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Interpol Issues Wanted Notice For Julian Assange
chrb writes "Interpol have issued a wanted notice for Julian Paul Assange for alleged sex crimes. The Guardian and Wired both have commentary."
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Just in case some reads the comments and not the article..
The women themselves said they were not afraid of him, and he did not force them.
How often does Interpol get involved in sex crimes cases? Specifically, I'm wondering if this is common practice, or if it's only common practice when the suspect is as famous/meddling/troublesome-to-xyz-government as Julian Assange.
There's a difference between not treating women with respect and raping them.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
One thing I respect that dude for, is his ambition. Not even the 'strongest' nation on earth could derail him. Think about that for a second.
A quote I remember in one interview he had with the BBC...
"I get personal satisfaction when I expose what governments have denied the citizens they represent and will continue to do so till the very end."
This dude is one hell of a dude. I wonder what governments really fear if all they are doing is 'doing good' as they say.
One thing for sure: We now know what many governments were thinking despite the public rhetoric. I personally cannot wait for the financial documents to be exposed. My hunch...BoA.
Spreading rumors of sexual crime (predator, pedo, deviancy, etc.) is standard policy against street people and homeless people. Any question about a new homeless person, asked of any ten other homeless people, will usually attract one to four respondants,"Don't know who that person is. I heard they might be a sex offender. $So_and_so said they heard that there are some new pedophiles around." It is nearly standard policy to run the pedo/predator line against any new people on the street and, if they so much as bat an eye, run them down with it.
Julian Assange is free to have a beer with me on the sidewalk any day! I'll even buy.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I'll bet even money that if they throw him in a cell that he unexpectedly and mysteriously hangs himself when nobody is looking. ;D
Got modded Troll for saying this which I'm not sure why.
Anyway I think the chances of these accusations against Assange being completely unrelated to the leak and the timing being coincidental are pretty slim. It's kinda obvious that higher powers have targetted him. It's even more scary because it seems that these days the easiest way to hurt someone is by accusations of sexual assault. Who would dare hint that it might be untrue? I mean even on Slashdot one gets modded down -1 as Troll for raising this option...
Here's a quote from the article:
According to local news reports, the women told investigators the sexual encounters began as consensual, but turned non-consensual. One woman said Assange ignored her appeals to stop when the condom broke.
I don't understand - the condom broke in the middle so she asked him to stop, he didn't - and that's rape?
In a statement earlier this month, Assange’s British counsel said that his client repeatedly offered to cooperate with local investigators while he was in Sweden, and has offered to answer questions remotely from Britain since then.
“All of these offers have been flatly refused by a prosecutor who is abusing her powers by insisting that he return to Sweden at his own expense to be subjected to another media circus that she will orchestrate,” wrote attorney Mark Stephens. “Pursuing a warrant in this circumstance is entirely unnecessary and disproportionate.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Why is this story filled with assinine comments like this?
Did you miss the part where Assange offered, through his lawyer, several times, to be interviewed by these prosecutors before he had left Sweden? And they weren't interested?
There's no reason for them to go after him now, other than this:
Wikileaks is releasing lots of shit that makes governments around the world look bad, and they apparently feel the need to DISTRACT PEOPLE with these trumped-up "sex" crime accusations, and try to smear Assange any way they can.
The way I see it, governments kill all kinds of people directly and indirectly in secret--and the U.S. has a particularly rich history of this. As such, I want every government's secrets to be plastered everywhere. The number of people that may conceivably die as a result of these leaks is absolutely nothing compared to what has been done in secret for decades. Of course, I'm a pacifist and an anarchist, so I consider the idea of having to balance secrecy and disclosure so that the state can continue to exist in its preferred form (I believe it's called "national security") kind of moot. YMMV.
Well, that answers the question of Sweden being the US stooge.
I was gonna write "our stooge", but I'm ambivalent on this one, as I am ambivalent about the disclosure of secret diplomatic cables.
Assange might be an asshole, but I want this guy protected.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's one thing to poke at governments. No one is ever happy with their government. In fact, it's pretty standard to have something bad to say about government and it all gets washed away and forgotten in a short time because there's always a fresh new stink pile being created to distract us from the previous stink pile we all got pissed off about. It's almost fun at times. But when Wikileaks says it is releasing secret data from banks? Well, THOSE are the people who run this planet. There are no election turn-overs or parties to choose from. It's just a bunch of men in dark suits controlling the money supply for the whole world. I think it's about time Assange seeks asylum in China. The bankers are a LOT more serious than governments and politics.
If he wanted a long, heathy and happy life, he could've remained in obscurity like all of us. I doubt that's his goal.
There's a lot of ways to look at these leaks, and one of them is a wake up call to the people of the world of what goes on and how things are run (it's a lot more "high school" than I ever would have guessed).
Things need to change.
Naw, this is blown out of proportion. He might disappear though, to be on the safe side. It's rather ridiculous, like a book, like "1984" by George Orwell, or something like that, but there you have it.
In 20 years, we will hear he's died from natural causes and went mad in the last years, like Fischer.
In the meanwhile, he can serve as our society's Enemy. It's convenient for authorities to create such Enemies, like Obama Bin Laden. They don't really exist, because in reality they are not that powerful as our Overlords, but they're very convenient for them to divert our attention to something that is not really important.
Oh look, someone's alleged of sex-abuse. They've not charged him, since both the girls rather enjoyed it, but they still wanna question him, just not when he agrees to it.
Something is very very rotten here..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Remember the start of dear old Interpol. It was founded as an organized escape aid for upper echelon Nazis during WWII.
In 1923. Learn to causality.
Worse, they're encounters that were consensual then turned non-consensual later when the women he was sleeping with met each other. Which is why the charges were completely dropped at one point as it turned out that you can't declare sex rape ex post facto, it's either rape at the time or it's not. It's not like one of those corner cases where somebody's not able to consent for one reason or another.
If you can have sex with two women who will later regret it, can I kill a few hundred thousand Muslims and take a big hairy shit on the Constitution and International Law? Awesome!
Oh, wait, those two things are probably not on par, are they? Tell you what... I'll throw in the complete destruction of your civil liberties, and you can have some self righteous celebrity gossip egged on by the establishment.
It's a deal? Awesome!
$20. Unless you want something unusual.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
he doesn't directly editorialise
Sure, "Collateral Murder" is a nice, neutral name.
We can't really hate them for bowing to pressure from the most powerful country in the world.
What a fascinating case this whole Wikileaks thing has become. While the leaks themselves have really been a lot more heat than light, the most interesting thing about this has been the repercussions around the world. The same way a bat squeaks and then gets a picture of the shape and size of his cave by the echoes, the perturbations created by the Wikileaks announcement (even moreso than the leaks themselves) is really giving us a picture of world, where the power lies, and who dances to whose tune.
It's going to be even more interesting when Wikileaks starts releasing corporate leaks. If it serves to enlighten people that corporations have become the de facto world government for at least the last twenty years, then the leaks will have been the most important journalistic product in my lifetime. If they help people understand that we are living in a post-government, post-sovereignty world where the corporation is the only meaningful power (and help people act accordingly) then 20 years from now, we will look back at Wikileaks as the most important development in the history of the Internet.
Or, we'll look back as Wikileaks being the end of the Internet.
By the way, does Wikileaks change anybody's mind on the importance of Net Neutrality? Does anyone think that Wikileaks would ever exist in AT&T's Internet? Or in Apple's Internet? Or in Comcast's Internet? The jury is still out on Google, but I don't see any of the big companies that are opposed to net neutrality really having room for Wikileaks in their universe. Anyway, interesting times...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe he should move to Switzerland. If the example set by Roman Polanski.is anything to go by, the country's a haven for accused sex offenders.
We can't really hate them for bowing to pressure from the most powerful country in the world.
China is involved now?
Actually in the latest round of releases he did exactly that. He and the newspapers asked the US government what names they needed protected, and those names were blacked out. Even the newspapers have reported that some names were blacked out to protect them. So please stop spreading false information.
My guess is the former and watch as he might mysterisouly be transferred to the US to be tried for American crimes on disclosing secrets.
Put the tinfoil hat away. Nobody has ever been successfully prosecuted in the United States for publishing secret material. The number of such prosecutions can be counted on two hands. All the case law on the matter comes down AGAINST being able to prosecute the publisher of such information.
The crime was committed when the information was leaked by someone with a duty to keep it secret, not when a third party published said information. This doesn't make Mr. Assange any less of an asshat but I would not be overly worried about an American criminal prosecution for his activities.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
is an anagram for
Iguanas Anal Juleps
and
Japans Sealing Luau
Which means a couple of things: the Japanese need to learn that the harming of marine wildlife is NOT a party. And iguanas should not be given anything rectally. But most importantly, the anagrams show that Julian Paul Assange is obviously a CIA agent.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How do you feel about Hillary Clinton ordering illegal spying on the Secretary General of the United Nations?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Sure, "Collateral Murder" is a nice, neutral name.
Yeah, it should have just been "murder".
How would you feel if some other country was killing your relatives and neighbors, for any reason whatsoever?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He was in Sweden and prosecution waited until he left Sweden to start making demands. Probably specifically to get Interpol involved and limit his movements. You knew this guy was going to get nailed for what he was doing. This is the beginning. Paint him as a child molester because nobody feels bad for one of those. A classic first step. Limit his movements, deny him places to be. Eventually he'll wind up somewhere with an extradition treaty and that will be that.
Also, if there are any Interpol people who happen to read this - I know of an actual child molester you could go pick up pretty easy if this is the sort of thing that actually interests you.
No? Not interested? Hypocrisy. Imagine that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
if the police strongly suspect a person is guilty of a crime but are unable to prove it, it's ok for them to go searching for something else to convict that person of instead?
That's a rather humorous misunderstanding of what I said, and how Capone's conviction took place.
It's more like they tried to collect evidence to convict him on murder and bootlegging charges, and when they looked at the evidence they'd collected realized that they could prove tax evasion.
It's not as if they said 'Well, we have no evidence for murder, start looking for the next thing on the list, we'll get him eventually.' Tax evasion came up after they'd already collected the evidence that proved he was guilty of tax evasion in the course of their existing investigation.
This is standard operating procedure for police organizations and prosecuting attorneys throughout the US. "What can we prove with the evidence we have?" So long as the evidence is collected legally (warrants and such), what is wrong with this? They weren't trolling random citizens for evidence of crimes, they found evidence of other crimes committed by someone they already had good reason to investigate.
Which means that if the police set their minds to it, they could convict anyone they wanted.
This is already a fact of reality. What stops it from happening is that they generally have to have a reason to carry out the initial investigation (see 4th amendment).
That's quite incredible. I agree that, if a girl asks you to stop, even if you're five seconds from orgasm, you should stop, and you are an asshole if you continue anyway. However, equating this situation (you are already having consensual sex, and you just keep going a bit longer than she wants) to an actual rape (she really never wanted to have sex with you at all) is pushing politcal correctness a bit too far.
When a girl is actually raped (forced to have sex with someone she never wanted to have sex with in the first place), this can be an extremely traumatizing experience. Merely being forced to continue a sexual act you have already engaged in, is more on the level of "being forced to do something you do not want to do" without all the "oh my god he's touching my vagina" feelings associated with a real rape.
Both are bad, but I think it's quite obvious that a real rape is orders of magnitude more serious, and punishment should be adjusted accordingly.
I've read through all of the comments on here, and I'm really sad. I don't visit here for up to date news, I can get that elsewhere; I come here for the discussions. But so many of the commenters here are scarily uninformed. And where they're not informed, many of them seem poisoned.
This is a geek site - we're supposed to be able to view information objectively and without being tainted by unrelated information. This reads more like a political forum :(
Firstly, these accusations stem from months ago, so this has nothing to do with the most leak. Sweden have been pursuing the interviews and warrants for a number of weeks now.
Secondly, what's with all of the conspiracy nuts here ? Why is everyone second guessing his reasons for not wanting to go in and talk to the police ?
He offered to go in repeatedly when he was still in the country. When his residence claim was denied, he asked if there was any reason he had to stay in the country and he was told that he was free to leave. So he did. Now he's in another country, and he's _still_ offering to talk to them but he's not prepared to schlepp back there - that's not unreasonable, is it?
Oh, I bet Julian Assange fully expects to be martyred "for the cause" at some point. He probably has some interesting "dead man's switch" set up to do something amusing after he goes... if it could make some point about how the world isn't ready for transparency then so much the better.
If these things don't go through WikiLeaks, they'd just go through something else. Hey, maybe his dead man's switch unleashes some sort of decentralized P2P leak site :P