Top British official orders Julian Assange's extradition to U.S.

[muriel_volestrangler]

82. You said it is "for suspicion of distributing stolen property, not for being a journalist"

My point is that your special private phrase "distributing stolen property" is misleading. The charges against Assange are not about property; they're about government defense information, and Assange's stance is that he was acting as a journalist when he published the information. There is obviously a case to be made there (as the Obama administration thought), and newspapers and TV published some of the information too - informing us of unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians, for instance, that the government tried to cover up. The charges are not about that the information belonged to the government (if he'd published internal government statistics on crop growth, no-one would give a shit); the government case is that the publishing endangered US government informants and agents.

The legal definition of stealing is clearly flying over your head, so I won't try to explain it any more.