CIA has been doing that and worse for many years. Look at South America for example. "Using another country's legal system" is just child's play compared to training assassins, installing brutal dictators, and overthrowing democratically elected governments.

> they'd be risking a very public international incident

Rendition flights in Europe, the rape of South America, torture, and assassinations, training terrorists didn't phase them. Do you really think they'll back down in front of the Swedish press. They can launch their own PR campaign in the US media to protect their image, they certainly have the funds for that.

> CIA would have to be pretty reckless

Sometimes that would be appropriate as well. Some campaigns are designed to intimidate and make it circumstantially obvious what it is, while still officially maintaining their distance from the case.

But Julian Assange is not Salvador Allende.

The US can't even figure out how to assassinate key military adversaries based on Baluchistan, one of the most violent and contentious areas in the world.

The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence.

I reply to comments like this not because I'm a great believer in US intelligence and foreign policy (I'm not) and not because I'm a philosophical opponent to Wikileaks (though I am). I reply because my nerdy brain just can't accept notions as wrongheaded as the idea that Assange is important enough to merit "executive action".

I'd be shocked and offended --- not on moral grounds but on practical grounds --- if there had been a single executive order with Assange's name on it.

I'm not sure this is relevant. Life in Baluchistan is not nearly as amenable to government surveillance as life in Sweden. And besides, I'd say that the US government is pretty skillful at killing people with drones by the point. Not always the people they meant to kill....

The idea that they'd be scheming to kill someone simply out of spite (for nothing they do at this point to Assange is going to keep the machinery he's put in motion from publishing every document disclosed to him) is an insult to our intelligence.

One thing that has surprised me is the degree to which people in the US national security community believe that organizations can be stopped by killing the right leader. It seems like a case of "if all you have is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail" -- we're good at killing individuals but pretty clueless when it comes to understanding mass movements let alone engaging with them or changing their incentives. For example, there was a lot of internal resistance behind backing the Anwar Awakening in Iraq as opposed to continuing the status quo of killing insurgency leaders.

So I agree with you: killing Assange would do nothing to stop WikiLeaks. But I'm not sure that understanding is commonly held in the national security bureaucracy.

It is, on the other hand, very easy for me to accept that the US would try to recruit any one of the tens of thousands of well-armed, morally ambiguous bandits carousing around the western tribal provinces of Pakistan. After all, tens of thousands of well-armed American and NATO fighters are waiting just on the other side of an invisible border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to shoot at those same bandits.

There is simply a world of difference between the Assange scenario and the AfPak scenario; an avalanche of incentive exists in AfPak, and yet we're still bound by a kabuki dance of "rules of engagement" and "surgical" airstrikes.

There's no way I can win an argument about this with you, because it demands that I prove a negative: that nobody in the US government, no matter how ineffectual or mentally incompetant, would, given the chance, seek to neutralize Julian Assange (by PR, by arrest, or by murder). But suffice it to say: you're talking to someone who believes that if agents from the FBI, CIA, and AFOSI were standing right in front of Julian Assange in an unlit alley blocked on either end with vans ready to spirit him away, they'd try to get him to answer a few (or many) questions... and then leave him to walk away.

Um...I'm not claiming that anyone is planning on killing Assange. Please reread my comment. I'm only disputing some factual claims that you made. Just because I think portions of your argument are weak and unsupported (or irrelevant) doesn't mean that I agree with the people you're arguing with.

There is simply a world of difference between the Assange scenario and the AfPak scenario; an avalanche of incentive exists in AfPak, and yet we're still bound by a kabuki dance of "rules of engagement" and "surgical" airstrikes.

When you say "we", are you referring to the US military or the civilian contractors that are running their own airstrikes in AfPak totally apart from the military and military rules?

My point here is that talking about government killings in Baluchistan is irrelevant. Baluchistan is a very different place than Sweden. The fact that government has great difficulty finding and then killing people in a remote tribal region doesn't tell us anything about their ability to find and kill people in a place like Sweden.

"I'm surprised by the degree to which people in the national security community believe that organizations can be stopped by killing the right leader"

My point here is that your mental model for how people in the national security bureaucracy seems incomplete. I think your belief that WikiLeaks can't be stopped by killing its leaders is correct -- I just don't think we have any basis for assuming this belief is shared inside the intel/defense establishment, especially given its recent history of being unable/unwilling to consider the futility of campaigns based on leadership strikes.

when you say these things, it sure sounds like you agree with the conspiracy theorists.

Not at all. I disagree with ignorant and poorly reasoned arguments. You are bringing some to the table.

Those are my premises. From them, I derive the argument that the evidence available suggests that we don't intend to harm Assange. We simply suck at picking people out and killing them, even when we have straightforward military objectives served by doing so.

From all your comments, I can tell that you have straightforward and valid objections to the way the US has persecuted its "war on terror". You and I probably agree on most of them. I understand how those objections might bleed into the Assange story, but I think that's all it is: an unrelated objection bleeding into this narrative. The world is not a spy movie, even though the US has sometimes acted in ways that might make it look like it is.

   [The US government is poorly equipped kill people] 
       => 
   [The US government does not wish to kill Julian Assange] ????

... while the nature of a world of multiple actors, motives and methods hardly cannot be fully pieced together with syllogisms, if you are going to try, at least use some are plausible.

As for Julian. Well, I think the best way to deal with him is to smear his moral stance. You see Wikileaks is presented to the world as standing on a high moral ground, fighting a warmongering and murderous giant empire. It is the classic "good little guy" vs "big bad guy" battle. So far the little guy is doing very well.

So the best way to deal with Wikileaks "problem" is to pop its moral balloon. Implicate them in child porn, rape, molestation -- anything that would completely discredit them. And it just looks like Julian has actually been accused of rape in Sweden, a country he just happened to set up some of his servers and where he planned on staying a while. Maybe it's a coincidence and not connected to the CIA at all -- but somehow I doubt it.

On another point. I think if any of the adversary intelligence agencies managed to actually assassinate him and made it look like a CIA job -- it might turn into a major win for them by making CIA look bad.

This happened at the height of the US/Middle East conflict (before major combat started in Iraq). Abu Omar was a prominent member of Jamaat Islamiya, a peer organization of Egyption Islamic Jihad, a group publicly affiliated with "al Qaeda" (probably more for PR purposes, though) and a group led in part by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who coordinated the first bombing of the WTC.

Julian Assange is not a leader of a violent Islamist movement. We are not at war with Julian Assange. No foreign policy objective is accomplished by kidnapping him off the streets of Sweden or Iceland or wherever he is now.

I don't want to sound (too much) like I'm advocating for the capture of alleged terrorists off western city streets. That's not my point. My point is this: do I believe that the CIA might try to kidnap or kill someone they believe to be a key figure in a bona fide "terrorist" (ie: organized, violent, competently armed, transnational militant Islamist) organization? Absolutely.

Does that mean kidnapping is S.O.P. for the CIA any time anybody antagonizes the US? Ralph Nader better watch his ass, then; third-party left-wing candidates pose a greater danger to the current administration.

Interestingly enough, it seems that neither is Abu Omar. After rendering him to Egypt where the secret police tortured him for a few years (electric shocks to the genitals, rape, beatings, the usual), an Egyptian court finally freed him declaring that there was no evidence against him. So, to recap: the CIA kidnapped a guy and delivered him to the Egyptian secret police for torture. But even in an insanely corrupt dictatorship like Egypt, where prosecutors have, um, very wide discretion let us say, they couldn't get any charges to stick. Including association with a terrorist organization, which is a serious crime under Egyptian law. So as far as we know, there's no reason to believe this guy has ever done anything wrong.

I mean, if a police state like Egypt can't manage to find (or concoct) something, anything with which to convict him, how dangerous can he be? And if he's not actually dangerous, then sending 20-odd CIA agents to kidnap him and render him for torture seems kind of crazy....My point is: the CIA sometimes acts in ways that make very little sense on the outside.

Would it make sense for them to kill Assange? No, it would be insane. But this isn't an organization that has historically demonstrated an overabundance of sanity. I doubt they're trying to kill him, but arguments premised on CIA sanity seem...rather weak.

Should the CIA have kidnapped him? No. We can see one strong argument against extrajudicial detention and exfiltration right here: it puts us on a slippery slope, where we have to take pains to argue about why we might kidnap a "terrorist" ("ah, but what's a terrorist! it's whatever you say it is, righ!"... sigh), but wouldn't kidnap a free-speech activist.

You can present no evidence that the "CIA" or any other agency in the US government is plotting the kidnap, murder, or even the propaganda-based discrediting of Julian Assange. All you can do is posit that something like that might happen, and sit back waiting for everyone else on the message board to try to prove the negative. Isn't that fun?

I do not see how it could be rational. Based on years of torture, we apparently have learned nothing that could justify a conviction in even a kangaroo court.

Look, I know that many people believe that everyone who any government anywhere ever declares to be a terrorist is automatically guilty. But really now: he hasn't been convicted of anything. Even though he was tortured for years. Even though was under the control of a police state that has a long reputation of convicting innocent people the state doesn't care for. And despite all that: no convictions. Which means he never should have been kidnapped and tortured. When you kidnap and torture innocent people, you are doing something wrong.

All you can do is posit that something like that might happen, and sit back waiting for everyone else on the message board to try to prove the negative. Isn't that fun?

Again, you seem very confused. I'm not trying to disprove your larger assertion. I'm calling into question subsidiary arguments that you've made. Those subsidiary arguments are not proving a negative, so you need not weep any more on that score. Now, since you've made many many subsidiary arguments, I don't think that calling a handful of them into question seriously damages your larger claim, but if you believe otherwise....

I'm doing my best to foresee all the various ways this discussion can turn into an HN referendum on the "war on terror", and I'm obviously failing, because I'm reading things about genital electrocution and discussing the 2003 kidnapping of a Jamaat Islamiya recruiter instead of what has actually happened with Julian Assange, someone who's newsworthy exclusively for having posted files to the Internet.

The US doesn't care much about foreign law; the kidnapping in Italy is just one example. Carrying out covert actions on foreign soil is in the CIA's mission statement: "Conducting covert action at the direction of the President to preempt threats or achieve US policy objectives."

Do I think the CIA had anything to do with this? I have no idea. But I don't think the CIA can be ruled out based on the US's respect for foreign governments and international law.