Julian Assange: rapist or not?

[uke2se]

I think that actually what is or should be up for debate is the degree of interest the US has in Assange, and whether it is leading them to apply any degree of pressure to any parties involved in ensuring the UK continues to ensure Assange does not leave the country except in handcuffs on his way to Sweden. My guess, most political pressure in the form of a mild and deniable leaning on all three countries involved, with no real anticipation of an extradition to the US any time soon, but it'll keep him more accessible if they ever changed their minds were he to be imprisoned in Europe than free in Ecuador (but for the particularly conspiracy minded, surely it'd be doable to send a team in to abduct him from Ecuador?)

Wouldn't it be even better for a US that operates according to your speculation to just "lean on" Sweden to grant Assange residency in the first place?

 

[superfreddy]

It appears that the WP opinion article is contradictory, since they acknowledge that the US has not charged Assange but they speculate that the Ecuadorian asylum decision could lead to some kind of economic sanctions from the US without giving any explanation why. Yes, maybe I'm giving too much credit to the editorial board of the WP.

 

[Matthew Best]

I'm pretty sure if Assange had raped these women, I'd have read about it on Wikileaks: they always have the inside scoop on stuff.

 

[Alt+F4]

Many poster in here have saidthat the US has no interest in Assange. Why would the Washington Post speculate that by giving Assange asylum, Ecuador could suffer economic consequences as retaliation from the US?

I saw nothing in that article indicating that the U.S. was planning any action against Ecuador. What was interesting is that the article stated that Assange "is a self-styled victim of an imagined international political conspiracy" and correctly points out that he is now in a prison of his own making.

 

[superfreddy]

I saw nothing in that article indicating that the U.S. was planning any action against Ecuador. What was interesting is that the article stated that Assange "is a self-styled victim of an imagined international political conspiracy" and correctly points out that he is now in a prison of his own making.

From the WP article:

"...But it also could have disastrous economic consequences for his country. As we’ve said before, the United States that Mr. Correa so despises allows Ecuador to export many goods duty-free, supports roughly 400,000 jobs in a country of 14 million people and accounts for one-third of Ecuador’s foreign sales. Congress could easily decide to diminish that privileged commercial access early next year"

It reads like speculation about economic sanctions.

 

[Alt+F4]

Well Congress never does anything "easily" and I doubt if most of them even know where Ecuador is. President Correa got himself a prisoner whom I'm pretty certain will wear out his welcome soon due to all that whining.

 

[Sabrina]

Quite frankly I think Assange ascribes rather more importance to himself than the US Government does.

Based on my experience, I would say we view him as little more than an annoying little attention whore who is constantly jumping up and down shouting, "look at me, look at me, I'm standing up to eeeeeeebil guvmints!!" Setting aside the fact that he seems to focus more or less solely on the US (and not, say, on North Korea, which is notorious for REALLY oppressing its people rather than the pseudo-oppression Assange and many CTers ascribe to the US government) in that regard, I for one would find it very surprising if the US government were interested in acquiring Assange at all. Silencing his efforts, certainly; I don't doubt that pretty much the entirety of the US government would absolutely LOVE to shut down Wikileaks altogether; but he himself? Not really a high value target, despite his posturing otherwise.

I have yet to see any definite evidence that indicates the US Government has any interest in acquiring Assange whatsoever (and please don't bring up the Stratfor emails; one, Stratfor is an independent, privately owned agency, and the opinion of one single member (which is essentially the content of the emails in question IIRC; i.e. one member speculating that the US Government will want to acquire Assange with no evidence to back up said speculation) does not represent the opinion of the agency as a whole, and two, Stratfor and the US Government have little or nothing to do with each other, since, as I said, Stratfor is a privately owned agency of sorts based out of Austin, TX.) Aside from Mr. Assange's hysterical assumptions that we want him, I tend to agree with others on here who have stated that we have the culprit we want to try for the Wikileaks fiasco already in custody; namely Bradley Manning. Assange; eh, we'd be happy if he'd just shut up, in my opinion.

 

[DreadNiK]

Wouldn't it be even better for a US that operates according to your speculation to just "lean on" Sweden to grant Assange residency in the first place?

true. an error on their part perhaps?

I might wish to retroactively amend my speculation as to the US' actions to include completely passive pressure applied simply by dint of the fact that Assange clearly pissed off the US and the US is pretty powerful

 

[Captain.Sassy]

Quite frankly I think Assange ascribes rather more importance to himself than the US Government does.

possibly

Based on my experience, I would say we view him as little more than an annoying little attention whore who is constantly jumping up and down shouting, "look at me, look at me, I'm standing up to eeeeeeebil guvmints!!"

But how do you, personally, feel about him?

Setting aside the fact that he seems to focus more or less solely on the US

Any evidence that Wikileaks has refused to publish leaks from elsewhere? They seemed to have no trouble publishing the Assad emails or the recent emails between Syrian gov't and Italian comms firm...

 

[Garrison]

If the US wanted him I'm sure they could come up with a charge and a request for extradition the UK would have been happy to help with, the notion that deporting him to Sweden is some devious plot is just bizarre.

 

[eirik]

If the US wanted him I'm sure they could come up with a charge and a request for extradition the UK would have been happy to help with, the notion that deporting him to Sweden is some devious plot is just bizarre.

reminds me of truthers trying to explain away planes.

 

[theprestige]

Agatha Christie - After politely but thoroughly questioning all the interesting parties, the charming little Belgian detective assembles everyone in the front parlor of the Ecuadorian embassy. There, he reveals that Assange is the rapist, and that US involvement was a red herring. Half the readers say "ha! I knew it all along!" The other half says "doh! I should have known it all along!"

 

[Sabrina]

Any evidence that Wikileaks has refused to publish leaks from elsewhere? They seemed to have no trouble publishing the Assad emails or the recent emails between Syrian gov't and Italian comms firm...

How many people know about those as opposed to the US Diplomatic Cables, though? Or the information Manning provided to Assange?

I'm not saying they don't publish information on other governments; I am, however, saying that they appear to focus a LOT on the US government when there are far worse governments out there that would be better to expose than the US's relatively petty dealings.

Most people only know in an abstract sort of way, for instance, that the North Korean people are oppressed, not the concrete evidence of the ways they go about it; if Wikileaks were to expose the corruption within the North Korean government, maybe we could finally get something DONE over there to help those people. Focusing on the US government in the way Wikileaks tends to do isn't exactly exposing a monumental disclosure; most people in the world know that the US government makes mistakes arse over teakettle, to coin a phrase, so focusing on us isn't going to do a whole lot of good overall. Exposing other governments, the ones that are actively oppressing their people and abrogating their basic human rights in ways that the US is definitively NOT doing to its own people would make much more sense. Assange seems to have, if you'll excuse the terminology, a hard-on for the US government in a way that really makes absolutely no sense if he's the human rights advocate and patriot he claims to be. There is no major oppression going on in the US, plain and simple, unless you want to get into the apparent views of the Republican party regarding women, gays, and blacks, (but then this isn't the Politics subforum, so I'll refrain); so why focus on us so much?

 

[theprestige]

William Gibson (with apologies) - They sent a slamhound on Assange's trail in Stockholm, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Brunkerbergstorg and came scrambling for his rented Volvo through a forest of denim-clad legs and bicycle tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of Sweden was the brown marble facade of a place called the Scandic Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Ecuador an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The British surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Assange hadn't made it out of Arlanda International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

 

[BenBurch]

Pure speculation

...

Then why did their lawyer insist the case be pursued?

 

[Checkmite]

Amazing how Assange felt comforable in Sweden for months, even wanted to live there, and only decided they were going to hand him over to the US to be tortured when he was accused of rape. Purely coincidence, I'm sure.

That's what I don't get. Assange supporters talk like the rape charges are a "pretext" to get him into custody so that he can be extradited to the US. But where does that line of thinking come from? When the US asked Australia to apprehend and extradite the CEO of Megaupload, the Australian authorities didn't make up some crime to arrest him for first; they just arrested him. Same thing when the US asked Switzerland to arrest Roman Polanski for them. They just went to wherever he was and arrested him. In both cases there was then an extradition hearing of course. But there's no conceivable reason why, if the US had asked Sweden to detain and extradite Assange, the Swedish police wouldn't just have gone and taken him into custody as usual.

 

[theprestige]

That's what I don't get. Assange supporters talk like the rape charges are a "pretext" to get him into custody so that he can be extradited to the US. But where does that line of thinking come from? When the US asked Australia to apprehend and extradite the CEO of Megaupload, the Australian authorities didn't make up some crime to arrest him for first; they just arrested him. Same thing when the US asked Switzerland to arrest Roman Polanski for them. They just went to wherever he was and arrested him. In both cases there was then an extradition hearing of course. But there's no conceivable reason why, if the US had asked Sweden to detain and extradite Assange, the Swedish police wouldn't just have gone and taken him into custody as usual.

I was gonna say Assange reads like a John Grisham novel, but really he reads more like Dan Brown than anything else.

 

[Captain.Sassy]

How many people know about those as opposed to the US Diplomatic Cables, though? Or the information Manning provided to Assange?

I'm not saying they don't publish information on other governments; I am, however, saying that they appear to focus a LOT on the US government when there are far worse governments out there that would be better to expose than the US's relatively petty dealings.

They publish what's given to them. You can't blame them for not having secret North Korean documents.

There may be worse governments out there, but there aren't any more powerful governments. The way American power is exercised has relevance for people around the globe in a way that the actions of few other governments do.

Finally, everyone 'knows' North Korea and Syria etc. are the 'bad guys', so we aren't surprised that the Syrian elites, for example, continue about their daily lives seemingly unperturbed by the civil war ravaging their country. But evidence of the US using strong-arm diplomatic tactics and covering up / under-reporting civilian deaths in a war is diametrically opposed to the standard discourse about how the US comports itself internationally. It's more sensational.

 

[Checkmite]

I was under the impression that the documents in fact showed the US pointedly not using strong-arm diplomatic tactics even when asked by interested parties, and that the military reports from Afghanistan actually showed a smaller number of civilian casualties than estimated by humanitarian groups.

 

[BenBurch]

William Gibson (with apologies) - They sent a slamhound on Assange's trail in Stockholm, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Brunkerbergstorg and came scrambling for his rented Volvo through a forest of denim-clad legs and bicycle tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of Sweden was the brown marble facade of a place called the Scandic Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Ecuador an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The British surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Assange hadn't made it out of Arlanda International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.

Five points to Slytherin!