[rad-green] With Assange Safely Locked up, Sweden Dro ps ‘Investigation’

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/20/with-assange-safely-locked-up-sweden-drops-investigation/

*Consortium News          November 20, 2019 *

With Assange Safely Locked up, Sweden Drops ‘Investigation’

*He is caged, and public support for him has been deliberately demolished.
The Swedish legal parody did its job.*

*By Caitlin Johnstone* <https://consortiumnews.com/tag/caitlin-johnstone/>
*CaitlinJohnstone.com <https://caitlinjohnstone.com/>*

*Now that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is safely locked up in Belmarsh
prison awaiting a U.S. extradition hearing, Sweden has, for a third time
<https://www.rt.com/op-ed/473835-assange-rape-dropped-evidence/>, dropped
its rape investigation.*

“After conducting a comprehensive assessment of what has emerged during the
course of the preliminary investigation I then make the assessment that the
evidence is not strong enough to form the basis for filing an indictment,”
said
<https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/19/sweden-drops-julian-assange-investigation>
Deputy
Chief Prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson at a press conference in Stockholm on
Tuesday.

Deputy Chief Prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson at a press conference in
Stockholm on Tuesday.

This decision comes days after the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils
Melzer began making noise
<https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1193878385547763712> about the
Swedish government’s refusal to answer his questions
<https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1193841574586781698> on the many
enormous, glaring plot holes
<https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=24838>
in
the investigation, which began in 2010. These plot holes include “proactive
manipulation of evidence” with the testimony of the alleged victim, a
condom provided as evidence that had neither the DNA of Assange nor of the
alleged victim on it, complete disregard for confidentiality rules and
normal investigative protocol from the earliest moments of the
investigation onward, disregard for conflicts of interest, Sweden’s refusal
to provide assurance that Assange would not be extradited to the U.S. if he
went there to answer questions, statements made by the alleged victims
which contradict the allegations, unexplained correspondence between
Swedish prosecutors and the FBI, and many others.

None of which matters anymore. He is caged, and public support for him has
been deliberately demolished. The Swedish parody of an “investigation” did
its job. Assange took political asylum with the government of Ecuador out
of fear of U.S. extradition and was slowly squeezed off from the outside
world, his own reputation, and his own physical health while the empire
prepared its case against him, keeping him increasingly immobilized,
silenced and smeared until he could be forcibly pried from the embassy in
April of this year.

Once this was accomplished, all the feigned concern for alleged victims of
sexual assault suddenly vanished, lining up perfectly with a 2010 article
<https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jaccuse-sweden-britain-an_b_795899> authored
in the early days of the investigation by feminist writer Naomi Wolf who
said, “How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden’s treatment of
Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape
accusations against men that don’t involve the embarrassing of powerful
governments.”

“In other words: *Never* in twenty-three years of reporting on and
supporting victims of sexual assault around the world have I *ever* heard
of a case of a man sought by two nations, and held in solitary confinement
without bail in advance of being questioned — for *any* alleged rape, even
the most brutal or easily proven,” Wolf wrote. “In terms of a case
involving the kinds of ambiguities and complexities of the alleged victims’
complaints — sex that began consensually that allegedly became
non-consensual when dispute arose around a condom — please find me,
anywhere in the world, another man in prison today without bail on charges
of anything comparable.”

Everyone who was familiar with sexual assault investigations knew that
Assange’s case was being treated wildly different from any other, and
anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty knew that this was because his
case *was* different from any other: it was an investigation of a man who
had embarrassed powerful governments. That was *always* what this was
about. It was *never* about protecting women. The fact that the case is
being flushed now that the imperialists have gotten what they wanted makes
this abundantly clear.

And now he’s locked up for no other reason than a pending U.S. extradition
request
<https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/17/the-worlds-most-important-political-prisoner/>,
exactly as he anticipated and rightly tried to avoid. The ridiculous bail
sentence he was serving has already expired, and the rape investigation
everyone pretended was so important has been tossed aside like an old gum
wrapper. As one reader put it on Twitter
<https://twitter.com/olwyn11/status/1196912678909829121?s=20> today, “So
Julian Assange continues to be detained in a high security prison, having
completed an extreme sentence for not meeting the bail conditions for a
charge that wasn’t and won’t be made. All on top of the rules of asylum
being cast aside to net him. This is rule of jackboot not law.”

“Let’s call this for what it is: an outrage,” the Defend Assange account
tweeted <https://twitter.com/DefendAssange/status/1196808914550943744> after
the news broke. “The road to Belmarsh and 175-years in prison was paved in
Stockholm–and so it will be remembered. The damage done to Assange’s and
WikiLeaks’ reputation-outing his name in an ‘investigation’ for which he
was never charged-is monstrous.”

Monstrous it is. And monstrous the whole thing remains. They have
maneuvered circumstances and narratives in such a way that they are now
able to literally imprison a journalist for exposing U.S. war crimes, right
in front of us, while telling us we live in a free society. It’s like
watching someone who’s supposed to be your friend reach down and start
strangling your dog to death while looking you right in the eye and saying
“I’m not killing your dog. I would never do that. We’re friends.”

They’ve locked him up. They’ve silenced him. They’ve broken his body.
They’ve broken his mind.
<https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/> And now
they’re trying to lock him out of sight forever, out of sight and out of
mind, so we can all forget all about the evil things they’ve revealed about
themselves.

But all that means is that now his fate is in our hands. Back when he was
strong and bright-eyed and had a voice, it was easy to kid ourselves and
say “Eh, he’ll find a way out of this. He’s the smartest guy around!” It
was easy to lean on his strength in order to abdicate our responsibility to
defend him tooth and claw from a globe-spanning oligarchic empire which
seeks to criminalize holding power to account.

We can’t do that anymore. We can’t take comfort in Assange’s power, because
he doesn’t have it anymore. His frailty now means *we* need to be the
strong ones. *We* need to fight for him, because he can’t do it himself. We
need to win this battle if we’re ever to have any hope of overturning the
status quo that is oppressing us all and shoving us toward greater and
greater peril. We can’t afford to lose this one. We need to fight for
Assange like the world depends on it. Because, in a very real sense, it
does.

*Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who
publishes regularly **at Medium* <https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone>*.
Follow her work on **Facebook* <https://www.facebook.com/CaitlinAJohnstone/>
*, **Twitter* <https://twitter.com/caitoz>*, or her **website*
<http://caitlinjohnstone.com/>*. **She has a **podcast*
<https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue>* and a new book **“**Woke: A Field
Guide for Utopia Preppers*
<https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Field-Guide-Utopia-Preppers/dp/064823455X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8>
*.”*

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sid-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sid-l/CACKppcy12zbDKWgKLtSdJtuCrf3%3D3hYQgcJRk5xHQ2AvnMfy0g%40mail.gmail.com.

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>