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Julian Assange Plans Modeling Debut At London Fashion Show
An anonymous reader writes with news about a possible new direction for Julian Assange. Julian Assange is expected to make his London Fashion Week debut this September. The Australian WikiLeaks founder will reportedly model for Vivienne Westwood’s son, Ben Westwood, at a fashion show staged at the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he has been seeking refuge for the past two years. He is avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over claims of sex offences. “Julian’s been in the embassy for two years and it’s important that he doesn’t slip into obscurity,” said Ben Westwood. “I want to highlight Julian Assange’s plight. What happened to him is totally unfair.”
Good grief.
No, not really. This is to quash any idea that he's an attention whore.
"Pulling in every favor" - and your evidence is?
You do realize that it's an explicit violation of the Swedish extradition treaty with the US to extradite someone for political, military, or intelligence crimes, don't you? They couldn't even hand over Edward Lee Howard, the greatest CIA defector to the Soviets during the cold war, and he didn't even have the cover of being a journalist (Sweden having the strongest whistleblower protections on Earth, as repeatedly noted by Assange at the time when he was moving there). And I assume that you know that someone surrendered under an EAW requires both the consent of the receiving (Sweden) *and* sending state (Britain) to be forward-extradited to a third state, meaning that being surrendered under an EAW only increases your protections against extradition. Britain, of course, being the country that took most of a decade to hand over Abu Hamza, a guy everyone hated and who was setting up terrorist training camps in the US, and which wouldn't hand over at all Gary McKinnon (the most costly hacker of US military systems in history) because he (like Assange) has Aspergers. Oh, and I'm sure you you know the ECHR, the world's greatest refuge for people seeking to avoid extradition, has the final say.
Lets just see if I've got the Shadowy CIA Conspiracy(TM) down pat. For reasons only beknownst to them, they can only nab Assange from Sweden, not the the UK, or any of the vast numbers of far-easier countries that Assange regularly globetrots to. No, it has to be Sweden. Let's just take that as a given for some Unknown Shadowy CIA Reason. Now, Assange was applying to live in Sweden when the Shadowy CIA Conspiracy decided, "Instead of waiting until we're ready to nab him for our charges, since he's planning to live here, wouldn't it be so much more fun to frame him for a crime? Yeah! And let's pick a crime that has a pathetically low conviction rate! Let's not only frame him for rape, but let's frame him for rape but use a case that involves the women having consented to certain acts but not others, have them do delays and other actions that could potentially hurt their case, etc, just like in real rape situations, where victims don't live their lives as though they're about to be judged in a trial, instead of a phony "knife to the throat" hollywood-style rape case." Why? Because the Shadowy CIA Conspiracy just rolls that way, stop asking questions! And because our CIA psychics have foreseen this event for decades in advance, we can now activate Sleeper Agent SW who we've had spend decades misleadingly cultivating herself as a young Swedish museum worker with a lifelong paranoia about unprotected sex. Now, let's install our CIA Plant, Ms. Ny, to prosecute him - because of course, we at the CIA have infiltrated the top levels of all of the major governments' of the world's judicial systems just for this purpose (we also run all of their courts, so that we can have the Svea Court of Appeals, the Swedish Supreme Court, the UK District Court, the UK High Court, and the UK Supreme Court each rule against him in turn). But, for fun, let's have the prosecutor take several weeks to get him, and let's let the news totally leak out during the time that they're getting ready to arrest him so that Assange can run. And let's just let him flee the country, and not tell Sweden so that they can stop him. Then when he exhausts his legal options in the UK and jumps bail to run into the embassy of a country with an anti-western leader who's a fan of his, let's do absolutely nothing - it'll be fun!
Is this how it went down, in your mind? Great job, Shadowy CIA Conspiracy. Who's heading the CIA these days, Bozo the Clown?
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
The funny thing being that according to Wikileaks itself, in 2006 Sweden created a major diplomatic incident with the US by diguising their special forces as airport workers and hijacking a US rendition flight to stop the US from renditioning people through their airspace. The very Swedish foreign minister that Assange rails against (Carl Bildt) is the same guy who was prime minister when Sweden refused to hand over Edward Lee Howard to the US because Swedish law bans extradition for intelligence crimes.
No country is perfect, and every country has bad marks at some point on its record, so anyone who wants to can pick attacks for any country. However, in Sweden, these sort of things are few and far between. The peer-reviewed World Justice Project Rule of Law Index ranks Sweden #1 in the world for fundamental rights of the accused. Assange on at least two occasions called Sweden his "shield" before the incident due to their having such good whistleblower protections**, and was applying for residence there. It was only after he got anklagad for rape that he suddenly changed his tune and decided that Sweden is an evil US lackey bent on his downfall. Funny how that works.
(** It's actually those very whistleblower protections that are responsible for why we know so much about the case. In Sweden, it's illegal to even look for a person who leaks documents if they consider it whisteblowing; as a result, pretty much every high-profile criminal case in Sweden leaks like a sieve)
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
This is misinformed - he was transiting through Russia when the US revoked his passport, and according to the stupid nation-state rules, that grounded him. If anybody chose where to cause Snowden to seek asylum it was John Kerry. He would have been in Latin America if not for the US State Department. Which, ironically would have been worse for him because the USG has no compunction about doing covert ops there. #monroedoctrine
My God, it's Full of Source!
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