Uh no offence Ian but the guy that leaked the information to Assange is staring down the gun barrel of the US Justice Department and a jail sentence that might include charges of treason.Ian wrote:There have always been leaks, but now anyone who has any sort of classified information can send it to Assange anonymously and see it published apparently without legal consequence.
Gawdzilla wrote:Ordnance Absorption Devices.AshtonBlack wrote:"Fuckin' civvies getting in the way of the bullets..."
And of course, Ahmad Chalabi, Curveball, etc. (hell, Colin Powell, the CIA, George Bush) can send "intelligence" to the US and see it used as justification without any legal consequence even though it's complete bullshit and will result in thousands of dead Americans.Mishakal wrote:Uh no offence Ian but the guy that leaked the information to Assange is staring down the gun barrel of the US Justice Department and a jail sentence that might include charges of treason.Ian wrote:There have always been leaks, but now anyone who has any sort of classified information can send it to Assange anonymously and see it published apparently without legal consequence.
Seems like a pretty big "consequence" to me.
Mad Hatter, your only point in this thread seems to be the above quoted. What makes you claim this?Assange has no system established to reasonably assess the risk, and he cares nothing about the information he posts, it is done entirely to feed his ego.
Well, I'm not absolutely sure about the "nothing" part. But, at present, I have not heard it articulated what crime he might be charged with, other than the rape charges. So, I assume the government has very little to hang its hat on, yet. I don't know where he was when he received the information, or how he received it. If he was engaged in a conspiracy with the soldier who downloaded and gave him the information, then he may well be guilty of espionage. So far, we don't know that, of course. If I were the US government, I'd be looking to connect these two up "pre-download."Chinaski wrote:The rape charges are utter, utter, bullshit. Now they arrested him in England. It's a conspiracy, I tells ya! A goddamm conspiracy! Nothing he's done is illegal!
Julian Assange of Wikileaks infamy was arrested in England today. But it isn’t for espionage—his Interpol “red notice” made no mention of the hundreds of thousands of classified government documents he has released illegally over the past year.
Neither does it mention the word “rape,” but you wouldn’t know that from the news reports. Searching Assange’s surname alongside the word “rape” on Google yields nearly 10 million results. Ever since Swedish authorities initially filed—then dropped—then reinstated—sex-crime charges against him late last summer, the words “Assange” and “rape” have been irrevocably wed online.
In a society hypersensitive about gender issues to the point of psychosis, a rape accusation is perhaps the worst claim you could lodge against someone short of adding that their victim was underage. But although certain gender-crazed pompom girls insist that false rape accusations are a vicious patriarchal fiction, by one estimate about half of all official rape complaints are entirely fabricated. Merely searching the word “false” alongside “rape” on Google News will yield a fresh crop of verifiably bogus allegations nationwide with each new sunrise. Try it if you don’t believe me.
Regarding the allegations against Assange, I’ve pieced together the following timeline from numerous sources, most notably London’s Mail Online, which had access to the Swedish police reports. Otherwise, I haven’t been to Sweden for 25 years, so I can’t vouch for any of it….
On Wednesday, August 11, only weeks after leaking nearly 100,000 secret Afghan war documents, Julian Assange arrived in Stockholm to speak at the invitation of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. Event organizer Anna Ardin, 31, allowed Assange to stay at her flat while she visited her family for a couple days out in the country. After Ardin arrived back home on Friday the 13th, she and Assange went out for dinner, then returned to her apartment for some hot, naked, Aussie-on-Swede action.
The following day, Assange delivered a 90-minute speech about how war’s first casualty is truth. If Ardin was upset by the previous night’s (and that morning’s—woof-woof, Julian!) sexual liaisons, she hid it well. Appearing reasonably untraumatized, Ardin can be seen sitting stage right at about 0:10 of this video. Only ten feet in front of her, facing the stage with blonde hair and a pink sweater, sat Sofia Wilen, her eventual co-accuser against Assange.
In the weeks leading up to the seminar, the 26-year-old aspiring photographer Wilen had developed an escalating nerd-crush for The World’s Most Famous Hacker, whom she described as “interesting, brave, and admirable.” She devoured online news accounts of him and took a holiday from work to attend his speech. She sat comfy-cozy and perky in the front row for his oration’s duration, reportedly snapping photographs of Assange and at one odd point appearing to pose for a snapshot herself. She waited for Assange outside the seminar and managed to get herself invited to lunch with him and three other males. “She was a little bit strange,” one of the other lunch attendees later noted. “Definitely an odd character and keen to get Julian’s attention.”
Assange and Wilen began openly flirting during lunch, then departed alone together in a fruitless search for a laptop charger that unfolded into a brief shopping jaunt (on Wilen’s dime) that ultimately found them entangled in some sort of genital horseplay in the back of a dark movie theater. But Assange cut the night short so he could attend a Swedish crayfish party back at Anna Ardin’s flat. He promised Wilen he’d keep in touch.
That night, while hosting a party in Assange’s honor at her apartment, the already “raped” Anna Ardin Tweeted about how she was hobnobbing with “the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!” (After going to police on the 20th, she deleted these Tweets.) At some point during the crayfish hootenanny, Assange apparently stepped aside to phone Wilen at her home in Enköping, about 50 miles west of Stockholm. He left a message asking her to call him.
Wilen says she tried calling him on the 15th but his phone was turned off. Assange and Wilen met up on Monday the 16th, and she paid for both train tickets back to her apartment in Enköping. She’d later complain that during the train ride, “He paid more attention to the computer than to me….The passion and attraction seemed to have disappeared.” Still, Assange mounted her that evening and—way to go, Bro!—again in the morning, apparently condomless that time. Wilen was so devastated, she went out to buy food, cooked him a sizzlin’-hot breakfast, and joked while they were eating that he may have made her pregnant. She bought his return ticket to Stockholm, asked him to call, he said he would, but he never did. He even screened her incoming calls—always a big mistake with any one-night stand in a foreign country.
“One would think that a globetrotting David seeking to slay the American Goliath would have the good sense to keep his dick in his pants.”
By the 18th or 19th Wilen had grown frustrated that Assange wasn’t returning her calls, so she phoned that nice organizer lady she met at the seminar—Anna Ardin— inquiring about Assange’s whereabouts.
As the conversation took the sort of turns that conversations between ladies usually take, both Ardin and Wilen realized they’d both had sex with their Hacker Heartthrob during the previous week.
In these sort of situations, one of two things typically happens: The women will claw out each other’s eyeballs to win the man, or they’ll team together to destroy him.
At around 2 p.m. on August 20th, Wilen and Ardin walked together into a Stockholm police station. Both women told police of how Assange had, against their expressed wishes, ridden their naked golden haunches bareback and rubber-free. They both said they were alarmed about possibly having contracted STDs from him but that he’d refused their requests to be tested.
Online accounts vary wildly about exactly what was alleged to have happened with Assange, the girls, and the condoms: Some say he gruffly ignored their requests to use condoms; others say he intermittently used them; others say the rubber gloves broke during sex but that he continued; yet others say he purposely and inscrutably poked holes in the jizzbags and continued happily pumpin’ along anyway. At least one of Assange’s accusers claims that he ignored her requests to stop after she realized his sword was unsheathed.
But in an interview with Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Ardin denied that Assange had engaged in what Whoopi Goldberg has charmingly referred to as full-blown “rape-rape.” Ardin said:
It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him….In both cases, what started out as voluntary sex subsequently developed into an assault. The other woman wanted to report rape. [The] responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a twisted attitude to women and a problem with taking ‘no’ for an answer.
Did you catch that? For both girls it was consensual, but suddenly it wasn’t consensual, but he wasn’t violent, but then again he wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, but neither of them are afraid of him, anyway, even though he’s twisted.
Prosecutors bucked Swedish legal tradition and leaked Mr. Wikileaks’ name to the Swedish press even before contacting Assange. They issued a warrant for his arrest late on August 20th—around the same time the story hit the Swedish tabloids and exploded online.
Then, 24 hours later, they dropped the charges.
On September 1st, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions Marianne Ny issued new sexual-assault charges against Assange for his trysts with Ardin and Wilen. Assange now faces charges in Sweden for what is legally known there as “sex by surprise.”
Ardin and Wilen have hired Swedish celebrity lawyer Claes Borgström, who has uttered such gems about the case as “He had sex against their will one way or the other” and explained that even though the girls insisted Assange didn’t use force, they don’t understand they’ve been raped because “They’re not lawyers.”
Somehow, what happened doesn’t quite sound like “rape” to me, at least as I’ve been led to understand the term in America.
Then again, I don’t live in Sweden. But after reading literally thousands of online forum comments about the case, many of them appearing to be from bona fide Swedes, I realize those blond bastards define rape as broadly as our fair galaxy. Everything is rape to them. Apparently there’s a running joke—“That’s rape in Sweden.” Did you spill your coffee? “That’s rape in Sweden.” Did you cough too loud during the board meeting? “That’s rape in Sweden.” What, you don’t understand the joke? “That’s rape in Sweden.”
Not much has been made public about where Sofia Wilen stands regarding the Gender War, but for now let’s say there’s not nearly the shit-ton of excruciatingly damning evidence against her that exists against Anna Ardin.
While a student at Uppsala University, Ardin led a campaign to ban student songs with bawdy, woman-hating lyrics such as “in every hole/do we stop our eels.” Ardin also worked on “women’s issues” and “sexual harassment cases” at Uppsala. It’s hard to conceive that she never rubbed elbows with Professor Eva Lundgren at the school’s Department of Gender Science. Lundgren claims that half of all Swedish men are violent toward women. She also insists there’s a Swedish epidemic of male Satanists committing hundreds of ritual baby murders. When former Uppsala professor Max Scharnberg published a book critical of Lundgren, the university banned and then literally burned it.
Following in such unimpeachable footsteps, Ardin once reportedly filed a sexual-harassment complaint against another student for looking at his notes and not paying attention to her—while she was apparently giving a lecture on sexual harassment!—and thus using “male suppression techniques” to make her feel inferior and unwanted. When the male student learned of the complaint, he apologized to Ardin, who filed a NEW harassment complaint arising from his apology.
In various post-college blog posts, many of which have since been purged, Ardin was found saying things such as “It is time to end the male ideal” and “Rape is a part of male power.” She apparently believes in a literal patriarchy that conspires to keep her down. Another entry details a fictional nonconsensual sexual encounter between a man and a woman that is so graphic, you start thinking Anna Ardin imagines such scenarios all the time.
But Ardin’s self-delivered knockout punch came on January 19th of this year in a blog post (here’s the original and a rough translation) titled “7 Steps to Legal Revenge.” Although the steps themselves were lifted from a non-Swedish source, Ardin begins her post with, “I’ve been thinking about some revenge over the last few days.” Step 3 counsels: “For example if you want revenge on someone who cheated or who dumped you, so should the punishment with the dating/sex/fidelity to do. [sic]” In Step 4, we are encouraged to “Use your imagination!” The seventh and final step reeks of All Things Stalker: “And remember what your goal is, while you are operating, ensure that your victim may suffer the same way he made you suffer.”
It’s said that Ardin was once tossed out of Cuba for subversive political activities and that she has ties to some sort of CIA operative. And when rape charges were first lodged against Julian Assange, he insisted the CIA or Pentagon set him up in some sort of “honey trap” with Ardin and Wilen, but he later backpedaled on that charge.
Whether or not he was set up, and whether or not it was the CIA, doesn’t seem all that important to me. One would think that a globetrotting David seeking to slay the American Goliath would have the good sense to keep his dick in his pants. But in this case, he apparently made the mistake of penetrating a radical feminist seeking to bring the patriarchy to its knees.
The charges against him may be true, false, or exaggerated. What seems important is that in all my research, I haven’t run across any governmental entity that claims the material Wikileaks releases is fabricated or in any way inaccurate. In fact, governments across the globe seem deeply ashamed and don’t really want to talk about it.
It’s sort of how rape victims used to act.
It's not necessarily illegal, especially considering he's not a US citizen. However, that does not make it ethical, or moral. More like reckless and naive.Chinaski wrote:It was consensual sex, for chrissakes. And someone remind me how distributing information released by a third party over the internet is illegal.
Dammit, more of this sort of stuff and you'll put us mods out of a job!DMac wrote:Good call. Hope they had a nice Halloween! Sorry for being so stridentIan wrote:I think I'll put the kids to bed and have a beer meself.
I agree, it has to have a political connection...mistermack wrote:There is clearly more going on here than just the alleged sex offences.
The original prosecutor threw it out. Then the leaks happen. Then a new prosecutor says it's rape. Then he goess voluntarily to the police, gives up his passport, and still doesn't get bail. It absolutely stinks of a stich-up. When judges and prosecutors start acting oddly, there's something being organised behind the scenes.
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