Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Some of this stuff just rubbish, frankly. Why did they get all the good writers and humanitarians in the dangerous places?
Sorry to prick some egoes, maybe in Foggy Bottom Wellington isn’t exactly considered the most effective allocation of the A-list talent? :)
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
There's also some speculation about anti-Wikileaks hacker The Jester's connections to US agencies, which isn't surprising.
Funny how "infowar" isn't quite so cool when it stops being asymmetrical, isn't it?
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Now that we are pretty settled on The Word of the Year, could we muse on the Film of the Year (before the newspapers fill up columns with their usual end-of-year bumpf).
Perhaps unfortunately, I've got to go for a mash-up of "they don't make 'em like they used to" and "The Film Festival rocks". The Red Shoes, Senso and Once Upon A Time in the West at the Civic were my cinematic highlights of 2010.
Honourable mentions go to Boy, Four Lions and Lo Sono L'amore (I Am Love) : three very different films that, in their own way, skipped along the edge of spectacular bad taste with great poise.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Sacha,
References?
Sacha - go Google and you'll find plenty of on-the-record mutterings about "honeytraps" and "dark plans" from Assange's lawyers. It is beyond credible that this stuff is being said without their client's knowledge and assent.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Steve Parks,
If Sofie knew how much I want to hug you right now, she'd be out buying a shotgun. Braaains are so much tastier when marinaded in thinkiness and knowledge. Just between us, you've moved my mind a few microns leftwards -- once or twice. ;-P
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All this macho talk about “infowar” gets on my tits a bit.
And it also seems to be tipping over into cyber-harassment and intimidation:
Mr. Housh acknowledged that there had been online talk among the hackers of a possible Internet campaign against the two women who have been Mr. Assange’s accusers in the Swedish case, but he said that “a lot of people don’t want to be involved.”
A Web search showed new blog posts in recent days in which the two women, identified by the Swedish prosecutors only as Ms. A. and Ms. W., were named, but it was not clear whether there was any link to Anonymous.
Very macho -- goobye #wikileaks, hello #wikicreeps. Am I the only person smell the faint odour of whale oil?
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Megan Wegan,
But yeah, I am done, now. My head hurts too.
Yeah -- pretty shitty day today. All kinds of technical and logistic issues with Public Address Radio, not helped by being in a pretty fragile state writing about this. I was hired to be the token Tory on PAR, looking back on a fair swag of my recent pieces not sure I'm entirely comfortable being the resident angry feminist as well. To bed with Wodehouse, methinks.
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Perhaps the Swedish authorities, when the cables were leaked, went “We need to act with regard to this investigation sooner rather than later because we now have good reason to think Assange will go to ground.”
Um, yes -- I'd recommend another look at the interview with Claes Borgström,Russell linked to earlier.
The unusual circumstances surrounding the initial handling of the alleged assault have been used by Assange's online supporters to fan suspicions about the case. Why was an investigation launched by the Swedish prosecutors before being dropped and then revived? Why did the women, who had not previously known each other, go together to the police to report the assaults? Why was an extradition required when Assange had earlier been allowed to leave Sweden?
Borgström attempted to refute this speculation point by point today. He would not say where the women were, only that he was in daily contact with them. He had advised them not to read what was being said about them on the internet, he said. "But they do …"
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.
He refused to reveal sensitive details of the evidence provided to him by the women. "It is important for the future investigation that the suspect himself does not know more than necessary before he is interrogated by the Swedish police," he said.
But he gave a concise summary of the key allegations. "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.
"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."
Two days later a second prosecutor, who conducted a preliminary investigation, came to a different conclusion, judging that the evidence did not meet the criterion of a rape or sexual molestation charge. "She made another judgment, saying: 'No it's not. It's very close, but not quite,'" he claimed. "So she cancelled the arrest order and he was still suspected of molestation without sexual motives.
"When I read that decision, my own conclusion was and still is that it was a rape, so I asked for a reopening of the case, and then the investigation was reopened." There was nothing suspicious about this closing and reopening of the case, he said. "The law is not an exact science. You can always make different judgments. Different courts and different prosecutors make different decisions. I think that the prosecutor who cancelled the arrest warrant did not study the case well enough."
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.
[...]Whether Assange will be prosecuted in Sweden on the four charges of rape, sexual molestation, and coercion against him depends on whether or not the Swedish director of prosecutions, Marianne Ny, finds enough evidence to be confident that the case will stand up in court. Before she does that, she needs to question Assange further, and may also need to question the women again.
The probability of the prosecution going ahead is around 50-50, or perhaps a little more than that, Borgström said.
"In Sweden, like in other countries, the burden of proof lies upon the prosecutor. The prosecutor must prove beyond reasonable doubt that a client is guilty of the crimes. Beyond reasonable doubt is very high – I don't know whether she can reach that level. And history tells you that you can reach different judgments on the same material depending on how you interpret that material."
If you really want to conspiratorial about it, is Assange himself the real puppet master here? A cynic could say it's hardly doing his "brand" any harm with the true believers to be able to represent as the victim of politically motivated right-wing "sexual Stalinism" (to quote one of the more unhappy coinages to come out of Bill Clinton's impeachment).
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Che Tibby,
no no, that was directed at one of Craig's diatribes, not the victims of sexual assault.
Wow. Just wow. I'm going to go away now, otherwise Russell will have to bring out the tear gas and riot gear. I don't really need gas to be choking back tears, right about now. Thanks.
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