly extreme sentence?
> But what will it take to stop the rhetoric about the U.S. wanting to lock him up and throw away the key?
When the US stops sentencing people to 35 years like with Chelsea Manning's initial sentence, and there's been a long period without e.g. illegal rendition flights, when Guantanamo Bay has been closed for a few decades and no new camps have taken it's place etc. Maybe when a couple of generations have passed, in other words.
I really would hope more people would understand this. Faced with indefinite detention and infinite legal cost would you admit to something you didn’t do to walk free? I’m pretty sure most people would.
It’s a difficult area of research, but there are various law schools[0] and charities[1] trying to help people who took pleas because they feared a harsher sentence if they couldn’t adequately defend themselves.
If you are going to call his guilty plea an expedient choice then Assange should have taken Trump's more expedient offer of a pardon 7 years ago: less time, no felony.
I didn't call it an expedient choice. And it's easy to say 7 years later that it would have been better for him to have taken it than after years of imprisonment in inhuman conditions to soften him up.
I am really glad that your government is gradually losing influence and power. I wouldn't have expected it 20 years ago, but I will probably live to see you completely lose your global hegemony and your fantasies of power become nothing more than embarrassing, self-castrating nostalgia, just like in the former colonial powers of Europe.
> will probably live to see you completely lose your global hegemony and your fantasies of power become nothing more than embarrassing, self-castrating nostalgia
And then you'll enjoy more experiences of aggressively-expansionist governments, Houthi-like groups, and the equivalent of Haitian gangs and Sudanese militias, all over the world, fighting to advance their leaders' own narrow parochial desires wherever they think they can get away with it. They'll be using WhatsApp, Starlink, and cheap drones in their efforts, and enlisting like-minded allies.
You'll find yourself looking back wistfully on the days of the Pax Americana, which for nearly 80 years has maintained a flawed but workable rules-based international order. That's even granting that the U.S. has done some bad things — on occasion, very bad things — in furtherance of its own perceived interests and those of some of its powerful interest groups.
Put a pin in this comment and look back on it. Americans of all people should understand that people are willing to suffer worse material conditions for the sake of freedom.
> Americans of all people should understand that people are willing to suffer worse material conditions for the sake of freedom.
"Freedom" — to be ruled by armed gangs battling for territory (Haiti, Sudan)? To be imprisoned or even killed for disagreeing with the ruling regime (Iran, Russia, China, North Korea)? Or for not wearing the proper head covering as a woman (Iran)? To be poisoned or thrown out a window because you're on the autocrat's shit list? That's certainly "worse," but it's hardly "material conditions."
If you want real "worse material conditions," ask yourself whether North Korean commoners think that their "freedom" makes up for the deprivations that they endure.
The U.S. has been the de facto world policeman for going on 80 years now. Not entirely, but on the whole, the world has been the better for it. Sometimes police make mistakes. Sometimes police are venal or corrupt or vicious. But a world without police would be Haiti, writ large.
> armed gangs battling for territory (Haiti, Sudan)? To be imprisoned or even killed for disagreeing with the ruling regime (Iran, Russia, China, North Korea)? Or for not wearing the proper head covering as a woman (Iran)?
Those are all conditions that exist in the current state of the world, so clearly US hegemony doesn't prevent them. The US intervenes only where it serves its interests to do so, and happily cosies up with equally vicious regimes (e.g. Saudi Arabia) when that serves their interests.
I'll take a world where my country has to pay for our own defence, even if it means higher taxes for me, over one where US personnel can kill someone like me and the US will give them a getaway flight with no repercussions.
> Those are all conditions that exist in the current state of the world, so clearly US hegemony doesn't prevent them.
By that reasoning, murder, robbery, etc., all exist everywhere, so clearly the existence of police forces doesn't prevent them — so sure, let's get rid of the police and other law-enforcement agencies. (Or more succinctly: Half a loaf ....)
> I'll take a world where my country has to pay for our own defence, even if it means higher taxes for me, over one where US personnel can kill someone like me and the US will give them a getaway flight with no repercussions.
If you can make such a world happen, you're of course free to do so. Until then, you might consider acknowledging that the U.S. — for its own mixed reasons, to be sure — provides the key support for an international rules-based order that, on the whole (and with tragic exceptions), has allowed billions of people to live better lives than they would have otherwise.
> By that reasoning, murder, robbery, etc., all exist everywhere, so clearly the existence of police forces doesn't prevent them
Right, to justify police forces you have to actually show that they don't cause more crime than they prevent, and by a big enough margin to make it worth the trouble.
> you might consider acknowledging that the U.S. — for its own mixed reasons, to be sure — provides the key support for an international rules-based order that, on the whole (and with tragic exceptions), has allowed billions of people to live better lives than they would have otherwise.
Every gang chief or warlord (including some of the examples you specifically picked out as bad places to live) makes that kind of argument.
1. There is no other country (not even close) that could be trusted with that amount of power (especially considering size)
2. Held up the (illusion of) “neutral” international institutions like the UN. They barely worked in the presence of a “benevolent” power, and will probably completely lose relevance to anarchy and the “right of the stronger” (on local levels), shall the US hegemony subside.
Then on the other hand the US has started undermining their own most important principles:
1. 1971: Removing the gold convertability from the $
2. 9/11: Starting to spy on each and everyone, eastern germany/soviet-style
3. Removing personal freedoms during COVID (not as severe as other countries, though)
If it weren’t for silicon valley, the us would already look like a stagnating state where the economy is mainly driven by government spending. The problem is larping EU socialism will only yield even worse results in the US, since the government seems to be even less efficient.
On the other hand the US is also one of the few countries that have turned around non-violently in the past. Attractiveness for international talent is still immense. So with a few adjustments I’m pretty sure it could be turned around
The illusion of a neutral global institution like the UN is a result of US hegemony too. They could not tolerate international courts but prosecute Assange...
I would go even further and blame the state of the developing countries on the west too, because their selfish competetivly oriented globalisation left them as vasals since the end of colonization.
This is actually the sadest part, what will remain of this hegemony: a world order made by and for the corrupt. Maybe china makes it better since they resisted IMF, WHO, etc but i have my doubts.
It's clear to me many of the European colonies post & during Monarchal Empires were exploited. But Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Phillipines, Germany, and a lot of the places that were sorta "vassals" of the United States faired well off-ish. I see a lot of examples in history where the United States actually played hardball with the colonial powers of Europe post WWII siding with the exploited more, forcing concessions on the European powers.
Not that the United States isn't flawed or doesn't do hypocritical or unilateral diplomacy (Israel or anything related to communism, & I guess installing/supporting dictators that support US interests), but is it too much to ask if you can provide me a few examples where the US acted like an exploitative colonial power that hindered developing countries (at least in the past 80 years)?
Besides installing dictators or at least manipulating political movements beyond latin america...
It looks like china is trying the same thing the west did after WW2: debt trap diplomacy. [0]
The linked article focuses alot on china in a negative way but the origin of debt trap diplomacy began with the bretton wood institutions (IMF, WHO, world bank) in 1944 and resulted in the debt crises of 1980s [1,2] and the globalized developing countries. These institutions where handing out massive loans meant for development but bound to sometimes very harsh economic reforms [3,4]. The effect was not the promised growth but the debt crises and the (imo intentional) economic opening of resource rich but otherwise poor countries to the well developed economies of the west.
Afaik the US did not directly acted as an expoitative power but hindered developing countries as a proxy for multinational corporations. Like for chiquita banana in latin america or for shell in nigeria [5,6].
This story is decades old, explains well the current corrupt-but-useful leaders all over the southern world and i dont even have to go into the petrodollar and its meaning for small oil exporting countries. The US/the west is imo very responsible for the global state of affairs and the gain of power/wealth is the only explaination for the development we took. This is my bridge to exploitation but propably not the smoking gun you where looking for. This topic is so vast to just focus on a single country.
> but I will probably live to see you completely lose your global hegemony and your fantasies of power
Not sure where you live, friend. And perhaps America never should have attempted to be world’s policeman. Neither an international awareness nor an appreciation for the subltiew of diplomacy have never been America’s strong suit.
But rest assured it is tired and over such a role, with two plus decades of military veterans having seen up close and personally how ugly the world can be in places.
Perhaps you are merely a troll but I’m guessing you have seen the most recent trendlines on this planet. They don’t look good. And it appears will get exactly what you seek.
Personally, the USA has done nothing to me. I am in Germany and live a good life. The USA is simply so violent in terms of foreign policy that there is no comparison: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq again. Assassinations of foreign heads of government, enemies of the state symbolically thrown into the sea from a helicopter. And all this with an unbelievably self-righteous conviction that they themselves are "the good guys". This strange view that the world is some kind of wilderness that needs to be civilized by a strong hand is completely baffling to me. Oh yes, one personal thing comes to mind: I have family in Cuba who have suffered massively under the US trade embargo for 65 years. "Communism evil!" Meanwhile, in the US, there are cities with 40,000 or 50,000 or 60,000 homeless people and people going bankrupt because of medical bills. Makes me wonder which side of that distinction lacks civilization.
I realize that other countries act similarly in terms of foreign policy when they can. Germany hasn't exactly covered itself in glory either. I'm not just referring to the Nazi era. But I am not at all as pessimistic about the multipolar future that probably lies ahead of us as some others are.
