Assange and US Extradition: the Impending Shitmess

with love to Sean Boots
and the memecloud

The Aussie High Commission went to see their citizen-abroad Julian Assange in lockup today to talk about the--I'm gonna come right out and say it--INEVITABILITY of the US indicting him and trying to extradite him for charges, which would effectively turn him into Spartacus.

(Because once they've got you, they can charge you with what they want. As my friend Zélie reminds me, "They caught Ted Bundy on parking violations".)

The rumblings are that the Espionage Act  could be used to try to nail Assange to the wall. The act that was written in 1917, after the US jumped into WWI, in order to stop corn-fed Iowans going to the Kaiser with information.
Hmm.

People previously nailed under the Espionage Act include poet e.e. cummings (for not hating Germans), and the people at the New York Times that published the Pentagon Papers (which gets a lot of reference in this wikileaks craziness for similarity).  Probably most gobsmacking is that in 1983, East German citizen Alfred Zehe was convicted under the damn thing because according to the US courts, the Espionage Act also covers non-American citizens acting outside the United States.

Let me say that again: the Espionage Act, that a bunch of US dudes passed in wartime in 1917, is enforceable on EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE.

So if I stop posting for a while and you know I'm not at work, check the gulags.

The Espionage Act is not without its critics, even within Americuh. A defense attorney in the Alfred Zehe case claimed his client was prosecuted as part of "the perpetuation of the 'national-security state' by over-classifying documents that there is no reason to keep secret, other than devotion to the cult of secrecy for its own sake."

Sounds suspiciously familiar, considering how much of the cables are taken to be public knowledge made more valuable only by the fact that they've got "TOP SECRET OMG" stamped on them 500 times.

Elsewhere in the world that isn't America, the UN Human Rights Chief is worried that wikileaks is getting the short end of the stick. Which might be the only action we get out of the UN, but is nice to hear.

And in the meantime, Beijing backs up Russia for the nomination of Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I wonder if Assange-related scandal will take the weekend off, so I can focus on those goddamn cables for a second.