What a surprise, the entire media history against Assange is a bunch of bullshit. Blows my mind that people can be so critical of mainstream media and doubt everything they say, but suddenly believe them 100% when it comes to something like Assange.
The media commentary I saw in the U.K. before I left was generally on the lines of “US shouldn’t be going after him this was journalism, and he should’ve gone to Sweden instead of hiding from the law”. People can be more than one thing.
The Sweden charges and investigation were an obvious pretext to have him extradited to the USA. The UN special investigation concluded as much. So this is just like accusing a Russian dissident fleeing Russia that they didn't attend some fake trial in Belarus.
Given that he is in fact being extradited to the US from the U.K., the US trying to get him from the UK to Sweden does nothing to achieve this end and actually makes it slightly harder for them to ultimately extradite him owing to the weaker political connection that Sweden has with the USA relative to what the UK has with the USA. (The U.K. like to think it has a “special relationship” with the USA, Sweden isn’t in Five Eyes and is not a member of NATO).
Do you have a link to the original UN report, because the newspapers reporting on the report are very obviously engaging in a game of telephone with what it actually says. I don’t know which newspapers are closer to the truth, but they’re sufficiently dissimilar that some of the claims I have encountered must be outright false.
Here is official correspondence between the UN special rapporteur and the Swedish Foreign Ministry on this topic - this was easier to find for me than the official report, but I think it contains the relevant claims:
In particular, section 3 - Reported arbitrariness of the preliminary investigation - raises 11 ways the judicial proceedings were highly problematic, each with numerous instances of such behavior. Quoting a few of the more egregious ones, an order for his arrest was issued a few hours after two women first contacted the police about the possibility of compelling an HIV test for Assange; an official statement hadn't even been collected from one of the women yet; no statement from Assange had been requested or collected before emitting the arrest warrant; official statements made by the accusers were modified post factum in the police databases; and that both the investigating officer and an attorney for the two accusers (who sought to reopen the case after it was first closed) were both friends of a former Swedish minister of justice "at the time when Swedish security police unlawfully kidnapped and handed over two persons to CIA-custody and subsequent torture".
This final collaboration may be exactly one of the reasons why Sweden would have been preferred as the extraditing state vs the UK. It's also important to note that, unlike Swededn, the UK is a common law country where the mechanisms for protecting individual rights are significantly different from the civil law system in Sweden.
They trumped up fake rape case in order for him to be brought to Sweden when they would extradited him to us.
Rape is serious accusation, but if you look at this case you can clearly see she got paid to go to court. They had sex, he left the sweeden and months after that she changed her mind and decided it was a rape.
The closest I have to the original statements are reports in newspapers such as the following. At the very least the acts described here seem to me to be in violation of either section 1 or 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (I don’t understand the difference) by the standard of section 75.2.d (being asleep). IIRC this is basically why the UK judge agreed to the extradition to Sweden, as I think extradition generally needs the act to be an offence in both places? Though I may have misunderstood that.
To clarify a little bit: according to the UN special rapporteur, the two women whom he supposedly rape did indeed NOT accuse him of rape - it was Swedish authorities that extended their request (forcing him to undergo an HIV test) to charges of rape. I believe this is what GP is referring to.
"People can be more than one thing" is VERY important.
Guys like this are free candy for foreign intelligence agencies and vital tools in waging war against the United States. It would be useless to create them as spies and saboteurs out of whole cloth, when it's so much more effective to find guys with a grievance… a REAL grievance… and turn them, own them, use them to full advantage.
Assange is a pawn and, like so many of us, not a good person. Doesn't mean he can't have had good motivations and goals. Doesn't mean those goals can't have proven useful to others.
"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
