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Assange Rape Case Reopened
eldavojohn writes "Wikileaks' Julian Assange had a warrant issued for his arrest in Sweden on the charges of rape. But it was withdrawn shortly thereafter. Now the case has been reopened to investigate 'molestation charges.' On top of that, a new site (parody?) called wikileakileaks.org has been launched by the chief editor of Gawker to give Wikileaks a taste of its own medicine. You can find links to details on the molestation charges there."
In this case, the testimony of someone who wrote "a seven step guide Ardin published in January to 'legal revenge' that involves, in one example, sabotaging a victim's sexual relationships."
not that that makes Assange pure, holy, or free of any wrongdoing, but perhaps it should make one think...
I've been following the case and the speculation around it on Swedish forums and blogs. A story in English that seems to have what is known / believed to have happened without any obvious errors can be found here.
In addition, it's known the police officer interrogating the younger woman has filed a complaint about not being allowed to give her view on what offenses if any were described to the first prosecutor and that her colleague who contacted the prosecutor refused to communicate. The colleague says she has contacted superiors and others and everyone agreed the charge would be rape. The initial prosecutor is under investigation for possibly issuing an arrest warrant without enough cause to do so and, in addition, for confirming Assange's name to a journalist.
The lawyer of the women says the published story is missing crucial details. He also says he's gone through material used in the preparation of the current law on rape in Sweden. To the question of why the older woman filed harassment charges instead of reporting a rape, he replied "She's not a lawyer".
Given that the chief prosecutor dismissed the charge of rape saying there's no reason to disbelieve the younger woman's story, but no crime has been committed, but the organization supervising the work of prosecutors think otherwise, it would seem to me there's disagreement on whether there was consent or not. If it was an issue of whether a sex act is rape vs molestation vs harassment etc, they wouldn't be flipping between rape and no crime like this.
What's absolutely clear is that much of the speculation on what Assange could have done is completely and utterly wrong since the chief prosecutor would never have simply dropped a case where he's accused of strangleholds, forcing himself on a sleeping woman, etcetc.
Gawker media has become Fox News of the blogs. But unlike Fox, their loyalty is only towards money - weather it's earned with facts, rumors or slanders.
And if you believe that, you've already bought into the Pentagon propaganda.
I ask you one simple question... If he was such a 'douchebag' all along, why did we not hear ANY of this until he dared to challenge the US military? Why are all these little details suddenly 'leaking' now? The obvious answer is that it's all BS. But no one even questions it. It's scary how blindly people follow media.
For example: Assange claimed for years, Wikileaks contributors are protected by the Swedish law, he even threatened to sue anyone who tried to expose a Wikileaks source.
But if you read the Twitter-stream of Wikileaks carefully, you will see this: this:
When you follow the link, you will read nothing about "prior-restraint" protections - in fact Wikileaks has until now no protection at all under the Swedish press laws. And they will not get it soon, because Wikileaks did not fill out the application correctly.
This is only one of the countless contradictions Assange was caught on. For example Assange claimed in 2009 a 17 year old Wikileaks contributor by the police in Iceland to press him for information about Wikileaks. In fact the juvenile was caught breaking into a business premises and was subsequently interrogated in the presence of his parents, police did not even know about any Wikileaks connections. Even when he had to wait for less than 30 minutes at an airport in Australia Assange did spread conspiracy theories about foul play and intelligence agency involvement.
heya,
Err yeah, but there's little evidence of these so-called war crimes so far.
I mean, Assange drummed up excitement, played the media really well, and then released these so-called Afghan War Diaries, to much fanfare...and it's turned out to be a fat lot of nothing.
Most of the data in there was already public knowledge.
Let's see...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary
Err, we have evidence that Pakistan is screwing over the US, UK and other NATO nations, and aiding the Taliban to kill our soldiers. Great....so what happens now? We try to charge Pakistan with war crimes? Lol.
Then we have evidence that Iran likewise is helping the Taliban and screwing us over. We're going to charge them with war crimes as well? We can't even get them to have clean elections....
Oh, and our good chum North Korea as well.
The of course, we have the civilian casualties, currently standing at a few hundred. Very regretable, and tragic. However, it's in contest how much of it's avoidable, and how much of it was caused by negligence, say, or poor regard for the civilian folk. Ultimately, that's a question for a court to decide - however, I don't see anybody actually making a solid case for any charges of war crimes. I mean, gee, most of these incidents are caused by cross-fire, bad-luck, panicking soldiers, or the Taliban deliberately trying to drag civilians into the conflict, or using questionable tactics.
Hardly any evidence of the grand conspiracy all these silly, IT'S A CONSPIRACY hippies are decrying about.
Then we have evidence in these war diaries that the Taliban is deliberately targeting civilians, and has killed some 2000 to date. Gee, we're going to charge the Taliban with war crimes? We can't even catch them all yet.
Hmm, then we reveal that the Taliban is using heat-seeking missiles to shoot down our aircraft. Oh great, another revelation.
I mean, seriously guys, the defence of Assange is getting pretty flimsy. He needless endangered Afghan informants and screwed over active military operations, just so he could get his name in the papers - and what, he reveals a bunch of useless information.
Sure, the US military, in fact, many militaries have a tendency to just mark everything classified, "just to be safe" even if it's completely stupid. But really...what of note was revealed here?
Cheers,
Victor
Just to let you know: The Daily Mail is never to be cited for anything, ever. Ever. It's simply not factual on a regular enough basis to be used in such a way.
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
I keep hearing that Remy Stern raped and murdered a girl in 2001. Why isn't he commenting on this? Does his silence mean confirmation?
Blar.
Orwellian, no. Endemic surveillance society, as a recent human rights report called it, no doubt. Alas we seem to be all headed in the same direction in Europe as well as the US.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Not so sure about this. It depends on the laws of the jurisdiction in question, but there are jurisdictions where using certain types of deception or fraud to obtain consent to sex is rape. The classic examples are deceiving a woman as to your identity (e.g., if her boyfriend's twin brother were to impersonate him), or making her believe it's a necessary part of a medical procedure (yes, this has happened). The most infamous recent case: a Palestinian man convicted of rape because he told the woman that he was Jewish.
It's not a stretch to say that it's rape if a man obtains consent for sex by falsely telling her he will wear a condom.
Well, you know, having sex with somebody against their consent is rape. Unlike what your comment implies, there is no magic moment where, once you've fucked her long enough, you no longer need her consent or to respect her conditions for that consent. If you've got a problem with her insistence on the condom you're not entitled to disregard them and have things your own way by either force or deception.
Are you adequate?