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Julian Assange Faces Rape Investigation In Sweden — Updated
mpawlo was one of many readers who have sent news that a warrant has been issued in Stockholm, Sweden for WikiLeaks founder and spokesman Julian Assange. The investigation apparently involves "one report of rape and one report of harassment." The story was broken by Swedish tabloid Expressen (original in Swedish), and later picked up by more reputable sources like CNN and the BBC, who say the warrant has been confirmed by Swedish authorities. The WikiLeaks Twitter feed has commented three times about the charges so far, first saying they were warned of 'dirty tricks,' then that they hadn't been contacted by Swedish police, and then a statement from Assange saying the charges are without basis.
Update: 08/21 15:58 GMT by S : Multiple sources are now reporting that the warrant for Assange's arrest has been withdrawn. Aftonbladet has coverage in Swedish. Chief prosecutor Eva Finne said, "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape."
Update: 08/21 15:58 GMT by S : Multiple sources are now reporting that the warrant for Assange's arrest has been withdrawn. Aftonbladet has coverage in Swedish. Chief prosecutor Eva Finne said, "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape."
The US Government plays dirty when you expose their secrets
moox. for a new generation.
Something like this was to be expected. I have read as much as there is but I cant see any details of victim(s) or of the crime itself. But surely surely surely he would have to be as stark staring mad as a bottle of chips to commit a crime like while running the worlds biggest whistle blowing web site. It stinks to high heaven.
In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
Well, the BBC story says "Swedish police have been trying to contact Mr Assange, but have not yet been able to" while Wikileaks says "No-one here has been contacted by Swedish police". Pity you can't serve someone over Twitter. I agree that the timing is suspicious as hell, but after the Reiser fiasco I'm going to wait and see.
No statement is true, not even this one.
When you are hiding from FBI in another country you don't go raping and harassing people.
Maybe Julian is crazy, but he is not stupid.
According to the article the two women did not actually accuse him of rape, only that they asked the police for guidance relating to what allegedly happened.
This point is rather interesting, as in e.g. Norway (which has very similar legal system) you can and often will get a year or more prison sentence if you knowingly falsely accuse someone of rape.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Furthermore, one has to remember that even if the accusations are true, it does not in any way invalidate Assange's work or "pro-leak" arguments. Doing so would be a simple, straight ad hominem.
Bah, as a swede this hurts, but essentially our government is a US lapdog. Witness the fiasco with the pirate bay for a glaring example, where the prosecution initially refused to press any charges because they felt there was no real case. Then suddenly a few months later they got the people behind it sentenced to pay record damages (1.35 M USD) AND jail time corresponding to a major case of assault and battery in a kangaroo court with the chairman being a member of several pro-copyright lobby organisations, and acquaintance of several of the legal counsels on the plaintiffs side.
I don't know about Denmark these days, but something is definitely rotten in the state of Sweden these days, and I think it was a major mistake of Mr Assange to decide to have anything to do with us.
In some ways it doesn't matter if he's never convicted of these charges. Mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh will be able to call him a "rapist and molester" and convince many that any information from Wikileaks is a lie.
If this is a false accusation, and I believe it is, I would also suspect that agents would be assigned to astroturf media sites with posts supporting the accusations and charges.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
In other news, accused rapist, Julian Assange, has released new documents on his WikiLeaks website...
Notice that then, as now, a large number of posters have decided that there is just no way he could have done it. With Reiser when the guilty verdict was handed down there were still plenty of people who decried how stupid the jury was, how there clearly wasn't enough evidence to find him guilty and so on... Until he confessed and gave the location of the body.
Same deal here, people have presupposed Assange's innocence because they like him. I don't mean given him the benefit of the doubt and said "Well let's see what evidence comes up," I mean saying that this is clearly an evil government plot, even though there is, of course, no evidence of that at this point.
It is just how it goes here. Geek heroes can do no wrong in the eyes of some and they'll come up with any number of reasons as to why something they did clearly must be a frame job by someone else.
As for this particular case, I'll have to see what, if anything, comes out. It could be a deliberate smear campaign against him, though I'm a bit doubtful of that as the risk of backfire would be pretty large. Could just be someone making shit up, this happens even to people who aren't well known never mind people who are. Could be he actually did it, the guy has a massive ego and questionable morals and may not have even thought he did anything wrong. We'll just have to see if anything comes of this.
Of course, the utter lack of information at this point won't stop a massive number of conspiracy theories from being posted here about how this is clearly a government frame job.
I assumed they were going to nail him with child porn. But I guess when they went to put it on his computer they discovered that his computer security was off the scale.
If I were the judge on this one I would accept no evidence short of a witness such as Nelson Mandela. I hope they solidly investigate his accusers to check what they have been up to for the last while and see if they have any relations to US interests or large payoffs.
Crime needs three things: motive, means, opportunity.
Motive, no big deal, being a heterosexual male is enough.
Means, easy, every man comes equipped with that.
Opportunity, that's the big problem.
I have lived in Sweden and cannot say I had any difficulty in picking willing girls in bars there, and I'm not even famous like Assange.
A man with his record of fighting government corruption would have an idol status in Sweden, he would have to hire security guards to keep the girls away.
If there's one case where the accused should be presumed innocent, this is it.
Well what it could do, at least for some people, is call motives in to question. Right now you see two major theories at to why he does what he does and in particular why he chose to leak a bunch of classified data which appears to have little to no public value:
1) He really believes in this "freedom and openness at all costs," thing. He is a zealot perhaps, but an idealistic one. He really thinks that the best thing for the world is to have no secrets that all information from any source should be public for all to see. What he does is not at all about him, it is about the greater good, about making the world a better place. He believes that what he does is necessary.
2) He's an egomaniac with questionable morals who likes puff himself up be getting the better of people and exposing them. He leaks indiscriminately, including documents of no real value (like sorority secrets) because it gets him attention, power, and gives him a thrill. All the "public good" stuff is just bullshit, he doesn't really care, it is all about him and his ego.
Well, if he actually committed a rape, it would indicate that #2 is more likely. You obviously have to have some twisted morals to want to rape someone and ego and power are a big part of it. It is as much about exerting your will on another as the sexual gratification. So it would be an indicator that indeed his work on Wikileaks was for self centered reasons.
Now even if he did it all for selfish reasons that doesn't mean that you are required to find it worthless. You could certainly say "I don't care why he did it *I* believe it is valuable and necessary, and a good thing for society." The value needs to be evaluated independent of anything he says or does and nay reasons he has.
In Sweden you can get an rape investigation on you for nothing. Its an well known fact and well used tactic in divorce cases, where the wifes charges the husband of rape, and thus the wife get soil custofy of the child
The proper response to such allegations is not to dismiss them out of hand as a government plot. The proper response is to assume and treat him as completely innocent until such a time that he is found guilty in a court of law - at that point you may want to look into the case to see if the jury was crazy or reasonable. Until then nothing should change to the extent that a "not guilty" verdict should be as if no new information was given. An allegation should be both taken seriously and not believed until it has been verified. That's the proper response. Now of course humans just aren't built to behave like that. If you can't maintain this stance, then you have to choose between being suspicious of him or saying that you are sure the allegations are false. In that choice it's pretty clear that the preponderance of evidence so far is to dismiss the claims. We have no evidence to look at.
We need to invent a pithy expression for this sort of "I like him therefore he is right" reasoning. How about "volo hoc ergo propter hoc"?
It's not just rhetorical, it's a cognitive bias. And there's already a name for it and plenty of research on it: see "Halo Effect".
An excerpt in a quick-and-dirty translation by me:
Any enemy of the US is our friend.
It's not fair that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets to post here when he keeps Iran's Internet connections locked down.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
people have presupposed Assange's innocence because they like him. I don't mean given him the benefit of the doubt and said "Well let's see what evidence comes up," I mean saying that this is clearly an evil government plot, even though there is, of course, no evidence of that at this point.
Yeah, well, quite possibly that is because the majority of /. readers are from the USA. You know, where you are PRESUMED INNOCENT until PROVEN GUILTY.
So until there is sufficient proof offered, Julian, in the eyes of most Americans, is completely innocent and the charges are completely bogus.
Likewise, until sufficient proof is offered, the US government is not performing a conspiracy. But /. does tend to draw out the conspiracy theories ;)
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Someone just leaked the entire plot on Wikileaks.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He's too high-profile to be killed off without it being obvious. Terrorists don't tend to care about PR all that much, or would even be glad to take credit for an attack. The US government, on the other hand, has an image and moral high ground to protect. Particularly in this case, where the leak greatly damages their credibility, killing the leaker would make it much worse. Hence the character assassination.
(However, Assange should worry about pissing off Mossad. From what they pulled off in Dubai, they don't seem to care about image issues or international opinion much either.)
Doesn't have to be, in Sweden, you can be convicted for rape without penetrating anything. Forced petting is enough. You do not even have to use force, only go against the will of the person that is the victim is enough.
The bad thing with this is that it leads to people starting to distrust the law and the authorities.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Breaking news on BBC... the arrest warrant has been canceled... definitely sounds like dirty government tricks now...
[The Universe] has gone offline.
this thing came up right 2-3 days after assange finally found legal solace in swedish law, by posing as a writer for a swedish publication, totally removing all the possibilities of legal means to get to him.
and suddenly, rape charges come up.
if there is ANYone who can still think that such big coincidences can happen, i have only one word to call them :
morons.
the powers behind these kind of shit, apparently have grown a lot lax and reckless lately. in 1960s, they would at least give some time before coming up with their game so that public wouldnt be able to see the correlation in between the two events. but apparently, they dont need to. for there are people who still can be as stupid as not to be able to see the linkage.
Read radical news here
If I didn't know any better, I'd honestly think this is the next plot in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
You're not going to be able to catch the CIA on this. Part of the deal when they pay you is that if you get caught, they will deny knowing you. As everyone discovered with the Valerie Plame case, being a government asset doesn't mean they give a shit about you. You exist, in reputation or in biological function, as long as you are useful to the State. I honestly have no idea why anyone would sign up given the history of The Agency.
The CIA is unconstitutional. It operates under a secret budget and outside the rule of Law. It has led to nothing but abuse, misery, and hasn't done anything but provide people from around the world with a good reason to hate the United States.
Intelligence services don't mean you train commandos to rape and torture and kill portions of the civilian populace in order to enforce your political will on a sovereign country. It doesn't mean you buy politicians off and then give them a bunch of weapons and training to do your dirty work for you in exchange for resource access. It means you have feelers around the world so you are always in the loop, so if some dictator does go batshit insane, then you prepare a response and let him know that you've got about ten million tons of reasonably accurate weaponry that you're going to drop if and only if he does carry out an attack.
Yes, it leaves you open to the possibility of terrorism committed by a few sociopaths, but that's the price you pay to live in a free and open society. The alternatives are far worse.
Here in Norway there was even a "reckless rape" charge for a while. It was for the times she said yes, but he ought to have understood that she really meant no. Fortunately, even the feminists agreed that this was demeaning to women (not being deemed capable of saying yes and no is pretty demeaning).
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I was raped once.
Of course I didn't find out until his credit card was declined.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.