Posted on December 11, 2010 - by Venik
Nothing Odd
A couple of days ago Claes Borgström (thank God I am not Swedish), the lawyer representing Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén in the sex case against Julian Assange, decided to explain some of the more obvious discrepancies in his clients’ version of events. Normally, this is what a good lawyer would be expected to do in the best interests of his clients. And Borgström is considered a very good lawyer. Perhaps it just wasn’t Borgström’s day, because the overall effect from his interview with the Guardian was exactly opposite from the one he must have desired.
Let’s take a quick look at the some of the stranger aspects of this case and Borgström’s attempts at clarifying them. If you are a bit hazy on the details of the sex scandal surrounding Assange, here are a few timelines describing the events:
- Timeline: sexual allegations against Assange in Sweden
- Julian Assange And A Broken Condom ‘Rape’ In Sweden: A Timeline
- Breaking Wikileaks
1) It is interesting that the two women who knew Assange quite well (slept with him) and did not know each other (never met before), somehow came in contact and decided to discuss such a deeply personal and embarrassing issue. Here’s Borgström’s take on this:
“These two women were molested by Mr Julian Assange at two different times, independently of each other,” he said. One of the two women, who met Assange at a lecture he gave in Stockholm in August, wanted to contact him after the alleged assault because she wanted him to take a test for sexually transmitted infections. She contacted the second woman, who had helped organise the lecture, to see if she could help her to find him. “When they spoke to each other they realised they had been through something very similar so they went to the police. That’s not odd,” he said.”
(“Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women ‘unfair and absurd’“, by Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, Dec. 8, 2010)
I guess I will just have to go ahead and disagree with Borgström on this one. Obviously, I am not a woman. I am not even Swedish. But I am just trying to picture this meeting:
- Excuse me, Miss. You don’t know me, but last night I had sex with one of your guest lecturers and the rubber broke. Do you think I need to worry?
- OMG! I did him this morning and the same thing happened!
- And then I fell asleep and he tried to put it in and I’m, like, “what are you doing?” and he’s, like, “hey, babe, go make me some coffee”.
- OMG! He told me Bareback was the vast, remote area of Australia!
I mean – jokes aside – if my rubber broke I would totally go to the cops, because going to a clinic for an STD test would make too much sense. Nothing odd about this.
2) It is interesting that only one woman wanted to talk to the police about her issue with Assange, supposedly to see if the cops had any “advice” for her. The other one tagged along for “moral support”. Or out of curiosity. Somewhere along the way this position has radically changed. Both women filed formal complaints and hired a lawyer. Even after the case against Assange was dropped by the prosecutor, the two women and their lawyer appealed the decision and had the case reopened. It must have been one hell of an advice they got from the police sergeant on duty. But, once again, Borgström assures us nothing extraordinary happened:
“They decided to go to the police, to inform the police of what happened, to ask for advice; also they were interested in whether there was a risk that they could have got HIV. They were not sure whether they should make a police complaint, they wanted to have some advice. But when they told the police officer, she realised that what they were telling her was a crime and she reported that to the public prosecutor, who decided to arrest Assange.”
(“Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women ‘unfair and absurd’“, by Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, Dec. 8, 2010)
So these two women threw themselves at the guy they considered an international celebrity, had unprotected sex with him and then went to the police to ask if there was a chance they could have gotten HIV. This almost makes me wish I was the police officer on duty. On a serious note, if you are a celebrity, crazy things like that probably happen to you on a weekly basis. It’s just not every such incident catches the CIA’s eye.
“It has nothing whatsoever to do with WikiLeaks or the CIA and I regret very much that Julian Assange does not publicly say that himself,” said Borgström. Actually, what Assange says publicly is exactly the opposite. Borgström said he advised his clients not to read newspapers for they may upset them. It would seem Borgström himself is easily dismayed, for he also decided to stop following the news. And I am sure that if the CIA did turn out to be behind all of this, Borgström would have immediately informed us. I mean, it’s not like he’s afraid of the CIA. What can the CIA possibly do to a respectable Swedish lawyer?
3) Sweden has some fairly strict laws protecting identity of suspects in sex cases. It is noteworthy how quickly Assange’s name made it to the papers. It is even more interesting that Assange’s identity was openly given to the reporters by the prosecutor who issued the warrant for his arrest. The initial police complaint was filed on Friday, August 20, 2010. The same night the on-duty junior prosecutor issued a warrant for Assange’s arrest – by itself, a very unusual step even in Sweden’s Byzantine legal system. Just a few hours later Kjellstrand talked to Niklas Svensson – a reporter from the Swedish evening tabloid Expressen – and confirmed that Julian Assange was the suspect in the case. Talkative Kjellstrand was later cited for secrecy breach.
Speaking of Sweden’s legal system: the prosecutor’s office declined to take a closer look at Kjellstrand’s big mouth on the account of the Swedish law that prohibits investigating journalistic sources. Oh well, this law is why Assange came to Sweden in the first place. I guess even in Stockholm you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Borgström avoided discussing this violation of Assange’s rights, whining instead about the negative publicity received by his clients:
“What is going on now is very, very unfair to them because they are being pointed at as if they have started a conspiracy against Assange and WikiLeaks, and that is not true. There is nothing wrong with their reputation and they have done nothing wrong in going to the police. What they are going through is unfair and absurd.”
(“Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women ‘unfair and absurd’“, by Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, Dec. 8, 2010)
Well, everyone’s entitled to their opinions. I guess this might as well include lawyers. Personally, I do not question the plaintiffs’ reputation. Just their intentions.
4) So, Friday night Maria Kjellstrand issued the strange warrant for Assange’s arrest based on nothing but a vague story about a broken condom. Early Saturday morning Stockholm’s chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, woke up and went to work cleaning up her assistant’s mess. The warrant for Assange’s arrest was withdrawn. “I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape”, says Finne. A week later the big boss – Director of Prosecutions Marianne Ny- came back from vacation and decided to reopen the case. “There is reason to believe that a crime has been committed,” she says. “Considering information available at present, my judgment is that the classification of the crime is rape”.
Assange seems to be besieged by wacky women who can’t make up their minds. I guess it must be his good looks. (On an unrelated note, I think Sweden may benefit from hiring a couple of male prosecutors. I know this sounds too good to be true, but I am available. Although not a prosecutor, I am a male and I like leggy blonds, so Stockholm seems as good of a place as any to start my career in jurisprudence. Just throwing the idea out there. ) Borgström has a rather philosophical view of Swedish judiciary:
“There was nothing unusual about different prosecutors, of varying seniority, coming to different conclusions about whether a crime had occurred, he said. Rape was rarely a clear-cut case of an unknown man pouncing on a woman, he said, and this case, like most, was nuanced and complicated.”
(“Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women ‘unfair and absurd’“, by Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, Dec. 8, 2010)
But it is somewhat unusual even for female Swedish prosecutors to be making so many hundred-and-eighty-degree turns in the course of one investigation in such a brief amount of time, during which no additional evidence has been introduced. Unless, of course, you count the position of the US Department of State as new evidence.
Side note: Julian’s Valkyries
Anna
Eva
Maria
Marianne
Sofia
Hillary
5) On August 31 Assange and his lawyer, Leif Silbersky, met with the Swedish police, who questioned Assange for two hours. The next day Director of Prosecutions Marianne Ny announced that the case against Assange will be reopened. Assange has not been charged with a crime (even to this day), there was no warrant for his arrest and he was free to leave Sweden at any time after the initial warrant has been withdrawn on August 21st. However, Assange chose to remain in Stockholm to defend against these asinine accusations.
For example, one of Assange’s accusers, Anna Ardin, described by The Washington Times as “a Swedish pro-American right-wing activist”, alleged that the morning after having consensual sex with Assange, he sexually molested her while she was asleep. Now, if she was asleep, then how can she possibly say that Assange was molesting her? And, of course, if she wasn’t asleep and just laid there waiting for Assange to do something that can be later used against him, then its still consensual sex. The Associated Press ran detailing the encounter between Assange and the two women, as well as discussing Sweden’s bizarre sex laws. I am impressed, however, that Swedes still find ways to reproduce. Must be tough, though, with cold climate, Ikea mattresses, and feminist prosecutors lurking behind every bed.
Assange remained in Sweden until the end of September, when he went to the UK to attend a public debate at London’s City University. Between the time of Assange’s interview with the Swedish police on August 31 and the time he left the country, Swedish authorities did not contact him or his lawyers. However, shortly after Assange’s arrival in the UK, Swedish prosecutors have developed an urgent need to speak to Assange. For some reason they only wanted to speak to him in person and only in Sweden.
Assange’s lawyers offered that their client could meet the Swedish investigators at the Swedish embassy in London or at the Scotland Yard, or via a video conference. Considering that Assange was a foreign national and has not been charged with a crime, these were reasonable offers – all rejected by Marianne Ny. Instead, Ny chose to issue an international arrest warrant and to request Assange’s extradition – a highly irregular and, in fact, unique approach to investigating an alleged sex crime where the suspect has not been charged. Assange’s British lawyer Mark Stephens accused Marianne Ny of “abusing her powers”.
In his interview to the Guardian Borgström doesn’t even bother explaining Ny’s abnormal zeal investigating Assange. Borgström simply restated the facts:
“Assange was at that time free to leave the country, Borgström said. “He didn’t have to ask anyone if he could.” It was only later when it appeared that Assange was unwilling to return voluntarily for questioning that the extradition process was launched, he said. “It turned out it was impossible to get him here for an interrogation, he wanted to be interrogated in the embassy, or wherever. Then the prosecutor decided to arrest him,” he said.”
(“Julian Assange rape allegations: treatment of women ‘unfair and absurd’“, by Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian, Dec. 8, 2010)
Of course the key question here is: when did Ny decide to arrest Assange – before or after he left Sweden? There has been no new evidence against Assange (and by “new evidence” I don’t mean whatever enhancements to their story Assange’s accusers and their lawyer came up with during the time between the initial police complaint and issuance of the second arrest warrant). Ny had no reason to arrest Assange while he was still in Sweden. She clearly had no further questions for him either, since she made no attempt to contact him. It was only after Assange left the country that Ny got a safe opportunity to arrest him – not for the alleged crimes she was investigating, but for failure to appear for a personal, eye-to-eye interrogation on Swedish soil.
Assange’s arrest has been criticized by the UN’s human rights chief and a number of world leaders, even those initially hostile toward Assange. Who would have expected, for example, Putin and Medvedev to come to Wikileaks’ defense? The effort to persecute Assange is being directed from the US Department of State and, as many observers suggest, perhaps even directly from the White House. By now it should be obvious even to the most computer-illiterate members of the US government that it is impossible to prevent the rest of the leaked embassy memos from becoming public (although this doesn’t seem to prevent Joe Lieberman from waging a private war against the First Amendment). So why are Obama and members of his administration appear so determined to take revenge against Wikileaks and its founder?
There can be no argument that the way the US embassy cables were leaked is an indication of deep systemic flaws in administrative and technological systems protecting America’s top secrets. Millions of pages of classified information, capable of destroying US foreign policy in its entirety, were casually taken by a low-level intelligence analyst from what appears to be a free-for-all electronic bazaar of varied US government classified materials open to anyone with minimal clearance.
Fixing this broken system will take a lot of money, but, most importantly, it will take time. Meanwhile, the US government feels it needs to intimidate Wikileaks and its supporters to deter any future “whistleblowers”. This persecution of Assange is strictly a punitive action by the White House. It is also a way of distracting public attention from certain key members of the administration responsible for US diplomatic activities. As long the average Joe (Lieberman) is concentrating his limited attention on Assange and the New York Times, the US Department of State and the Pentagon can avoid public scrutiny of their lax security standards.
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