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Not necessarily in this area. Wikileaks has exposed a number of US war crimes that went completely unpunished, while a person who was working on behalf of Wikileaks is being prosecuted on grounds that are fairly constructed and far-fetched even by US standards. Morally speaking, even if some of Assange's actions were immoral they might be considered excusable because the perils were outweighed by the benefits of these actions. It's not uncommon to reason that way. The same kind of reasoning is used to justify the means by the ends, e.g. purporters of the US drone strike program argue that the many civilian bystanders that are killed by those strikes are justifiable by the end, which is the extrajudicial killing of the alleged terrorist targets.

It's called a balance of consideration argument, sometimes also "conductive argument".

Obviously, the legal question is different from this, IANAL and I don't even know if lawyers use conductive arguments in this way. The judge in this extradition case certainly didn't, but that's not surprising since her job wasn't to judge Assange's actions.



Assange literally encouraged people to infiltrate US intelligence agencies and "leak" classified intel.

Let's not even get into his work laundering Russian hacked docs to damage the US, and then repeatedly lying about it.

He also is credibly accused of being a rapist.

The US has done some bad shit, no doubt, but that doesn't make Assange some saint. He's a bad dude.


CIA literally funded drug cartels. Obama literally authorized a drone strike on a "suspected terrorist US citizen" in Yemen.

While the rape accusation was retracted.

There's no equivalence of a proven fact vs accusation. Assange is unquestionably on a moral high ground here.


This is a straight-up lie. The accusations were never retracted. The women have maintained their allegations ever since.

and Not even going to respond to your whataboutism here, just lazy argumentation.


If I encourage people to leak Chinese classified documents, would that make me a bad dude too? I don’t think your reasoning is sound here.


If you raped two women, encouraged people to steal Chinese intel, and then worked with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda, yes, indeed you would be a bad dude.




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