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Winston is in Washington this week. I wonder if he might raise the issue?

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Thank you for raising the Assange issue. So few senior journalists seem to realise the implications of his detention.....perhaps because they were so used to compromise in their own careers.

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This is outrageous. On what legal grounds is Julian Assange being held in captivity in the UK? Surely there's something in here which is being breached by the UK. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights

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You wrote: "The charges in Sweden were dropped in 2019."

This is untrue. Assange was never charged with any crime by Sweden, as acknowledged by the British Supreme Court in 2014 (1). The Swedish government thus dropped *allegations* in November 2019, not charges, as the so-called investigation never progressed beyond the preliminary phase for almost a decade. The government acknowledged that their "evidence [was] not strong enough to form the basis for filing an indictment". (2)

You also wrote: "The British and Australian governments have succumbed to the American empire over a man who through his computer skills and contacts inside the military has exposed unethical US behaviour in wars that were pointless in the first place."

The framing that implies Assange's "computer skills" were partly responsible for why those US war crimes were exposed unnecessarily cedes ground to the US prosecution, which holds that Assange personally assisted his source, Chelsea Manning, in exfiltrating that material via password cracking. This is also untrue. Manning has always been quite clear that she was determined to leak that material, and that she did it on her own. Further, the alleged scheme that the US has been shown to be impractical (3). Assange did nothing more than receive the material from his source and publish it, as any journalist would. For the US government, these basic journalistic activities are now crimes.

1.) https://web.archive.org/web/20140203032704/https://www.supremecourt.uk/news/julian-assange-v-swedish-prosecution-authority.html

2.) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/19/sweden-drops-julian-assange-investigation

3.) https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/26/password-cracking-conspiracy-theory-assange-extradition-tria/

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