Regarding staying in the UK and not returning to Sweden for the rape case because of fear of extradition to the U.S… The UK was obviously part of the EU from 2010 - when this occurred- to 2020 with Brexit.
“ Can Assange be extradited from Sweden to the USA?
The Swedish government exclusively makes decisions in extradition cases to countries outside the EU.
The Swedish government exclusively makes decisions in extradition cases to countries outside the EU.
In short, the country that wants a person extradited needs to hand in a formal request to the Ministry of Justice.
Every extradition case is to be judged on its own individual merits. For that reason the Swedish government cannot provide a guarantee in advance that Julian Assange would not be subject to further extradition to the USA.
Once the British authorities enforce the UK Supreme Court’s decision to extradite Julian Assange to Sweden, Sweden is bound by the
so-called “Doctrine of Speciality” which means that Sweden cannot extradite him further to a third country, for example the USA, without permission from the UK. This means that Julian Assange would be in the same position in Sweden as he would be in the UK with regard to further extradition to a third country.”
Likewise, you can’t read an article Assange without someone chiming in to say “how can we really know he’s a shitty person when the the U.S. government has worked so hard to discredit him?”
But consider that the U.S. government has had every bit as much motivation to discredit people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, yet their reputations as principled whistleblowers have remained more or less intact.
Could it just be that Julian Assange is known around the world as an asshole because years of his own words and actions reveal him as an asshole?
Oh yeah, let’s talk about “russian shill edward snowden” and “mentally unstable chelsea manning”.
This is completely true. Assange is a self-centered asshole. It is also true that united states weaponized rape to discredit wikileaks.
And that is the extent to how much I will say about the issue, as I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to explain how unjust the full situation was for everyone involved (including the rape victims, one of which alledgely was coerced by a covert agent to report her rape) without resorting to defend an someone I never liked, even when he was characterized as some kind of “freedom advocate”.
As I said for me the bottom line is clear: never blow the whistle again, and don’t mess with the US Army (something that in Spain learned the hard way, too)
The United States did not charge Assange with rape or sexual assault. You are postulating that Sweden only charged him with those crimes because the United States asked them to, which is to say that you don’t believe the Swedish government or the actual women involved had any agency in the ordeal.
This is the part that irks me the most. For the allegations made by Assange’s supporters to make any kind of sense, you have to just take it for granted that Sweden is a puppet state that would gladly violate EU law upon request for the US…moreso than the UK would for some reason. The whole thing really requires you to believe that Sweden has no integrity whatsoever.
Right… it always comes down to “Assange pissed off powerful people in the United States government, therefore absolutely any bad thing you hear about him can’t be trusted regardless of the source.”
Let’s be frank here: anyone who thinks that Assange would have been at greater risk of extradition to the US in Sweden than he already was in the UK, is too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion on this. (Yes, this quite possibly includes Assange himself.)
Yes, exactly. That’s the point of a character assasination campaign. One that, by the way, was confirmed in the leaked NSA papers from Snowden.
And by they way, I did not say Sweden was a puppet of US intelligence, you did. So…
Look, there’s a reason I said I don’t want to go into that rabbit hole deeper. Nuance is hard. Nuance would requrie me to unearth sources I stopped collecting 4 or 5 years ago, that probably don’t exist anymore, and then verify if they are already disproven. This is a case 12 years in the making, and specially, there’s nothing for me to win by trying to covince you otherwise. Is not like is going to change your perception of Assange.
Mostly because in that part we agree: Assange was, is and will be an asshole. And a rapist.
But this is missing the point of what happened here, and seems we get only this take, or the gif take.
Even though it was Sweden that charged Assange with those crimes rather than the United States. So yes, you are pretty clearly implying that the US is pulling Sweden’s strings here.
Of course you also wrote
(ETA) and also
And also
So I’m having a hard time discerning what you actually believe or what point you’re trying to make.
“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Is Julian Assange such an individual? I’m not sure if he willingly accepted “the penalty of imprisonment”, since imprisoning himself in the Ecuadorian Embassy was not the penalty imposed by the state.
But that has nothing to do with Assange and everything to do with how the US government illegally prosecuted Snowden and Manning. Assange has never been a whistleblower.
Jacob Appelbaum (one of the creators or Tor and also high up in wikileaks) similarly had rape allegations made against him. There was a good episode of Canadaland about him this week. Again, this guy seems like kind of an asshole, but the rape allegations against him have inconsistencies. It’s a similar story (except that Jacob hide in an embassy for 7 years).
Notably it was Tor who made the decision to boot Appelbaum after hiring a private investigator to look into the various (and apparently longstanding) allegations, so it seems unlikely that he was just a victim of a secret government smear campaign designed to undermine Wikileaks.
