US Deceptions at the Heart of Assange Case

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : The charges against Assange are unprecedented and there is no wording in the Espionage Act to warn foreign journalists of potential liability, according to U.S. constitutional attorney Bruce Afran.
46% : This is deceptive because the Act also bars extradition on the basis of political opinions.
46% : "A Plea for DecencyIn their submission, Assange's lawyers also made this plea to common sense and decency, very little of which the British courts have so far exhibited:"Julian Assange's work, dedicated to ensuring public accountability by exposing global human rights abuses, and facilitating the investigation of and prosecution for state criminality, has contributed to the saving of countless lives, stopped human rights abuses in their tracks, and brought down despotic and autocratic regimes.
45% : The drafters of the Espionage Act did not intend for publishers to fall within its ambit, unchallenged expert evidence showed that receipt and publication of state secrets is routine, and that there was an 'unbroken practice of non-prosecution' of publishers.
42% : The defense accuses the U.S. of falsely arguing that a ban on extradition for political offenses appears only in the U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty and not in the Act of Parliament that governs the treaty.
39% : While unauthorized possession and dissemination of defense information is classified as a crime in the Espionage Act, under the Official Secrets Act it is not an offense to republish classified information if it's already in the public domain, and if publication won't cause serious harm.
37% : Those who expose grave state criminality, defenders of fundamental human rights, are, and always have been, vulnerable to acts of political retaliation and persecution from the regimes whose criminality they expose.
21% : Stating that she would rely on the Act and not the Treaty, Vanesa Baraitser ignored that the Act does not allow extradition because of political viewpoints.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.