He has been locked up in Belmarsh, a high security prison in the UK for the last 5 years.

No. Imprisoned for stealing records of secret information and betraying them to a media source while employed by the US Army, in breach of the terms of said employment. Assange's case is different, as the non-US publisher of the stolen records, and the British courts have just given him leave to appeal against extradition, though I think this is on human-rights grounds related to his possible treatment by the US authorities, not on free-speech grounds. If he were extradited, his defence would rest on free-speech grounds and perhaps jurisdiction grounds (meaning the US can't claim jurisdiction over foreign citizens acting outside the US just because the US feels like it), but that's a way down the road.

It is in part because the usa have failed to give assurances that he will be protected by the right to free speech. That and the death penalty iirc

An Egyptian soldier has been killed, presumably by the Israelis, in an exchange of fire near Rafah. Egypt is allied to Israel by treaty since the 1970s. This is not going well. The weird conspiracy theory quoted above is obviously silly.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c51108le52xo

Just what we KNOW the Egyptians were complicit to the last few years now looks really really bad. Gotta be some politicians in Israel who question is Egypt was just a really good frenemy.

I don't think the whole thing will unravel though. The status quo was easier for Egypt before.

bit of a thread derail, but...

I guess legally speaking, you're right, but...

have you seen the video she leaked?

I thought basically everyone agreed that it's a crime to keep that video hidden, not to release it

so releasing the video is journalism, imo... and basically everyone else's opinion too.


and even legally, i'd assume there is some sort of legal case to be made for whistle blowing, or covering up mass murder... which I'm sure was made in the trial, but that doesn't mean justice was served

oh really.. yeah that actually sounds familiar now that you mention it. I thought he was still hiding out in an embassy lol.... like I said, I'm pretty uniformed

thanks!

I think there was some concern about torture too... not like waterboarding, but just general practice of USA prison to use solitary confinement and/or keep people isolated 23.5 hours a day, and constant fluorescent light

or whatever lol... just vaguely remember something about torture too

The Israeli air strike on a tented refugee camp, an area they actually told Gazans to go to, has not worked out well. Intended to kill two supposed Hamas fighters, it actually and not surprisingly killed 45 people.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0kkqkngnedo

EU leaders from France, Spain, Italy and Germany are all pretty fed up and would like Israel to obey the ICJ ruling and stop this kind of thing.

https://www.politico.eu/article/refu...-civilians-eu/

A public-interest defence could have been made, if the leak had been more selective, but in this case it didn't succeed. The sheer volume of material betrayed, compromising US intelligence assets and diplomatic cables en masse, meant that Manning, as a serving US soldier, hadn't a prayer.

So it’s just accepted that Hamas commanders are hiding among civilians and the only thing to do is to make Israel leave them alone.

It's getting that way.

Israel have eroded nearly all support and then there's the law.

That’s a preposterous outcome and for obvious reasons unacceptable to Israel.

The reality is that they are digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole.

I think Israel will find that if they want to send troops into these places to capture or kill Hamas commanders (or really any actual combatants) "by hand" they will not get much pushback, even if there are civilian casualties that result from this type of operation. It seems what the rest of the world is getting fed up with is the dozens of civilians killed by an airstrike that may or may not also kill the intended targets. If Israel cares at all about international opinion/support it will need to reduce the collateral damage to civilians even if that means greater casualties to their own forces. If they don't care at all about international opinion or support, carry on.

There's a lot that can happen between "doing nothing" and an airstrike which will kill a lot of civilians.