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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   24451 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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The guardian on Assange and Biden considering to drop the charges.

Should Biden decide to drop the Assange prosecution it would bring him into line with the previous Democratic administration of Barack Obama. It held back from charging the WikiLeaks founder for fear of infringing freedom of the press rights under the first amendment.

The 18 charges against him were ultimately brought under the presidency of Donald Trump.

To my surprise, this is actually a take echoed by Glenn Greenwood:

So Obama ended eight years in office without indicting Assange or WikiLeaks. Everything regarding Assange’s possible indictment changed only at the start of the Trump administration. Beginning in early 2017, the most reactionary Trump officials were determined to do what the Obama DOJ refused to do: indict Assange in connection with publication of the Manning documents.

The facts go like this:

  • In 2010, Assange fled from Sweden to the UK because he was concerned that his prosecution for some alleged sex crimes was a pretext for extraditing him to the US.
  • In 2012 he took asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK, citing the same concerns.
  • In May 2017 the Swedish prosecutors dropped their charges
  • In April 2017 the Trump DOJ announced that they wanted to prosecute Assange
  • In 2019 he was arrested in the embassy and has been mostly greenlighted for extradition to the US by now.

The Guardian/Greenwood narrative would have to go like this:

  • When Assange stated that he was afraid that Sweden would extradite him to the US in 2010, he was a poor delusional paranoid, because the Obama DOJ valued freedom of the press and all that. None of the prosecution he faced until 2017 was anything different than what any random citizen of Australia accused of similar crimes would have faced.
  • When the evil Trump DOJ took over, they promptly decided to prosecute Assange, suddenly turning his paranoid delusions into reality and putting pressure on the UK to extradite him for his Wikileaks work.
  • When Joe Biden took over, he just forgot to stop his DOJ from further prosecuting Assange.

My narrative would go something like this:

  • Assange was right that the US was out to get since 2010. The sex crime allegations were played up for political reasons. Sweden would have totally extradited him to the US. The DOJ simply kept their mouths shut because there was no advantage for them to admit they intended to prosecute him while he was out of their reach, and playing the freedom of the press champion made Assange look like a paranoid fool.
  • When the Swedes finally dropped their charges, Assange was still wanted in the UK for skipping bail. For some reason (probably something internal, possibly related to the administration change) the US decided to finally put their cards on the table instead of waiting until he was in UK custody.
  • After Biden took over in 2021 he did not drop the prosecution because getting hold of Assange had been a goal of the US (especially the intelligence community) since 2010, not a partisan Trump pet project.

I took Greenwald's comment mostly as a reminder that it was Trump admin who did prosecute Assange, since Greenwald has a lot of followers/fans who love Trump and also love Assange, and since Trump fans have often demonstrated a particularly remarkable talent for ignoring actual stuff that Trump does/did (which isn't that different from your standard "swampy" Republican) and supporting Trump on the basis of some fantasy version of Trump in their heads.

It is more that one man can not be an administration, even if the appeal of Trumpism is the fantasy of change.

For all the promise of Trump changing things, at the end of the day his administration will have plenty of typical republicans. But Trump at least represents a promise. And there is some difference.

You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration. And you would be getting a different administration if people more like Pompeo, Mike Pense, etc, were the president.

I do agree with another poster that people should put more pressure on politicians like Trump who they think are supposedly on their side, when pushing counter establishment moves. But also towards other politicians of course.

While some criticism can be warranted, and Greenwald manages to usually be fair about this issue, blaming everything on Trump and doubly so focusing the blame on Trump fans is unwise, even if one isn't doing so from a lefty perspective. It lets off the hook more powerful, numerous factions like the neocons. Especially the permanent bureaucrats who don't change, or lobbyists, or the media and those that run it. It is better to focus on them, than Trump fans who are at least hopeful of a bigger change than what Trumpism probably can bring.

Trump himself isn't any sort of libertarian's dream when it comes to people like Assange and Snowden. From what I recall, he made some vague murmurs about possibly pardoning Assange at one point, but that went nowhere. Meanwhile, when he was on the campaign trail in 2016, he strongly hinted that Snowden should be executed as a traitor. Which also went nowhere, of course. But my point is that on this issue, Trump has made as many pronouncements which are more authoritarian than the typical establishment politician as he has made pronouncements that are less authoritarian than the typical establishment politician.

However, I agree that Trump has acted like slightly less of a neocon than the typical US president, although that is a low bar to clear.

Trump's own thoughts are immaterial. The behavior of institutions is moved by organized minorities, not the inner monologues of figureheads. After his surprise election, his administration was quickly captured by typical spook mouthpieces and behaved as such. No surprises.

If he is to win this time, it will be on the legs of a persecution by those same institutions and the support of Project 2025 people who, from my estimation, are absolutely woke on the spook question. I've seen some quietly repeat Moldbuggian slogans about retiring everyone from the CIA and they're specifically drawing a plan to purge the deep state instead of Trump's original total lack of steps to drain the swamp.

I don't know if that means he does anything about Assange and Snowden. I don't know if those people survive his election. I don't even know if he'll be elected. But it seems fair to say he gets a mulligan on this particular question given the situation and his staff.

You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration.

Neocon and interventionist like assassinating Iran's most important and revered military leader in a foreign capital by drone strike?

I think the neocon interventionist move was "war with Iran." They built the Littoral Combat Ship for a reason, and it wasn't fighting China.

LCS was horrendously bad, was it even suitable for Iran?

In April 2012, Chief of Naval Operations Greenert said, "You won't send it into an anti-access area"; rather, groups of two or three ships are intended to be sent into areas where access is jeopardized to perform missions like minesweeping while under the cover of a destroyer. The LCS's main purpose is to take up operations such as patrolling, port visits, anti-piracy, and partnership-building exercises to free up high-end surface combatants for increased combat availability.

Sounds like it was supposed to be handling Yemen...

By May 2022, the Navy shifted its plans to decommission nine LCS warships in Fiscal Year 2023, citing their ineffective anti-submarine warfare system, their inability to perform any of the Navy's missions, constant breakdowns, and structural failures in high-stress areas of the ships.

Or not.

I think the idea was that it was supposed to help handle the swarms of Iranian speedboats.

My vague sense of Iranian capabilities is that once we fielded the LCS in numbers their capabilities had evolved beyond merely "100 speedboats with warheads" anyway, although we know from Ukraine that the threat from speedboat swarms is real.

The key is the comparison. Would a typical republican be just as interventionist as Trump was, or much more? The reality is that there is in fact a much more gung ho republican faction and there has been backlash against Trump for not going along with the neocon agenda, as much as they wanted.

Both in regards to Ukraine, Syria, and general American involvement and intervention with other countries.

Greenwood's

I raised an eyebrow at OP's misspelling of his name as some sort of funny-only-to-him joke, but I'm a bit surprised to see you go along with it. Anyway, yeah, the idea that Greenwald in any way supported the narrative that Assange was too paranoid is ridiculous.

and supporting Trump on the basis of some fantasy version of Trump in their heads.

I suppose, but as a counterpoint this entire argument seems to rely on a fantasy version of how politics works. Presidents aren't absolute monarchs, they still have to form coalitions, man positions with actual people, not programmable NPC's, etc. That the Republican establishment, which was the pool he had to draw from, were completely hostile to Assange is not a surprise. Trump himself probably doesn't care one way or another.

Presidents aren't absolute monarchs, they still have to form coalitions, man positions with actual people, not programmable NPC's, etc.

This is one respect in which Presidents are actually monarchs - he can pardon anyone of a federal crime at the stroke of a pen.

I meant it in the sense that people working for him will have their own agendas. I agree that if he really wanted to get Assange out, he could have, and this is why his base should put more pressure on him.

Ugh, I thought that there was something wrong with that spelling but didn't bother to check. To be honest I haven't followed or thought about Greenwald for some time.

Trump himself probably doesn't care one way or another.

Even that would be quite a different stance from those who somehow think that Trump and Assange are on the same side (against the globalists or whatever).

Even that would be quite a different stance from those who somehow think that Trump and Assange are on the same side (against the globalists or whatever).

Not too different, or at least it makes the idea of voting Trump to bust out Assange a not-terrible one, it's just that you have to put actual pressure on him, instead of hoping he'll do it on his own initiative.

Ultimately this is the reason why I consider Trump to be easily the best option americans have had in a long time. Of course a wise and devoted to the population's well-being president/king would be best, but at least a vanitous president is a lot easier to keep aligned with the population's wishes than the puppet of a PMC that believes they should be the one deciding what the population should desire. The former just has to be reminded that the population will love him if he does what they want. The only thing that seems to motivate the PMC to go along or pretend to go along with the population's wishes is the threat of losing to a populist who could undo their long term sociocultural engineering projects.

Unfortunately, I don't trust the population's wishes either.

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