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TinTower posted:It last came up when Bush pardoned then unpardoned Isaac Toussie, but he had legal advice that he could revoke Clinton's pardons (probably hinging on US v. Wilson) if he wanted. Looking at both of those, the only legal basis I can see to unpardon anyone is if the next President is able to intercept the paperwork before it's delivered to the pardonee (which Bush managed to do, since it was his own paperwork). I would be ... surprised ... if Obama's people didn't make sure any last-minute pardons or commutations got delivered to the right people before Trump took office.
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Jan 17, 2017 23:18
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FourLeaf posted:Great news. Please do Edward Snowden next. The White House was quite clear that Snowden isn't getting poo poo, because he's fled to Russia, hasn't expressed remorse for his actions, hasn't faced a court, and hasn't served any time. Manning was commuted, not pardoned: i.e. Obama decided the punishment was too harsh, not that punishment wasn't warranted at all.
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Jan 17, 2017 23:21
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:Snowden has said numerous times that he would face the US courts if they were willing to consider the potential that information he released was in the public interest. The Espionage Act specifically forbids this, so if he comes back it's only going to be for the sake of having the book thrown at him. Whether that constitutes a fair trial is up to you, I suppose it depends on how much you inherently respect the US legal system. That's disagreeing with the law, not if his trial is fair or not.
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Jan 17, 2017 23:27
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Perestroika posted:Yeah, I've been wondering, if Assange actually follows through with that, is there some way/chance for the US to basically just turn him around on the airport and extradite his rear end to Sweden? That's always been a smokescreen to avoid facing his rape charges because anyone with half a brain knows the UK was far more likely to agree to extradite him to the US than Sweden. There was never any reason to believe facing his charges in Sweden increased his risk of extradition, he was always just playing credulous idiots to avoid justice.
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Jan 18, 2017 15:15
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Chomskyan posted:Actually, a court's ability to consider extenuating circumstances is very much related to whether a trial is fair or not. Extenuating circumstances go to punishment, not guilt. In any event I went and read the Espionage Act and it doesn't "explicitly" bar anything relating to public interest, it doesn't mention it at all. I don't see any reason why he would not be free to raise public interest at the sentencing phase.
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Jan 18, 2017 15:29
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duz posted:Plus there's the whole not being charged with anything in the US and not being a US citizen thing. A number of US laws can and would apply to non-US citizens and you can seal an indictment so it's not public until the person is arrested. For example, the US considers conspiracy to import drugs to the United States a crime against the United States even if you're a non-US citizen and have never set foot in the United States - that's why countries can and do extradite drug kingpins to the US. But they'd have easily been able to do it if they'd wanted to. They didn't, because it would have been counterproductive and caused international and domestic blowback. But the UK would have been the perfect partner in extraditing Assange because they're very friendly to the United States and their legal system is even more harsh on leaking state secrets than the US. Specifically the UK has the Official Secrets Act which makes it a crime to report on leaked confidential information, even if the newspaper did not participate in the leak at all. In the United States the Official Secrets Act would likely be a violation of the First Amendment: it is not a crime for a newspaper to report on leaked information and it's quite often said when discussing that that the US does not have an Official Secrets Act. Assange, in the US, could only be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit the leak itself (my vauge recollection is there's enough chatlogs of him encouraging Manning to leak the information to make at least a reasonable case for this, but I don't remember the details). So not only is the UK extremely friendly to the US, but under the UK's legal system Assange's actions are a clear-cut crime, making it impossible to contest extradition on that basis. Frequently there's an exception to extradition for, in effect, things that are not a crime in the extraditing country and could be considered political. One (sort-of) example to this is the US considers the UK's libel laws an impermissible violation of the freedom of the press, and while US courts will enforce most UK court judgments, they will refuse to cooperate with any UK libel judgments, and a similar principle usually applies to extradition. The US, for example, would give the finger to any country that requested extradition for someone accused of writing a pro-democracy newsletter, for example, even if there was an extradition treaty. So some european countries might consider conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act a political crime and refuse to extradite, but the UK certainly wouldn't. So the government would probably cooperate, and the legal system would absolutely cooperate. I don't know what Sweden's legal system is like and if they're a country that would refuse extradition but it couldn't be worse for Assange than the UK's. evilweasel fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jan 18, 2017 |
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Jan 18, 2017 16:16
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Agnosticnixie posted:I'm glad Lybia managed to have a lower body count than most US interventions. That doesn't make it a good track record except in the utterly evil mind of a technocratic gently caress. oh good, feelings in response to discussions about facts, a sure sign you know things instead of just feel them
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Jan 18, 2017 18:23
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Agnosticnixie posted:There is no fact involved in reducing US interventionism to Lybia as a justification for its potential for good, especially not when it was obvious that I was talking about Iraq, which was a bipartisan boondoggle. its not obvious at all, considering that the iraq war was driven from the top rather than from the state department, it's lybia where the state department was pushing to intervene, so there was really no scenario where anything you said indicated any connection to facts as opposed to just feelings
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Jan 18, 2017 18:54
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AARO posted:http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/01/18/assange-might-stay-put-despite-earlier-extradition-promise-lawyer-suggests.html
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Jan 18, 2017 20:02
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AARO posted:He hasn't been charged with anything in Sweden. He is merely wanted for questioning. The entire reason for his refusal to go there has been because they will not agree to non-extradition with the US. Wrong. He hasn't been charged with anything in Sweden because the questioning is a necessary part of charging someone with a crime under Swedish law. The only people who believe this are idiots, for the reasons I outlined before: if the US had wanted to extradite Assange at the time the UK was the perfect country for him to be in. He made that concern up to evade the rape charges.
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Jan 18, 2017 20:19
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Party Plane Jones posted:Question is, is her dishonorable discharge going to follow her past the name change (is her name even changed legally yet?) as a practical matter: anyone doing enough research on applicant "chelsea manning" who just submitted a resume to verify the circumstances of their seperation from the military already googled their name and found out exactly what happened
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Jan 18, 2017 21:04
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JeffersonClay posted:If she had leaked dirt about evil liberals instead of are troops she'd be their hero. like new conservative hero, Julian Assange
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Jan 18, 2017 21:09
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:But ARE TROOPS This is probably why they're all obsessed with the UN's black helicopters and secret storm troopers.
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Jan 18, 2017 21:13
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are the ones you gotta get your guns ready to defend against during The Purge, right? I'm probably getting my factions confused, but... if you think you need small arms to defend against unconstitutional enforcement of martial law and the final erection of a tyrannical despot, then the people you're prepared to kill are state and federal troops.
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JeffersonClay posted:Being harassed due to your identity is terrible and all trans people experience it. Unlike most, manning has a platform to fight back in the media and she could probably get paid to do so relatively easily. She's one of the most recognizable trans people in the country and is the perfect person to criticize Trump's coming poo poo show for Trans people. I doubt Trump is going to be trans-friendly, but one of the few minorities he doesn't seem to actively hate are gay people and I sort of assume he's just going to lump trans people into that mental category in his head too.
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Jan 18, 2017 21:25
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:What really exacerbates the sense of this heavy-handedness is how unevenly those leaks were punished. Ranking insiders seem to have been shielded (Petraeus, anyone?), but nobodies like Snowden and Manning are publicly sacrificed. even if you think their leaks were justified there's no comparison regarding the scale of Snowden and Manning's leaks compared to, well, anyone besides Daniel Ellisberg and literal spies
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Jan 18, 2017 22:11
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to be fair his first choice of a freedom-loving paradise to call his new home was china china was less interested in that nonsense
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Jan 19, 2017 00:11
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Agnosticnixie posted:He ran to Russia because he was literally stranded there when his passport was blocked. Assange has been tut-tuting him for being critical of Russia. oh hey i had actually forgotten about that part, though it's highly unclear exactly what went down considering that russia would have been free to send him along if they felt like it that said I also discovered this leak of information to the american public of important information they needed to know that he made while checking that out: quote:While in Hong Kong Snowden told the Post that "the United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the PRC as well," going on to identify Chinese Internet Protocol addresses that the NSA monitored and stating that the NSA collected text-message data for Hong Kong residents. Glenn Greenwald explained the leak as reflecting "a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China."
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Jan 19, 2017 00:31
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Chomskyan posted:The NSA's programs were actually illegal under US law, and whistleblowers who had tried to work within the govt before Snowden had their lives destroyed, forcing his hand. These facts are convienently ignored by his opponents. and if he'd only revealed those programs, perhaps you'd have a point
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Jan 19, 2017 00:36
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botany posted:he didn't reveal anything actually, he passed the info he had over to respectable journalistic outfits who then independently and in some cases against his judgment decided what to publish in what form. quote:While in Hong Kong Snowden told the Post that "the United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the PRC as well," going on to identify Chinese Internet Protocol addresses that the NSA monitored and stating that the NSA collected text-message data for Hong Kong residents. Glenn Greenwald explained the leak as reflecting "a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China."
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Jan 19, 2017 00:39
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That said he is certainly better than Assange, but he made no effort to separate out and leak NSA activities that might violate US law and ones that didn't. I mean, I'm sure other countries were interested in knowing how they were spied on by the United States, but that's not whistle-blowing, that's deciding you don't believe in spying on other countries which is absolutely the job of the NSA.
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Jan 19, 2017 00:42
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Chomskyan posted:If the US was interested in holding anyone accountable for the crimes detailed in the leaks, rather than a singleminded push to punish the whistleblower, maybe you'd have a point. nope, my point is still valid either way, while yours relies on ignoring the rest of that
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Jan 19, 2017 00:51
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Chomskyan posted:Nah, I'm pretty sure your argument for the rule of law falls apart once we recognize you're only interested prosecuting the weak, not the powerful. that's a dumb argument by a dumb person who cares what my interests are, regardless of if you know them or not, they don't change what's right or not it just lets you try to weasel out of being wrong
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Jan 19, 2017 02:03
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Chomskyan posted:e: Furthermore, from a broader moral perspective anything that it's wrong to do to a US citizen it's wrong to do to a Chinese citizen. Human rights don't depend on Nationality and Nationalism is a cancer on humanity hth drawing a distinction between external espionage and internal survellence is a completely normal thing normal people do because one of them empowers a government to act in a more totalitarian way against their citizens and another is states enhancing their security against external threats
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Jan 19, 2017 02:10
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Agnosticnixie posted:Both tend to follow each other rather closely, and paranoia abroad becomes paranoia at home very easily. man the American public must really have been shocked when Snowden revealed the NSA exists then
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Jan 19, 2017 02:20
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it is too bad that the paranoid american public thinks that, say, knowing what vladmir putin would like to keep secret would be a good thing to know about, good thing there's not been anything recently that would suggest that is important information to know silly paranoid american public
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Jan 19, 2017 02:23
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Chomskyan posted:Who gets prosecuted and who doesn't matters because a system that applies one set of rules to the powerful and another set to those who oppose them doesn't actually have a "rule of law". i find it ironic that you're calling for the prosecution of the people responsible for the domestic nsa survelience programs in these posts while not calling for the prosecution of war criminals in african civil wars really makes you think, seems you don't think the deaths of black people are important
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Jan 19, 2017 02:27
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and the complete lack of any attention to food insecurity in your post, clearly you're one of those young white men who thinks that the only issues that matter are the ones that affect your pet issues, electronic communications
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Jan 19, 2017 02:29
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Archonex posted:The best counter to them is "because we're not Russia". well, we aren't yet
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Jan 19, 2017 03:49
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Frogfingers posted:Manning, whether you love him or hate him depends how you feel about American Exceptionalism. People who buy into that think betraying American interests and allied stability is some sort pact with Satan and nothing less, whereas those who don't feel that if America presumes to lay down the rules of statecraft, it should be expected to live by them also. that is an exceptionally stupid post what on earth do you think "the rules of statecraft" are
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Jan 19, 2017 14:20
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Chomskyan posted:If you're opposed to bulk surveillance against Americans, you can't rationally back these kinds of attack against Chinese individuals (Nationalism isn't a rational ideology). of course i can, the primary danger from bulk surveillance by a nation's government is its aid in totalitarianism its like thoughts have never entered your head
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Jan 19, 2017 14:24
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Agnosticnixie posted:"Why do these people even deserve human rights or privacy, they're not flying my flag" - a very serious person man, you are going to be furious when you learn that the chinese government monitors its citizens internet and uses it to squash dissent quite openly privacy lol
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Jan 19, 2017 14:39
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the bans against domestic survelliance are precisely to prevent what china does against its citizens, while spying on other countries communications is literally what every nation ever has done whenever possible
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Jan 19, 2017 14:41
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Frogfingers posted:Don't be dense, America has always portrayed itself as the exemplar of the rule of law. Manning's leaks exposed the undercurrent of human rights abuses and flagrant corruption it takes other countries to task over. Being just and honest is good, but it carries a featherweight load when your prime example is a hypocrite. It's poo poo like the Wikileaks material that Manning leaked, whether it was malicious towards the US or not, that invites whataboutism. Example: how can America say its poo poo doesn't stink when it's still flirting with Monroe doctrine in Honduras? rule of law isn't "rules of statecraft" it was the right thing to do to leak the info on war crimes in iraq, it was not to data-dump diplomatic cables as to hypocricy if you would rather that the united states not push to end human rights abuses and corruption elsewhere, you're going to get your wish tommorow so w/e
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Jan 19, 2017 14:49
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Agnosticnixie posted:"China does bad thing, therefore we are allowed to stoop to their level and consider ourselves good" - What very serious persons believe. those two things do seem the same, to an idiot
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Jan 19, 2017 14:59
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like espionage is older than even the concept of nations and the idea that people would be ~outraged~ and demand protection for someone who reveals ongoing espionage operations as a "whistleblower" is laughable. bulk surveillance against china is absolutely the right thing to do, it's a territorially expansionist country and while we have been on relatively friendly terms with them, the more we know the better. given that it's a foreign country the concern about domestic bulk surveillance doesn't apply. also, russia! the nsa is, almost certainly, responsible for us knowing exactly who was doing what in interfering with our election. yes in a perfect world we'd all be one happy nation without such things, that's nice. who cares. exposing american capabilities for foreign espionage is absolutely exactly what the law bans and what it should ban, and whining that you don't see a difference between domestic surveillance and foreign espionage really only reflects poorly on you
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Jan 19, 2017 15:10
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Frogfingers posted:Forgive my broad expression, I said 'rules of statecraft' to encompass what someone else said about the US having some right to conduct espionage, which is ridiculous. ok thats even dumber because (a) all countries conduct espionage and the united states is quite open that it does, just like other countries and (b) the united states has never ~laid down the rules of statecraft~ that states aren't allowed to conduct espionage we stop any espionage on us anytime we can, just like any other country. that is different from some idea that it's a bad thing a whistleblower needs to blow a whistle on considering that any american was completely aware we had government agencies that did that (they might not have known the nsa by name but would have assumed that we did that) Frogfingers posted:I don't know anyone can say that is was bad those cables came out and not condemn the contents as well? Aren't you better off knowing that not knowing? Aren't we all? no, my knowing what's in those cables has done very little to no good but the idea that america can't keep a secret prevents us from, say, talking to dissidents in countries that prosecute dissidents
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Jan 19, 2017 15:14
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Agnosticnixie posted:"I am a very serious person who brings rational arguments to this thread by calling them morons" - Much serious, so argument, wow and when you post a criticism with any merit beyond your feelings and whining that i am not giving your feelings sufficient respect, perhaps i will bother to respond to them in kind until then don't whine that your posting receives precisely the effort back you put in Frogfingers posted:Oh I know, I'm not saying espionage is an abomination or even unwise, but don't even think about giving it pretensions of righteousness. And the US has a bad habit of giving their intelligence companies such a long leash they graduate from information gathering to coup d'etats. What Russia did with the US election was scummy, and if I remember Obama made threats in kind about the Russian electric grid. So don't get so loving worked up the infiltration works both ways. True, the CIA did not exactly slather itself with glory during the cold war and a lot of the James Bond poo poo was stupid and counter-productive. The NSA's mission though just doesn't really lend itself to that sort of freelancing because they're not doing the whole human intelligence angle, they're just trying to read everyone's mail. They're not covert ops guys, that's more of a CIA concern. The NSA's job is to read everyone's mail and be able to hack systems, they don't really leave the country. And nobody's come up with any better way to respond to cyberwarfare attacks than measured retaliation in kind, so i'm certainly not upset that the US government has been developing that capability. The issue with Russia's interference wasn't so much they collected the information but that they used it offensively. China has been repeatedly hacking personnel databases but there's been no real mutters we should retaliate because everyone collects information and vulnerabilities, it's using the information that crosses the line.
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Jan 19, 2017 16:08
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