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Notes -
The guardian on Assange and Biden considering to drop the charges.
To my surprise, this is actually a take echoed by Glenn Greenwood:
The facts go like this:
The Guardian/Greenwood narrative would have to go like this:
My narrative would go something like this:
What your narrative doesn't explain is why the US is considering dropping charges now - assuming that they actually are considering that and it's not just another deception.
I'm not sure your timeline is correct - I thought the US maintained that there were no charges against Assange until he was arrested in the UK. I do agree that the USA absolutely wanted to get it's hands on Assange while lying through it's teeth that it didn't want him. I don't see that as a partisan issue. When the US put in it's extradition request 15 minutes after Assange was booted out of the Ecuadorian embassy the verb used was that the charges were 'unsealed', implying that they had been in place for some time.
But the idea that these Swedish charges were a trumped up excuse just to get him into the hands of the Americans doesn't pass the smell test for me. My impression is that the Swedish are not particularly sympathetic to the goals of the US intelligence or military community, are generally appalled by the state of the US justice/prison system, and are not particularly beholden to the US in a way that would make extradition especially likely. Certainly I think the Swedish were less likely to extradite Assange than the British, who notably have still not extradited him. Additionally, because of the way extradition law works, had he submitted to the European arrest warrant, and the US had then put in an extradition request, then both Sweden and the UK would have had to agree to the extradition to the US. He would have had twice the protection that he currently has. If he was worried that he couldn't trust the Europeans not to sell him out to the Americans, why was he even operating in Europe in the first place? His story just doesn't add up for me.
Finally, and I realise this isn't necessarily relevant to your points, I want to add that I have zero sympathy towards Assange. His game plan seems to have been to hole up in the embassy and then whinge about being a 'political prisoner' and 'held without trial' while doing everything in his power to avoid any trial, even on apolitical charges. 'Victim of psychological torture' - bollocks. He was just straight up a fugitive from justice and his prison sentence for breaching the UK bail act was fair and just. His argument was basically that in order to be safe from the evil machinations of the Americans, he had to be functionally immune to any part of the European justice system, which is obviously absurd. The man is a weasel, and the most surprising thing about this entire episode is that it took him seven whole years to wear out his welcome with the Ecuadorians.
Thankfully, we don't have to just use our noses for issues like this - we can just go look at the actual facts of the matter. To quote a fairly well credentialed expert on the matter, Nils Melzer...
https://medium.com/@njmelzer/response-to-open-letter-of-1-july-2019-7222083dafc8
Your position directly contradicts the statements of the people actually involved in this case, and I think that the actual supposed victim's testimony is substantially more reliable than your nasal sentiment.
You haven't been paying attention to the case - Assange and his lawyers made multiple offers to testify and participate in a trail as long as there were guarantees that he would not be immediately extradited to the US. He also offered to testify remotely from the embassy, and these requests were denied as well. Assange and his legal representation clearly had substantial reason to believe that arrest in Sweden would lead to US extradition almost immediately, and he was more than willing to participate in the trial if there was an assurance it wasn't an excuse to just immediately send him off to the US. The Swedish prosecutors notably refused to provide any of these assurances, and so he didn't do it despite making multiple good faith attempts to actually have the trial! Your post is riddled with factual errors, and while I don't think everyone has to unconditionally love the man, I think you at least owe it to yourself and the rest of the motte to make sure your opinions are informed by the actual facts of the matter.
Nothing you have said in your post has surprised me at all, and you have barely engaged with the points I have made. Your attempt to shame me by framing me as uninformed, while vaguely gesturing to the approximately zero factual errors in my post strikes me as an attempt at consensus building. Ironic, considering that you are trying to throw the lofty standards of The Motte in my face while breaking the spirit of its rules. Next time you think that someone may be wrong on The Motte, might I suggest that you spend less effort telling them off and more effort explaining in a specific way why you think they are wrong.
Anyway.
On to your points:
Don’t care.
I mean, I don’t get your point. Are you trying to say Assange didn’t commit a crime in Sweden? Because that doesn’t contradict anything I have written. I am totally agnostic on the question of whether Assange committed some sexual crime in Sweden. What I am not agnostic about is that he was expected and required to present himself to the Swedish authorities so that they could conduct an investigation into whether a crime had been committed.
Are you trying to say that the accusations are so shaky that they couldn’t have been anything other than a bad faith attempt by the Swedes to get hold of Assange? Don’t agree there either. There was reason to believe that a crime had been committed, and it was up to the Swedish Police to determine if that was the case. That should pretty obviously involve an interview with the suspect. That the Swedish police wanted to talk to him strikes me as extremely, tediously normal.
And your narrative that this was all just a ruse still makes no sense to me! Why do you think that the Swedish would have been more receptive to a US extradition request than the UK? I’m not even asking for evidence, just some reasoning. And again, if he had been extradited to Sweden by the UK, then both Sweden and the UK would have had to agree to any follow up requests from the USA.
But anyway, this is all totally academic. Regardless of whether he broke the law in Sweden, he certainly broke the law in the UK by violating bail. He gave assurances to the British court that he would appear when summoned and on that basis he was granted bail. He then failed to appear. That’s a crime. For reasons that I have already mentioned, once he was (rightly) convicted under British law he had far fewer legal protections against extradition to the US than if he had just accepted extradition to Sweden in the first place.
“What do you mean ‘a zoom call is not an appropriate venue for an interview under caution’? Don’t you know who I am?! I'm Julian Assange god damn it! Your petty ‘procedures’ are meaningless to me!”
I mean, the absolute gall! Can you imagine being pulled over for a warrant in America and telling the cop “I’m afraid being arrested doesn’t really work for me right now, but I’m totally willing to skype this out later.” Sorry Julian, but this isn’t a negotiation, you’re under arrest, get in the police car.
The assurances Assange wanted were totally impossible to give, as anyone familiar with, uh, law would understand. The Swedish can’t give someone blanket immunity from extradition. They have treaties. They are required to consider an extradition request from the US. The only assurances they could give Assange would have been the normal ones:
1 - We will not extradite you unless the crime you are accused of would also be a crime here in Sweden.
2 - We will not extradite you unless we are sufficiently certain that you will receive a fair trial.
3 - We will not extradite you unless we are sufficiently certain that you will be treated humanely.
These, of course, would not be enough for Assange. He’s special.
And now, he remains in custody in the UK, because nothing says ‘flight risk’ better than spending seven years holed up in an embassy after you were previously granted bail. Assange is sleeping in a bed fully of his own making.
Intelligence agencies are perfectly capable of using their influence to trump up charges that may not stand up in court, but look plausible enough that you can't prove bad faith in advance. Your standard here is a blank check to the intelligence agencies to get anyone they want.
The accusations might have been in good faith, but they also might not, and the possibility that they aren't was substantial.
Versus your standard that every court action involving a person of interest to the Americans is inherently corrupt? If I can't use plausibility as my basis to judge these things, then what basis can I use?
The theory that the Swedish charges were somehow trumped up by the CIA has one glaring problem: why bother? If the Americans wanted Assange, why bother getting him extradited from the UK to Sweden as an intermediate step? What's the advantage? Why not just request extradition from the UK directly?
If Assange goes along with the extradition to Sweden and then America tries to extradite from Sweden, then he gets to fight extradition in both Swedish and British courts, and he only has to be successful in one of them.
Say rather, inherently suspect. Appeals to process require faith in the process being appealed to. The feds observably warp process to satisfy their interests, so naked appeals to process in cases where their interests are in play should not be given the benefit of the doubt.
Suspect, fine. 'Suspect' is reasonable. But 'suspect' alone is not sufficient reason to call bullshit. It's reason to dig, to sniff around, to raise an eyebrow, to build a case. But in the end, you still need to evaluate that case on its merits, not on the feeling of suspicion.
I've gathered a lot of downvotes on this subject. People here clearly disagree with me, but nobody has even taken a crack at the most basic question here - how does it benefit the feds to have Assange extradited to Sweden? That's a real obvious question that nobody seems interested in tackling.
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