Wikileaks

Tuesday

Slavoj Zizek

Why Julian Assange is hated

The British High Court ruled on Friday that Julian Assange can be extradited from the UK to the US. The US thus won its appeal against a January UK court ruling that he could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health. This latest twist in the endless Assange saga is just the culmination of the long and slow well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination that reached the lowest level imaginable with unverified rumors that Ecuadorians in their London embassy wanted to get rid of him because of his bad smell and dirty clothes.

assange

Monday

Phoebe Greenwood

Will the right save Julian Assange?

In late 2018, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture, was contacted by lawyers representing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, asking him to intervene on their client’s behalf. ‘I was like, “No. Not this guy. Isn’t this the rapist hacker guy?”’ Melzer recalls. He ignored the email. Three months later, the lawyers contacted him again, this time warning that Assange’s extradition to the US — where he faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents — could be imminent.

assange

Sunday

Cory Doctorow

The coming stitch-up

To look upon a freshly painted wall is to behold a smooth surface; to look at it through a magnifier is to see a rough and irregular landscape — but turn the magnification up sufficiently and see it become regular again, a geometric matrix of atoms held in molecular bonds. Keep magnifying and you enter the unimaginably messy realm of the subatomic, a weird place of eldritch geometries and smeared-out, probabilistic motion. The world is smooth and rough, orderly and messy, all at once, depending on how closely you look.

tangled web

Friday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump livens up the Marie Yovanovitch testimony

A grave matter — the future of American fashion — rests in the hands of President Trump. The foremost promoter of the drape cut, or soft shoulder suit, pioneered by Savile Row tailor Anderson & Sheppard, is Roger Stone, who was found guilty Friday of obstructing Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and lying to Congress. If Stone heads to the hoosegow because of his Wikileaks shenanigans, then he won’t be able to wear his flamboyant A & S suits and cutaway collars, let alone maintain his fashion blog. It will be prison stripes, not pinstripes, for him as he prepares to join his former business partner Paul Manafort behind bars. So will Trump heed the pleas of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and pardon Stone, his chum since the 1980s?

marie yovanovitch

Friday

Michael Tracey

The soiling of Julian Assange

Here’s an intense irony for you. The journalistic activity for which Julian Assange has been indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia led to the exposure of blatant American war crimes and official deceit in Iraq: the very war Donald J. Trump vociferously decried during his successful presidential campaign. Over and over again in 2016, Trump lamented ‘Iraqi kids blown to pieces’ and pilloried Hillary Clinton for backing the invasion. And yet now, by seeking the extradition and prosecution of Assange on charges that stem directly from the revelation of those crimes, Trump has chosen to shunt all this aside and do the bidding of his besmirched GOP predecessor, George W. Bush.

assange