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Julian Assange May Surrender To British Police On Friday (twitter.com)
bestweasel writes: As reported by The Guardian and others, Julian Assange has announced via Wikileaks that: "Should the UN announce tomorrow that I have lost my case against the United Kingdom and Sweden, I shall exit the embassy at noon on Friday to accept arrest by British police as there is no meaningful prospect of further appeal. ... However, should I prevail and the state parties be found to have acted unlawfully, I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me."
Actually, I don't think they will shoot Assange immediately. I think he will disappear into a black hole of some sort, unless they can use him for a show trial a la Stalin. Doesn't even matter anymore what he did. What matters is putting the fear of gawd into anyone else who is thinking of doing something that causes similar embarrassment to sufficiently rich and powerful people.
As regards the comments here, I'm not at all surprised to see the attacks on Assange. I just wonder why are they such big fans of corporate secrecy and government secrecy? (Same thing now, given our corporatist overlords.)
Occam's Razor says they are shills, probably professional abusers of your privacy, and mine.
Secrecy and anonymity are funny things, but it's a tough philosophic topic. On principle, I think that secrecy is wrong, because the truth is eventually going to come out, but it turns out to be quite easy to justify anonymity in terms of prior secret crimes and the anonymity of the perpetrators... No reason to protect the whistle-blowers if the crimes were already known to the public, eh?
However, the criminals are not worrying about eventually. They just want to die with the most toys. Their planning horizons are limited to statutes of limitations or death. Preferably the whistle-blower's death.
Any trace of privacy will soon be the ultimate luxury good. The rest of us peasants will be naked on the podium, with all our weaknesses and mistakes well known and used as sticks to threaten and control us. However, that's only the half of it. Our interests, tastes, and even our strengths will be used to manipulate and control us, too.
Returning to Assange, I actually think it was his taste in women that was used to set him up. I would say he's losing his freedom for being a sucker, but he actually lost his freedom years ago.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Most of the comments so far are made by people joking about assassinating Assange. I'm going to assume that these are mostly kids who don't have a clue about the real world and how fucked up things can get.
Just step back for two fucking seconds.
Irrespective of whether Assange is guilty of raping those girls in Finland, in the first instance he deserves a completely fair and open trial.
Second to this, once that matter has been dealt with, he deserves to remain free of US-led persecution. US LAW DOES NOT COVER THE GLOBE!!! Just try to imagine how awful that would be. And I know most of the US is actually thinking this would be pretty sweet and a good deal for them, but just imagine what it would be like it Chinese law was suddenly being applied to men and women out on the street in the US - and if Moscow was joking about murdering a US citizen because he/she had embarrassed them politically.
I know I'm wasting my time and that most of you readers are just bored kids in highschool posting shit for shits and giggles. But why not learn some history and realise how fucked up the US foreign policy has been over the years and how _down-right wrong_ the CIA is.
If a country's government reflects its people, then US citizens are fucking disgusting.
Ok, I keep hearing "rape" being brought up but, the charge is not quite what it seems. The women in question did not go to the police with charges of sexual assault. One of them discovered that the condom came off, during consensual sex, and after she was unable to locate him, went to the police to locate him for the purpose of taking a STD test. After a short time, federal authorities and US authorities were involved in the case (for a STD test!) and they convinced one of the women to upgrade her complaint to failure to cease sexual activity immediately upon request; namely he didn't stop instantly when the condom came off, it took a few moments. This does not qualify as any sort of a crime in most countries, including the US and UK. Yet, for this, even by Sweden's standards, minor charge, he was wanted by Interpol and had an international manhunt for him to the point of having to take shelter in an embassy. And there's been a 24 hour guard around the embassy ever since in case they try to move him or he comes out. US and UK authorities still try to claim that this has nothing to do with his involvement in Wikileaks or US authorities' interest in him, they only want justice for the women in Sweden. Smells like bullshit to me.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Your post is a bunch of baloney. Assange's extradition went to the Supreme Court in the UK and the allegations against him were judged to include rape. Assange was wanted on an international arrest warrant because Sweden filed for it. Assange went to the embassy to escape arrest, deportation, and judgment. Please substantiate the involvement of US authorities regarding "STD testing." Your bullshit detector is miscalibrated.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
There's a reason why Sweden has one of the highest rape rates in the world and it's not because there are that many actual rapes going on.
But it is somewhat amusing to watch the racists and the feminists fight over it, as the racists claim it's because the immigrants and the feminists have to constantly switch their realities back and forth between 'it's only a statistical issue' and 'but rape is everywhere!', depending on the situation...
But yes, if you read the original police documents, the purpose of going to the police was to force an STD test. That the US was involved I rather doubt, as any borderline chargeable offense will automatically be pushed by the police and prosecution whether the supposed victim wants it or not it's quite enough that an activist prosecutor like Marianne Ny smells some publicity and the opportunity to 'send a message' to start that chain of events and completely screw up the victims life far beyond the original issue. Hopefully Ny's utter incompetence in this has put a permanent black mark on her career.
Of course the US was involved. One of the women who put forward charges worked and still works for the CIA. At least that's what the publicly available evidence suggests.
She made him breakfast the next morning, apparently the victim did not think she was a victim. In fact she did not even go to police until she found out he had slept with her friend as well. So it was consensual until she decided to remove the consent after the fact.
a) Now he had an STD....? That's news.
b) Nobody except the Swedish prosecutor is sure what exactly he's accused of. The Swedish police didn't think he'd done anything, they let him go. The prosecutor only became interested int he case when she was on a fishing trip through the police computers using the search term "Julian Assange". After she found his name on a police statement she called the two girls in and persuaded them to upgrade their query to "complaint" so she could call Assange in. Both the girls later regretted doing this after they figured out what was really going on and how they'd been manipulated by the prosecutor.
c) He has hasn't been _charged_ with anything, he's wanted for an *interview*. He's offered to do the interview on numerous occasions, just not in Sweden; Because Sweden has a weird law that allows them to "lend" him to the USA.
No sig today...
Also Sweden doesn't have any laws to allow them to lend someone to another country. That goes against both Swedish law and EU law.
So Sweden has no ambassadors? No tourists? Nobody ever leaves? It's like the roach-motel of countries. And Sweden doesn't even have phones? Why couldn't the people already outside Sweden at http://www.swedenabroad.com/lo... walk down to Assange? It's illegal for someone from Sweden to walk?
That's why I default to believing Assange. The "other side" just seems insane.
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