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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."
Officer: Sir, your car tyre is over the line meaning that you have parked illegally. You will now be transferred to Guantanamo Bay for 12 years of interrogation and torture. We take parking tickets very seriously around here.
Maybe he shouldn't have legal issues? Just keep his head down?
That's a fantastic idea! No one should ever make waves, or make things uncomfortable for The Powers That Be(tm)!
Everybody wins! [If they happen to be one of The Powers That Be(tm); otherwise they lose...]
While we are at it, let's put the final nails in the coffin of all investigative, yet inconvenient, reporting!
Also: I want a pony...
1) Claim asylum in Russia.
2) Menage a trois with Snowden and his lover.
3) Pressure from conservative Russians to have them imprisoned for being bum-boys.
4) Putin knows they're too good a fuck-you to the West to bring to harm.
5) Putin, bareback, rides horse, bareback, into Snowden+Assange love shack, figuring that if you can't beat 'em, beat 'em off.
6) Homosexuality in Russia decriminalised.
7) Oligarchs no longer have blackmailable closet secrets on Putin, so he purges them and renationalises the commanding heights of the economy.
8) Putin is more popular than ever.
9) Putin renationalises everything else and rebuilds Soviet command structures.
10) Finland figures it won't get lucky a second time and finally applies to join NATO.
11) Putin pre-emptively overruns Finland and founds a new Union of Soviert Socialist Republics comprising Russia and Finland.
12) Stallman is invited to visit Putin, who is keen to implement a single People's Licence for all Soviet intellectual property, and ends up choosing GPL 3.0. Putin makes Stallman an honorary Russian bear, sealing the deal in his Kremlin bedroom.
13) Torvalds is kidnapped and repatriated to Finland, where he is forced to direct a Russian musical based on Stallman's "The Free Software Song".
Eh my cat's just jumped on my lap I'm tired now.
I disagree. Investigative reporting is good, but it can be sensationalized and it's really done for profit. In many cases, investigative reports don't release the documents and interviews that form the basis of the stories. There isn't a lot of transparency, and reports don't actually want the transparency. See this article complaining that once an FOIA request is made for a document, the documents are made freely available to anyone, which would be damaging to investigative reporters. In short, they want access to the documents requested under the FOIA but don't want others to have access because it would cut into their profits from reporting. Although Wikileaks can't be fully trusted because they are (necessarily) selective about what they release, it's not biased out of desire for profit and it's transparent enough in that you see the original documents.
I hate all anonymous shitbags. Log in, you filthy bastards.
The UN working group on human rights has no authority to do much of anything. Here is the current membership. After making a decision, they will work with the countries involved to help them "Do the Right Thing." They can't force England or Sweden to let him go.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So if he gets off, ...
Wasn't that what got him into this mess to start with?
#DeleteChrome
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.
How is the UK acting "shitty" here? He was allowed legal representation, allowed to appeal his case to the highest court in the land, lost at each level with each judge giving a detailed reasoning to each of his legal teams arguments, and he still went on to commit a crime in the UK. Regardless of how Swedens case is ruled on, there is no way the UKs actions can be considered unlawful in this instance - Assange jumped bail. His bail sponsors already lost their case to have the money back, so Assange is facing an open and shut case should he surrender to the UK authorities.
PECTOPAH "MOPKOBKA". CEKC HA 3ABTPAK.
See, you can work with what you have.
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." -
They went to the police to locate him for a STD test, not for rape charges. Officials "convinced" one of the women to upgrade her charge. She's wanted it dropped ever since.
"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
Journalists unfortunately, need to get paid. If, when you are making a feature of some form, and waiting for 20 responses to FOIA - if someone comes along and writes an article on the first 15, you're pretty much screwed, and don't get paid (directly, or your employer) this means less investigative journalism. Journalism is pretty much dying - especially investigative journalism like this.
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.
Read the British judges conclusions - they consider the concept of "dual criminality", which is a requirement for extradition from the UK. Under UK law, the same charges are indeed classed as rape. So yes, it is exactly what it seems.
No, skipping bail is illegal in the UK, especially after the extradition warrant against you is found to be 100% valid and legal. The rest of the legal case is Swedens, the bit ruled on by the UK passes UK law just fine.
If the "crime" had no equivalent in the UK, then Assange would have easily won his case in the UK at the very first court hearing, as the concept of "dual criminality" is paramount when it comes to extradition warrants and UK law - you cannot be extradited from the UK if the charge you are to be extradited for is not a crime in the UK, and on all the charges on the extradition warrant against Assange the requirement of dual criminality was satisfied.
It is amusing to see in these threads those people who actually know nothing about the facts of the extradition case against Assange.
On the BBC just now: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35490910
He probably had someone "leak" that result prior to his "I'll give myself up on Friday", offer.
As if the UN can change anything...
> How is the UK acting "shitty" here?
Remember: acting shitty and acting legally are, alas, not mutually exclusive.
While the "state of law" is a huge advance wrt tyranny, law (especially this hypercomplex law shaped by many interest groups we have these days) bends more readily to those in (financial, political) power.
Sometimes the only (meaningful, I don't believe violence cuts it long term) weapon we have is calling foul: they may have good attorneys, but they still are assholes.
At the same time, the purpose of FOIA isn't to help journalists, it is to ensure that data collected and held by public bodies has a way of becoming publicly available to the general public. If that suits journalists then great, if not, well, it wasn't specifically intended for them anyway and supporting their particular needs is not FOIAs purpose.
Who's a spy for which enemy exactly? The only enemy here are western governments, including the US, who will engage in any activity at all to promote their multinational corporations, protect their overseas assets at taxpayer expense, and suppress by any means necessary anybody who tries to tell the truth about that, especially when they have proof.
The US has always had a problem with being full of idiots who think their country can do no wrong anywhere. A disturbing number of our population (radical conservatives) have a proven psychological issue where showing them proof of something that contradicts their beliefs actually makes those beliefs stronger. It's a mental problem that constantly gets exploited for the gain of large economic interests.
Asssnge and Snowden are guilty of one thing: exposing the dirty dealings of the US and its allies, and the extent to which governments try to control the population lest they actually decide to do something about it.
Don't expect the authorities to give him back his passport any time ever.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
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The prosecutor's office has already announced that there will be no restrictions on his internet access - there's actually a court ruling on that. That's only for people accused of computer crimes who are deemed a high risk of conducting more from prison, and people who are deemed likely to try to interfere with cases against others from within prison.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Meh, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Swaziland... what's the difference? ;)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
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.
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.
The Swedes will be glad to hear that. Of course you realize there are different views about that.
But it is somewhat amusing to watch the racists and the feminists fight over it,...
I suppose it would be a shame for nobody to get a benefit from the situation.
But it is somewhat amusing to watch the racists and the feminists fight over it,
If it turns out the "racists" are correct in some fashion, does that make them "racists"?
But yes, if you read the original police documents, the purpose of going to the police was to force an STD test.
Traumatized people don't always think right.
That the US was involved I rather doubt
In absence of evidence that is a good thing.
as any borderline chargeable offense will automatically be pushed by the police and prosecution whether the supposed victim wants it or not
See my first comment.
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.
Interesting rhetoric, but I don't recall hearing that it was the prosecutor that "screwed up" anyone's life. I would think Assange might have played a roll in that.
Hopefully Ny's utter incompetence in this has put a permanent black mark on her career.
That is probably what happened to the first prosecutor.
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
I don'; know about not leaking, but not having sex with woman you have to start "holding her arms and bending her legs open and trying to penetrate her" would be a pretty good start at avoiding legal problems.
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...
wikileaks is biased though. Wikileaks has been shown to edit documents and footage to alter their meaning. hiding the originals as they do so.
or did you forget the footage from the iraq they posted a number of years back. the original and the wikileaks version were very different
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You do realize that no one in sweden is tried or even charged in absentia. You have to appear before a judge before charges can even be filed or dismissed.
I really wish idiots like you would stop thinking swedish law is the same as English common law.
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Even the Swedish prosecutor has admitted that it happens all the time, in accordance with EU law.
Now, unless I have missed something, the UK hasn't left the EU yet, and neither has Sweden.
Not all feminists believe the way you seem to think they do. That says more about you than them, unfortunately, and it's not good for you.
Well then, "thank goodness" you're here to help set the record straight. How could progress occur without folk like you?
The rush to smear Assange’s rape accuser
OK, so maybe the charges really are for rape-rape, but still — the woman has CIA ties! I’ve read that on at least a dozen blogs! Keith Olbermann tweeted it and everything! That’s got to be coming from a highly credible source, right?
Actually, as far as I can tell, the only source for that claim is an August Counterpunch article by Assange fanboys (seriously, they recast him as Neo of “The Matrix”) Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett. Here’s the most damning evidence Shamir and Bennett have compiled against Assange’s accuser:
1) She’s published “anti-Castro diatribes” in a Swedish-language publication that, according to an Oslo professor, Michael Seltzer (who?), is “connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner,” who reportedly has CIA ties. Let me repeat that: She has been published in a journal that is connected with a group that is led by a guy with CIA ties. Says this one guy.
2) “In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter.” That link goes to an English translation of a Spanish article noting that at a march last spring, Posada “wander[ed] unleashed and un-vaccinated along Calle Ocho in Miami, marching alongside” — wait for it — “Gloria Estefan in support of the so-called Ladies in White.” Apparently, it’s “an established fact” that Posada and the Ladies also share a shady benefactor, which means he should clearly be called a “friend” of the organization, and this is totally relevant to the rape charges against Julian Assange, because the accuser once interacted with them in some manner.
Are you kidding me? That’s what we’re basing the “CIA ties” meme on? An article that reads like a screenplay treatment by a college freshman who’s terrified of women? Actual quote: “[T]he Matrix plays dirty and lets loose a sex bomb upon our intrepid Neo. When you can’t contest the message, you smear the messenger. Sweden is tailor-made for sending a young man into a honey trap.”
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
It's BS. I did as the AC suggested, and Googled it. It looks like one of the women's best friend's mother's uncle's former roommate said something about Cuba one time. Or something silly like that.
http://www.theguardian.com/med...
What has most engaged the conspiracy theorists and Assange's more excitable defenders, however, are a few key incidents in Miss A career, in particular that she is said to have worked in the Swedish embassy in the US, and wrote her university thesis in 2007 on a vision of Cuba after the death of Castro.
This has led to widespread allegations that the woman is a CIA agent, planted as a honeytrap to bring down Assange. One blogger notes: "[Assange] just happens to meet a Swedish woman who just happens to have been publishing her work in a well-funded anti-Castro group that just happens to have links with a group led by a man at least one journalist describes as an agent of the CIA: the violent secret arm of America's foreign policy.
There are various more sensational articles, but none of those provide any evidence. This was the only article that seemed to explain the connection clearly.
You like many others confuse Swedish law and English common law. In Sweden you can't be charged in absentia. That means to even have charges applied against you have to be I front of a judge.
Those same charges can only be dismissed by a judge.
He will be in Sweden for 6 hours of which 2 will be be spent waiting for the next flight out, and 2 more for driving around town
Lastly Sweden extradition to the USA is and always has been several order more difficult than from the uk. Sweden won't extradition people to countries with the death penalty.
These facts have never changed.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
uh, the US and other countries have been purposely trying to keep the focus on him to keep people from paying attention to their bad behavior Wikileaks has been shedding light on.
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.
Learn to love Alaska
No, it's not a "front"; it's a country that has an extradition treaty with the US.
If the US has a legal and valid arrest warrant for him, then any country that the US has an extradition treaty with needs to extradite him; it's as simple as that. Where do you see the problem?
Assange is far too prominent to "disappear", nor would there be any point to it. If the Obama administration wants to get their hands on him, it's for the trial and the publicity.
Anyone who starts a comment with "wake up people" I automatically ignore.
A good strategy. That phrase generally prefaces a big pile of unsupported claims that the author believes are so obvious that he's surprised everyone else can't see it. If it actually were obvious, the author wouldn't have to explain it, and if it's not, then the right approach is to offer evidence rather than to imply that other people are stupid for not seeing it. But, given that the author chose the latter course, you know there isn't going to be anything of substance.
Why do you say that? The excel file pulled from your link shows a rate of 282 reported crimes against life and health per 100,000 residents in 1975, and a rate of 923 per 100,000 residents in 2014. That's a 327% increase over that time period.
And "the right thing" is to arrest Assange for jumping bail and haul him back in front of the court. The whole point is that he is *not* currently in detention (and so of course isn't being detained illegally) when he should be.
So she has ties to two anti-Castro groups that get CIA money.
Are there any anti-Castro groups that DON'T get CIA money? I'm pretty sure that I could move to Miami and get some anti-Castro letterhead printed up and get some CIA money.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
That'd be the sexual assault charge. The rape charge is from the other situation where he penetrated a woman while she was sleeping, knowing she did not consent, having been explicitly told "no" before she went to sleep. That's the one that the UK courts said "yes, that's rape, even under British law."
The us military released the entire video unedited to discredit and show just how badly edited the file was.
That's not correct.
Wikileaks actually released both videos at the same time, with the edited "short version" clearly labeled as such.
Here is a link to the videos: https://collateralmurder.wikil...
Is it regret to wake up with a man having sex without a condom when you had previously stated your preference for condom use?
You have a strange definition for regret.
Having sex with a sleeping woman is indeed rape, as she has not given her consent. Sometimes the relationship you have with the woman allows this, but this is a very specific thing.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Activities after rape should not be used to determine if rape occurred. Some people sit in the corner and cry, some get on with their lives.
Nonconsensual sex is rape. Whether Assange is guilty of it isn't for me (or you) to determine. That's a matter for the courts. There's a lot of blame to go around for how this has been handled.
I respect Assange's determination; I really didn't think he'd last very long before giving up, but he's sticking this out far longer than most believed he would. I also am not opposed to his mission, though it's still pretty one-sided against the US government and some of the things he's claimed have been in cables aren't really what's being said. I'd like to see more from other countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia. Still, I think he's far too stuck on the idea that the Swedes would turn him over to the US government when the UK's extradition treaty is far easier to use, though I don't think he's done anything wrong under US law as he wasn't in the US when he received the information, he's not a US citizen or resident, and he holds no loyalties to the country. Maybe there's an argument for incitement, but that requires some pretty significant proof, and courts (with tons of amici filings by media organizations) may not be keen to agree on that abridgment of free speech. Arguments for damage to national security are similarly thin, especially given the claims of damage in the Pentagon Papers and other
I don't know enough about Swedish law to determine whether the prosecutor could travel to another country for the required interview; I've seen claims that they can or can't, that it's OK under some circumstances but not others. Perhaps it's a point of principle to not do it under circumstances where the accused has such a high degree of control; if he were questioned in the embassy and charges were filed, would he then give up, or would he continue his fugitive status?
Even if Sweden drops the charges (or he waits them out completely), he's not leaving the embassy without getting arrested for bail jumping. He's almost certain to get the maximum sentence (one year) for doing so, and to spend it incarcerated. Once that's finished, I expect he'll be deported to Australia (which I believe also has an easily-implemented extradition treaty with the US), and that relatively few countries will accept him in the future, assuming Australia doesn't revoke his passport. Ecuador might take him in (though the Australian government and those of the nations surrounding Ecuador could make this difficult even if Ecuador did issue travel papers), but that may change with the 2017 elections, since Rafael Correa is term-limited to two terms under the 2008 constitution (he was first elected under that constitution in 2009 and re-elected in 2013).
Whatever happens, it is unlikely that any court, in whatever country, is going to ever grant him bail in the future.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
23% of anti-Castro groups are actually fronts for Castro, and the money is used to fund the Cuba government budget. Any surplus is used to subsidize low rum prices.