How rapidly people forget their history. Britain has a specific law on the subject because of an incident that occurred in Britain within my memory, a shooting of a police officer from within the grounds of the Libyan embassy.
No, harboring Julian Assange is not just like shooting at police officers outside the embassy, but preventing the host country from continuing to follow the steps of its agreements about accused defendants with another country is also not the normal activity of a diplomatic representative. There is a long tradition of dissidents seeking asylum in foreign embassies, and that tradition seems to be longest in Latin America, but that can also have consequences for the embassy's relationship with the host country.
AFTER EDIT:
By the way, it has been a very, very long time (since before I was born) since the United States federal government has imposed capital punishment for the crimes of treason or espionage (which, yes, could be a basis for capital punishment under federal law).
Nowadays, it is routine for persons who revealed secret information to the harm of the United States to be imprisoned, sometimes for a term of years rather than for life.
Simply put, even IF Julian Assange were to have to leave Sweden after going from Britain to Sweden for questioning, and even IF Julian Assange were then charged with espionage by the United States, and even IF he were then convicted of espionage, it is quite doubtful that Assange would be executed. Most likely, he would just (if ALL of the hypothetical events happened) end up spending a lot of time in the Supermax prison in Colorado.
Since 9/11 the USA has shown that it does not follow the civil rules of law for non-citizens. Obama's DOJ has convened a secret grand jury investigating Assange under the Espionage Act[1]. Joe Biden has called him a terrorist [2]. Others have called for his assassination [3]. Sweden was involved in the CIA's illegal rendition program and sent people to be tortured in Egypt[4]. Assange has every reason to fear for his life.
but not all of the subpoenas are secret, certainly is it rare for them to include NSLs (as Appelbaum has indicated the FBI hinted) and rarely if never are the dockets themselves sealed (as Appelbaum's lawyer is currently fighting)
Let's not pretend that it's a problem only with the current administration and his political party. The previous one found the civil rules of law rather inconvenient also and waved them off just as easily.
I am not arguing with your statement (you have said nothing wrong) but I'd like to head off the potential "Obama/Democrats is/are the problem!" rants.
Yes. Obama ran on change but when he met the entrenched interests of executive branch Washington, he quickly refashioned himself into George Dubya Bush's third term. His civil rights policy, technology policy, tax policy, financial regulatory policy, and many others confirm it.
The only major difference is that Obama always really wanted to catch Bin Laden and Bush -- openly -- didn't care. Now that that's over, he seems to want to run for Bush's fourth term.
I emphatically disagree. Obama and his administration seems way more competent, and willing to hear many sides, than Bush.
Obama tried to close guantanamo for years (see politifact) before giving up. He tried to end the trickle-down economics that Bush had (such as ending tax cuts for the rich) but conceded to the opposition somewhere around the US debt ceiling crisis.
His administration's technology initiatives are far ahead of Bush's (witness http://data.gov for instance, and requirement for all agencies to have an API).
His social programs are better thought out and actually save us money. Compare for example Bush's Medicare act in 2003 vs the CBO's assessment of Obama's Affordable Care Act which actually will save a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Or compare Bush's "gotta go cya later" bailout to the TARP that happened under Obama. His administration even set up http://recovery.gov to "track the money". Or compare the success that they had in bailing out the automakers. I would say that this administration is much more conscientious than the one with Dick "Deficits Don't Matter" Cheney and co.
Where Bush basically attacked Iraq with no emergency or multinational support ("coalition of the willing" was a sham), US involvement in Libya under Obama is closer to a Just War in that there is an emergency (dictator bombing his citizens), and it was also merely part of a multinational response, including a UN resolution, to a situation decried by human rights groups.
Where I agree with you is Obama's cavalier attitude toward executive privilege and rights granted by the NDAA. This represents an erosion of CIVIL liberties and security in America, which I am not happy about.
It should be no surprise that PPACA saves money over 10 years, if the 10 years contain 10 years of PPACA revenue and only 6 years of PPACA spending. Perhaps we would do well to determine whether it saves or spends money in its eventual steady state, rather than pretending that the world will end in 2020.
As of the bill's passage into law in 2010, CBO estimated the legislation would reduce the deficit by $143 billion[185] over the first decade, but half of that was due to expected premiums for the C.L.A.S.S. Act, which has since been abandoned.[186] Although the CBO generally does not provide cost estimates beyond the 10-year budget projection period (because of the great degree of uncertainty involved in the data) it decided to do so in this case at the request of lawmakers, and estimated a second decade deficit reduction of $1.2 trillion.[180][187] ...
He promised a lot of those issues during his campaign and a lot of people voted for him. Yes, they are utterly stupid to believe that Obama can just sit down and start writing laws into the books, but that doesn't exactly prevent him from appearing as being a liar.
I agree, he did break promises, many of them due to encountering opposition he couldn't muster the political power/courage/recklessness to surmount. You can see a more in depth analysis here:
1) After getting into office, he actually addressed the fiscal and economic crisis that was developing, and we can definitely say that today the charts are a little higher than in 2008. That took some re-prioritizing.
2) All politicians promise something. Just hear Romney's promises: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlnaYOv0DZY ... so believing everyone's promises is silly. For me it's more about how competent the guy is to actually achieve/maintain the stuff I think we need as a country. And even so, I don't think the president can do that much these days. You should worry about the Senate, they have the lowest approval rating ever I think.
3) He has made some major reforms, the medical reform is a big one, perhaps one day he may tackle immigration reform. Also the JOBS act is bringing about some much-needed financial reform, but I can't give all the credit to Obama on this one. Actually here is what I think about the direction this country is headed: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=108
I'm amused by the notion that Assange has to somehow be extradited to Sweden if the CIA is going to rendition him. The CIA renditions people by kidnapping them off the street. They can do that in London just as well as anywhere else in the world. If the CIA wanted to rendition Assange, Assange would have been renditioned by now. The whole Sweden business would only get in the way of a rendition, not facilitate it.
The Obama admin has an active global program of executing US citizens that are labeled 'enemy combatants' or providing aid to E.C., with no judicial review.
The entire idea of charging Assange with espionage against the United States is ridiculous - he owes no duty to that nation. What's next, Russia demanding the extradition of CIA analysts so that they can be charged with revealing Russia's state secrets while working at a desk in Virginia?
That is if the world treated US as a reasonable actor bound by laws and respecting human rights etc. (all the propaganda that it like to spew about itself).
Its actions have shown in the last 10+ years that is not the case. It has detained, tortured and killed people extra-judicially. Even its own citizens. Making any appeals to the the quality of it judicial process is a bit silly at the moment.
So in other words it might not make sense to be afraid of that particular threat "charge of espionage" but it is not unreasonable for him to fear in general.
Remember the case how that Russian ex-KGB agent was poisoned with Polonium? There is little doubt it was the Russians doing it and they also wanted to make sure there would be little doubt (except hard evidence) that they did, so that everyone learns to fear opposing or criticizing them in the future.
It seems to me Assange and Manning are prime candidates for being turned into example for all to see.
The most obvious suspect is oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a London refugee from Russia, accused of embezzlement at home, who is waging a fierce propaganda war with the current Russian government.
That's not what I was implying. The argument is that he fears they will do something to him. And whether that fear is based in reality.
The response of the grandparent was 'no' because US legal system can't technically touch him. My response to that was that I am not exactly sure if the world should trust US in light of its actions in the last 10 years.
When the hypothetical is "will I be killed" then it makes sense to try and work it out in hypothetical rather than ignore it until it becomes, one way or the other, reality.
As someone else already replied to this. When it comes to strategic decision (I call them decision that you can't reverse, say being killed, or imprisoned for life) hypotheticals and gut instincts are pretty good.
You can't conduct an experiment to figure things out, if you can't then come back and conduct more experiment because the first one killed you.
I think you've misread me. I'm not saying that it's ridiculous, so there's no reason to fear it happening; I'm saying it's ridiculous, and I would be entirely unsurprised if it happened anyway.
There's a Bob Dylan song called "Julius and Ethel". What is he singing about?
Julius and Ethel are the young couple who were executed for espionage in 1953. This was at the height of McCarthyism. Most of us agree McCarthy was a little, ahem, extreme. It's an interesting story and younger readers should check it out. Was Ethel Rosenberg really a spy? What did she do? The Wikipedia page has some links to further reading.
Reading over the BBC's timeline of the Assange case really leaves one in a state of bewilderment. The "rape" story was shared with between two women and then with a journalist? The allegations were dropped. Then reinstated? He's being extradicted for some allegations? Allegations, not charges. And those have nothing to do with leaking documents and espionage? WTF?
Are all the newspapers innocent in this? They spread the cables far and wide. It took more than just a disillusioned private and some nerds sniffing Tor exit nodes. The papers are still attracting readers and advertising dollars using this whole incident as a catapult.
The whole thing is really bizarre if you come at it objectively.
And the world tends to have different views on requesting asylum due to political persecution vs requesting it to avoid accusations that you've committed a fairly serious criminal act.
How exactly do you think 'political persecution' works? When they come to arrest you, do you think they proclaim "We're politically persecuting you!" ?
Ecuador's justification is that they believe there is a chance that the USA is planning to extradite him from Sweeden and then charge him with a crime which is punishable by death. Ecuador believes that a death sentence is a violation of Assange's human rights.
That is a pretty grand claim to make, when Sweden has conceded that they have participated in rendition from Sweden to Egypt that was in clear and blatant violation of both Swedish law and international treaties. They were censured by the UN for it. And those are only two cases where they were caught red-handed.
Just to clarify things there is no charge against Assange. Assange isn't accused of any crime.
Perhaps if there were Ecuadorian charges against Assange to which he could plead guilty and thus be a fugitive from international law, which would obviously require he be sent to Ecuador to serve time before going to Sweden for questioning.
I wonder how Britain would feel about it's international obligations under those circumstances.
Lest we forget, Bradley Manning was not given his right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. Though the federal government hasn't imposed capital punishment for espionage/treason officially, who's to say solitary confinement isn't just as bad (or worse)?
Assange doing his thing via wikileaks is better than 10 diplomats in how he promotes governmental transparency, and more equitable relations between the people and their governors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher
No, harboring Julian Assange is not just like shooting at police officers outside the embassy, but preventing the host country from continuing to follow the steps of its agreements about accused defendants with another country is also not the normal activity of a diplomatic representative. There is a long tradition of dissidents seeking asylum in foreign embassies, and that tradition seems to be longest in Latin America, but that can also have consequences for the embassy's relationship with the host country.
AFTER EDIT:
By the way, it has been a very, very long time (since before I was born) since the United States federal government has imposed capital punishment for the crimes of treason or espionage (which, yes, could be a basis for capital punishment under federal law).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_the_Unite...
http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/tit...
Nowadays, it is routine for persons who revealed secret information to the harm of the United States to be imprisoned, sometimes for a term of years rather than for life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_spies#American...
Simply put, even IF Julian Assange were to have to leave Sweden after going from Britain to Sweden for questioning, and even IF Julian Assange were then charged with espionage by the United States, and even IF he were then convicted of espionage, it is quite doubtful that Assange would be executed. Most likely, he would just (if ALL of the hypothetical events happened) end up spending a lot of time in the Supermax prison in Colorado.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Penitentiary,_Flo...