Every time i see some one backing Assange and his antics and proclaiming him a hero, i cringe. Sorry but Steve's got this sorted fair and square; the damage the man did is immeasurable. Are we as a country perfect? Hardly. Did we cross some lines? Yup. Was it necessary? More often than not.
The mere fact he collaborated with the Russians should end the debate/discussion regarding his intentions. Ultimately the numbers killed by his releases will never be known. Being used by Russia (no they are not our friends) was the real tell and pretending otherwise is folly.
Thanks for the cut on Netanyahu. It's time for him to go. He's been playing politics for too long and with too many lives. It's interesting the parallel. Was Assange doing it for the right reasons? Was Bibi doing it for the right reasons? In both cases, i vote no.
Assange is not a friend of the USA. Yet, he did no more damage to our national defense than Bradley "Bradass" Manning (a.k.a. Chelsea), whose sentence was commuted by President Obama after he approved sex transition surgery for the traitor at taxpayer expense.
This article is shameful gibberish. Assange was a hero who exemplified the best of what every American should be, a whistleblower of government corruption. Assange loved America and understood what it is supposed to be, a nation of whistleblowers. His reports were embarrassing? Good, they should be! America is supposed to be transparent, not a haven for dictators, the State is always the greatest enemy of freedom. People were put at harm or at risk? Baloney, only if they were doing something they should not have been doing. DNC emails were leaked by imaginary evil "Russians"? Again an utter fiction, they were leaked by a single, likewise brave and patriotic DNC operative, who was subsequently murdered by those he exposed, and the story is still being covered up. I doubt Assange will take the risk to leak again, but he is a model every American and world citizen should look up to. While yourself, meanwhile, sound like a sore loser shilling for the deep state globalists who truly hate freedom, democracy and popular sovereignty in all its forms. It is therefore yourself who are a great embarrassment and hater of your alleged country, and a hater of free peoples everywhere. You should turn yourself in.
Sorry, not buying it. Assange's motive is to harm America. And yes, there's definitive proof the DNC servers were hacked from groups with ties to Russia, whether they are directly state actors or just harbored by Russia is debatable. But they are Russian.
As a 1st amendment backer, I have to disagree with these sentiments Mr. Berman. Here's a different perspective from journalist Michael Shellenberger, one among many others I have read, if interested:
I can't totally agree because I spent too many sleepless nights protecting national defense information, but the first amendment is extremely important to me also. What Assange did is not much different than what reporters often do when they are given government secrets. They are allowed to protect their sources with only minor consequences. Those sources might be genuinely concerned citizens, or they might be traitors, or they might be disgruntled employees looking to get even. Those who are conscience-driven to reveal secrets must be prepared to pay the price.
I think he's guilty as can be. I'm just comparing his treatment with that of known traitors and so-called reputable journalists. There is no uniform justice. It varies with who is affected, who does the leaking, who makes it public and the jurisdiction.
I don’t know his true “motive”. But he owed no allegiance to the US.
There was net public good to know of some of the lines crossed by government.
There was a net human cost from the indiscriminate release of info, paid by people who were US friends.
The question is whether he should have been the judge for what to release and to not release? Was he the collator of info from whistleblowers (ie platform) or was he a curator of that info (ie publisher)?
I can see the argument advanced here, but I can also see a counterpoint position.
It does seem to me that Assange meant to harm America (including collateral damage to those who served it honorably) moreso than reform it. In that sense I abide your critique of the man as in keeping with the tradition of Burke who failed to be convinced of the intellectual chic of the french revolution.
In no small way I'm here today because of Matt's post on the corporatist captains' chic anti-capitalism. No small matter for the man who cut his teeth at Rolling Stone kneecapping the greed is good Bonfire of the Vanities clique to long for the good ole days of capitalism that has me scrolling the site.
But it is your postnote that I think is the kind of throwaway that should be, you know, thrown away. This is just the kind of thing I despise in the mainstream media. Not that they report accurately what the court-ruled, but that they add their own biased interpretation of Netanyahu's inspiration for court reform, as if that interpretation is unassailable.
Of course there have been others, e.g., that the whole thing was to allow him to escape justice in the corruption cases–an equally appealing but unsupported assertion. It is so easy to draw lines between action, it is far less easy, and apparently the lost business of even the alternative media attempting to actually show the real fabric corresponds to these idelogically convenient explanations.
It actually appears from the story that the ruling is less than remarkable and is the kind a goad to legislative action rather than an example of how court reform to allow the legislature to override court would have crippled this action. Rather the court ruled that the government shouldn't enforce a law that has expired, becoming then an incentive for a new law.
It is true that the court pronounces on the apparent inequality in military service as perhaps inspiring it not to accept what we in America would recognize as an executive extension of the exemption. But as with executive efforts to create "dreamers" as citizens or foregive college loans, the matter should turn not on whether the court thinks it a moral propostion but on the separation of powers. This is revalatory of the problems with the Israeli court that any American ought to be perplexed by, but instead if you don't like Netanyahu, your love the Israeli court, a court that appoints its own successor. I wonder how any of the blathering class blaming court reform for destabilizing Israel have thought about how they would feel if Clarence Thomas chose his own replacement.
There either is or is not a law of exemption for orthodox jews in seminary from the requirement to serve in the IDF. And because Israel has no constitution upon which to base the enforcement of equality above the statute law, this is given to statute. If the politicians in Israel should, in some form, extend the exemption, will you say they are overriding the court? In this time of war when the expired exemption looms large, the form, if any, of its renewal may indeed require a more fully egalitarian manner of service. Sobeit.
I'm I don't have NDS, but the failure of Netanyahu was not court reform which was needed from a democratic perspective–if one could debate the particulars, his failure was to prepare for October 7th, was to have seen Hamas as a better bogeyman than the Palestinian Authority and continued friction to push public opinion toward the emerging one-state ideal–buying into the all or nothing strategy espoused by the militants on the other side. He should have resigned the week following the attack or expressed the goalposts of a wartime government after which he would resign.
In the abstract, the settlements in the west bank that are in no small measure associated with the growing orthodox community seem to me to be an impediment to Israel's standing in the world of far greater significance than its campaign to eliminate Hamas–a goalpost that Netanyahu might have set and could have been in power virtually forever whether or not those focused on the "occupation" seem only to know of Gaza (if they know anything).
It would seem that the obvious strategy to divide noncombatant Palestinians from the most violent agitators would have been served by dually relieving and reversing settlement pressure in the West Bank and policies easing the actual occupation while flattening Gaza. Failure to recognize this is what we should call out and not besmirch the idea of court reform.
Netanyahu’s compromises to stay in power are well-documented. If you have Israeli friends (I do), you know how divisive the haredi draft issue is. End-running their own high court to make the Knesset supreme without a check or balance on their power is wrong, no matter what you think of the court’s issues. This is an issue for Israelis to solve. Their government is not in most ways similar to the U.S. It’s more similar to Ireland than us.
i will say again steve, your take on this seems really affected by priors. i'm not saying you are wrong but I am skeptical because you have built up a narrative of what is happening and your version of the court's ruling caps that narrative.
have you read the decision? I cannot find a translation, but reading several articles that quote from it, this is a case that turns on legislative expiration and is ripe for the legislature to 'overturn' it in the sense that court does not apparently propose to forbid legislative renewal of the provision.
that means this ruling follows democractic norms, however political analysis suggests that Netanyahu doesn't have the votes to pass a measure that substantially reinstates the exemption. That is democracy in action and the court is only saying just the kind of thing it has about executive overreach in America, i.e. that the interim cabinet measure that proposed to delay the effect of this expiration was ultra vires. (it might be said the court takes advantage of the reality that the actual democratic institution of the legislature will not make such a renewal. But if a renewal were passed it would be no different and no less toward than the U.S Congress acting to 'overturn' the Ledbetter decision with legislation–not possible in the US if the grounds of decision had been a constitutional bar on such legislation, but then Israel has no constitution.)
while i'm aware that the systems are quite different, in this ruling they were suprisingly similiar (again based on coverage, although it should be a hanging offense for any news outlet to publish a story about a court ruling and not include a link to the ruling. I guess I put Racket in that realm as well although I'm proposing a cabinet measure to delay the sentence to allow the oversite to be corrected).
As per usual, the mainstream headlines on this are completely wrong. They make it sound like the court ruled on the substance (it does appear that the court made statements about the exemption undermining egalitarian commitment, but it was hardly substantively some sweeping idea of equality laid down by the court which carefully chose to sidestep the issue of conscription of arab citizens in Israel) when in fact the court simply ruled that there could be no convenience of executive extension of the status quo.
I'm dually unimpressed by you saying you know people in Israel as if that sample is definitive in analyzing the actions and motives of the players there. I'm put in memory of Pauline Kael's paraphrased observation: "I don't know how Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him" (https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/the-actual-pauline-kael-quote%E2%80%94not-as-bad-and-worse/). The court reform proposal preceded October 7th which is reported in articles about the decision as a precipitating event for questioning the exemption. So the court reform could not have been focused on this question or really even a part of the consideration of proposing such reform.
And because the legislature is not, other than by democratic pressures, prohibited by this decision from extending the exemption, this isn't even the kind of case for which court reform was proposed. The kind of case for which it was proposed was the case in January where the court ruled that the proposed court reform couldn't be enacted. I'm shocked, shocked to see gambling going on here. How the heck is a non-elected court telling the elected legislature it can't pass a law keeping to democratic norms where there is no constitution but a judge made 'common law constitution' formed at the whim of the court.
In fact it seems that, with a conservative government, an energized vocal minority–at least in the sense that their views are in the minority in the governing coalition the country elected (perhaps close to say the Trump 'minority' during the Biden administration) looks to the court for results it cannot obtain legislatively. I think this is fundamentally anti-democratic. It might be a good check on a legislature but then one ought to have a constitutional mandate to support the manner in which values not defended by the democratic branch are protected. Otherwise, the court–which to my understanding picks its own successors in a kind of ensconced bureaucratic manner–is the king that democracy was meant to lay to rest.
You may be right about sentiment in Israel following October 7th and I agree with you that Netanyahu should go, not because I buy into the narrative that his cloying grip on power is the problem, but for his obvious failings to protect Israel on October 7th. We don't need a narrative that he is political or log-rolling or corrupt or manipulative–but I repeat myself. There should be an election. But the court would have no business telling the new government it couldn't renew the exemption for orthodox in yeshiva. The new government might well have no such intention but it should face no such prohibition either unless Israel were to adopt a constitution which forbid it. Yes that is an American way of thinking and I'm glad to hear why my template of American institutions does not fit Israeli democracy and how the court is actually democratic in nature. But I do not hear that from you.
and hearing Matt's long form take on the impacts of wikileaks, his take is that the harm from Assange's releases was to American prestige and not to particular operatives although he is ambiguous about the possibility that Assange published names of those who worked with us in Afghanistan who, if not theoretically confidential or military in their cooperation, nonetheless could have faced retribution. This suggests that covert operatives and military personel were not compromised albeit this is not stated or known with precision I would guess. People hating us for what we do, including abandoning those of the 'asian spring' who threw in their lot with us, is wholly legitimate, but failing to redact names is careless as it surely placed them at higher risk and, ironically, makes Assange America's partner in this abanonment.
Every time i see some one backing Assange and his antics and proclaiming him a hero, i cringe. Sorry but Steve's got this sorted fair and square; the damage the man did is immeasurable. Are we as a country perfect? Hardly. Did we cross some lines? Yup. Was it necessary? More often than not.
The mere fact he collaborated with the Russians should end the debate/discussion regarding his intentions. Ultimately the numbers killed by his releases will never be known. Being used by Russia (no they are not our friends) was the real tell and pretending otherwise is folly.
Thanks for the cut on Netanyahu. It's time for him to go. He's been playing politics for too long and with too many lives. It's interesting the parallel. Was Assange doing it for the right reasons? Was Bibi doing it for the right reasons? In both cases, i vote no.
Assange is not a friend of the USA. Yet, he did no more damage to our national defense than Bradley "Bradass" Manning (a.k.a. Chelsea), whose sentence was commuted by President Obama after he approved sex transition surgery for the traitor at taxpayer expense.
This article is shameful gibberish. Assange was a hero who exemplified the best of what every American should be, a whistleblower of government corruption. Assange loved America and understood what it is supposed to be, a nation of whistleblowers. His reports were embarrassing? Good, they should be! America is supposed to be transparent, not a haven for dictators, the State is always the greatest enemy of freedom. People were put at harm or at risk? Baloney, only if they were doing something they should not have been doing. DNC emails were leaked by imaginary evil "Russians"? Again an utter fiction, they were leaked by a single, likewise brave and patriotic DNC operative, who was subsequently murdered by those he exposed, and the story is still being covered up. I doubt Assange will take the risk to leak again, but he is a model every American and world citizen should look up to. While yourself, meanwhile, sound like a sore loser shilling for the deep state globalists who truly hate freedom, democracy and popular sovereignty in all its forms. It is therefore yourself who are a great embarrassment and hater of your alleged country, and a hater of free peoples everywhere. You should turn yourself in.
Sorry, not buying it. Assange's motive is to harm America. And yes, there's definitive proof the DNC servers were hacked from groups with ties to Russia, whether they are directly state actors or just harbored by Russia is debatable. But they are Russian.
And: he's not an American. Never was, never will be.
No, but I expect more from an Aussie.
This feels like a shill/troll account to me ... has anyone seen this "kmsbstck" poster around here before? It just reads as bogus.
As a 1st amendment backer, I have to disagree with these sentiments Mr. Berman. Here's a different perspective from journalist Michael Shellenberger, one among many others I have read, if interested:
https://public.substack.com/p/julian-assange-is-free-his-persecution?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
I can't totally agree because I spent too many sleepless nights protecting national defense information, but the first amendment is extremely important to me also. What Assange did is not much different than what reporters often do when they are given government secrets. They are allowed to protect their sources with only minor consequences. Those sources might be genuinely concerned citizens, or they might be traitors, or they might be disgruntled employees looking to get even. Those who are conscience-driven to reveal secrets must be prepared to pay the price.
And one thing to note is that Assange is not a US citizen ... so I'm not sure the 1st Amendment even applies when discussing him.
I think he's guilty as can be. I'm just comparing his treatment with that of known traitors and so-called reputable journalists. There is no uniform justice. It varies with who is affected, who does the leaking, who makes it public and the jurisdiction.
Not sure where I come down on Assange.
I don’t know his true “motive”. But he owed no allegiance to the US.
There was net public good to know of some of the lines crossed by government.
There was a net human cost from the indiscriminate release of info, paid by people who were US friends.
The question is whether he should have been the judge for what to release and to not release? Was he the collator of info from whistleblowers (ie platform) or was he a curator of that info (ie publisher)?
I can see the argument advanced here, but I can also see a counterpoint position.
It does seem to me that Assange meant to harm America (including collateral damage to those who served it honorably) moreso than reform it. In that sense I abide your critique of the man as in keeping with the tradition of Burke who failed to be convinced of the intellectual chic of the french revolution.
In no small way I'm here today because of Matt's post on the corporatist captains' chic anti-capitalism. No small matter for the man who cut his teeth at Rolling Stone kneecapping the greed is good Bonfire of the Vanities clique to long for the good ole days of capitalism that has me scrolling the site.
But it is your postnote that I think is the kind of throwaway that should be, you know, thrown away. This is just the kind of thing I despise in the mainstream media. Not that they report accurately what the court-ruled, but that they add their own biased interpretation of Netanyahu's inspiration for court reform, as if that interpretation is unassailable.
Of course there have been others, e.g., that the whole thing was to allow him to escape justice in the corruption cases–an equally appealing but unsupported assertion. It is so easy to draw lines between action, it is far less easy, and apparently the lost business of even the alternative media attempting to actually show the real fabric corresponds to these idelogically convenient explanations.
It actually appears from the story that the ruling is less than remarkable and is the kind a goad to legislative action rather than an example of how court reform to allow the legislature to override court would have crippled this action. Rather the court ruled that the government shouldn't enforce a law that has expired, becoming then an incentive for a new law.
It is true that the court pronounces on the apparent inequality in military service as perhaps inspiring it not to accept what we in America would recognize as an executive extension of the exemption. But as with executive efforts to create "dreamers" as citizens or foregive college loans, the matter should turn not on whether the court thinks it a moral propostion but on the separation of powers. This is revalatory of the problems with the Israeli court that any American ought to be perplexed by, but instead if you don't like Netanyahu, your love the Israeli court, a court that appoints its own successor. I wonder how any of the blathering class blaming court reform for destabilizing Israel have thought about how they would feel if Clarence Thomas chose his own replacement.
There either is or is not a law of exemption for orthodox jews in seminary from the requirement to serve in the IDF. And because Israel has no constitution upon which to base the enforcement of equality above the statute law, this is given to statute. If the politicians in Israel should, in some form, extend the exemption, will you say they are overriding the court? In this time of war when the expired exemption looms large, the form, if any, of its renewal may indeed require a more fully egalitarian manner of service. Sobeit.
I'm I don't have NDS, but the failure of Netanyahu was not court reform which was needed from a democratic perspective–if one could debate the particulars, his failure was to prepare for October 7th, was to have seen Hamas as a better bogeyman than the Palestinian Authority and continued friction to push public opinion toward the emerging one-state ideal–buying into the all or nothing strategy espoused by the militants on the other side. He should have resigned the week following the attack or expressed the goalposts of a wartime government after which he would resign.
In the abstract, the settlements in the west bank that are in no small measure associated with the growing orthodox community seem to me to be an impediment to Israel's standing in the world of far greater significance than its campaign to eliminate Hamas–a goalpost that Netanyahu might have set and could have been in power virtually forever whether or not those focused on the "occupation" seem only to know of Gaza (if they know anything).
It would seem that the obvious strategy to divide noncombatant Palestinians from the most violent agitators would have been served by dually relieving and reversing settlement pressure in the West Bank and policies easing the actual occupation while flattening Gaza. Failure to recognize this is what we should call out and not besmirch the idea of court reform.
Netanyahu’s compromises to stay in power are well-documented. If you have Israeli friends (I do), you know how divisive the haredi draft issue is. End-running their own high court to make the Knesset supreme without a check or balance on their power is wrong, no matter what you think of the court’s issues. This is an issue for Israelis to solve. Their government is not in most ways similar to the U.S. It’s more similar to Ireland than us.
i will say again steve, your take on this seems really affected by priors. i'm not saying you are wrong but I am skeptical because you have built up a narrative of what is happening and your version of the court's ruling caps that narrative.
have you read the decision? I cannot find a translation, but reading several articles that quote from it, this is a case that turns on legislative expiration and is ripe for the legislature to 'overturn' it in the sense that court does not apparently propose to forbid legislative renewal of the provision.
that means this ruling follows democractic norms, however political analysis suggests that Netanyahu doesn't have the votes to pass a measure that substantially reinstates the exemption. That is democracy in action and the court is only saying just the kind of thing it has about executive overreach in America, i.e. that the interim cabinet measure that proposed to delay the effect of this expiration was ultra vires. (it might be said the court takes advantage of the reality that the actual democratic institution of the legislature will not make such a renewal. But if a renewal were passed it would be no different and no less toward than the U.S Congress acting to 'overturn' the Ledbetter decision with legislation–not possible in the US if the grounds of decision had been a constitutional bar on such legislation, but then Israel has no constitution.)
while i'm aware that the systems are quite different, in this ruling they were suprisingly similiar (again based on coverage, although it should be a hanging offense for any news outlet to publish a story about a court ruling and not include a link to the ruling. I guess I put Racket in that realm as well although I'm proposing a cabinet measure to delay the sentence to allow the oversite to be corrected).
As per usual, the mainstream headlines on this are completely wrong. They make it sound like the court ruled on the substance (it does appear that the court made statements about the exemption undermining egalitarian commitment, but it was hardly substantively some sweeping idea of equality laid down by the court which carefully chose to sidestep the issue of conscription of arab citizens in Israel) when in fact the court simply ruled that there could be no convenience of executive extension of the status quo.
I'm dually unimpressed by you saying you know people in Israel as if that sample is definitive in analyzing the actions and motives of the players there. I'm put in memory of Pauline Kael's paraphrased observation: "I don't know how Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him" (https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/the-actual-pauline-kael-quote%E2%80%94not-as-bad-and-worse/). The court reform proposal preceded October 7th which is reported in articles about the decision as a precipitating event for questioning the exemption. So the court reform could not have been focused on this question or really even a part of the consideration of proposing such reform.
And because the legislature is not, other than by democratic pressures, prohibited by this decision from extending the exemption, this isn't even the kind of case for which court reform was proposed. The kind of case for which it was proposed was the case in January where the court ruled that the proposed court reform couldn't be enacted. I'm shocked, shocked to see gambling going on here. How the heck is a non-elected court telling the elected legislature it can't pass a law keeping to democratic norms where there is no constitution but a judge made 'common law constitution' formed at the whim of the court.
In fact it seems that, with a conservative government, an energized vocal minority–at least in the sense that their views are in the minority in the governing coalition the country elected (perhaps close to say the Trump 'minority' during the Biden administration) looks to the court for results it cannot obtain legislatively. I think this is fundamentally anti-democratic. It might be a good check on a legislature but then one ought to have a constitutional mandate to support the manner in which values not defended by the democratic branch are protected. Otherwise, the court–which to my understanding picks its own successors in a kind of ensconced bureaucratic manner–is the king that democracy was meant to lay to rest.
You may be right about sentiment in Israel following October 7th and I agree with you that Netanyahu should go, not because I buy into the narrative that his cloying grip on power is the problem, but for his obvious failings to protect Israel on October 7th. We don't need a narrative that he is political or log-rolling or corrupt or manipulative–but I repeat myself. There should be an election. But the court would have no business telling the new government it couldn't renew the exemption for orthodox in yeshiva. The new government might well have no such intention but it should face no such prohibition either unless Israel were to adopt a constitution which forbid it. Yes that is an American way of thinking and I'm glad to hear why my template of American institutions does not fit Israeli democracy and how the court is actually democratic in nature. But I do not hear that from you.
and hearing Matt's long form take on the impacts of wikileaks, his take is that the harm from Assange's releases was to American prestige and not to particular operatives although he is ambiguous about the possibility that Assange published names of those who worked with us in Afghanistan who, if not theoretically confidential or military in their cooperation, nonetheless could have faced retribution. This suggests that covert operatives and military personel were not compromised albeit this is not stated or known with precision I would guess. People hating us for what we do, including abandoning those of the 'asian spring' who threw in their lot with us, is wholly legitimate, but failing to redact names is careless as it surely placed them at higher risk and, ironically, makes Assange America's partner in this abanonment.