Julian Assange To Write For Swedish Tabloid

An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has signed on as a columnist for Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Why such a move? Maybe there's something more to be found in Swedish law when you are employed by a newspaper." Here's an account in English, including a translation of the interview that forms part of the linked Aftenbladet article.

Comments

Re:Well...

[dingen]

Or maybe the Swedish tabloid just figured he was a guy who would write interesting stuff for the readers, asked him if he was available for such a position and mister Assange agreed to write them some columns.

Re:Tor Worm

[Pedrito]

Link or it didn't happen.

Re:Swedish Law

[copponex]

Yeah. All of those middle class Saudi Arabians committed a horrific crime. I'm really glad we forced the Saudi government to help us bring the remaining criminals to justice, and root out and prosecute all of their enablers. Oh wait: we didn't punish Saudi Arabia at all, or even get them to sign an extradition treaty. And where did all of the money come from?

Financing of the Plot
To plan and conduct their attack, the 9/11 plotters spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000, the vast majority of which was provided by al Qaeda. Although the origin of the funds remains unknown, extensive investigation has revealed quite a bit about the financial transactions that supported the 9/11 plot. The hijackers and their financial facilitators used the anonymity provided by the huge international and domestic financial system to move and store their money through a series of unremarkable transactions. The existing mechanisms to prevent abuse of the financial system did not fail. They were never designed to detect or disrupt transactions of the type that financed 9/11

Oh man. We totally nailed that one. It's a good thing Al Qaeda are so dumb, or they'd keep finding friendly states with zero infrastructure, and using them to launch attacks so we get stuck in intractable war after intractable war, eventually bleeding our treasury dry.

We'd never be dumb enough to fall for it, though. Right?

Re:How has he made his living

[PopeRatzo]

Do you think he flies coach?

I'll absolutely bet he flies coach. But that's not the story, is it? The story is that we're supposed to want to kill the messenger for showing what lots of us would prefer stays hidden in the shadows.

We're not supposed to know about all the greasy things our government does in the name of "national security" and we're supposed to like it that way. Any challenge to this tacit agreement between citizen and government is met with extreme prejudice, because what kind of society would we be if we actually had to account for our collective actions?

I don't think the fact that Assange is still alive should give us any indication of his personal security. There are lots of ways to neutralize a threat to the power structure. We have lots of examples of how actual assassination is no longer necessary to remove a threat. Have you noticed how much news space has been taken up demonstrating that Assange may in fact may not be a perfect human being? I don't think those stories are materializing out of nowhere. Very few news stories do any more. So the main focus becomes Assange and his human foibles instead of the massive fuck-up in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

I hope dozens of wikileaks copycats spring up around the world. This responsibility should not be in the hands of any one person. I think this is a more worthy use for the Internet than just more commerce. In a decade, things like wikileaks won't be possible, especially without a world-wide movement toward net neutrality. Some people prefer not knowing about war crimes, and I guess I can understand that, unless you happen to be one of the victims.

Re:How has he made his living

[FatLittleMonkey]

And what exactly did he tell us about what [...] "war crimes" are you talking about? Care to cite any examples?
And yet, I haven't seen anything that justifies [...] quite clearly putting lives of our Afghan allies and our own soldiers a risk.

(Pardon the elisions, I wanted to contrast those two statements. I don't think I've altered your intended meaning.)

Do you see the contradiction? You have accepted without evidence the claims that the leak "quite clearly" puts soldiers at risk, but you won't accept claims that the reports detail unlawful civilian killings, instead demanding proof.

Shouldn't you extend the same skepticism to the government's claims?

That said, I think Wikileaks screwed up the release by dumping it all at once. Since the US Gov was primed for it (after the arrest of PFC Manning) they were ready to counter-attack by making the issue about the leak itself, not the contents of the leak.

It would have been better doled out in smaller event-specific lumps. (Such as the Polish mortar attack on a village. Or the US Marine panic killing of civilians.) And better to have first privately, then publicly, approached other governments (UK, other NATO, Afghan, etc) to request help with hiding names of Afghani informants. They'd probably refuse, but you'd have media reports of the attempts before anything was released.