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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

"The charge against Julian is very specific; conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs, the Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables. The charges are nothing to do with Sweden, nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with the 2016 US election"

I'd like to call out the popular and prolific users of hacker news who previously were all about Sweden, sex and election interference and who are very silent now.

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The Swedish case was a separate issue; he hid in the embassy until the clock ran out on that. It's difficult to say how differently things would have gone if he'd simply gone to Sweden, but I would have expected them to be less likely to re-extradite than the UK.

It's perfectly possible for the US to be overreaching in its "national security" prosecutions and also for Assange to have sexually assaulted someone in Sweden.

This is a lie.

"The clock ran out" only on some of the crimes he was accused of. Sweden simply dropped the case (i.e. decided not to proceed with extradition request) after he got out of the embassy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Swedish_sexual_...

> the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape", whose statute of limitations is due to expire in 2020

> Following Assange's 2019 arrest, the case was reopened under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. In September 2019, she revealed that she had interviewed seven witnesses, two of whom had not been previously heard, but had yet to determine how to proceed in the case.

It might be less inflammatory to say "this is incorrect" rather than "this is a lie".

Or do you have reason to think that pjc50 is deliberately lying?

So many untruths ("lies") in this thread, I expect it to be full of shills. At some point it gets really hard to attribute to incompetence, not malice...

“Please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request,” wrote a lawyer for the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2011, without explaining why, or why the CPS would spent the next few years arguing against their Swedish colleagues questioning Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in order to resolve the matter. In 2013, when Swedish prosecutors proposed to drop extradition proceedings against Assange, it was the CPS who persuaded them to continue.

In 2017, having finally questioned Assange after refusing to do so for more than six years, the Swedish authorities dropped the investigation altogether. Both the accusers and the accused were denied any chance of justice through the incomprehensible delaying tactics of the prosecutors in both countries.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2018/07/25/wikileaks-political-ror... Author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ludlam

The real gripe: he revealed too much. Now the political and security classes are just looking to make an example of him, to deter anyone else who would unveil their crimes and abuses.

I don't think anyone would look to repeat assange's life story at this point. A decade in semi self-imposed detention before being dragged before the judge and jailed for breach of bail and then a long drawn out court hearing. It hardly seems worth leaking state secrets that a lot of military/industry guys knew about anyway.

He was in the UK when he was arrested for extradition to Sweden. He was in the UK [1] when he was arrested for extradition to the USA.

As I have said before, the very fact that the USA is having essentially zero difficulty with extraditing him from the UK even thought the rape case preceded the USA case and is ongoing and is nearly facing the statute of limitations demonstrates that his claim “going to Sweden will cause me to be face the death penalty in the USA” is bogus — the USA neither needed nor benefited from him being in Sweden.

If anything, I am as angry with the USA for preventing him from facing his rape accusers in trial in Sweden as for interfering with anti-warcrime whistleblowing (journalism or not) by going after him like this.

[1] I neither know nor care if he was technically in the embassy at the time as they had just kicked him out anyway.

> demonstrates that his claim “going to Sweden will cause me to be face the death penalty in the USA” is bogus

Doesn't matter; what matters is what Assange thought would happen. He clearly thought that if he left the Embassy he would be promptly sent to the US.

And lo and behold, it is shaping up that he was right. Did he know the exact legal mechanisms that would be employed - apparently not. But his overall read of the situation has been vindicated.

It most certainly does matter, as he only went into that embassy in the first place to avoid going to Sweden. He would have been at least as safe in Sweden as in the UK, even if convicted.

> he only went into that embassy in the first place to avoid going to Sweden.

His attempt to avoid that was basically 10 years of self-imposed jail in Ecuador's embassy and his health gave out.

His decisions make sense if he thought he was at risk of being black-holed in America. They don't make sense if he thought he was only up for what Sweden is accusing him of. The Swedes are going to be charging with relatively minor non-violent crimes like otherwise-consensual sex without a condom.

That doesn't even make any sense.

How could the US extradite Assange for a crime committed in Sweden ?

And why would they extradite for election interference when Barr would just shut it down ?

The author here is painting the UK as rolling over and doing whatever the US says, rather than applying proper justice.

This is why people were skeptical of the Sweden charges. It was commonly believed that the point of those charges (whether they were true or not) was to get Assange to Sweden, at which point Sweden could roll over, do the US's bidding and extradite him to the US.

> It was commonly believed that the point of those charges (whether they were true or not) was to get Assange to Sweden, at which point Sweden could roll over, do the US's bidding and extradite him to the US.

Which was always ridiculous, as it was based on the idea that Sweden would be more willing to extradite than the UK, a ridiculous notion.

Sweden is one of a number of nations who have cooperated with US Extraordinary Renditions in the past [0] and also has an extradition treaty with the United States. The extradition request probably has a similar chance of success in both countries.

It is a notion that can be very reasonably entertained; especially since there are a very limited number of Swedish lawyers on HN who can interpret the extradition treaty. Sweden could easily fold like an origami under US pressure regardless of the law too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Sweden

> How could the US extradite Assange for a crime committed in Sweden ?

For a lot of stuff the US applies "global jurisdiction" as soon as anything in the US is being touched, which is also the base for the Kim Dotcom / Megaupload extradition case.

> I'd like to call out the popular and prolific users of hacker news who previously were all about Sweden, sex and election interference and who are very silent now.

What do you mean? Obviously it was always about US military secrets... our point was simply, that sex/Sweden were a distraction, a ploy to keep him until they could build a case (or, as it happened, until they managed to install a more favorable government in Ecuador).

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