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By Justin Raimondo * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz
By Carlos Latuff
Anyone who doubts the unmitigated evil of the US government and its international enablers has only to look at the disgraceful persecution of Julian Assange to see Washington’s brazen malevolence in full flower. As the WikiLeaks web site continues to release daily examples of US incompetence, bullying, venality, and corruption, the response from the Imperial City has been a coordinated campaign of lies, smears, and what can only be described as utter filth.
This outpouring of satanic bile has been disgorged onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers in retaliation for the “crime” of revealing the everyday machinations and cynical maneuverings of the US government as it rampages, loots, and murders its way across the face of the earth. In doing so, Assange and WikiLeaks have violated the first principle of the new world order, which is that they (the governments of the world) have every right to know what we’re saying in the privacy of our own homes: in our emails, our phone conversations, and anywhere else we (falsely) believe we’re free from prying eyes and ears. However, we have no right to know what they are doing, in our name – with our tax dollars – and to believe otherwise is “treason.”
For these people – the scum who inhabit the corridors of power – character assassination is an art, to be practiced with a fine attention to detail: and, to be sure, in this case they have outdone themselves. While sex is a weapon they’ve often used to hunt down their quarry, they can’t nowadays merely expose the intimate details of their victims’ personal life. In a society that resembles the last days of the Roman empire, where what we used to think of as immorality is rife, the smear artists have to give their revelations a more specific character, and in Assange’s case they have given us a textbook example.
The “charges” against Assange, made by two women – Anna Ardin, a “feminist” harridan who works as the “gender equity” officer at Uppsala University, and Sophia Wilen, a sometime photographer and former Assange groupie with stalkerish tendencies – are quite murky. Assange had come to Sweden at Ardin’s invitation, or, rather, at the invitation of the ” Brotherhood,” a Christian faction of Sweden’s Social Democratic party for which Ardin is the press secretary. He was staying at her home because she was supposedly going to be gone for a few days with her family, but Ardin returned early, for some reason, and they agreed to cohabit on a temporary basis. Ardin avers that she had agreed to (or perhaps – who knows? – even initiated) consensual sex with Assange, and so, as the Daily Mail reported, “they had sexual relations, but there was a problem with the condom – it had split. She seemed to think that he had done this deliberately but he insisted that it was an accident.” Ardin also claims Assange used the weight of his body to keep her immobilized – being a feminist, she likes to be on top.
However, she gave no indication of distress, either that day or the next: instead, she threw a party for Assange at her home. That evening Assange gave a seminar at the Stockholm headquarters of a trade union, and in the front row sat Sophia Wilen, an employee of the local Social Democratic-controlled council in the northern town of Enkoping. Wilen later told police that she had seen Assange on television and had become “obsessed” by him. When she heard he was speaking in Sweden, she called the “Brotherhood” of Social Democratic Christians to volunteer to help at the event, but was turned down: she came anyway, of course, and was soon glomming on to Assange with all the persistence of a blond and very leggy tick – the kind that give you Lyme Disease.
Loitering outside the venue in her shocking pink jumper, she approached Assange and two others who were going to a local café, and managed to get herself invited to join. One of the participants in the ensuing conversation describes her as “certainly an odd character,” who seemed out of place. Aggressively pursuing Assange, she sat there looking at him adoringly, and there was – say witnesses – what seemed to be a mutual attraction. After lunch, the two went out to a movie, and later on, when Assange said he had to go – Ardin was planning a crayfish party for him, a traditional Swedish-style event – she asked if she could see him again. He readily agreed. Later, at the party, Ardin would Tweet to her friends that she was “‘Sitting outside … nearly freezing, with the world’s coolest people. It’s pretty amazing!” She later tried to erase this record of her short-lived joy, but the internet knows all, sees all, now doesn’t it?
The honey-trap was nearly sprung, but there were a few more details to take care of. As Ardin was stuffing her face with crayfish and getting drunk, Assange was on the phone with Sophia. They arranged to meet in Stockholm. As the Daily Mail reported:
“When they did meet they agreed to go to her home in Enkoping, but he had no money for a train ticket and said he didn’t want to use a credit card because he would be ‘tracked’ (presumably, as he saw it, by the CIA or other agencies).”
Little did he suspect that was already being tracked. Sophia generously offered to buy him a ticket. When they got to her Enkoping digs, they had sex: he used a condom. The next morning, they again had sex, this time without a condom. They went out for breakfast, with no sign of displeasure or even the barest hint of “rape” coming from her side of the fence: she told him to stay in touch, and he said he would. She then bought him a return ticket to Stockholm, and he was gone – but hardly forgotten.
Here is where the story gets murky: for some reason not readily apparent to me, Sophia called Anna, and the two got to talking: the former confided she had been sleeping with Assange. Anna was furious: here is a woman who had earlier posted on her personal blog a rather scary “Seven Steps to Legal Revenge,” which reads like it might have been written by Valerie Solanis.
Sitting alone in Enkoping, wondering why Assange didn’t call, Sophia had been simmering in her own resentments, and Ardin was more than happy to give her the opportunity to vent. Together they concocted a plan to go to the police: initially the focus was on Sophia’s obsession with the possibility she might have contracted AIDS from the unprotected sex. The two of them went to a police station and asked if it was possible to force Assange to undergo a test for STDs.
It was the weekend, and the regular prosecutor was off duty: a substitute prosecutor listened to their story and decided, on her own authority, to go after Assange. The police combed the entertainment district of Stockholm, looking for him: to no avail. This indictment was later rescinded, however, by the regular prosecutor, due to the fact that, as the office put it, there was “no evidence” a crime had been committed.
The two had leaked the story to the Swedish tabloid Expressen, which relentlessly blared it on their front pages. Pretty professional work for a couple of alleged groupies. Indeed, Ardin is a former Swedish embassy official who served in Buenos Aires, and Havana: she was reportedly asked to leave Cuba after her interactions with Cuban exile groups linked to the CIA.
With those kinds of connections, Ardin was not easily deterred by the dropping of the charges. In order to construct a legal case against Assange, she recruited Claes Borgström, a lawyer and the former “Equal Opportunities Ombudsman” for “gender equity issues.” He has been working assiduously to expand the legislative reach of high feminist theory, including by extending the legal definition of rape. According to this new manifestation of extreme political correctness – which is only possible, one hopes, in dreary, suicide-prone Sweden – rape need not necessarily involve physical coercion. There is also, these professional victimologists believe, a form of “psychological” coercion enforced by the unequal “power relations” between the sexes.
In league with a third prosecutor, Marianne Ny, Borgström succeeded in having the case re-opened in order to advance this unique legal innovation: the concept of “rape” without physical coercion. As Assange’s Australian lawyer, James Caitlin, puts it:
“Consensual sex can be rape, according to Borgström and Ny – but the alleged victims don’t decide – they do. “The new laws which establish these ‘precedents’ are not yet on the books – but it’s Marianne Ny’s intention to make the Assange affair into a test case for that purpose. “In other words: Marianne Ny wants to try Julian Assange for something that wasn’t a crime when it took place.”
So much for the “legal” case against Assange. It’s a put up job, pure and simple, so brazen that one wonders how anyone – let alone a sitting judge outside of Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia – can entertain it with a straight face. And yet a British judge has indeed upheld the validity of the international arrest warrant, which went straight to the top of Interpol’s agenda as soon as it was issued: in the new world order, “sex by surprise” is on a par with being a mass murderer. In spite of having pledges of funding from prominent supporters, the judge denied Assange bail: and so the governments of the world have him where they want him – behind bars.
In their quest to destroy WikiLeaks, the Powers That Be are destroying their own credibility – such as it is, or was. This disgusting frame-up discredits them much more than it does Assange, or WikiLeaks. As the corporate extensions of the US government – PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, etc., ad nauseam – shut their doors to WikiLeaks, and COINTELPRO-style disruption of its operations continues unabated, the fact that the site is still up – indeed, it’s much easier to access now than ever before – indicates the battle is far from over.
What this all means is that the future of the internet is being decided, right here, right now: if the worldwide alliance of tyrants and crooks succeeds in shutting WikiLeaks down, the rest of us are doomed. If they can get away with this, they can get away with anything – including legislation regulating content. That’s where we’re headed, unless the authoritarian assault – led by Senators Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein, Fox News (excepting Judge Napolitano, of course), and neocons left and right – is repulsed.
There is no more important task for antiwar activists, civil libertarians, and all those who treasure freedom than the defense of WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange. That’s why the Amazon boycott is so important. That’s why we’ve got to work tirelessly to free Assange. That’s why we must never give in to the Liebermans, the Feinsteins, and the Fox News lynch mob. As the commies would say: No Pasaran!
The extradition of Assange to Sweden would signal the final phase of Britain’s long slow slide into authoritarianism, an outcome that seems nearly inevitable for a society that imposes a draconian “speech code,” and has its population under constant surveillance. From there the plan is obviously to jail him in Sweden until the US can cook up a “legal” rationale to have him extradited for trial in the US – perhaps as a material witness in the case of Bradley Manning, suspected of providing the diplomatic cables – and the Afghan and Iraq war logs – to WikiLeaks.
Truth is on trial – and a conviction would be fatal not only to WikiLeaks, but for the cause of liberty itself. This is an issue that the ruling elite is counting on to plug the giant hole in their armor called the internet. We can’t afford to lose this one – at least without inflicting some pretty heavy damage on the enemy.
Assange is the first high-profile political prisoner is a new age of repression and fear. If he is martyred to the cause of liberty, let his bravery and determination serve as an example and an inspiration to us all. But we don’t need any more martyrs: we need living activists, like Assange, who are willing to take on the States of the world. We must tirelessly work to free him, and in the process free ourselves.
* Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
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