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Sweden Drops Julian Assange Rape Investigation (cnn.com)
rmdingler writes: "Sweden is dropping its investigation into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on rape allegations, according to a prosecution statement released Friday," reports CNN. "Assange, who has always denied wrongdoing, has been holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, in an effort to avoid a Swedish arrest warrant." Despite Friday's announcement, he's unlikely to walk out of the embassy imminently. There is no apparent change in the risk of being detained in the west, particularly in the U.S., but it's definitely a win for Assange.
Joshua.Niland adds: The pressure on Julian Assange may have lifted ever so slightly with Swedish prosecutors dropping their investigation into the allegations of rape. A brief statement ahead of a press conference by the prosecutor later on Friday said: "Director of Public Prosecution, Ms Marianne Ny, has today decided to discontinue the investigation regarding suspected rape (lesser degree) by Julian Assange." This will not likely deter the United States from pursuing their own charges against him for publishing tens of thousands of military documents leaked by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
After describing the development as "an important victory," Assange said, "[...] it by no means erases seven years of detention without charge under house arrest and almost five years here in this embassy without sunlight. Seven years without charge while my children grow up without me. That is not something I can forgive. It is not something I can forget."
Guess I'll have to do it. Boldfacing the interesting parts, which for some reason Slashdot didn't bother covering in the summary.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
No. See the explanation for the dropping of the investigation which for some reason Slashdot didn't bother to mention. The short of it: They dropped it because Moreno won the Ecuadorian election, and he's refused to negotiate on handing over Assange, so there's no realistic possibility that he'll be surrendered before the statute of limitations runs out. Swedish law mandates that when all possibilities to resolve an investigation have been exhausted, the prosecutor is obliged to discontinue it.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
Trying to imagine how Assange can see "victory" in any part of his situation. While he started with nice ideals, at this point he has been transformed into a "useful idiot", though it would still make a lot of powerful people quite happy to see him punished well beyond indefinite imprisonment in an embassy.
Still seems to me to be an economic problem at heart. Largely based on a couple of books about WikiLeaks, I think it was the lack of a viable economic model that led them (though mostly just Assange) to where they are now. Competing economic models of journalism are equally bad or worse. Consider the eyeballs-for-advertisers model that produces disaster porn like CNN and clickbait websites. Worse than that is the paid propaganda model of FAUX "news", rightwing listen-to-a-nut-talking radio, and Alt-Right websites. The vestiges of mainstream journalism are now engaged in a last-newspaperman-standing strategy, and I think journalism still loses, regardless of whether the last paper standing is the "venerable" NY Times or the Washington Post. (I think the LA Times is already on the ropes and the Boston Globe was never a real contender, though the last paper might be some dark horse like the tainted WSJ.)
Assange is no longer part of any solution, so he must be part of the precipitate.
If this is still the first post, it says something about the state of the Slashdot, eh?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I know slashdotters love to hate assange but now we know it was fake charges all along
We know no such thing. The European arrest warrant was dropped because there was no way to execute it, but prosecution can be continued if he becomes available before 2020.
His claim that he has been imprisoned for seven years without a trial is of his own doing - he would have received either a trial or the charges dropped if he had presented himself. He chose to avoid to cooperate with the investigation, and jumped bail.
Not only is he wanted for fleeing while on bail, but there are civil suits pending from several of the sureties; individuals who lost money when he turned out to have lied to them and skipped bail despite promises not to do so.
erm. There are a lot of happy parents that would disagree with you on this.
No, if you start fuck a sleeping girl to work around her previous refusal to consent to your preferred form of sex, that's rape.
Which was charge #4 on the EAW, the one marked rape. The other three charges were 2x molestation and 1x unlawful sexual coersion.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
and surrender to the US. https://www.usnews.com/news/na...
Manning is free. That was the condition. Please Mr Assange, honor your own words.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Actually if you knew anything about suspected rape cases in Sweden you would realize that this case is in fact very odd.
Let's put this in a less charged context than rape. Suppose a woman did some lines of cocaine with a man and the claims "he forced me to do that last line of cocaine!" In a system that isn't based on presumed guilt, you know what the court and/or jury are going to see?
1. She was there of her own free will.
2. She did cocaine with him freely, by her own admission, for most of that time.
3. She lacks signs of coercion.
4. Police have found not traces of evidence to plausibly back up her sudden change of mind.
5. Another line of cocaine made it into her system.
Now, if you are a judge or jury who is not a psychopath, you are probably going to weigh that evidence and conclude that you have a non-trivial chance of being the implement of someone's revenge. You are a decent person who doesn't want to throw someone in prison on a "maybe" or a "it looks bad, but I don't know." You're going to side with Assange here.
The only thing "fishy" about this case to start with was that Assange decided to run and hide in the embassy rather than face his day in court, spouting this blatant nonsense about a US extradition scheme.
Yet America refused to say that they would not ask Sweden to extradite if Assange agreed to testify.
And then they got Bolivian president's Evo Morales' plane rerouted by spreading rumors that Snowden was aboard and demanding extradition
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
He did present himself to Sweden, and Sweden refused. This was highly unusual on the part of Sweden. This makes the whole thing quite suspicious.
Learn to love Alaska
No it is not according to the main sources on political manners it would be former President of the honorable. This can be seen in laws that that cover pasting for costs of corners presidents .
You need a new Russian-English translator, comrade.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Your mom didn't say anything about rape when she gave me a condom too.
Does that mean we're eskimo brothers?
You are welcome on my lawn.
He did present himself to Sweden, and Sweden refused.
No, he did not. He agreed to do an interview from the embassy to an Ecuadorian intermediary, but not to present himself. The "interview" took place last year, but was worthless in that none of questions asked were answered, and instead deflected to a pre-written statement. It was a farce. As a result, the Swedish prosecutors upheld the charges.
The investigation is now dropped, mainly because after the election in Ecuador, there seems to be no way to negotiate an extradition. With no way to bring the investigation to a conclusion, the investigation has to be dropped. But if he presents himself, the charges can be brought forward, and he will have a chance to defend himself and actually answer the questions given.
SW (the only person there was a rape charge concerning - there were only lesser charges concerning AA, and the statute of limitations has expired on them) did indeed only seek to force Assange to get an STD test - but she was telling people (including before going to the police, including before she met AA) that she had been raped. According to the witness statements, she didn't want to become embroiled in some big public mess with the public heaping negative attention on her (like, by the way, the vast majority of rape victims - the reason that rape reporting rates are so low), and so only tried to force the STD test issue. Yeah, that didn't quite work out.
Regardless of the initial goal of trying to stay out of the public spotlight, now that they're being trolled, doxxed, and receiving rape and death threats from Assange fans (one actually fled Sweden for a few years; both have to keep very low profiles due to all of the hostility), that option no longer exists. After the case got out into the open, both women secured legal representation which has consistently sought Assange's prosecution. Upon hearing the news of Sweden giving up hope of ever getting Ecuador to give up Assange and dropping the case, SW's lawyer was shocked:
Elizabeth Massi Fritz is the second legal representative that SW has retained; she switched from the first one, Claes Borgström, because she felt that he was more focused on self promotion than bringing Assange to justice.
In short, trying to pretend that SW and AA don't really want Assange prosecuted is pure nonsense.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
He was actually under house arrest at one point in the UK, while the UK court cases were playing out - although said "house" was a luxurious country mansion. He had to cut his tracking bracelet before fleeing to the embassy.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
Oh and one is suspected to be CIA operative or payed by the CIA. Wikileaks came months before the consensual sex and false rape charges, that even the women said they weren't raped.
Chelsea Manning was not pardoned, her sentence was shortened. She is still guilty of the charges.
Assange leads an average life, not too many sexual encounters but he does OK. One of his encounters evens brags about her conquest on Twitter. Then a year later, her and another ex press charges at the same time. Unlikely to be a coincidence. I am sure that if asked, you will lie and say you are always a saint when with a woman but this is not rape. This would never go forward as a case as it can never get past being an accusation. There is no case to answer as all he has to say is that it is not true and there is no evidence. It is just an attempt to get him into custody so he can be extradited to the US. Why not extradite him from the UK? The UK have a special agreement and never refuse to extradite. The only difference being that if extradited from Sweden the US does not have to agree not to execute him. It is not rape as sex was agreed upon. You are discussing the terms which makes it a civil case not a criminal case. If I buy a car from you and you make the sale conditional it does not become theft if I break those conditions but you may be able to make a civil case and sue me. Sex was agreed and the girls are saying that the terms and conditions were broken, that does not make it rape.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
because US went off the reservation in pursuit of those guys (him and Snowden). And since that part was very publicly proven [wikipedia.org], it throws some serious shade on the whole accusation thing.
The US going after Assange is pure, unadulterated, extra-legal revenge for the public political embarrassment WL has caused the US government by exposing their wrongdoing. Assange no more broke US laws than Woodward & Bernstein did in printing the Pentagon Papers, and W & B are US citizens and were on US soil when they printed the PPs, totally unlike Assange.
But then, if we've learned anything over the past 10 years, it's that those in power believe themselves above the law and think they can do whatever they want and to whomever they want with little consequences.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
erm. There are a lot of happy parents that would disagree with you on this.
Eh? Where did that come from?
Oh. Found it. Per my settings, I mostly don't see the ACs. Not all of them are trolls, but even when they aren't, they tend to be wasting my time. Having dug up the actual parent of your reply, I'll just say I think you [Cederic] are just wasting your time by feeding an obvious troll. No detectable interest in a rational discussion there.
Quite serendipitously and tangentially, there is an actual issue touched there. After all these years, I'm still wondering if Assange was set up. It is possible that his real crime was the invention of stealthing, and in that case the critical legal issue is how the Swedish legal system addresses undefined crimes. One version of the nationalistic joke is "In America [but you can swap countries in accord with fashion trends or your actual prejudices], everything is permitted unless it is explicitly forbidden, while in Germany everything is forbidden unless it is explicitly permitted." A typical punchline might be "And in France, everything is required [or expected?] as long as it is explicitly forbidden." What do the laws of Sweden say?
Depending on when Assange got on their radar, it is quite possible he was targeted years ago. By whom? I'd say by any powerful person or nation with secrets to hide, which seems to provide plenty of suspects. Depends on someone's prediction that the very idea of WikiLeaks was a sufficient threat to worry about.
If targeted, then they would have accumulated targeting data about Assange. For example, they could have found out about his philosophy related to eugenics and his belief in his own superior genes and duty to reproduce. Combine that with some data about the kind of women he's interested in and details of his schedule and the schedules of suitable women, and something could be arranged. Add in a bit of patience and there's no need to expose anything to any of the actual participants in the "crime", especially when none of them knew there was a crime involved.
No, I'm not actually ready to say that Assange was set up, but it's like my sig says, coercion counts. I really like that freedom thing.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
He's always been available-- they could come to talk to him at the embassy, interview him on the phone, or whatever. He just won't go where it's easy for the US to grab him, which is not at all an unrealistic fear at this point.
A modest proposal: if we're the good guys, we shouldn't go around acting like the bad guys in a cold war spy novel.
Wouldn't their minds better be put at rest by taking their own STD test? Why the concern over Assange's well-being?
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
It is just an attempt to get him into custody so he can be extradited to the US. Why not extradite him from the UK? The UK have a special agreement and never refuse to extradite. The only difference being that if extradited from Sweden the US does not have to agree not to execute him.
This is a load of bullshit. Neither Sweden nor Norway will extradite anyone facing capital punishment, this was also directly confirmed by the Swedish minister of justice William Hague. That is to say we'll certainly extradite to countries that have the law on the books, but in that particular case we'll insist you can at most get life without parole. If they executed him it'd lead to a huge diplomatic incident and the end of any future EU-US extraditions, that would never happen. The only semi-valid accusation he could make is that this was a honey trap set to discredit Assange and Wikileaks by creating trumped up rape charges.
As for the actual charges, to have any power to demand invasive tests you must be charged not merely a suspect, at least here in Norway and I assume also in Sweden. That is to say, a breathalyzer is considered a non-invasive test, but before anyone will poke a needle in you because you're suspected of a DUI you will be charged first, then tested and if you're sober the charges will be dropped. I believe STD checking is the same, they interpreted what the women said in terms of some sexual misconduct so they'd have a basis for demanding he take the test. If he had come and taken the test I think the whole case would probably fall apart either before court or in court and never reach a conviction.
When you try to evade the justice system though that becomes the issue by itself. And when you run the assumption becomes that you run because you're guilty, not because you fear a miscarriage of justice. The justice system doesn't care if the accused trust the system. They care that the people can trust in the rule of law and that if they've been victims of a crime that the police will investigate, the courts will give a fair trial and hopefully the guilty punished and the presumed innocent let go. The merits of this case will never be tested in court, because the accused has successfully evaded it. I real don't understand people cheering over this.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Going back further he did, when he was in Sweden.
When he was in Sweden, he was not yet wanted as a person of interest in a rape case. The charges changed as more information was brought forward.
(Which, incidentally, goes a long way to squash the conspiracy theory about the charges being phony and intended to get him extradited to the US. If that was the purpose, they would have brought full charges to start with, and not added to them after more details surfaced, giving him an opportunity to leave.)
Whether the case case had been brought to prosecution is irrelevant, as the matters little to those who really want Assange: the US. The sexual assault case is just convenient cover to go after a declared enemy that is considered a threat. Don't play dumb.
So you say I am talking BS and then go on to explain that you think it is legal to accuse someone of rape based solely on a desire to get them to take a STD test? Whether or not he has an STD is not in any way relevant to whether or not it was rape. It is extremely unlikely that he did anything illegal at any point but at worst he is being accused of being a cad. Given that the girls were happy with the encounter at the time and only became unhappy a year later, at the same time, it is extremely unlikely that the unhappiness is related to the event. A view that the initial prosecutor shared when the case was initially dropped. There never has been a charge so why was there an extradition request without a charge? You seem to be wrapped up in the idea that Sweden is above reproach but this whole case stinks.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
As additional evidence, I note the sudden horde of negative mods on the branch. Just par for the brokenness of Slashdot, unfortunately.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.