Posted on 08/23/2012 11:28:33 AM PDT by managusta
They just can’t help themselves. Today it’s John Pilger in the New Statesman: “The pursuit of Julian Assange is an assault on freedom and a mockery of journalism”. One by one the cream of the intellectual left (and George Galloway) are lining up, in well-disciplined rows, to hurl themselves lemming-like onto the rocks of WikiLeaks. Tony Benn: “the charges are that it was a non-consensual relationship. Well that's very different from rape”. Galloway: "Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don't constitute rape”.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
1. This appears to be a classic “honey trap”; a time-honored way for intelligence agencies to entrap men (especially married men) with a “wandering eye.”
2. Is Assange accused of raping two women **at the same time**? He is quite the sex machine, then.
The anti-semitic/pro-terrorist Socialist pig George Galloway claims that having nonconsensual sex with a sleeping (passed out?) woman is not rape, merely “bad manners”.
NOW is silent as are Facebookers.
Better to tear Assange apart. Dude creeps me out.
If she remained sleeping while he was having sex with her, forget my “sex machine” remark in the earlier post. Dullsville, all the way.
It appears to me to be more like an extreme narcissist doing what an extreme narcissist does and getting in trouble for it. What if you were the father of one of the young ladies?
They seem to be confusing themselves. Their positions seem to be (1) Having sex with a sleeping woman isn’t rape, (2) he’s being railroaded with fake rape charges because of Wikileaks, and (3) Wikileaks was journalism, not espionage, and he should be given a medal. It never seems to dawn on them that they can take just one of those positions without the other two, or two without the third.
I don’t know if Assange is being railroaded with the rape charges. If he did what they say he did ... it sounds like rape. There are specific situations where I believe consent can be presumed unless specifically withdrawn — like in marriage — so that a wake-up call for a sleeping woman wouldn’t be rape. But, this doesn’t sound like one of those situations. She was, essentially, a complete stranger. Consent can’t be assumed with a complete stranger.
I don’t know if he’s being railroaded. Its possible, though not probable. Maybe the chicks were paid off and are lying, or set him up. Maybe he habitually wakes-up his one-night-stands with condomless surprise sex ... which would be assault. Wouldn’t feel all that sorry for him if he were being railroaded — he got a lot of people killed.
Espionage is a crime. It has been for a long time, and these laws weren’t written because of Assange. The pertinent part of the Espionage Act of 1917 is makes criminal the conveyance of classified information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies.
I don’t see any reasonable argument that this isn’t exactly what Assange did. Even if he is completely innocent of the rape charges — he should go to prison for the rest of his life.
SnakeDoc
“The pertinent part of the Espionage Act of 1917 is makes criminal the conveyance of classified information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies.”
Assange can argue that he had no intention to either “interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies” and claim that he was merely engaging in journalism with juicy information obtained from an outside source. Now I have no problem with throwing the book at that outside source, namely the vile little degenerate Bradley Manning. Assange (sleazy playboy-wannabe that he is) merely does what the MSM is either too lazy or afraid of stepping on toes to do. As for the rape charges, I still standy by the honey trap theory. Just seems to convenient.
Can Assange really be charged with espionage if he is a non-US citizen and was not operating within US borders? Wouldn’t that technically mean that say, a Serbian engaging in espionage on US forces in 1999 could be extradited from a third country and tried for spying?
He can argue all kinds of things. Doesn’t make it true.
Assange should be charged with espionage, and Manning with treason. Let a jury decide whether they’re as guilty as they appear.
SnakeDoc
My understanding of the espionage act is that jurisdiction is not dependent on citizenship or where he is, but on the nature of the information and how it was obtained. It isn’t about who or where, it is about what he did and to whom.
Jurisdiction sounds as if it would be similar to jurisdiction over terrorists that kill Americans ... even if the Americans are killed in a foreign country by a non-citizen that never set foot in the U.S (like the Lockerbie bomber and Pablo Escobar, for instance).
SnakeDoc
I agree with SnakeDoc, treason for Manning, espionage for Julie, and let a trier-of-fact decide.
That’s a good question. But I think if he were engaging in battlefield espionage—especially if the force were on his (the spy’s) own territory—then that would be a legitimate act of war, and the US might be barred by convention (or common sense) from indicting him.
Indeed, and when say, Russia or China or Iran, decides to prosecute an American who has never set foot in their country for acts committed in the U.S. or the U.K., under their espionage laws, you'll see why trying to prosecute Assange is wrong. American law does not apply to the whole globe, just to American citizens and persons on U.S. territory. Throw the book at Manning, throw the book (at least administratively) at whatever moron set up the protocols so an Army specialist had access to classified diplomatic cables just because he had clearance to access classified Army documents, but extraterritorial prosecutions of foreign nationals almost strike me as causus belli, not that Australia will even break diplomatic relations with us over it, but perhaps they should, even as we should break off relations with China, were China to seek extradition of an American (say living in London) for publishing secret Chinese documents passed to him by a Chinese analogue of Manning.
See my post #16. No Assange should not be charged with espionage. He’s not a U.S. citizen, he wasn’t in the U.S. If the U.S. claims extraterritorial application of its laws to the whole of humanity, other countries unfriendly to the U.S. will do the same, and Americans will be hounded for publishing things in violation of the espionage laws of Afghanistan, . . ., China, . . ., Iran, . . . Russia, . . . Sudan, . . ., and Zimbabwe, even if they never set foot in those countries.
As for the analogy, well, it's pretty much a given that jumping out of a plane without a parachute will inevitably have negative consequences. That's not really true of sex without a condom... But yes, if true, this would be a criminal case even if -- as teflon9 maintains -- that this was a "honey trap." He could be found not guilty of a rape because of entrapment, but still guilty of assault because of the terms of the sexual act.
Are you familiar with the case of Lord Haw-Haw?
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