6 ms·
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accused of rape
- AlexMuir 16y agoThere's an interesting problem here. Any criminal accusations against him are going to be presumed false by virtually everybody. Imagine if he'd been arrested for possession of drugs. Would you believe that? No way. So he's pretty much alright to smuggle drugs, because if he gets caught it'll look so much like a setup that any jury will struggle to convict.
- jacquesm 16y agoAccusations are never enough. The proof is in the evidence. Assange is not free to smuggle drugs, just as the government is not free to plant drugs on him to try to accuse him of something that he didn't do. Both are illegal. The problem is in separating fact from fiction and making sure that you do the right thing. Juries have that problem anyway.
- Entlin 16y agoOh c'mon, that's just bullshit and slander. A very dirty trick. Disappointing of Sweden, to say the least.
- frooxie 16y ago"Disappointing of Sweden"? Really? Are you saying that the Swedish police should NOT investigate when rape is reported? Or are you saying that you are disappointed by Sweden as a whole because you suspect that a couple of Swedish women lied about rape?
- jacquesm 16y agoWhat's disappointing is that this was leaked to the media.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoLeaked? CNN interviewed the prosecutor. Not much of a leak if you're doing public interviews. http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/08/21/sweden.wikileaks.charge/index.html?hpt=T1&iref=BN1 http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/08/21/sweden.wikileaks....
- jacquesm 16y agoBut somewhere this story was made to go, and if it wasn't the women talking to the press and it wasn't Assange then it must have been some person working for the Swedish authorities that broke the story first in such a way that the Swedish press knew to go fishing. CNN is just following up. There is a bit of information in how this story first made its way in to the world.
- Hagelin 16y agoIt made it’s way in to the world after an arrest warrant was issued. There has been some debate in Sweden over the choice of publishing names or not, this is hardly a unique case.
- rimantas 16y agoSo now leaking is wrong?
- jacquesm 16y agoWhen done by the authorities about a case that is under review, yes, it is absolutely wrong.
- orborde 16y agoI'm glad to see an actual news organization checking into this story by talking to Swedish police. It's a nice change from the thousand blogs reposting that single Swedish tabloid article and Twitter post.
- jacquesm 16y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622556 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1622556
- Ardit20 16y agoThat is quite clever. You can't just arrest him. You can't just kill him either because then we all would know who dun it, but rape is well, anyone can be accused of rape, it would be your word against the "victim". It would be quite a circus show though. We would get to learn about every little detail. In this kind of case, it should not be a sample of the public, that is the jury of 12 ordinary people of the public who decide, but the entire public. Have the entire trial in public, in front of the cameras, and let the public know everything the jury does.
- rickmb 16y agoSmall addition: you can't kill him because of this: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/wikileaks-insurance-file/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/wikileaks-insurance... But anything that damages the man that can not be directly traced back to the source will do fine. In that case, the obvious choices are either possession of child porn or rape. And the first would be hard to pull off with a paranoid tech-savvy guy. Which leaves accusing him of rape, which is the perfect crime to frame someone with, since you can take it all the way to court without a shred of physical evidence. None of this excludes the possibility that he actually did it, but it is the perfect scenario for a frame-job. Don't think it will come that far though. I would put my money on the following scenario: 1) Assange turns himself in. 2) He is led away in front of the cameras in an unnecessarily humiliating and public way, making him look like a criminal, which is a very powerful image. 3) The victim mysteriously disappears, making sure there will always be lingering doubts. Damage done, operation successful. Even if it won't stop Assange, it will scare the crap out of anyone thinking of helping him.
- jacquesm 16y agoI was with you until '3'.
- pwim 16y agoGiven that it is Sweden, there won't be a "jury of 12 ordinary people": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_system_of_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_system_of_Sweden
- Typhon 16y agoMr Assange is innocent until proven guilty. There's nothing else to say about this. Nothing. And I don't think this particular accusation should be anymore newsworthy than any other rape accusation. What matters concerning wikileaks is the authenticity of the leaked documents. Not the various crimes that the founder may or may not have committed.
- riffic 16y agoHans Reiser was innocent until proven guilty too.
- stfp 16y agoAnd a lots and lots of people were innocent until proven innocent. Why you'd bring Reiser of all people in this is beyond me... Is it because Assange is kind of a geek and Reiser a programmer ? If this seems like a valid connection to you, I wonder how much persuading you'd need before agreeing with throwing, say, all muslims in jail right away.
- Typhon 16y agoYes, and then he was proven guilty and sent in jail. What you said is completely pointless. You could just as well have typed a meaningless random word like dgedfgrdgjlkdfgjdflg. If you want to draw a comparison, to make a point, to disagree with what I say, do so, instead of merely implying something, and letting your readers fill in the blanks.
- vaksel 16y agoHe'd be the dumbest criminal in the world to rape someone while everyone is watching his every move. To do it twice within a few days? And to do it to women who both know each other? This just doesn't pass the smell test.
- ugh 16y agoPeople do, from time to time, stupid things. There is no reason to come up with crazy conspiracy theories. The jury’s out. (Although they probably don’t have juries in Sweden.) I don’t really know, though, how this is supposed to change my opinion of Wikileaks in any way. What they do is valuable, no matter what Assange did or did not do.
- jbjohns 16y agoJust because there are nuts out there with insane conspiracy theories don't mean there are no such thing as a conspiracy. It's very open what Wikileaks is doing and it's very obvious that a lot of powerful people want it stopped. If you always take everything at face value you're never going to understand politics.
- ugh 16y agoI just don’t think there is any good evidence for this being a conspiracy. Hence crazy conspiracy theory. That’s all. Just take a moment and think about what would be necessary to frame someone. That doesn’t seem like a simple task to me. We are talking about Swedish police and prosecutors here, police and prosecutors who know that they would be in the spotlight and under intense scrutiny the moment they decided to prosecute Assange. Sweden is not exactly known for its corrupt police and prosecutors, taking that route seems like a stretch. How do you get two completely normal women (and not any random women, women which have some, however torturous, connection to Assange) to lie to the police? They, too, must know that they would be under intense scrutiny the moment they talked to the police. Lying to the police is no joke, it’s a crime. It’s also a risk for the briber. Who’s to say that one of those women doesn’t break under the intense scrutiny and reveal the conspiracy? If there ever is a trial it will be public and intense stress for the two women. They will also be evaluated, probably several times, by a psychologist. Those two women are not professionally trained super agents.
- JeanPierre 16y agoJust for people questioning whether this is a dirty trick or not: 1) From what I know, there hasn't been any mentionable cases where the Swedish police has been either bribed or done something questionable. At least not in recent time. 2) The two women went to the police for consulting about the two claimed events. The police looked at both cases, and decided that both cases were serious enough to prosecute Assange. The two women did apparently not want to prosecute Assange due to his "position of power". (From expressen.se - Whether that's reliable or not) The most reasonable to guess if Assange has not raped them, is that the girls are lying. However, I'm questioning whether it's easy to make a horrible foolproof lie so bad that the police wants to prosecute him. No, I'm not going to guess on anything at the current moment. I'm going to wait until all the facts have been laid on the table. Much easier that way.
- rickmb 16y agoOn what do you base this first claim? Because a little Google search on the subject of Swedish police and corruption turns up quite a number of (recent) hits. Not to mention the legally dubious raids by the Swedish police on the hosters of the Piratebay, that seemed to have been bought and paid for by Hollywood. By the way, is it normal police procedure in Sweden to tell the world's media that some dude is wanted for rape within a few hours of the accusation?
- Hagelin 16y agoIt was reported by the media after an arrest warrant was issued.
- JeanPierre 16y agoMy first claim was rather weak: It was just from my own knowledge and experience with Swedish police and the lack of news regarding corruption with them involved. If a Google search says otherwise, then I must have missed those corruption-cases. Sorry! > By the way, is it normal police procedure in Sweden to tell the world's media that some dude is wanted for rape within a few hours of the accusation? I would suppose that the media would sniff out as much information as fast as possible regarding Assange, because of his position. Also Expressen claimed certain things other media channels couldn't. E.g. all Norwegian newspapers cited Expressen.se for the information, and whenever they tried to get a confirmation from the Swedish police, they only got things such as "I can confirm that he is indicted. But since this is a delicate matter, I can not comment on the investigation beyond that."
- lhnz 16y ago1. Innocent unless proven guilty. 2. Whether or not the validity of the accusations can be proven or not, this is slanderous and a well-timed smear. It is a huge shame that it has been leaked to the media. 3. Regarding Julian Assange, at the very least I admire his resolve against incredible mounting pressure. 4. If he is found guilty does that mean the afghanistan war logs are fake and the government are right? ;) 5. For now this is just a baseless accusation. I would prefer to only traffic in facts.
- swah 16y agoWhy are so quickly defending this guy? What's so special about him?
- mrleinad 16y agoBecause he's someone who has the guts to face the most powerful government in the world, uncover their lies, and give them the finger. That's why.
- tome 16y agoIs there anywhere a quick summary of the most extreme lies [edit: made by the US] that Assange has uncovered? As far as I've seen (and I've only really read stories about Assange that have been posted here) what he's demonstrated is "war is horrible, and it's not going very well". That's important for us to know, but it's hardly ground-breaking.
- acangiano 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks has a list of the most important leaks.
- jacquesm 16y agoI think you were a little late to the party there, wikileaks has done a lot of stuff before the war related leaks. That's when they started to get serious headwind from various governments though.
- tome 16y agoI know, but mrleinad was specifically talking about Assange's dealings with the US so that's what I was asking about.
- tome 16y agoThose who downvoted, and the other replies to this have missed the point. I know what Wikileaks has done. None of it fits the description "fac[ing] the most powerful government in the world [and] uncover[ing] their lies" any more than the most banal of broadsheets does.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agojust to throw a cog in the "dirty trick" reasoning...why wouldn't they simply use child porn? it's a much more effective effective accusation for this sort of thing and much harder for outsiders to call bullshit on.
- jacquesm 16y agoIt would have to be planted in a way that it could not be proven to be planted. Now I don't know Julian Assange personally, but I do know one dutch hacker that he hangs out with and if there is anybody that I'd be very wary of when pulling such tricks that would be the guy.
- nazgulnarsil 16y agoas opposed to rape which involves people, places, and times?
- w1ntermute 16y agoThis could just be a stunt pulled by the tabloid that reported it: Assange said "Jag har inte blivit kontaktad av polisen."[0] Translates from Swedish as "I have not been contacted by the police." 0: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/anklagelserna-skakar-wikileaks-1.1157157 http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/anklagelserna-skakar-wikile...
- rimantas 16y agoInteresting. Now: will there be any documents about this case leaked and appear on wikileaks? Variaton: will there be any documents appearing on wikileaks if they are incriminating against Assange?
- kilian 16y agoThis happened before, when the names of anonymous Wikileaks donors was posted on Wikileaks: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/02/wikileaks-force/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/02/wikileaks-force/ I'm sure that, even if documents incriminate Assange, they will be posted.
- burgham 16y agoThe story is over: "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/ http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/ [== Swedish prosecutor's office news announcements, swedish version: http://www.aklagare.se/Media/Nyheter/Anhallen-i-sin-franvaro/ http://www.aklagare.se/Media/Nyheter/Anhallen-i-sin-franvaro...
- Snoddas 16y agoCharges dropped Jag anser inte att det finns anledning att misstänka att han har begått våldtäkt, säger Eva Finné i ett pressmeddelande från Åklagarmyndigheten. Quick translation: I dont think there is any reason to suspect that he has comitted rape says prosecutor Eva Finné. http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/assange-inte-langre-misstankt-for-valdtakt_5167469.svd http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/assange-inte-langre-missta... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316