They can’t take us back to the way things were on June 30th, 2024, to make this ruling like it didn’t happen. It doesn’t have the power. The best the that Congress can do is pass an unconstitutional law that may, at some future date, through a highly-fraught process in the courts, reverse it.

Yes, technically they could, but any suit under that law would be vulnerable to getting thrown out on summary judgement. Would you agree that it’s more accurate to say that Congress can’t fix the system by reverting to the old law?

No, Congress cannot pass legislation on this matter. The ruling says that the Constitution itself grants the President immunity, so it would take a Constitutional amendment to change it.

That’s an expansive definition that also describes what a journalist does, which is what upset defenders of civil liberties about the prosecution of Assange. The usual connotation of the word espionage, however, is that it is done by an organization, against adversaries, for its own benefit. Assange was explicitly seeking information from whistleblowers to release to the world. Like a journalist.

But to my point, the CIA explicitly engages in espionage as its mission. So would President Xi be justified in sending his police to the environs of Langley to drag CIA employees out of their beds and before a court to stand trial in Beijing? I say no, because they’re American citizens in the United States. Chinese law should not apply here in America.

Traditionally, courts need to have jurisdiction to hear a dispute, and it comes in multiple types: There’s subject-matter jurisdiction; a municipal traffic court has subject matter jurisdiction over traffic infractions. It can’t hear a murder case. Then, there’s personal jurisdiction, meaning it has power to compel an appearance by a defendant, and impose penalties or assess damages. Personal jurisdiction usually comes from citizenship, or physical presence. State and federal courts have wide-ranging personal jurisdiction, but even then they have to “reach out and touch someone” with service of a summons to effect it. (Trial in-absentia is not allowed in the U.S. unless the defendant waives the right to appear.) Tangentially, the admiralty law system developed because of a lack of a country’s courts’ personal jurisdiction over foreign nationals, and suing property (the basis of civil forfeiture) came about due to sailors simply returning to their home countries, out of legal reach.

Thus, the idea of prosecuting a foreign national outside of the U.S., for actions undertaken outside of the U.S., in places where U.S. law shouldn’t apply—essentially extending a U.S. court’s personal jurisdiction to the whole planet—is deeply troubling. Even if it’s just one category of crime, like espionage. If there’s one exception, then there’s no practical protection, since a country can define espionage in any way it wants to trigger the exception. Or not. It could just accuse somebody of espionage, evidence be damned. After all, that person would be hauled off to a foreign land before being able to mount a defense in court.

That is a tool of tyrants.

And you keep saying espionage, invoking a word as if it’s some special kind of crime exempt from the rule of law, and also immutable. China gets to define what espionage is under their laws. The U.S. did mangle it far beyond the common definition to pursue Assange.

Travel to those countries? The precedent here is that China has the right to extradite me for supporting democracy in Hong Kong from here in the U.S., never once even leaving my house. Assange was not a U.S. citizen, and located outside of U.S. territory.

Of course, the U.S. won’t cooperate with the extradition request, but that’s just a matter of power relationships, not principles. The principle is that everybody in the world is subject to every country’s laws. Or, every person in the world is subject to the laws of the U.S., which fundamentally breaks the rule of law.

It’s scary how many people out there are okay with that.

Yikes! This reply validates my concern 100%.

Other sovereign nations get to make their own laws and legal systems without our control. They can make bullshit laws if they want to, like conflating journalism with spying. Then they can charge journalists in another country with a crime and extradite them to face charges. But, spying or journalism or criticizing their king, the details didn’t really matter, they could charge anybody anybody, anywhere in the world with any crime they want. And since it’s another country, we have no assurances of due process there.

That’s scary shit.

Wat? Are you thinking of Snowden?

Worse, it validates the precedent that non-U.S.-citizens can be prosecuted for breaking U.S. law over things they did outside of the U.S.

Really happy that Assange gets to go home, since he’s suffered enough personally, but I really don’t like the precedent that I can be prosecuted in, say, Israel under Israeli law for things that I did in Wisconsin (e.g. boycotting).

I’ll note here that we Americans have no influence whatsoever on what Hamas does, but allegedly, the President represents us. It makes sense to criticize Biden, whereas criticism of Hamas is just farting into the wind.

I have no direct evidence, but it’s not at all far-fetched. The Obama administration set up a coordinated effort to share intelligence and plan tactics for the crackdown on Occupy Wall Street across the FBI, state and local police forces, and the banks themselves. The uniformity and brutality of the response to the university anti-genocide protests is… curious, at least.

I do not, so I’ll take that back. It was widely discussed at the time, so I remembered it as Bush being there when the attack occurred, not that he left shortly before. I will say that I think it’s close enough for the point to stand that the Bush and bin Laden families had business interests in common, and had had personal dealings prior.

Thanks for the correction.

Correct. If journalists know something as a fact, they should state it, and share the source of that fact. If they don’t know something, but have a guess, they can say that it’s their own inference.

But to use weasel words to lead the reader to infer things that are not factually supported is, well, not a good look.

I haven’t forgotten that George H.W. Bush (the President’s father) was literally in a meeting with a member of the bin Laden family when the attacks occurred. The Bush and the bin Laden families were highly entangled in oil business dealings. I remember, too, that the only airplanes allowed to fly in U.S. airspace in the days after 9/11—all other traffic everywhere being grounded, stranding Americans far from home—were the flights taking members of the bin Laden family out of the United States, and back to Saudi Arabia.

I wonder why that attack on Saudi Arabia never happened?

Exactly. Those are weasel words, designed to lead the reader to infer things, warranted or not.

And Charles was the Prince of Wales before he took the throne. Is that just an interesting factoid, or are we supposed to infer something from it?

“Connected.” Another weasel word. A genealogy web site that I use can tell me how I’m “connected” to King Charles. (At least 32 degrees of separation, including through many marriages.) What are the specific allegations here?

“Ties” and “links” are favorite weasel words of media manipulation. They’re factual and imply causality without stating it so they’re not technically wrong. Like, “Schools linked to school shootings”.

What if the IDF is pursuing a strategy of plausible deniability? What might that look like? The current violence is seeing Israel losing support throughout the world. If the IDF were to start a straight-up Holocaust, those countries that are protesting now might take direct military action to stop it. Plausible deniability might include, say, fostering the creation of a radical militant group, and directing funds to them in order to create a Big Bad to fight against as cover for genocidal land theft.

What, specifically, do you think South Africa got wrong in its filing with the ICC laying out the case that it is a genocide? They were pretty thorough.