As I wrote earlier in this publication, the alleged sexual crimes
that Assange is currently being sought for by a Swedish prosecutor are:
1. Allegedly failing to halt an act of consensual sexual intercourse
when his sex partner and host, Anna Ardin, claims she somehow became
aware that the condom he was using had “split” and,
2. Having consensual sex with a second woman a few days later without
informing her that he had just been with Ardin, and then, a day later,
allegedly refusing to return a phone call on his cell phone, when she
tried to call him to ask him to take an STD test.
(Assange says he had
turned off and was not using his phone for fear he was being traced
through it, not that refusing to take a call from a woman one recently
slept with should be considered criminal. Cold or even cruel, maybe, but
not justification for a rape charge!)
In most countries, including the US and UK, these would not pass the
test to be considered a crime, much less qualify as a category of
“rape," but Swedish authorities, who in all of this year have only
submitted one other request to Interpol for assistance in capturing a
sex crimes suspect, asked the international police agency to issue a
so-called Red Alert for Assange, who was subsquently asked by police in
the UK, where he was staying, to turn himself in or face arrest. (The
other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for
Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on
multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.)
You have to ask, given that Sweden has the highest per-capital number
of reported rape cases in Europe, how it can be that only these two
suspects--Wallenkurtz and Assange--are brought to Interpol.
You also have to wonder how it is that Assange--charged only with
consensual sex “offenses”--is denied bail by a British court magistrate,
despite having several people at his arraignment hearing, including a
well-known British filmmaker, ready to post whatever bail might be
required to assure his return to court for an extradition hearing, while
even people charged with aggressive rape are apparently routinely
released on bail in both the UK and Sweden.
Here’s an interesting letter that ran yesterday in the Guardian in
England, authored by Katrin Axelsson, of the British organization Women Against Rape:
“Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual
zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations.
Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to
rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes
in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction
rates have decreased. On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul
(respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden)
wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes
never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though
almost 4,000 people were reported". They endorsed Amnesty
International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape
cases that had been closed and the quality of the original
investigations.
“Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused
bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail
following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been
supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man
previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her
children – he was granted bail while police investigated.
“There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual
assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's
safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was often
justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white
woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused,
while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.”
The long arm of the US in this case is hard to miss here.
Especially in view of one of the latest WikiLeaks State Department cables to be disclosed in the New York Times,
which in an article on Thursday laid out how the US had strong-armed
even the powerful German government into blocking German prosecutors
from indicting and requesting the extradition to Germany of 13 CIA
agents involved in the illegal kidnapping and renditioning to Bagram
prison in Afghanistan of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen wrongly
thought by the CIA to be a terrorist. El-Masri was kidnapped by these
agents in 2003, stripped, bound, placed in an adult diaper with a plug
in his rectum, and flown by the CIA to Bagram, where he was repeatedly
tortured, sodomized, injected with mind-altering drugs, and held for
months, before being simply dropped off by the CIA on an Albanian
roadside, after it was determined by the US that a “mistake” had been
made. The US did not want its rendition program and its policy of
officially-sanctioned torture disclosed and so it pressed German
authorities to drop all prosecution of the agency kidnappers,
threatinging “the implications for relations with the U.S.” (El-Masri
has been barred from suing the US government for damages.)
It strains credulity to believe that the same US government that put
such pressure on a NATO ally Germany is not behind Swedish prosecutors’
sudden intense interest in this preposterous case of consensual sex and
a broken condom--particularly as the initial prosecutor in the case
dropped it after learning that the two women, far from being upset
following their nights with Assange, had in one case thrown a party for
him following the alleged incident, and in the other, left him in her
bed while she went out to buy him breakfast. (Both women reportedly sent
twitters to friends bragging about their conquests, messages they later tried to have expunged from the Twitter system).
It also strains credulity to believe that the denial of bail to this
particular suspect by a British court--particularly given that he is
not charged with any violent act, and has no criminal record--is not the
result of behind-the-scenes US pressure.
Indeed, it appears that the US is busy trumping up more serious
charges against Assange, with his lawyers saying they are anticipating
that the US Justice Department (already reportedly in discussions with
Swedish authorities about getting their hands on Assange), is planning
soon to charge him under the 1917 Espionage statute, the same law that
the Nixon Justice Department tried to use unsuccessfully against Daniel
Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case. That could explain why efforts
are being made to try to keep Assange held in a cell.
It could also explain why Assange is challenging the Swedish extradition request.
Opposition to the Afghan and Irag Wars is intense in the UK and is
supported by the overwhelming majority of British citizens, which makes
Assange something of a hero in Britain for his WikiLeaks exposes of the
ongoing crimes by US and UK forces in those conflicts. British
government acquiescence to an extradition order from the US on espionage
charges would likely lead to massive opposition by British citizens.
Sweden, on the other hand, which is not a member of NATO, but which has
some 500 troops participating in the "NATO" war in Afghanistan, does not
face the same kind of popular opposition to its role, and Assange may
fear that Sweden, a very small country, could be pressured much more
easily to hand Assange over to US authorities, with little resulting
fuss from the Swedish public.
Back in the US, there has been no move by news organizations
to come to Assange’s defense. In fact, the corporate media reaction to
this whole issue has been the opposite. For the most part, the Swedish
charges, and his arrest in Britain on the basis of the Interpol Red
Alert, are reported as being about “rape,” without any explanation of
the actual “violations,” which would not even rise to the level of a
crime in the US. Meanwhile, most editorial pages are condemning the
violation of diplomatic secrecy, not the government’s efforts to shut
down a source of important news about government ineptness, malfeasance
and deceit.
Yet if it turns out, as I’m confident it will, that the US
government has been the driving force behind both the arrest and
imprisonment of Assange, and his extradition to Sweden, and if it turns
out, as appears increasingly likely, that the US government has also
been behind simultaneous decisions by Visa, MasterCard, Paypal and
several Swiss banks to refuse to handle donations to WikiLeaks, as well
as by Amazon, which withdrew Wikileak's access to its cloud data storage
system, and a DNS registry which de-registered WikiLeak's URL,
publishers and broadcasters, and journalists themselves, should be up in
arms defending him. As I wrote here earlier, this kind of attack on a
news source for purely political reasons is a threat to the First
Amendment as profound as the Nixonian attack on Daniel Ellsberg, and the
attempt to block the New York Times from publishing his purloined documents about the origins of the Vietnam War.
Andreas Fink, CEO of DataCell ehf, the Swiss company that has
been accepting donations on behalf of Wikileaks via Visa, had this to
say about the Dec. 8 decision by Visa to cease processing Wikileaks
donations:
“The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of
the agreements with their customers. Visa users have explicitly
expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is
not fulfilling this wish. It will probably hurt their brand much much
more to block payments towards Wikileaks than to have them occur. Visa
customers are contacting us in masses to confirm that they really donate
and they are not happy about Visa rejecting them. It is obvious that
Visa is under political pressure to close us down. We strongly believe a
world class company such as Visa should not get involved by politics
and just simply do their business where they are good at. Transferring
money. They have no problem transferring money for other businesses such
as gambling sites, pornography services and the like so why a donation
to a Website which is holding up for human rights should be morally any
worse than that is outside of my understanding.”
Contributions can still be made to Wikileaks and to Assange’s
Defense by wire transfer and by check and ordinary mail. To find out how
to contribute, go to: www.wikileaks.ch/support.html
By the way, if there is anyone out there working
for Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, or any banking organization, or in a
government office, who can provide me with evidence that the US has been
behind the decision of any of those organizations to freeze out
WikiLeaks and destroy it financially, I will guarantee your anonymity at
all costs. Please contact me or send me documentation.
Far be it from me to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from
the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange (technically, Swedish prosecutors say it's not
rape, it's "sex by surprise"), currently being held in a British jail
without bail pending an extradition request from Stockholm: “Something
is rotten in Sweden.”
