Julian Assange wanted in Sweden for alleged rapes

[Simulist]

From the office of the Swedish Prosecution Authority:

Assange no longer wanted

Chief prosector Eva Finné has come to the desicion that Julian Assange is not suspected of rape. Considering that, Assange is no longer arrested in his absence.

http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/

Can he sue his accuser for fraud?

He has an accuser?

(I thought maybe it had been an actress or an actor for this bit part.)

[seemslikeadream]

Rape and molestation, words that will follow him everywhere now on the google, as if soldier killer wasn't good enough

[elfismiles]

VIDEO!!!

Sweden drops rape accusation against founder of WikiLeaks
By the CNN Wire Staff
August 21, 2010 1:23 p.m. EDT

Stockholm, Sweden (CNN) -- Swedish authorities say they have revoked an arrest warrant that had alleged rape against the founder and editor of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

Assange is "no longer wanted" and "is not suspected of rape," Chief Prosecutor Eva Finne said in a statement posted on the agency's official website Saturday. He is also no longer arrested in absentia, the statement said.

The arrest warrant filed Friday had also mentioned a molestation charge, but molestation -- which is not limited to child victims in Sweden -- is not a crime punishable behind bars in Sweden.

Karin Rosander, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, told CNN affiliate TV4 that Assange is still being investigated for molestation.
Video: Wikileaks founder accused of rape
The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing.
--Julian Assange, WikiLeaks on Twitter
RELATED TOPICS

* Wikileaks.org
* Sweden

Earlier, Rosander told CNN that Assange was arrested in absentia Friday night, and faced charges in relation to two separate instances, but she did not have more detail about when the alleged crimes occurred or who the alleged victims are.

Assange denied the allegations in a posting Saturday on the WikiLeaks Twitter page, saying, "The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing."

Assange was in Sweden last weekend, but Rosander said it's not clear whether he is still in the country.

She told TV4 that the decision to make the arrest was made by an "on-call prosecutor," and that the arrest was revoked Saturday by the chief prosecutor. Rosander said such differences in prosecutorial judgment are common in Sweden.

She also said she does not believe that Assange had contacted police yet.

An elusive figure, Assange reportedly lives part-time in Sweden. He told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet this week that he chose Sweden to host several servers for WikiLeaks because of the country's privacy laws.

He also told the paper, in an interview published Monday, that he had been in Sweden because he wanted a safe place to go after the high-profile leak of U.S. documents related to the war in Afghanistan.

A statement was posted by the "WikiLeaks team" on the website earlier Saturday, saying, "We are deeply concerned about the seriousness of these allegations. We the people behind WikiLeaks think highly of Julian and and he has our full support."

WikiLeaks will continue its work as "Julian is focusing on his defenses and clearing his name," the statement said.

WikiLeaks has sparked major controversy by posting some 76,000 pages of those documents online last month, in what was called the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates criticized the leak, saying it would have a significant negative impact on troops and allies, revealing techniques and procedures.

Assange has defended the leak by saying it can help shape the public's understanding of the war. He said the material was of no operational significance and that WikiLeaks tried to ensure the material did not put innocent people at risk.

Assange reportedly has spent his life developing the tech skills needed to set up WikiLeaks. When he was a teenager in Melbourne, Australia, he belonged to a hacker collective called the International Subversives, according to the magazine Mother Jones.

He eventually pleaded guilty to multiple counts of breaking into Australian government and commercial websites to test their security gaps, but was released on bond for "good behavior," the magazine said.

As WikiLeaks has grown and published increasingly high-profile items, Assange has found himself the target of what he says are many legal attacks -- though not necessarily of the type he now faces in Sweden.

"In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks," Assange said in an e-mail to the BBC earlier this year. "To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.

"We've become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can't expect everyone to go through the extraordinary efforts that we do."

In a news conference following the release of the Afghan documents, Assange said the site has 800 part-time volunteers and a loose network of 70,000 "supporters."

CNN's Bharati Naik in London, England, and Per Nyberg in Stockholm, Sweden, contributed to this report.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/08 ... 1&iref=BN1

[esotericmetal]

There's something really fishy about this Assange/Wikileaks thing. The feeling i get is that by trying to implement this fake character assassination attempt they are in fact lending Assange credibility: "Well they tried to accuse him of rape and murder, that means everything he said was true and that 'they' really want to squash this guy". I personally don't buy it. I get the impression that Wikileaks/Assange is having their reputation groomed so that they can used for greater effect for any future strategic propaganda/psyops.

Kevin @ Cryptogon write:

The fact that I’m reading about this damn near everywhere, and that so many people are submitting it, is giving me a really bad feeling. The hive mind of Reddit is upvoting “character assassination” type comments to the top. Be extremely careful when coming to the same conclusion as the zombie herd on Reddit.

I’m coming out with a solid: I don’t know what the f*&@ is happening here.

I suppose there is always the chance that this is just a total clusterfuck of incompetence on the side of intelligence agencies that are trying to squash this thing.

[justdrew]

.

[Jeff]

I get the impression that Wikileaks/Assange is having their reputation groomed so that they can used for greater effect for any future strategic propaganda/psyops.

That can't be discounted. The problem drawing conclusions about Assange is neither can so many other competing narratives. Until I can scratch a few I'm remaining curious but noncommittal. All I know is I don't have the same reservations about Cryptome.

[MinM]

kenny's sideshow: Wikileaks Psyops Takes a New Twist

'Honey trap' ensnares Assange? Time for Julian to cash it that 'insurance' policy?

Are these charges to discredit Wikileaks or to enhance the perception that Assange is not a part of the intelligence services?

Deception is the way of war .....


UPDATE:

Sweden drops arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder | Reuters

[DrVolin]

If wikileaks and Asange are legit, an obvious countermeasure is to flood them with low quality material to crash the signal2noise. How many documents are there in that Afghan release? 600 000? If they are an op, then a well publicized witch hunt will keep their stock high and keep the rebels connecting to their site. Right now, there isn't any way of knowing which version is closer to the truth.

[matrixdutch]

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassif ... ments.html

WikiLeaks Lawyer Says Pentagon Given Access to Unpublished Secret Documents

by Mark Hosenball

A lawyer representing the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks says U.S. government officials have been given codes and passwords granting them online access to official U.S. government documents that WikiLeaks so far has not published.

Timothy Matusheski, a lawyer from Hattiesburg, Miss., who says he represents whistle-blowers and has been in touch with both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and at least one government official involved in investigations of WikiLeaks, said the site had set up a “secure channel” through which authorized users could access the unpublished material. He said credentials for using this channel had been forwarded to representatives of the U.S. government whom he did not identify. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Matusheski indicated that the reason WikiLeaks had taken these steps was to make good on its offer to try to work with U.S. authorities to remove from reports, published in the future by the Web site, sensitive information that could put innocent lives in jeopardy.

Matusheski said U.S. officials had even been given access to an online mechanism through which they would be able to redact what they consider potentially sensitive information. Matusheski says he himself has been given only a portion of the codes needed to access the unpublished material. So, he says, the U.S. government now has wider and more complete access to the material than he did.

Matusheski did not explain how WikiLeaks allegedly passed this information on to government representatives, and he said he has no knowledge of whether anyone in the government has actually used the codes to take a look at unpublished material in WikiLeaks' hands.

Earlier this week, Assange and Pentagon spokesmen indulged in a bout of long-distance name-calling, with Pentagon spokesmen denying that U.S. defense officials had “any direct contact with WikiLeaks," and Assange insisting, in an interview with the Associated Press in Stockholm, that the U.S. had expressed a willingness to discuss a request from WikiLeaks that U.S. officials help the Web site redact Afghan war documents that it has in its possession but hasn’t yet published. In an e-mail to Declassified, Assange insisted: “We are correct, the Pentagon lies or misleads, as per usual.”

Not long after the “liar, liar” accusations began flying between Assange and Pentagon spokesmen, WikiLeaks posted, via Twitter, a copy of an Aug. 16 letter that Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, had sent to Matusheski. In the letter—which was sent out before the Pentagon spokesman gave us their denials of any “direct” contact with WikiLeaks—Johnson claimed that Matusheski, on behalf of WikiLeaks, had sought a conversation with someone in the U.S. government to discuss “harm minimization” with regard to 15,000 official Pentagon reports on the Afghan war that WikiLeaks has been threatening to make public.

In the letter, however, Johnson reiterates the Defense Department’s position as it was stated by official spokesmen to Declassified: “The Department of Defense will not negotiate some ‘minimized’ or ‘sanitized’ version of a release by WikiLeaks of additional U.S. Government classified documents. The Department demands that nothing further be released by WikiLeaks, that all of the U.S. Government classified documents that WikiLeaks has obtained be returned immediately, and that WikiLeaks remove and destroy all of these records from its databases.”

The disclosure that the Pentagon had sent its letter to Matusheski before its spokesmen issued denials to Declassified of “direct” contacts with WikiLeaks attracted a certain amount of commentary in the blogosphere (see this item by Salon's Glenn Greenwald) questioning the credibility of the official Pentagon story and the sincerity of assertions by Pentagon reps that WikiLeaks alone is putting innocent lives in jeopardy.

A second WikiLeaks lawyer, Julie Turner of Palo Alto, Calif., told Declassified on Friday that earlier this summer—after news stories began to appear about the arrest of a U.S. soldier alleged to be a WikiLeaks source, but before WikiLeaks published the first tranche of its trove of Pentagon documents on the Afghan war—she had engaged in an after-hours call with State Department officials in which she gave them reliable contact information for WikiLeaks, whose leading figure, Assange, is notorious for being hard to reach.

However, neither Turner nor Matusheski said they ever had an indication from any official representative of the U.S. government that authorities were in any way willing to engage or cooperate with WikiLeaks in prepublication review of any official reports in the Web site’s possession. Hence, while both WikiLeaks and government officials sometimes appear to have tried spinning the facts to their advantage, both parties appear to have at least been consistent in stating their respective positions on cooperation with each other—or lack thereof.

Matusheski added that on Friday, an Army investigator working on the case of Bradley Manning, an Army soldier linked to WikiLeaks who has been charged with unauthorized handling of classified reports, had contacted him about a possible meeting next week. Matusheski said the Army investigator, Chuck Ames, said he expected to bring along three colleagues, including a lawyer—presumably a federal prosecutor—from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Matusheski said Ames did not explain the purpose of the meeting, but that the Army investigator did advise Matusheski that his party intended to respect any attorney-client privilege he wished to assert.

[wintler2]

Interesting turn. If Wikileaks is legit and its enemies are really as powerful as we often imagine, then surely they could provide a fake victim willing/made to claim JA did X.

But either they aren't that powerful/something went wrong, or they aren't actually involved in the accusation against JA. Which even if true (despite withdrawal of charge) would not prove that JA much less wikileaks are a poisoned honeypot for whistleblowers.


Two things JA & Wikileaks don't get enough credit for imho is that, so far, they're clean, and they've already got a tremendous number of runs on the board. Against that, theres cliche tennis of 'gee theres a subversive mob having inspiring successes it must be a plot', and 'what bad hair', but nobody can show what Wikileaks or JA have done wrong.

The ongoing "is he/isn't he" is reminding me more & more of 'fostering debate' on climate change, creationism, smoking etc, whereby subsidising uncertainty pays off as a distraction and maintains the profitable status quo. Better keep the plebs wondering about hair colour and disinfo than reading the actual army records on how their cousin died defending a drug deal 1000s of kms away.

[Sounder]

wintler2 wrote...

whereby subsidising uncertainty pays off as a distraction and maintains the profitable status quo.

Or, WE subsidize the uncertainty because we are uncertain. Does making a decision cure the disease or does it instead only bury the symptoms, leaving stridency in its space.

Still, I liked the tone and cadence in Julian’s voice when I heard him on National Propaganda Radio. He turned the ‘Generals’ accusation of wiki being responsible for deaths in Afghanistan back at them with deft use of common sense. (The objective of an army is to kill people.)

Yet anything that gets major coverage on MSM is sus for me. Thing is, something can be earnestly put forward and yet that thing can still be used, by changing its context, into something that advances another section of a psyop agenda. Say, folk are (emotionally) caught up in the idea that the GOM is being devastated. Can there be any doubt that media executives have been desperately searching for something that may preempt their obligation to bring their public news from the GOM?

add on edit: In reference to the accuser here, its possible that this person is a ‘free agent’, looking for a new kind of payday, but doing the work on ‘spec’ in the hope of bagging a sponsor.

[matrixdutch]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100822/en ... kileaks_11

Wikileaks man says Pentagon may be behind rape claims
1 hr 1 min ago

.STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview published on Sunday that he believes the Pentagon could be behind a rape accusation against him that was later dropped by Swedish prosecutors.

The country's prosecution service meanwhile justified the chaotic situation when authorities first issued an arrest warrant for the Australian whistleblower late on Friday night but then withdrew it the following day.

The Aftonbladet newspaper quoted Assange, 39, as saying he did not know who was "hiding behind" the claims, which came amid a stand-off with Washington over the website's publication of secret Afghan war documents.

Assange said he was shocked by the allegations against him and that he had never had sexual relations with anybody in a way that was not consensual, the tabloid said.

But he said that he had been warned previously that groups such as the Pentagon "could use dirty tricks" to destroy Wikileaks -- adding that he had been particularly warned against being entrapped by sexual scandals.

Assange told Aftonbladet that despite the lifting of the warrant, his enemies would still use the claims to damage Wikileaks, which is set to publish thousands more secret papers about the war in Afghanistan in coming weeks.

He refused to give more details about the two women whose claims sparked the furore, saying that it would impinge on their privacy.

Prosecutors said Saturday that Assange was now "not suspected of rape" and was no longer wanted for questioning on the charge, but added that an investigation into a separate molestation charge remained open.

Assange, Wikileaks website and his aides have strongly denied all the claims.

He had been in Sweden earlier this month giving a press conference on the upcoming release of the last batch of Afghanistan documents, but he generally remains on the move around the world staying with supporters.

The Swedish prosecutor's office issued a statement on Sunday defending its actions.

It said that chief prosecutor Eva Finne, who was responsible for withdrawing the arrest warrant, had "more information available to decide on Saturday than the duty prosecutor on Friday evening."

"A decision regarding restrictive measures, such as this, must always be reevaluated in a preliminary inquiry," the statement added.

The spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office, Karin Rosander, told AFP late Saturday that the procedure followed was normal and would have been launched automatically by the duty prosecutor in serious cases such as rape.

In an interview in the Expressen newspaper, which broke the story, duty prosecutor Maria Haljebo Kjellstrand said that she "did not regret her decision".

The two women who originally made the claims did not make an official complaint and it was the police who took the decision to inform the prosecutors office, she said.

"I received a report from the police which seemed to me to be sufficient to arrest him. On Friday evening I got a call from the police describing what the women said. The information I received was convincing enough for me to take my decision," Hljebo Kjellstrand was quoted as saying.

WikiLeaks has already released nearly 77,000 secret papers about the war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, sparking charges that it had endangered the lives of informants and others named therein.

The website says it had repeatedly asked the Pentagon for help analysing the remaining documents, and Assange has said he wants to avoid publishing the "names of innocent parties that are under reasonable threat".

[annie aronburg]

Rape and molestation, words that will follow him everywhere now on the google

Including this board,is it too late to edit the thread title?

[crikkett]

http://amovingworld.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-was-leak-on-wikileaks-conducted.html

Why Did Swedish Prosecutors Break Their Own Policy in Assange Case?

The "why" of the quickly-withdrawn 'case' against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange seems clear enough--it has all the initial indicators of a fabricated attempt to defame him. But the "how" of this attempt is murky. Here's an admittedly rough translation of part of the Swedish Prosecution Authority FAQ on their actions to date regarding Assange (Google translation edited for clarity):

Why was Julian Assange's name published?

Prosecutors do not normally publish the names of arrested persons, and the Swedish Prosecution Authority was not the source [cause] of Assange's name [being published] in this case. Assange's information reached - in a way that the authority does not know - a news service. The prosecutor's office merely confirmed the information.

If the above is true, why didn't the Authority simply issue a "no-comment / ongoing investigation" statement rather than confirming that Assange was indeed the subject of investigation? If it is indeed the Prosecution Authority's policy not to release identities, the act of confirming an identity and making it public is no less a violation of policy than announcing Assange's name outright.

And if the Prosecution Authority is being truthful that it did not leak Assange's name as part of a false smear effort, who did?

So far, the explanations offered by the Prosecution Authority do not even begin to explain an apparent failure to follow their own policies. All this, needless to say, doesn't even touch on the remarkable flimsiness of the case, which was withdrawn within hours of being issued.

[82_28]

I still think this is an effort to frame anonymity on the 'net as dangerous, unpredictable, ultimately criminal -- obviously I have no idea as to which level this is working on (i.e. is Assange part of the effort?) Most people, especially those who are younger don't think of the Internet as anything more than automated social networks. We used to be merely "users", now we define ourselves by some kind of online profile and the friends we keep, songs we listen to, books we read, things we buy etc. . .

This is now natural unfortunately. I miss bbs and phone phreakers.