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Comment by duchenne | Hacker News Reader

I feel sad, because this is not the right debate to have, and I initiated it.

First, I repeat: What he allegedly did is a serious and horrible crime.

Also, people need to see the elephant in the room. These two victims' case is weaponized by some governments to scare whistle-blowers. Assange directly or indirectly exposed many horrible crimes, including war rapes, group rapes, mass murders. People need to remember this video of soldiers in Irak shooting at human beings from far away while laughing and listening to rock music, and shooting again at wounded survivors crawling on the floor. People need also to remember the images of war prisoners tortured, humiliated, forced to be naked and raped with sticks.

But, more importantly, people need to make sure that future whistle-blowers fell safe to expose this kind of hideous crimes.

Prisoners' case [nsfw]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

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I see no indication that this was “weaponized.” Assange was wanted for questioning in Sweden. He was in the UK and would have been arrested and extradited. This is all completely normal. It went off the rails when he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, which was his own choice.

Supposedly he did this because he was afraid that he’d be hauled off to Guantanamo Bay or whatever, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

At any rate, we should separate these things. The whistleblowing done by Assange and the rape (allegedly) done by Assange are unrelated. Talking about the whistleblowing should not involve minimizing the rape.

He had already been questioned by police in Sweden prior to that. He even stuck around for a month and then asked the Swedish police if he was free to leave, he was told he was.

The prosecutor dropped the charges because the alleged victims were quite obviously lying about having been raped using any conventional definition of the term, there was also no way to resolve any dispute about whether someone was asleep when sex happened, and they would never reach the level of "beyond reasonable doubt" by any jury as a consequence.

The charges were later mysteriously resurrected by a different prosecutor so he could be questioned again. Or maybe it's not such a mystery after all. Either Sweden is doing as the USA asked for some convoluted reasons, or the Swedish justice system is a complete joke when the R word gets involved.

The prosecutor dropped the case because the alleged rape victim didn't want to press charges, because she was overwhelmed in the immediate aftermath. Then she hired a lawyer to advocate for her who got the charges re-opened.

The other woman, who alleged lesser offenses, never dropped charges, though the statute of limitations have since expired on them.

Assange was told early on in the investigation that he was not restricted from traveling, but as the investigation developed further and it became clear they wanted to prosecute him, he went missing.

After multiple failed attempts to schedule another police interview, the prosecutor told his attorney she'd be filing an arrest warrant that day. Five hours later, Assange arrived at the airport and bought the next available ticket to Berlin.

Assange claims that's just a coincidence. That he was avoiding contact with his lawyer because he was afraid of "threatening statements made by politicians in the U.S"

The timing of the Swedish charge is very noteworthy. The charge and extradition request was made shortly after the release of the US diplomatic cables.

The diplomatic cables were released November 28 2010. The international arrest warrant November 18 2010. Before that other documents had been released, during the course of almost a year. So, the way I see it there is nothing really special about the timeline here. It is interesting that a lot of people seem to think that he should not be held responsible (or at least investigated) for the crimes he might have committed against the women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_diplomatic_cable...

Wikileaks is not just Assange. Obviously there far more people were working in background to verify everything they can and make sure their data is legit before they show it to the public. Do you really think there was way for them to keep upcoming release like actually secret from US government?

Sure. They probably had an idea of what was going on. Don't really see why that is important though. What I was replying to stated "The charge and extradition request was made shortly after the release of the US diplomatic cables." which is incorrect. There is not anything suspicious about the timeline as I see it, the arrest warrant was issued after Assange left Sweden during an open investigation, which he was quite aware of. The only thing that would have been strange is if an arrest warrant hadn't been issued.

We're discussing this now, using materials available now, and discussing a historical event that differs by two weeks. It could have been that the time stamp on the warrant was backdated two weeks.

Except that it was widely reported by mainstream media on 18th November, as the culmination of a long, drawn out and widely reported appeal process dating back to earlier in the year. It really is astonishing how creative people can get with the well-established facts in order to make their conspiracy theories have legs...

Ockham's razor says if there's any connection at all between the two dates, it's Assange ordering Wikileaks to release the files as soon as possible after the arrest warrant was issued to get himself more sympathetic news coverage.

The wrong event may have been cited, but the timeline was special. As https://www.npr.org/2019/04/11/712306713/12-years-of-disrupt... verifies, here is the order of events.

April, a famous video was released from inside a chopper that was mistakenly shooting journalists. May, Chelsea Manning was arrested for that. July, 75,000 documents were released about the Afghan war. August, the rape charges are filed. October, 400,000 documents about the Iraq war. November, the cable leak.

So the cable leaks did not come first. However there was lots of other stuff already released that could have motivated the US here.

And it is also quite possible that concern over the cable leaks was the motivation. You see, the US knew about everything that Chelsea Manning had already released, and had reason to believe that Wikileaks had it all and was releasing things in stages for maximum damage. (It turns out that a drip drip of bad news has much greater emotional impact on people than a single torrent.) Therefore they had the motivation to find ways to put pressure on Assange to NOT leak what he had. And what they did, didn't work.

Moving on, please check your assumptions about whether he should be held responsible. It is my belief that he is an example of selective enforcement of laws that should be more broadly enforced. Therefore my belief that he was targeted for other reasons is not in conflict with my belief that he should have been targeted. I just think that it is wrong that it takes a guy embarrassing a major military for the police to take a woman's complaints seriously.

"Moving on, please check your assumptions about whether he should be held responsible. It is my belief that he is an example of selective enforcement of laws that should be more broadly enforced. " Okay... I live in Sweden and my view is not that he is a victim of selective enforcement. All rape allegations reported to the police are investigated in Sweden as far as I know. Unfortunately it is usually hard to find supporting evidence and it is usually word against word, which often is not enough for conviction. That his case was open for so long, and that the prosecutor found a reason to reopen the case (on request of the victim) does indicate that there might be substantial evidence.

It has to be said that many other journalists who reported on war crimes (including collaborating with Wikileaks on Manning stories) are entirely safe and well and have not been accused of rape.

We don't really know what threats have been delivered to them, only Assange is high-profile enough for whatever happens to him to send message. For all we know those other journalists received a friendly phone call and capitulated immediately - or more likely, they're simply not as big a target.

I mean, some of the other journalists include Wikileaks members and Assange supporters who've personally assisted Snowden in escaping to Russia. If it's an intimidation strategy, it's clearly not working.

The US hasn't asked for their extradition for conspiracy either, and yet they have for Assange. Unless being accused of raping women in Sweden causes the US to do that, there must also be some other difference between Assange and those other journalists.

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