Remember all the people, including HN commenters, who said he should just turn himself in and clear his name in court in Sweden. Only conspiracy theorists believed that powerful authorities were gunning for him behind the scenes.
I don’t see how it is self-consistent to say Sweden would’ve been more dangerous than the UK, when it is the conduct of the UK that led to condemnation by the UN and Amnesty International, and the UK is currently in the process of considering his extradition to the USA.
My own personal belief (which is merely at the level of “well I reckon“), is that he probably did the Sweden crimes, and also that the prosecution only even attempted because he was also a political thorn.
This belief is based partly on the surveys which show that an enormous number of women have been sexually assaulted and also that they don’t generally report this to the police, partly on his behaviour.
It is also partly based on the fact that — as is currently being demonstrated by the very extradition hearing currently occurring — the US is quite capable of extraditing him directly from the UK without going via Sweden.
While the current hearing is a complete farce, at least there's one.
There's precedent in the Swedish court system which has previously denied extradition on espionage charges.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/18/would-sweden-ever-extra...
> But Assange could be more afraid of a snatch-and-grab CIA operation. In 2002, Sweden collaborated with the United States in the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians seeking asylum. That example is often seen as indicative of what even left-wing Scandinavian governments will do when pressured by the United States in such cases.
Also the complainant (who could, with lower implausibility than the prosecutor, be part of such a conspiracy) did attempt to resume the extradition to Sweden as soon as she heard about the USA beginning the process of trying to extradite him from the UK.
That's some really weak logic.
He cooperated fully with the investigation remotely.
He maintains that he has long been informed of the existence of the secret US charges from credible sources.
What compels a person to sacrifice his life for the sake of an investigation where the prosecutor is not even able to bring charges?
He was also targeted in 2016 using an obviously contrived Bahamian pedophelia accusation. Should he have a moral obligation to sacrifice himself for that investigation as well?
> He was also targeted in 2016 using an obviously contrived Bahamian pedophelia accusation. Should he have a moral obligation to sacrifice himself for that investigation as well?
That is for the police to decide, not him.
To say literally anything else is to assume that he must be beyond reproach simply because of who he has upset.
And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
Edit: also, again, Sweden isn’t threatening his life, America is (IMO, even if the government denies it) — and they’re doing that just fine without Swedish help.
No one is saying Assange must be beyond reproach, we are saying let’s be honest about what games the authorities are very clearly playing.
The investigation was then re-opened by a politician subsequently after he released the Afghanistan war logs. iirc.
But if that doesn't bother you maybe the uncontested fact that his _one_ accuser literally wrote a scribe on how to get back at an ex-boyfriend by falsely accusing them of rape might just a little bit.
To say the case was thin is the most massive understatement. If you had published the secrets of the military industrial complex and intended to publish more should any heroes get them to you for publication do you think you'd be at all scared?
>To say literally anything else is to assume that he must be beyond reproach simply because of who he has upset.
That is nonsense. Nobody has said that. Ever. He has consistently said he was available to be questioned a second time via video link up or in person in the uk.
The total unwillingness of the swedes to make a skype call in the circumstances while being completely willing to drop the charges is something that bothers me.
>And if you cannot trust the police, it is already too late.
At no point have you ever been able to "trust the police" This is why we have the rule of law and courts in liberal democracies. It isn't perfect but its vastly better than anything else the human race has devised. We should protect it and keep striving for its ideals. This is the big issue at the center of this story. Assange's rights and yours and mine to the rule of law and equality before really appear to be being infringed based on the power of upsetting the military industrial complex.
That should probably bother us all to some degree.
When I say “trust the police” I mean trust them to decide who to prosecute, not trust them to decide who to convict.
Obviously you need to have the rest of the rule of law going on for any hope of a good outcome.
Rule of law includes not skipping bail to avoid an extradition that was lawfully agreed to by a judge of the nation you’re currently in, and penalties if you try it.
It also means that people don’t get to decide how they are interviewed when they are suspected of a serious crime.
It was a UK judge which decided to do this, remember. Rule of law.
> his _one_ accuser
There were two accusers.
> That is nonsense. Nobody has said that. Ever. He has consistently said he was available to be questioned a second time via video link up or in person in the uk.
Then why do the Swedish allegations get mentioned and dismissed on every single discussion of the case America is making against him for completely different charges?
Nope. Just one. You were lied to. The second woman refused to sign the statement that was presented to her by the police officer. She had been taken to the police officer by the first woman. The police officer was a friend of the first woman. The second woman _refused_ to sign.
If you didn't dig in to get the facts I can totally see how you would believe the constant misinformation that there were two accusers but there were not. One of the women made no accusation.
>Then why do the Swedish allegations get mentioned and dismissed on every single discussion of the case America is making against him for completely different charges?
Becuase this is the hook that is used to smear you as an "Asssange The Rapist Supporter" if you wish to protect your rights which are the same as his.
But going back to Police deciding who to prosecute. The police in sweden decided not to prosecute Assange and that he was free to leave the country. A politican decided something different later.
People /do/ get to decide to legimitately protect their human rights, even, perhaps especially, when they are being infringed through false accusation. Assange always said the US were after him. Remember when he was accused of lying about that to avoid being prosecuted for rape. Now nobody believes the rape accusation and here he is being vindictively pursued just as he said.
It really should bother you if that happened to an actual goddamn nazi thug. The ACLU defend your rights when they're attacked to get at an actual muderous nazi thug. Assange is a publisher and journalist who has exposed war crimes.
Those are your rights.
Out of interest I have tried to google this. I found precisely zero results the back up your claim, even with multiple attempts at rephrasing the query.
I have also found no references to their names, much less their relationships with officers.
> It really should bother you if that happened to an actual goddamn nazi thug. The ACLU defend your rights when they're attacked to get at an actual muderous nazi thug. Assange is a publisher and journalist who has exposed war crimes.
Literally why I started this sub-thread with “It is entirely self-consistent to say both that he should’ve faced his accusers in Sweden and that the American charges look like an outrageous attempt to stifle legitime journalism.”
> Remember when he was accused of lying about that to avoid being prosecuted for rape.
Looked like that then, still looks like it now. Why? The name of the country America is trying to extradite him from — the same country he was in when he said he didn’t want to go to Sweden.
> Now nobody believes the rape accusation
"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events. Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation," says Eva-Marie Persson, Deputy Director of Public Prosecution. — https://www.aklagare.se/en/news-and-press/press-releases/201...
> Rule of law includes not skipping bail
"prosecute" "convict" "skip" "bail" These are all terms which explicitly apply to people who have been charged with a crime. If you believe that he was charged with a crime in sweden, you are mistaken. Otherwise, you are not really discussing Assange here.
“Julian Assange sentenced to 50 weeks for skipping UK bail” - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/01/julian-assange-sen...
Timeline according to Swedish authorities (archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20190502114026/https://www.aklag...
No. Life went on in the USSR, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy. Life goes on in the US and UK, despite the police being manifestly untrustworthy (albeit to a lesser degree). You still have to make choices and decide how to live, even when you live in one of the authoritarian regimes that form the majority of the history of human societies.
Is your opinion, with absoultely nothing at stake, somehow more accurate and superior to his, when he has everything to lose? I don't know the answer to which country is worse. But I'll grant him the right to make his best bet when, against his will, he is all in for having published evidence of war crimes.
I don't know Assange at all. I might not like him at all if I did know him personally, I couldn't say. What is clear is the job they've done on him to "other" him and stop people from sticking up for his rights, which are of course their own rights has been utterly superbly done. Everyone sticking up for our rights has to clear their throat about not being "An Assange supporter" to even make obvious, simple and uncontroversial points about the rule of law and equality before it.
That bothers me quite a bit.
I completely agree our personal opinions should not define who we support or oppose in a court of law. Even if he had gone to Sweden, been convicted, been given the maximum sentence for those offences, served that entire sentence, and only then been released: that does not change how guilty he is or isn’t of the new accusations by America.
Likewise in reverse: even if he is completely innocent of every crime is accused of by America, and the American courts exonerate him and proclaim the prosecution to have been brought for purely political reasons, and end up prosecuting and convicting his persecutors instead of him, that does not mean he is incapable of being guilty of the crimes he was accused of by Sweden, and for which the statue of limitations has now expired.
He has to guess which country he will be more at risk in. He can't /know/ any more than you or I can know.
He has the right to make his best guess and potentially be wrong about it because he has everything at stake. If you or I or anyone else thinks he has made the wrong guess. Fine. But acknowledge that he has the right to make the best guess he can and had rather more at stake with that guess than a mere opinion.
What has changed utterly is the formerly bogus claim that he need not worry because the US were not pursuing him. The people who claimed that, of which there were very, very many had nothing at stake and were completely, totally and utterly wrong. I haven't seen anyone acknowledge "Yeah I thought he was making excuses but it turns out he was right when he said the US were after him and I was wrong about that one thing at least."
Easy to say anything at all when there are no consequences to us. We should acknowledge it. Indeed from a different angle we should cherish it and protect it.
Everything up to this sentence, we are on the same page:
> But acknowledge that he has the right to make the best guess he can and had rather more at stake with that guess than a mere opinion.
I would say he has the capacity, not the right. The right stopped the moment his appeals against his extradition to Sweden ended.
I do totally agree that people think differently when their skin is on the line. That’s part of why I’m in the “well I recon” rather than “totes innocent” or “he’s a wrong’un” camp.
At the time, and now, it feels logically incoherent to argue that Sweden is less safe for Assange than a country which has literally just decided to extradite Assange. Doubly so if you want to claim that Assange did not commit the offence and America conspired to fake it, because of the latter was true America could easily have done so with other offences that would have him sent to the USA direct.
America not liking Assange was obvious even back then, but it felt (and still feels) irrelevant to the specific claims in Sweden.
The conspiracy theories were about the US seeking to extradite Assange using the rape case as pretext. This was dismissed as lunacy because US authorities didn't need the rape case as pretext; they could have simply sought his extradition on the charges they are now seeking to extradite him for. If anything, the rape case would have made extradition more complicated because Sweden is less willingly to extradite to the US than the UK, the UK would have prioritized extradition to Sweden over extradition to the US.
They know that he / wikileaks have got more material / dirt on the US though, and that if he were to disappear that material would be unlocked (dead man's switch).
So for now the illusion of due process is maintained.
The Sweden accusation was started, because Sweden can send prisoners to the US immediately. The US started this scheme after wikileaks exposed the warcrimes in Iraq.
The Uk kept the arrest on Assange, even after this all was cleared. And are still holding him against all laws.
However, I do not think he should be extradited to the US over helping someone who had already decided to leak to do so.
I admit I hadn't realised just how badly the USA wanted to make his life miserable, and the fact that he was clearly right about that has made some of his actions more understandable.